Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth by Edward R. Tufte
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55610573
High hopes for this one. I’ve read many other Tufte books.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is my favorite; very relevant, clear, crisp. Really beautiful book
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Not a great start, I’m not a big fan of centering text. Looks jumbled. The pages with the quotations also feel cluttered. Ironic, as the main message is about space. Could have used some more white space imho
Tufte is consistent.
Shorter sentences are fitted on one line with extra white space between them. Feels cluttered to me
This is strange; all Tufte’s books are meticulously edited.
So why the weird break in this Berners-Lee quote on p.11?
The l of leaf is one one line, eaf on the next. Accidental carriage return?
Does central axis typography assist reading poetry aloud?
Probably yes, I’d say
The awkward linebreak (my autocorrect wants line break) on p.11 are even weirder as Tufte chastises linebreaks (sic) in a dishwasher manual on p.18
Great example, thought bubble typography
Cleveland Clinic’s video Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care
Electronic Health Records
Medical centers pitch empathy in their marketing, but intimidate patients to sign gag orders seizing ownership of all medical patient records.
Image Quilts
The Marey collage is too cluttered, looks like an overcrowded power point slide.
The quilt with data on vaccine effectiveness is beautiful with a clear and powerful message
Page 37 is very nice, here the centered text does work for me. And I agree with the importance of (and emphasis on) space. Which makes its absence more glaring elsewhere in the book
To have an open mind
But not an empty head
(p.46)
When you meet with experts in another field, shut uр and listen.
occasional prompts 'Why is that? How do you know that?'
Be skeptical, learn what you can about a field but don't believe it. Outsiders need not accept the assumptions and doctrines of disciplines.
Chapter 2: Content-responsive typography
Space can and should be content-responsive, actively contributing to meaning
Subtle visual spacing differentiates and clarifies sentences, and meaning becomes more consequential, memorable, retrieveable.
Ioannidis’ Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
Used as example for content-responsive (p.49) and typography (p.52, also includes content-responsive)
I don’t feel the difference on p.52 is due to typography;
Can also be attributed to linebreaks
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
“The ceremonial central-axis typography reinforces what is inherent in the words, that these two paragraphs are an annunciation and revelation.”
The quote on p.56 supposedly is from Pace (2001) https://www.pnas.org/content/98/3/805
I thought it unlikely Escherichia coli not be italicized in the original.
Turns out, neither E. coli nor elephants are mentioned by Pace
Probable source is of quote on p.56 is https://www.bionity.com/en/encyclopedia/Metabolism.html#_note-SmithE/
Which actually cites another PNAS paper (Smith & Morowitz, 2004) that does not mention E. coli or elephants
https://www.pnas.org/content/101/36/13168
conventions ("we've always done it this way") enshrined in legacy code caused 50 years of content-hostile and reader-inconvenient data graphics in powerpoint, excel, and sophisticated data-analysis computer packages
Chapter 3, p.71
Stacked inline confidence limits:
A better way to show confidence limits in a table
(Don’t know if I agree; CI often symmetrical, so ± seems more efficient and clear)
Beautiful!
Handwritten/handdrawn archaeological notebooks of Karl Richard Lepsius
p.73
Very effective and good redesign of Isaiah Berlin’s on foxes and hedgehogs (p.76-77)
Chapter 4 Data analysis
= avoid this grave error, how to prevent it, and if it occurs, what to do (p.82)
Tufte ’s boxplots (p.100), even his own 1983 redesign.
Brave to revert opinion, but I feel too harsh on boxplot. Best is probably both; data & boxplot
Uncharacteristic type on p.101 (thE)
The graphs from a @MicrobiomDigest tweet on p.101 are meant to illustrate the point (showing data reveals fraud), but are not very intuitive or clear.
I can see the grey and blue boxes being replicated, but why the single yellow and purple box?
The placement of “three” on p.103 looks off (too high and right)
“Formal models yield a goes-to-eleven Bayes factor, but then followed up by list of concerns that can't be quantified.”
Credible data-based conclusions (p.104)
@xkcd made similar point in this great graph:
Sub-sub-sub-group cherry-picking (p.107)
“Randomized controlled double blind studies are by far most likely to be true, as Thomas Chalmers decisively proved.”
Obviously an important and seminal paper, but a meta-study w/ 53 papers can hardly be “decisive”
#pt I think RCTs are better and many more studies have probably shown this. But the high and rigorous bar Tufte sets for other evidence elsewhere, seems suddenly lowered in this sentence.
The Grand Truths of Meta-Research
Well-designed randomized controlled trials are diamonds, most observational studies are song
Confirmation bias is omnipresent.
Money doesn't talk, it screams.
It's more complicated than that.
p.111
Great story; Which half?
p116 one day when I was a junior medical student
E. E. Peacock, Jr., University of Arizona College of Medicine; quoted in Medical World News, 1 September 1972, 45
‘The most important medical advance in our generation is not a pill, or a stent, or a surgery, but the randomized controlled trial’ (p.116)
said Vinay Prasad @VPrasadMDMPH
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52540972
Gray areas show false alarms, over-diagnosis, cured cancers, Incidentalomas, indolent and subclinical cancers.
Smoking cessation caused much/most of the mortality reductions shown here.
Cancer is mostly prevented, less often cured.
Life expectancy vs. health expenditure, 1970 to 2018
Our world in data @MaxCRoser
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure
Many examples from chapter 4 also feature in @EdwardTufte keynote session at Microsoft Machine Learning & Data Science Summit 2016
Chapter 5 Annotations
Catch 22 plotchart by Jospeh Heller, Tufte suggests changing noisy grids with ghost grids
More generally, ask of information displays and interfaces, "What is the strongest visual element?”
The correct answer is not "grid lines”.
Sorry, plotgrid was from Chapter 6 instructions at point of need
Chapter 8 Smarter presentations & shorter meetings
Begin all meetings with a document and time to read it
Do not send your stuff in advance, people won’t read it
Bezos on power points: you get very little information, you get bullet points
Documents model information better than decks.
Data paragraphs are smarter than sentences.
Sentences smarter than bullet lists.
Evaluating content problems:
a sure sign of trouble is an inability to write a paragraph explaining the problem, relevancy and solution
p.155 Tufte mentions the 2016 key note
It's not what you say, it's what they hear
RED AUERBACH
The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I sought to design the book [The Visual Display of Quantitative Information] so as to make it
self exemplifying – that is, the physical object itself would reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book.
p.161
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Chapter 9 a visual index, a quilt of sources and images remodeling the back-matter in books
Gorgeous
And funny: recursive quilt-quilt visual index for chapter 9 in chapter 9
Oorspronkelijk getweet door Wilte Zijlstra (@wilte) op 26 december 2020.
