Edward Tufte
From Exampleproblems
Edward Rolf Tufte (IPA /ˈtʌf.ti/) (born 1940) is a professor emeritus of statistics, graphic design, and political economy at Yale University and an expert in the presentation of informational graphics, such as infographics, charts and graphs. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. His work today centers on the field of information graphics.
Tufte's work is important in such fields as information design and visual literacy, which deal with the visual communication of information. He coined the term "chartjunk" to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of information displays; Tufte's work argues strongly against the inclusion of any decoration in visual presentations of information, and claims that ink should only be used to convey significant data and aid its interpretation.
Tufte also developed Sparklines, "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics".
He currently resides in Cheshire, Connecticut.
Bibliography
Tufte's Yale PhD thesis was The civil rights movement and its opposition (1968).
Early in his career, Tufte wrote several books about using statistics to analyze political issues:
- 1973: Size & Democracy (with Robert A. Dahl). ISBN 0804708347
- 1974: Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. ISBN 0131975412
- 1978: Political Control of the Economy. ISBN 0691021805
The following books, all published by Tufte's own Graphics Press, make up the core of Tufte's work, documenting how to best display different forms of information with copious examples and commentary:
- 1983: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (pictures of numbers). ISBN 096139210X
- 1990: Envisioning Information (pictures of nouns). ISBN 0961392118
- 1997: Visual Explanations (pictures of verbs). ISBN 0961392126
- Chapter 2 is also published as Visual & Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making, ISBN 0961392134. It contains extensive analysis of Dr John Snow's intervention into the cholera epidemic in London in 1854 and into the Challenger disaster of 1986.
- Forthcoming: Beautiful Evidence (Possible publishing date: December 2005)
- portion published as The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
