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March 10, 2006

Simon Fodden

The Friday Fillip

Like many people with a yen for systematizing, I like diagrams. When I think a problem out I doodle and draw lines to boxes, circle words, do double underscores and the like. When I assemble something from, well, you know where, I look at the pictures and almost never read the instructions.

So I'm mightily impressed when someone can represent a complex situation with a clear picture. My hero in this regard is Edward Tufte, whose three last books — 1983: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (pictures of numbers). ISBN 096139210X; 1990: Envisioning Information (pictures of nouns). ISBN 0961392118; 1997: Visual Explanations (pictures of verbs). ISBN 0961392126 — are wonderful studies of visual representation of information. (His fourth book, Beautiful Evidence, is coming out soon.)

But for a delightful mosaic of nearly 300 portrayals of various kinds of information, visualcomplexity.com is the place to go. Here you'll find links to all manner of attempts to grasp data in a gestalt, which, if nothing else, is a refreshing change from the more linear lapping up of information from text.

Simon Fodden is the founder of Slaw. He taught law at Osgoode Hall Law School for more than 30 years before he retired to focus on writing, publishing, and IT and law.
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One Comment on “The Friday Fillip”

  1. Simon C says:
    March 13, 2006 at 1:59 pm

    My comments in a speech at Puerto Murelles last month on Professor Tufte's diatribe against PowerPoint are now on CBA PracticeLink at
    http://www.cba.org/cba/PracticeLink/home/default.aspx

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