Now that Edward Tufte’s name has come up it seems natural to start thinking about information design. A very strange set of graphics regarding media industry ownership is available at http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html (click on a company, e.g., AOL, after the page loads). It is unclear why this information is presented graphically at all or what one is supposed to infer from two blobs overlapping. Contrast with the market maps at http://www.smartmoney.com/ (click on “maps” and choose one), which make it easy to visualize how important an industry is and whether the stocks in that industry are going up or down.
2 thoughts on “As long as we’re on the subject of Edward Tufte…”
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That design is attrocious. I really can’t tell a thing from their graphics.
Funny that you should mention the smartmoney market maps because we implemented a similar mechanism for displaying per-minute data for Chevron-Texaco’s Pascagoula refinery. If you want to see an image (for curiousity’s sake) we have a webpage with a couple of screenshots at http://www.concepthouse.com/products/RefVis/ .
The boxes are individual components of the refinery (furnaces are shown) and the feed rate of the fuel determines the box size while the efficiency of the burn determines the color of the box.
We did numerous tests with different color schemes and color styles: smooth color variations for efficiency vs. straight good/bad coloring; variations for color-blindness, etc.
I figured that another application of a market map-like visualization might be interesting for your readers.
Philip, you should spend more time reading Tufte (and William Cleveland for that matter). Here is a link to a post on “Ask E.T.” about this topic.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000Kf&topic_id=1