
Edward Tufte: Sparklines: theory and practice - glymor
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR
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teej
A major failing of sparklines in practice is the lack of a visual benchmark.

When you don't have a fram of reference, it can be hard to tell what
directions the lines are moving. You end up with an effect like this illusion:
[http://www.internetgamesfree.com/games/images/illusion_68.gi...](http://www.internetgamesfree.com/games/images/illusion_68.gif)
where your perception of the line deviates from reality.

The "normal range" line he shows does a great job to fix this.

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yesbabyyes
I really like sparklines and I wish they were more common. I dream about
Twitter adding support for them. ;)

If you want to play with sparklines I can really recommend this library - it's
very nice to work with and supports lots of different sparklines:

<http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/>

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eitally
We've started adding these selectively to internal tools to supplement more
complex tools aimed at depicting progress or trend visualization. It's helped
a ton, and goes a long way toward turning indecipherable IT goon geek speak
into something normal users find helpful (along the same lines as somethings
like Google's App Status Dashboard (<http://www.google.com/appsstatus>), the
Stashboard (<http://www.stashboard.org/>), or the Salesforce.com status board
(<http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/>) do for red/yellow/green statuses
at a glance.

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cma
Don't put them in a grid:

[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=0003Y1&topic_id=1)

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_delirium
I must admit I don't totally get what sparklines are and what they aren't.
They seem quite recent, but the examples I see don't seem _that_ unusual or
new. Is it a new name for a concept, or is the _concept_ itself new, or is it
a particular take on or way of using that concept?

For example, do gkrellm's "krells" count as an example of sparklines, or are
they something else? -->
[http://members.dslextreme.com/users/billw/gkrellm/gkrellm0.p...](http://members.dslextreme.com/users/billw/gkrellm/gkrellm0.png)

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michaels0620
One of the main things that distinguishes sparklines from other small graphs
is that they are "word sized" and can be integrated into a line of text.
Because of this, the graphs tend to be wider than they are tall and also have
a very clean appearance to them (not lot of background color or other "chart
junk" as Tufte calls them).

I would say what you linked to would not be considered sparklines from the
above.

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sahillavingia
I use them in one of my iPhone apps (Dayta) and it's an easy way to provide
trends at a glance and make a simple design look much better in a few lines of
code.

Library used: <http://key-solutions.ca/cksparkline.html>

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ced
These rules are useful heuristics, but a good graph has a _purpose_ , and its
parameters are chosen accordingly. So, while Tufte may favor a wide sunspot
graph to emphasize the weak downward slope, my advisor (a solar scientist)
would have slammed me for that. We _already know_ that there's a weak downward
slope. What we care about is the absolute magnitude of the peaks. Tufte's
graph is useless here.

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Kliment
I'm impressed with the quality of the comments. They appear to be not only
moderated, but also summarized in one line by Tufte, who then responds in a
separate posting. Very pleasant and skimmable format.

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beefman
Tufte's had a lot of good ideas, but sparklines isn't one of them.

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bronson
You're usually right but not this time.

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beefman
Example of a document in which they're useful?

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beefman
...didn't think so.

