Edward Tufte

Edward Rolf Tufte (born March 14, 1942), sometimes known as "ET", is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University.

He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.

Edward Rolf Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginia Tufte (1918–2020) and Edward E. Tufte (1912–1999).

He grew up in Beverly Hills, California, where his father was a longtime city official, and he graduated from Beverly Hills High School.

He received a BS and MS in statistics from Stanford University and a PhD in political science from Yale.

He was hired in 1967 by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School as a lecturer of Politics and Public Affairs, where he steadily moved up to the rank of full Professor.

He taught courses there in political economy and data analysis while publishing three quantitatively inclined political science books.

His dissertation, completed in 1968, was titled The Civil Rights Movement and Its Opposition.

In 1975, while at Princeton, Tufte was asked to teach a statistics course to a group of journalists who were visiting the school to study economics.

He developed a set of readings and lectures on statistical graphics, which he further developed in joint seminars he taught with renowned statistician John Tukey, a pioneer in the field of information design.

These course materials became the foundation for his first book on information design, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

In 1977, he left Princeton for Yale University, where he accepted an appointment as Professor of Political science, Statistics, and Computer science, as well as a Senior Critic in the School of Art.

After negotiations with major publishers failed, Tufte decided to self-publish Visual Display in 1982, working closely with graphic designer Howard Gralla.

He financed the work by taking out a second mortgage on his home.

The book quickly became a commercial success and secured his transition from political scientist to information expert.

In 1999, these positions were made Emeritus.

On March 5, 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Tufte to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's Recovery Independent Advisory Panel "to provide transparency in the use of Recovery-related funds".

Tufte is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Tufte's writing is important in such fields as information design and visual literacy, which deal with the visual communication of information.

He coined the word chartjunk to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays.

Tufte's other key concepts include what he calls the lie factor, the data-ink ratio, and the data density of a graphic.

Tufte uses the term "data-ink ratio" to argue against using excessive decoration in visual displays of quantitative information.

In Visual Display, Tufte explains, "Sometimes decoration can help editorialize about the substance of the graphic. But it is wrong to distort the data measures—the ink locating values of numbers—in order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme."

Tufte encourages the use of data-rich illustrations that present all available data.

When such illustrations are examined closely, every data point has a value, but when they are looked at more generally, only trends and patterns can be observed.

Tufte suggests these macro/micro readings be presented in the space of an eye-span, in the high resolution format of the printed page, and at the unhurried pace of the viewer's leisure.

Tufte uses several historical examples to make his case.

These include John Snow's cholera outbreak map, Charles Joseph Minard's Carte Figurative, early space debris plots, Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius, and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

For instance, the listing of the names of deceased soldiers on the black granite of Lin's sculptural memorial is shown to be more powerful as a chronological list rather than as an alphabetical one.

The sacrifice each fallen individual has made is thus highlighted within the overall time scope of the war.

In Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo presents the nightly observations of the moons of Jupiter in relation to the body itself, interwoven with the two-month narrative record.

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used.

In his essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint", Tufte criticizes many aspects of the software:

Tufte cites the way PowerPoint was used by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster as an example of PowerPoint's many problems.

The software style is designed to persuade rather than to inform people of technical details.

Tufte's analysis of a NASA PowerPoint slide is included in the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report -- including an engineering detail buried in small type on a crowded slide with six bullet points, that if presented in a regular engineering white paper, might have been noticed and the disaster prevented.

Instead, Tufte argues that the most effective way of presenting information in a technical setting, such as an academic seminar or a meeting of industry experts, is by distributing a brief written report that can be read by all participants in the first 5 to 10 minutes of the meeting.

Tufte believes that this is the most efficient method of transferring knowledge from the presenter to the audience and then the rest of the meeting is devoted to discussion and debate.

One method Tufte encourages to allow quick visual comparison of multiple series is the small multiple, a chart with many series shown on a single pair of axes that can often be easier to read when displayed as several separate pairs of axes placed next to each other.