beautiful evidence

i attended a seminar today given by edward tufte. i had lunch with my friend ashish, and ended up describing the course as "how to make really good charts," which doesn't quite do it justice. the course was about the effective visualization of data, something i think we all deal with in one way or another. i should probably make up a graphic or something to demonstrate how cool this seminar was, but instead i'll just rely on my usual text and scans (have i learned nothing?!)

one concept that tufte pioneered is that of sparklines - tiny, work-sized graphics that fit neatly into text and convey more information than a word, in less space than a traditional graphic. tufte is all about high information resolution, and these little "datawords" can increase the informational content of text significantly. or, they can be used in sets of small multiples, to convey large amounts of information in small spaces.

some examples

apparently the sparklines were inspired by galileo's original text describing saturn's rings. galileo incorporated drawings right into the text.

(very) rough translation: saturn looks like this XXXXXX; when saturn is blurry, it looks like this XXXXXXX .

brilliant!