Revisiting Tufte, Pt 2: In Defense of the Ridiculous

First off, please don't get me wrong. The man's a genius. Ed Tufte's books really are glorious explications of unspoken rules and structures in a world (information graphics) that's supposed to be all about clarity but is surprisingly opaque even to its experienced practitioners.

They're also a treasure trove of examples of information graphics and how to make them clearer.

I've been realizing as I revisit Tufte that his foundational structure is pretty well laid out in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, the first of his "picture books". The other three books are essentially collections of add-on essays. There may be themes running through the books, but really each chapter stands alone quite well, referring to the original book and to other essays from all four volumes.

I was struck by a few other things:

1. data and texture
In Beautiful Evidence, in the chapter on "sparklines", he evokes the intensity of linework in older western artists, using a sample from a Dürer engraving. He evokes it, but I think he mis-describes it. In Tufte's vision, all marks are information—all ink is data. Tufte evokes the Renaissance artist and then moves on to Swiss mountain cartgoraphy, with its similarly intense linework, implying that the Swiss are in the same business.

It's revealing that Tufte chose Dürer to evoke instead of, for example, Rembrandt. Dürer, to our eyes, is fussy; the intensely engraved lines at once read as texture and as information: every mark has a feeling of intent, and the sum is a rich picture, full of recognizeable detail but still forming a coherent statement as a whole.

Rembrandt's etchings are no less detailed, and form no less of a statement, but each mark does not imply data in the same way Dürer can seem to. Rembrandt's marks, especially as he matured, are about texture. In the map world, we know that's a lot of what pulls a map together: texture. We want it to be meaningful, for that texture to itself carry meaning, but we need to remember that the holding-together of the map is what it's really there for, and that at a certain level it no longer carries specific data-meaning: at one scale the wobbles of a river-line are traced precisely, but at a certain point they only mean "the river isn't straight." They are texture, not data.

2. ridicule
I was struck at how Tufte uses ridicule as a weapon against the "enemy": Clarity is good, confusion is bad. If you're going to intentionally create a muddle, make it a clear muddle. And he picks good targets: the ineffective decision-making that led to the Challenger explosion, Powerpoint's limitations...

Here's the problem:

If we become afraid of ridicule, we will not push ourselves. Sometimes, like when launching a hugely expensive piece of equipment into outer space with seven humans aboard, careful is a really really good idea. But not all charts and statistics should carry this sort of load. That no-fun attitude is, maybe, why cartography ends up feeling so stilted sometimes.

I'm a believer in Sturgeon's Law, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer. From Wikipedia:

The meaning of Sturgeon’s Law was explicitly detailed by Sturgeon himself. He made his original remarks in direct response to attacks against science fiction that used “the worst examples of the field for ammunition”. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crud is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms do.

From my point of view, Tufte in using ridicule to fight against what he calls "chartjunk" is also throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

What baby? What bathwater?

3. In defense of texture and the Baroque
Tufte points to a graphic like this first in Envisioning Information as an example of an interesting use of simplification and distortion to allow comparison. Later, in Beautiful Evidence, he ridicules it for having all that extra texture, the knobby lakes and so forth. To me, this is a really beautiful and interesting graphic, something to strive for, not an eccentric maiden aunt. That texture and those extra squiggles don't communicate Really Useful Data, but they do present part of a sense of identity and character.

Tufte attacks information graphics with unnecessary framing, or with editorial illustration, and he uses egregious examples to do it with. But like Sturgeon says, there's lots of crap to go around. I want to look at some baroque graphics that work. Like the river-comparison chart, or historic illustrated maps. Tufte repeatedly quotes Jonathan Swift: "So, geographers in Afric maps,/With savage pictures fill their gaps/And o'er unhabitable downs/Place elephants for want of towns.").

You know, I like the elephants. I like illustrated maps when they are done well. There are lots of badly done "plain" maps, and Tufte is at his best when he's giving us a theoretical framework to work within in building that sort of graphic, but I think he falls down when he turns around and says that that sort of graphic is superior to baroque graphics.

Over and out for now.

