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Tufte Touted

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tufte.jpgThere’s an enjoyable, short article on Edward Tufte in this week’s New York Magazine: “The Minister of Information” by Christopher Bonanos. Tufte’s latest book, Beautiful Evidence, was (self)published in 2006. His work is interesting for us, I think, because, in the words of the article, “Pretty much anyone who writes or presents can learn from Tufte,” and my guess is that we’ve been know to do both.

This is the book that talks about “sparklines,”There’s a fairly extensive discussion and a draft of the sparklines chapter on Tufte’s website. I used this site to create the sparkline: http://bitworking.org/projects/sparklines/ those miniature inline graphs that Tufte originated (and that my failing eyesight likes less than that of others). Here, for example, is a sparkline showing the growth in the average number of daily visits to Slaw over the past 12 months: slaw_sparkline.gif — which is not too shabby, even if it is small.

Tufte previously on SlawI’m a fan of Library Boy‘s practice of pointing readers to earlier entries on a topic, so I’m experimenting with it here, still uncertain about how best to present that information clearly. Any ideas, Edward?:
https://www.slaw.ca/2007/01/05/the-friday-fillip-42/
https://www.slaw.ca/2006/03/10/the-friday-fillip-4/

Comments

  1. Connie Crosby
    June 14th, 2007 at 11:10 am

    re: footnote – Sabrina Pacifici also does a fantastic job of cross-referencing previous posts over at http://bespacific.com/ .

  2. Simon Fodden
    June 14th, 2007 at 11:21 am

    You mean the “topics” (i.e. categories), Connie? I’m getting ready to wade into the taxonomy waters again for Slaw, so if you could ask a portion of you mind to mull over that in the background, it’d be a big help.