In An Era Of Big Data And Small Attention Spans, It Is Important To Revisit Edward Tufte

Many of us would remember this graph from last year. It kept the ruling party, the opposition, parody sites and social media busy for a few days. While this was the most obvious of “errors”, it was fairly common during the heady days of elections to find bizarre graphics.

There were quite a few instances when the sum of percentages in pie charts would not add up to 100 per cent or the number of Lok Sabha seats to 543.

These days when “data journalism” is the in-thing, the number of graphs and charts in our newspapers is on the rise. But, some of them are more like puzzles to solve than attempts to simplify complex information. Nevertheless, it is a welcome trend that our publications are looking to back assertions with data.

Even in political literature, a distinctive trend over the last few years is to support emphatic claims of parties with statistics. Political parties create eye-catching graphics for their social media feeds.

The PowerPoint was once almost the preserve of consultants and bankers, who were the witnesses to and purveyors of many a soulless deck. But nowadays, even schoolchildren prepare slides for their projects.

In an era of big data and small attention spans, the ability to distil data to tell a story without losing its richness, still remains a challenge. It is imperative that graphics are created to inform clearly than to have something fancy for the sake of it.

Perhaps, it is the right time to revisit the works of the legendary Edward Tufte. Tufte, called as the “The Leonardo da Vinci of Data” and “Galileo of Graphics”, was a political science professor who taught at Yale and Princeton. He has claimed fame through his books and lectures on making catchy presentations.

Tufte has a cult following. His first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has been a hit from 1983. Tufte elevates preparing presentations to a moral enterprise. He says:

Making an evidence presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity.

He riles against “chart junk” and his books are odes to minimalism.

In his book Beautiful Evidence, he presents a number of captivating charts that one can gaze at and learn from. He cites examples from topics as diverse as astronomy, ornithology, music, finance, war and much more to elucidate the first principles of making sound presentations.

The most eye-catching chart of the book is Charles Minrad’s plot of Napoleon’s march into, and retreat from Russia. The dwindling size of his army is plotted over the map and the route it took.

The location, distance, time, temperature, and the size of the force over time, are elegantly presented to capture the magnitude of Napoleon’s folly better than a thousand words. His army left Poland with about 4.5 lakh men in the winter of 1812-13 and returned with just 10,000!

With that epic chart, Tufte deep-dives into the fundamental principles of analytical design namely, comparison, causality, multivariate analysis, integration of evidence, documentation and content.

PowerPoint has its vast share of detractors. From Harvard Business Review to New York Times, many publications have carried articles that have trashed it. But it has become almost impossible to get rid of PowerPoint from our lives.

Tufte is pretty harsh on PowerPoint, pointing to the restrictive features that suck the soul out of communication. He contends that the tools of PowerPoint themselves lead us to warp what we intended to say to begin with. He even reproduces Peter Norvig’s hilarious presentation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in a PowerPoint.

Tufte is an advocate of little plots called Sparklines that are minimalist and give all relevant information. It is being used pervasively these days by magazines to present data compactly. Twitter analytics also uses this technique.

The book has a chart on skiing that is presented below. The position of torso and knees during skiing illustrated using a simple stick diagram adjacent to photographs, lucidly explains the technique of skiing. The beauty and clarity that manifests in the simplicity of the chart, perhaps best sums up the theme of the book.

His chart plotting body mass against the brain mass of various animals is an education in presentation. What was a simple scatter plot with dots, comes to life with the illustrations of the animals.

Tufte also throws abundant caution on false structuring of data, where one tries too hard to find patterns when none exist. In a chapter on “corruption in evidence presentations”, he points to basic errors like false causation, cherry picking data to suit one’s point of view, overreaching through false-fitting of regression curves, “chart junk” of garish decoration and “a rage to conclude” that strips the nuances of the data.

For writers, the educative portion is in the part that speaks against use of passive voice. He quotes from the report of the “9/11 commission” that is replete with passive voice. The style hinders in pinpointing responsibility on particular authorities that should have been made accountable for the ill-preparedness. Sample this:

It is impossible to capture the spirit of a book on presentations and graphics. It is akin to writing a review of a symphony. Capturing the aesthetics and the intangibility of beauty is not meant for written words. This write-up is just a humble effort to reintroduce Tufte into the current- day consciousness.

Tufte intersperses his theories with awesome quotes such as: “Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.” The current generation of writers and presenters will do well to imbue his emphasis on both beauty and accuracy. He defines Beautiful Evidence as that which would “delight both by the wonder of spectacle and accuracy of expression”. Only presentations that spark of such integrity could be springboards of truth and beauty.