Diana Wynne Jones and rules and structure

While I was sick earlier this month, I reread (after entirely too long) Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock. It's one of my favorite books; for a while in my early 20's I would have put it atop my list of favorites. As Jones explained later in an essay on the novel, it's at root about the heroic ideal—she has a really great piece of the essay where she summarizes the rise and fall of that ideal—and how it translates into modern ways of thinking. I'll write more fully on it later, and about the truly problematic ending of the book (it's the one thing pretty much everyone ends up compaining about in the book). But what it brought to mind in rereading Tufte, is the difference between structure and rules.

Jones hates rules. No, that's too strong, but a lot of her characters spend their books working their way out of a web of rules, only to discover that those been used by the villains to hide the true state of things from everyone. They've been used to cheat.

On the other hand, discovering the true state of things, which often involves learning about the structure of the story's universe, is often central to the action of her stories. She loves structure, as her nonfiction essays make clear. Fire and Hemlock was built around the structure of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which she admires for their mix of stasis and change. If anything, her fascination with the shape of stories may be a weakness; she get so caught up with the structure sometimes it's hard for her to just follow the story where it needs to go according to emotional logic. Sometimes. Especially at the end of stories.

In her short story "The Sage of Theare," the two ideas are tied together in my mind by this pronouncement, presented as a graffito:

IF RULES MAKE A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MIND TO CLIMB ABOUT IN, WHY SHOULD THE MIND NOT CLIMB RIGHT OUT, SAYS THE SAGE OF DISSOLUTION

I love that. To me it puts structure and rules in precisely the right place: necessary but not exclusive.

Jones's stories though, differentiate between the True Structure of the universe (the way things work we can't do anything about), and rule structures set up to imitate that True Structure and replace it in people's minds. These structures are all about the maintenance of power.

I had a long conversation with Joe tonight, after entirely too long. In regards to rules, he talked about how strange it has been for him to be back in an office environment after a long time away. In particular, he has been reminded of a peculiar dynamic of work environments: everyone is working from their own rulebook. Some are there to earn their paycheck and then go do what they really love, and they pay by rules that follow this way of thinking about work; some are there to do Great Work regardless of what the needs of the company are, and they have a different set of rules; some are there because they are workaholics and they go crazy if they aren't there—another set of rules. And so on. And each person quickly learns who is playing with a comparable rulebook, and who is just weird (i.e. everyone else). In an office environment where people are allowed to play by their own rulebook and where their role in the company fits that rulebook, it can work out fine. Where everyone is expected to play by the same rulebook, those who don't end up in a Dilbertian nightmare sort of job.

It got me thinking about our "what is a map" discussions, here and elsewhere. I think the same thing applies: we want our rulebook to be the rulebook. I'm not saying we don't need rulebooks. It can be really useful to discover what your rulebook is; it can help immensely in clarifying your work. What is more useful to the wider community though is to describe (measure?) the structure we are working in—in my case, the structure of cartographic expression—and then work with that structure with our own rulebooks, without using formulated rules to proscribe that structure.

If we can stand it.

I hope that all made sense.

More soon on E Tufte.

Revisiting Tufte, Pt 1: Visual Display of Quantitative Information

[note: I have this to say about pneumonia: Bleh! I'm feeling much better, but let me just say that as weight-loss programs go, I do not recommend this one]

In response to Katie Benjamin's question, I decided to go back and read Edward Tufte. I read him years ago, but it's been years.

I've started with the first of his "big books," The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

A few thoughts:

The book starts out so well. Really good observations and history of statistical graphics. And then the basic concept of graphical integrity, one in a lineage of "graphic parades of horribles," in a line with How to Lie With Statistics and How to Lie With Maps. It's an effective and entertaining technique, and Tufte does a good job with it, in particular excoriating those who make infographics that in their pictoriality distort the data.

In particular, the idea of the ink-to-data ratio is a useful one: if a mark doesn't mean something, leave it out. It's really a Strunk-and-White kind of practical model towards lean and effective graphics.

After that, I fear things go downhill. First, his analysis of why we have bad statistical graphics. He ascribes this to (1) bad training on the part of graphic folk who haven't spent much time with data analysis: they are drawing about things they know little about; (2) the idea that statistics are boring and need "livening up" if readers are going to pay attention; and (3) the idea that readers won't understand charts if they're too plain.

