CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
October 1997, Vol. , No. 9

A Review by Vince Juliano

Our GUI (graphical user interface) world did not begin with Mosaic and Netscape, Windows 3.0, the revolutionary 1984 Macintosh, or even the futurists at the ground-breaking Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. We were born with it. We humans interface with our environment visually, and we have tried to use a graphical approach to communications throughout our history.

Edward Tufte has made a career of studying how we graphically present information, and he has strong feelings about how to do it effectively. His opinions are so intense that he became his own publisher because no other publisher could meet his principles of visual presentation!

In an age of television, the World Wide Web, GUI operating systems, touch screen kiosks, and Power Point presentations, Tufte's observations and advice are especially apropos. With our 21st century tools, we should be able to produce graphics that convey large amounts of information quickly and clearly. Yet, most of us have seen more than our share of graphics that were foolish, unclear, and misleading. One of my favorite examples is "file footage'' shown with TV news stories. In recent years, the footage has become less and less connected with the news items being read. We often see politicians accused of transgressions being applauded at last election's victory rally, or a cleared suspect being led away in handcuffs. This apparently occurs because the footage is old and the studios no longer bother to label it as such. These news shots are eye-catching, but misleading. What about those 3-D newspaper weather maps that show the U.S. from the perspective of a boat in the Gulf of Mexico? Since I live in Connecticut, it irks me to get a panoramic vista of the weather in Texas and Florida, but a terrible view of my corner of the country. These maps are attractive, yet nearly meaningless to a New Englander.

If misleading or meaningless graphics trouble you, then you are in for a treat with Edward R. Tufte. He offers models of wonderful graphics. Take a look at the reproduction (in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) of a chart done in 1861 by Charles Joseph Minard, showing Napoleon's fateful 1812 march to Moscow. Minard displays incredible amounts of information on one easy-to-read chart: the size of the army from the start of its march through its disastrous retreat, the route of the campaign, the distances traveled, the time frame, and the winter temperatures. Minard had none of the electronic charting tools available to us, but he knew the information he wanted to convey and he planned the best way to present it. It is a work of art and of science.

At their best, graphics can be critical to analyzing serious problems and presenting solutions to decision-making bodies. Study Tufte's reprint of the map of London used by Dr. John Snow in 1854 to track down the cause of a cholera epidemic (in Visual Explanations). Dr. Snow started by showing the number and locations of fatalities on the map. He concentrated on Broad Street because of the high incidence of cases there. He investigated the fatalities on Broad Street and the fatalities outside of the Broad Street area, and he found that they both pointed to the Broad Street well. One resident of another neighborhood died because she stopped at the Broad Street well to get her water supply. Dr. Snow interviewed Broad Street residents who did not become ill, and he found that they did not use the nearby well. Neighborhood brewery workers shunned the water because they received free beer on the job! Inmates at a nearby work house suffered few fatalities because the institution had its own well. Snow presented his readily understandable chart, and related information, to the city board in charge of the water supply. They took immediate action to remove the source of the epidemic, the pump handle at the well.

In contrast, Tufte offers a more contemporary case study of a poor graphical presentation. In 1986, engineers at rocket-maker Morton Thiokol were convinced that the space shuttle flight scheduled for the following morning should be delayed. They feared that the cold January temperatures would cause the rocket's "O-rings" to fail, leading to an explosion of rocket fuel. The next morning, the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded shortly after takeoff, killing the entire crew. Investigations confirmed that the engineers had been correct. However, as Tufte demonstrates, they failed to present their data in a meaningful way. They included irrelevant data and used confusing labels. They did not focus on the critical factor of temperature, and how it had affected "O-rings" on previous flights. The engineer's flawed presentation failed to persuade the decision-makers.

Don't miss the chapter on magic in Visual Explanations. Tufte reasons that, since magicians use visual tricks to obscure what they are really doing, we can learn a great deal from them about how NOT to present information!

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