Notable passages from
Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte
Graphics Press, Cheshire, 2006
This practical, workaday diagram [a diagram tracking the spread of SARS shown at the top of page 78] demonstrates excellent analytical practices for displays that use links and arrows to tie nouns together: timelines, trees, networks, organization charts, project management charts, and the like. These practices are:
- Focus on causality
- Multiple sources and levels of data
- Annotated linking lines
- Annotated nouns
- Efficiency of design
- Credibility
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Excellent graphics exemplify the deep fundamental principles of analytical design in action.
- Show comparisons, contrasts, differences.
- Show causality, mechanism, explanation, systematic structure.
- Show multivariate data; that is, show more than 1 or 2 variables.
- Completely integrate words, numbers, images, diagrams.
More generally, the principle of information integration points to a philosophy of inquiry: a broad, pluralistic, problem-directed view of what constitutes the scope of relevant evidence. Too often in scholarly research, ins social science at least, there is a certain narrowness in the choice and use of evidence. Thus many investigations of, say, political economy rely exclusively on a single mode of evidence: statistical data or wordy memoirs of policy-makers, or anecdotes, or mathematical models, or metaphor, or economic or political ideology, or newspaper clippings. Research questions are framed along the lines of "How can one type of information or one particular approach be used to explain something?" rather than "How can something be explained?"
Pre-specifying the mode of relevant information or the explanatory method may produce a tendentious misalignment of evidence in relation to substantive matters under investigation. The world to be explained is indifferent to scholarly specialization by type of evidence, methodology, or disciplinary field. A deeper understanding of human behavior may well result from integrating a diversity of evidence, whatever it takes to explain something. Like good information displays, explanatory investigations, if they are to be honest and genuine, must seek out and present all relevant evidence regardless of mode.
- Thoroughly describe the evidence. Provide a detailed title, indicate the authors and sponsors, document the data sources, show complete measurement scales, point out relevant issues.
- Analytical presentations ultimately stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of their content.
The first question is What are the content-reasoning tasks that this display is supposed to help with? Answering this question will suggest choices for content elements, design architectures, and presentation technologies.
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It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and unjust that once you have a point of view all history will back you up.
Van Wyck Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age (New York, 1915), 20.
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Given the persistent threat of cherry-picking and aggressive advocacy, consumers of reports and presentation might well ask: Do the report's findings grow from the evidence or from the process of evidence construction? Would that process survive the scrutiny of a research audit? Does the presenter have a reputation for cherry-picking? Is the particular field of inquiry notorious for advocacy and evidence corruption (investment analysis, land development, new drug research, sales reports)? Are the findings too good to be true? Have the report's findings been independently replicated? How much does the decision to be made depend on the evidence in the report at hand? Who paid for the work?
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When Louis Gerstner became president of IBM, he encountered a big company caught up in the ritualistic slideware-style presentations:
One of the first meetings I asked for was a briefing of the state of the [mainframe computer] business. I remember at least two things about that first meeting with Nick Donofrio, who was then running the System/390 business....
At that time, the standard format of any important IBM meeting was a presentation using overhead projectors and graphics that IBMers called "foils" [projected transparencies]. Nick was on his second foil when I stepped up to the table and, as politely as I could in front on his team, switched off the projector. After a long moment of awkward silence, I simply said, "Let's just talk about your business."
I mention this episode because it had an unintended, but terribly powerful ripple effect. By that afternoon an email about my hitting the Off button on the overhead projector was crisscrossing the world. Talk about consternation! It was as if the President of the United States had banned the use of English at White House meetings.
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Powerpoint's convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience. These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers. This cognitive style harms the quality of thought for the producers and consumers of presentations.
Now and then the narrow bandwidth and relentless sequencing of PP slides are said to be virtues, a claim justified by loose reference to George Miller's classic 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." That essay reviews psychological experiments that discovered people had a hard time remembering more than about 7 unrelated pieces of really dull data all at once. These studies on memorizing nonsense then led some interface designers, as well as PP guideline writers seeking to make a virtue of a necessity, to conclude that only 7 items on a list or a slide, a conclusion that can only be reached by not reading Miller's paper. In fact the paper neither states nor implies rules for the amount of information shown on a slide (except for those presentations consisting on nonsense syllables that the audience must memorize and repeat back to the psychologist). On the contrary, the deep point of Miller's work is to suggest strategies, such as placing evidence within context, that extend the reach of memory beyond tiny clumps of data.
A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Practical teaching techniques are very helpful for presentations in general. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentation are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching—explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism—are contrary to the cognitive style of PowerPoint. And the ethical values of teachers differ from those engaged in Marketing.
Sentences are Smarter Than The Grunts of Bullet Lists.
Shaw, Brown, and Bromiley found bullets leave "critical assumptions about how the business works unstated," and also displace narratives, an effective tool for thinking and for presentations. They describe, as we saw in the previous chapter on evidence corruption, the weakness of bullet outlines for thinking about causality, the fundamental idea behind strategic planning and, indeed, analytical thinking in general.
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