# Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

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public:t-701-rem4:scales_display_of_data [2008/10/29 14:58]
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===Edward Tufte's Six Grand Principles of Information Display=== ===Edward Tufte's Six Grand Principles of Information Display===
-| The First Grand Principle: Enforce Wise Visual Comparisons., i.e., force answers to the question "Compared with What?"  | +| The First Grand Principle: **Enforce Wise Visual Comparisons**, i.e., force answers to the question "Compared with What?"  |
-| The Second Grand Principle: Show Causality. We are looking at information to understand mechanisms. Policy reasoning is about examining causality. Napoleon was defeated by the winter, not the opposing army, as shown by the temperature scale o n the bottom of Minard's graph.  | +| The Second Grand Principle: **Show Causality**. We are looking at information to understand mechanisms. Policy reasoning is about examining causality. Napoleon was defeated by the winter, not the opposing army, as shown by the temperature scale o n the bottom of Minard's graph.  |
-| The Third Grand Principle: The World We Seek to Understand is Multivariate, as Our Displays Should Be. The Minard graph has six dimensions: size of the army, the two dimensional route of the march, the direction of the march, the temperatures and the dates.  | +| The Third Grand Principle: **The World We Seek to Understand is Multivariate, as Our Displays Should Be**. The Minard graph has six dimensions: size of the army, the two dimensional route of the march, the direction of the march, the temperatures and the dates.  |
-| The Fourth Grand Principle: Completely Integrate Words, Numbers and Images. Don't let the accidents of the modes of production break up the text, images and data. Just because the artists, technical writers and database people work in differen t buildings doesn't mean reports should be disjoint with text, graphs and images in different boxes or on different pages.  | +| The Fourth Grand Principle: **Completely Integrate Words, Numbers and Images**. Don't let the accidents of the modes of production break up the text, images and data. Just because the artists, technical writers and database people work in differen t buildings doesn't mean reports should be disjoint with text, graphs and images in different boxes or on different pages.  |
-| The Fifth (most important) Grand Principle: Most of What Happens in Design Depends upon the Quality, Relevance and Integrity of the Content. Minard's graphic was made as an anti-war poster. To improve a presentation, get better content. If yo ur numbers are boring you have the wrong numbers. Design won't help, it is too late.  \\ Page 18 of Envisioning Information shows a book by Galileo published in 1613 which reported the discovery of sunspots and the rings of Saturn for the first time. He wrote in Italian, not Latin, because he wanted to reach a wider audience than the scie ntific elite. His tone of writing is wide eyed, straight-forward, undiplomatic, sardonic and sounds a lot like the modern voice of Richard Feynman. The report of the discovery of sunspots has a simple drawing of the sun on each page to show daily obser vations. From these observations he learned that the sun was rotating as the spots moved across the page and changed apparent shape at the edges due to foreshortening. It is easy to make comparisons between the left hand and right hand pages because the y are within the eye span.  | +| The Fifth (most important) Grand Principle: **Most of What Happens in Design Depends upon the Quality, Relevance and Integrity of the Content**. To improve a presentation, get better content. If your numbers are boring you have the wrong numbers. Design won't help, it is too late.  \\ Page 18 of Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte shows a book by Galileo published in 1613 which reported the discovery of sunspots and the rings of Saturn for the first time. He wrote in Italian, not Latin, because he wanted to reach a wider audience than the scie ntific elite. His tone of writing is wide eyed, straight-forward, undiplomatic, sardonic and sounds a lot like the modern voice of Richard Feynman. The report of the discovery of sunspots has a simple drawing of the sun on each page to show daily obser vations. From these observations he learned that the sun was rotating as the spots moved across the page and changed apparent shape at the edges due to foreshortening. It is easy to make comparisons between the left hand and right hand pages because the y are within the eye span.  |
-| The Sixth Grand Principle: Information for Comparison Should be Put Side by Side., i.e., within the eye span, not stacked in time on subsequent pages, which is known as 'one damn thing after another', and also known as the computer interface. T he computer interface is a low-resolution display device compared to paper, so we have a relentless sequentiality. The most common user question after a sequence of computer operations is "Where am I?" The lesson: get the biggest monitor of the highest resolution that you possibly can. \\ \\ One of Tufte's students scanned Galileo's images and animated them so the sun of 1612 could be seen to rotate. At a couple points in the annimation the images skip forward because there was missing data due to clouds, or Galileo taking a day off. \\ \\ A Jesuit rival of Galileo republished the sunspot data (see p17 of Envisioning Information). He used the single most effective tool of information design, the small multiple, which puts all 38 images within the eye span.  |+| The Sixth Grand Principle: **Information for Comparison Should be Put Side by Side**, i.e., within the eye span, not stacked in time on subsequent pages, which is known as 'one damn thing after another', and also known as the computer interface. The computer interface is a low-resolution display device compared to paper, so we have a relentless sequentiality. The most common user question after a sequence of computer operations is "Where am I?" The lesson: get the biggest monitor of the highest resolution that you possibly can. \\ \\ One of Tufte's students scanned Galileo's images and animated them so the sun of 1612 could be seen to rotate. At a couple points in the annimation the images skip forward because there was missing data due to clouds, or Galileo taking a day off. \\ \\ A Jesuit rival of Galileo republished the sunspot data (see p17 of Envisioning Information). He used the single most effective tool of information design, the small multiple, which puts all 38 images within the eye span.  |

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