Edward Tufte's "Data Analysis for Politics and Policy" | Hacker News Reader

Edward Tufte's "Data Analysis for Politics and Policy"

edwardtufte.com

56 pointsdanso9 comments

Very nice. I hope political/public policy groups pay attention to the lesson Tufte pushes throughout the rest of his other books which is to avoid presenting the data in way which mislead or obfuscate what the data is.

Political/public policy groups are among the worst offenders of misusing/abusing numbers and statistics to support a conclusion they have already reached rather than as an honest tool.

This is a link to the full book, apparently, presented as images (ick); the review on the first screen is just a review/summary, don't be fooled. Looks worth reading so far.

Yeah the first page is a list of images, for the intro/review pages. The rest are PDF files for each chapter/section, with each page basically an image...Tufte is kind of a stickler about layout and format and there was probably not much desire in him to make a web-friendly format. You can read about his decision to graciously put the book online for an interested reader here: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

One of the best revelations I got from a Tufte lecture was that Flash graphics...more specifically, the tendency to hide data with fancy rollover/popup interaction, was dumb.

His philosophy was to lay it all out as much as you can without requiring a click...and that restraint causes you to rethink how to display the data and to be more clever in visual symbolism, rather than requiring the user to click a button to reveal a block of descriptive text.

However, I think overall, he is not someone who has spent much time thinking over web-formatting and display. Most of his work on his site is plain text or images of text.

This is an excellent book. I bought a used copy this summer, and what has been so striking to me is the quotes and examples he uses; I have read most of them before, in one form or another, travailing the internet. It feels like someone modern collated the examples for the book, but Tufte wrote it in 1974! You also get a glimpse of Tufte before he becomes the information visualization guru.

Thanks for the great link! Browsing through Tufte's main site, I also saw that he has upcoming classes:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses

New England next week, then in the Washington D.C. region, then the Bay Area in December...!

I love Tufte but most likely won't end up going through 179 pages just on how to present data the "right" way. He should develop some form of a Web curriculum or something more accessible for those only interested in the essentials. He did this already quite brilliantly with his Powerpoint essentials.

'just on how to present data the "right" way'

If you're involved with data and humans, I can think of few things more professional than spending the time to understand how they come together.

It's highly ironic that you're arguing for TL;DR and using the Powerpoint work as an example -- his argument was precisely that deeper thought and attention were warranted than was generally possible given the presentation formats commonly in use.

It is probably depending on what importance one attributes to the role of data and humans in this context. What I would be most interested in his how he understands objectivity or what he is going to present as his way of presenting data - especially because I am coming from this "all data is subjective" standpoint. But this is of cause just a personal standpoint.

I don't think that the length-is-quality argument should be here an issue - as he has demonstrated in the Powerpoint discussion that it is very well (within his philosophy) possible to make an argument within a 3X page booklet. Instead what I was asking for was a similar accessible or solution oriented approach as he did with the Powerpoint subject.

This book isn't about presenting data; it's about analyzing data, i.e. basic statistics. His later books are on data presentation.

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