Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

Describes design strategies - the proper arrangement in space and time of images, words, and numbers - for presenting information about motion, process, mechanism, cause, and effect. Examines the logic of depicting quantitative evidence.

With IVisual Explanations/I, Edward R. Tufte adds a third volume to his indispensable series on information display. The first, IThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information,/I which focuses on charts and graphs that display numerical information, virtually defined the field. The second, IEnvisioning Information,/I explores similar territory but with an emphasis on maps and cartography. IVisual Explanations/I centers on dynamic data--information that changes over time. (Tufte has described the three books as being about, respectively, "pictures of numbers, pictures of nouns, and pictures of verbs.") P Like its predecessors, IVisual Explanations/I is both intellectually stimulating and beautiful to behold. Tufte, a self-publisher, takes extraordinary pains with design and production. The book ranges through a variety of topics, including the explosion of the space shuttle IChallenger/I (which could have been prevented, Tufte argues, by better information display on the part of the rocket's engineers), magic tricks, a cholera epidemic in 19th-century London, and the principle of using "the smallest effective difference" to display distinctions in data. Throughout, Tufte presents ideas with crystalline clarity and illustrates them in exquisitely rendered samples.