Edward R. Tufte. Graphics Press: Cheshire, CT, 1983. 195 pp. ISBN 0-961-39210-X. $40.00.

Envisioning Information

Edward R. Tufte. Graphics Press: Cheshire, CT, 1990. 126 pp. ISBN 0-961-39211-8. $48.00.

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities,

Evidence and Narrative
Edward R. Tufte. Graphics Press: Cheshire, CT, 1997. 156 pp. ISBN 0-9613921-2-6. $45.00.

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative is the most recent of three books by Edward R. Tufte about the expression of information through graphs, charts, maps, and images. The most important of all the practical advice in these books is found on the first page of the first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Quantitative graphics should:

Show the data

Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than the graphical design

Avoid distorting what the data have to say

Present many numbers in a small space

Make large data sets coherent

Encourage the eye to compare data

Reveal the data at several levels of detail

Serve a clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration

Be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set

Tufte illustrates these principles through all three books, going to extremes in the care with which he presents examples, both good and bad. He has designed the books so that the reader almost never has to turn a page to see the image, graph, or table that is being described in the text. The books are set in Monotype Bembo, a lead typeface designed so that smaller sizes open the surrounding white space, producing a pleasing balance. Some of the colored pages were put through more than 20 printing steps in order to render the subtle shadings required. The books are printed on heavy paper stock, and the fact that contributing artists, the typeface, the printing company, and the bindery are all credited on one of the back flyleaves is one indication of how seriously the presentation is taken. The books are certainly as much works of art (and craft) as they are of science.

The author, a Professor of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University, is also the founder of The Graphics Press. Because no one else would take on what seemed to be such a totally impractical project, he established his own company (sacrificing his garage). The first two volumes have sold more than two hundred thousand copies. The first of the three books, The Visual Display, is the one most likely to be of immediate use to a chemical scientist because it provides more examples (both good and bad ones) than the others of the traditional, two-dimensional graphs that we are likely to use in our work. One cannot help but be intrigued, if not inspired, by the classic depiction by Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870) in a single figure of the essential quantities involved in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812-13. In one ingenious plate are shown six variables: the size of the French army as a function of time and position, in both advance and retreat, the movements of the main army and auxiliary troops, and the temperature on various days during the retreat from Moscow. Impressive and informative as this example may be, it pales in comparison to the density of information required to present the number of galaxies in the sky map from the Lick Catalog, also shown in Visual Display, which more typifies the problem of presenting huge data sets collected with computer aid.

The second volume of the series, published seven years after the first, is Envisioning Information. With the same aesthetic sensitivity as in the first book, Tufte here concentrates on the presentation of "nouns" rather than numbers. In six chapters and epilogue, he discusses the third dimension as represented in two (as in Guide for Visitors to the Ise Shrine, Japan), the use of color to convey information (as in Oliver Byrne's Euclid), the organization of material for graphics (as in the names on the Vietnam War Memorial), and the use of layering and repetition to emphasize aspects of the data (as in the Hudson and Manhattan railroad manual for train signal lighting).

The examples mentioned are only a few of hundreds from various sciences and engineering endeavors, from cultures all over the world and through centuries of time. The examples that Tufte renders are so seductive that the reader is drawn into consideration of data that would not ordinarily be of interest; how many people would you expect to be interested in the geographic distribution of the birthplaces of 10,086 poets of four Chinese dynasties? In Tufte's hands, the data sing to us.

Graphics are not just an opportunity for creative and artistic expression. Tufte argues in Visual Explanations that better designed graphs of the data pertinent to the failure at low temperature of the O-ring seals on the Challenger booster might well have altered the fate of the mission and saved the lives of the astronauts. Tufte is by no means the only one making the claim that there was sufficient evidence to justify postponing the launch, but he shows how compelling the data can be, when best presented.

Visual Explanations focuses on the presentation of information that has a temporal component. Examples include the visualization in three dimensions and time of the development of a thunderstorm, the explanation of several magic tricks, the hand-drawn graphical log of cosmonaut Georgi Grechko, and notations for the recording of ballet positions. I would think that the designers of textbooks and instructional multimedia materials would find inspiration in this most recent of Tufte's masterworks.