

Edward Tufte's "Data Analysis for Politics and Policy" - danso
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/dapp/

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michaels0620
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.

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gwern
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.

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danso
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...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=00001F)

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.

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realitygrill
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.

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gregsadetsky
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...!

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01PH
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.

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jdunck
'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.

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01PH
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.

