Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative [Images and quantities - Visual and statistical thinking: displays of evidence for making decisions - Explaining magic: pictorial instructions and disinformation design - Smallest effective difference - Parallelism: repetition and change, comparison and surprise - Multiples in space and time - Visual confections: juxtapositions from the ocean of the streams of story]

1st. ed., 8th printing, with revisions ; 156 pages : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 28 cm ; ISBN 9780961392123, 9781930824157, 0961392126, 1930824157 ; OCLC 36234417 ; LOC: P93.5 .T846 1997 ; Dewey: 302.23 ; grey cloth in pictorial dustjacket ; "Specialists in esoteric fields can become cult figures in their own time. Carl Sagan in astronomy and Stephen Hawking in physics have achieved that status. A third cult figure has emerged: Edward R. Tufte in the field of information design. The author of works on subjects as varied as graphic design, statistics, and political economy, Tufte is building his own legend. Through his books and public lectures, he serves as historian and theoretician of graphic and information design, advocate of the pairing of illustrations and words, and teacher of audiences as diverse as technical writers, illustrators, and statisticians. In the early 1980's Tufte founded a publishing company to produce his books on information design, thereby gaining control of their appearance and distribution. One result of his founding the company is that the books do not go out of print. Another is that he controls their distribution and physical appearance. His books look as their author wishes them to look--full of gorgeous color illustrations and what I call adult learning toys: three-dimensional pop-ups and lift-up flaps that conceal intriguing or astonishing information. The books assemble illustrations and text from many centuries and cultures and from authorities in numerous fields: statistics, music, medicine, painting, engraving, cartography, graphics, computer display design, and business correspondence. The design principles he explores in these books are applicable to images delivered in print as well as electronically. The books should be required reading for those interested in ways that data can be used to both inform us and lie to us. Tufte's work has already been embraced by statisticians, technical writers, graphics designers, designers of computer displays of all kinds, including Web pages, architects, scientists, engineers, and aficionados of art history. In one striking chapter of Visual Explanations, Tufte proves the persuasiveness of a historical graphic display: a street map of London used in 1854 by Dr. John Snow to pinpoint the cause of that summer's cholera epidemic. Dr. Snow's map and related research (27-38) pass Tufte's tests for determining whether a particular visual display is properly designed: it places data "in an appropriate context for assessing cause and effect" (29), it makes "quantitative comparisons" (30), it considers "alternative explanations and contrary cases" (32), and it provides an "assessment of possible errors in the numbers reported in the graphics" (34).In the same chapter, Tufte presents a powerful verbal and visual argument that accurate graphic display of data might have prevented the tragic explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Properly constructed charts--such as those supplied by Tufte in Visual Explanations (44-45)--would have clarified the relationship between low temperature and O-ring failure and might have convinced NASA officials not to launch the shuttle. Ineptness at conveying information, as demonstrated by the charts and memos associated with the shuttle disaster, is one cause of the misuse of data. Deliberate creation of inaccuracies is another cause. Tufte demonstrates the subtleties of visual disinformation design in a lighthearted chapter on magic. He balances that chapter with one on "visual confections," which he describes as "an assembly of many visual elements.brought together and juxtaposed on the still flatland of paper" (121) and not intended to be realistic. To demonstrate the ability of confections to convey both emotion and fact, Tufte reproduces illustrations as dissimilar as an engraving (127) from 1514, Albrecht Durer's "Melancholia I," and a 1980's warning-and-information diagram--H-Net; FINE/FINE.…