Basically we have charts that lie because the people who make graphs are ignorant, disrespectful and bored. If you make bad graphics, it's a character fault. I think it's a cheap shot.

He then goes down the road towards graphic language reform in the name of "data-ink" maximization, proposing specific new techniques that feel to me a little like the spelling reforms of Melvil (aka Melville) Dewey: based on sound theory, but ignoring the power and centrality of cultural habit. They assume because something makes sense and fits an ideal of simplicity that people will either do that something or be dunderheads.

Maybe people like complexity for its own sake. Sometimes at least. Coming soon, a blog entry: in defense of the graphically baroque.

The following chapter I think illuminates what's really going on: It's called "Multifunctioning Graphic Elements" and it's about graphics that can be read fully from a variety of different view points. The graphics in this chapter are like poems: they are multi-faceted, complex, sometimes ambiguous in the sense that they play different sorts of information off each other in the same expression.

They really are things of beauty.

So here's what I think: sometimes you want a poem, but sometimes you you want a straight answer to the question, "how much does that tomato cost?"

The former, you want to pack in multiple layers of meaning in a way that may miraculously land in your lap or that may take years of gathering and pondering. The latter, you want a clear social mind operating in the moment, which can respond in the same language to a conversational question.

The presumtion that all communications ought to strive for a single ideal oversimplifies the variety of human communication. I think Tufte actually has interesting reads on multiple pulses; I'm just not convinced that in his quest for Overarching Rules he hasn't Overreached.

In any case, more from the Tufte trail soon...

Qualified

Further to my last post, the thread on James Fee's blog took an interesting turn in which John from Jerzee complained against unqualified people creeping into GIS (especially in management), I responded noting that I had only three classes in grad school and a studio art degree and have built a successful career on that, and John responded (in part):

Nat: I find your post irritating to say the least. Your example is based on getting an entry level job you were never qualified for then learning on the job and taking a higher position you should’ve never been qualiifed for either.
My argument is based on people like yourself who think you can pick up every detail on the job. Unfortunately, you can not and that is why formal training is neccesary. All my cartographic skills were developed in training and college. I applied them in my job but I never gained more cartgraphic training at work.
On the job training teaches us how to make cost effective maps not cartographically correct maps.

Not surprisingly, I take umbrage at the idea I am unqualified for my job. But the whole exchange sets up for me a fundamental divide not just between GIS and cartography, but between people whose job it is to manage and operate a complex system, and people whose job it is to make something or perform a service. For the former, training is essential; for the latter, seat-of-the-pants can work, especially if the system is not too complex.

There was an article last year in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande about checklists in medicine. A doctor named Peter Pronovost has found that using checklists for procedures (such as intubation) where every step is essential can save lives, because in the heat of the moment even the best nurses or doctors can have a momentary lapse. In a relatively simple system, like driving a car, one can readjust, but at some point that is a recipe for disaster.

The classic example, and the origin of Pronovost's idea, is the 1935 crash of the prototype Boeing airplane later called the "flying fortress." The plane crashed not for mechanical reasons, but because the plane had gotten too complex to fly by the seat of the pants. So:

...the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable. So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.
They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.

So what does all this have to do with cartography and GIS?

A GIS is a very complex suite of software. It takes all one's expertise and attention to make sure it does what it needs to do, and it can do an enormous amount. But because of this, GIS experts tend to be very focused on the system.

Cartographers (or at least the graphic-designy ones I identify with) tend to have a less intensive approach to the tool(s), and spend more time on the product as an organic whole. The cartographer will be working back and forth between comparatively simple adjustments of the map elements and stepping back and judging how it is working from the point of view of a user.

All extremely generalized, but as I think about the difference between liberal arts types and technical types—and how they approach the nature of a job—it makes a lot of sense. Most of us find ourselves having to meld the two approaches: the generalist has to learn some very specific tool-based skills (and yes, training of one sort or another is usually necessary), and the specialist has to learn some basic "liberal arts" skills like business writing and customer service (often on the job).

[updated 2-17-13 with new links]