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Beautiful Evidence
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Beautiful Evidence
I am a fan - and a sometime student back in my New Haven days - of Edward R. Tufte. His latest book, Beautiful Evidence (buy through Amazon) continues his legacy of bringing discipline and beauty to quantitative data.
I cannot recommend it enough - unless you have not yet read Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Or Envisioning Information. Or Visual Explanations, with its brilliant deconstruction of the roots behind the Challenger disaster. Those should be read first, because they embody a coherent theory on the integration of visual elements to convey useful insight.
In contrast, Beautiful Evidence is a set of essays linked by the themes of his prior work, and useful in their exposition of best (and worst) practices, but to my mind it is richer with the afortementioned theoretical framework.
A must-read for us data geeks.
September 18th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
[…] Beautiful Evidence (review) […]
October 6th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
[…] In the alternative, if you are not ready with a summary plan, consider offering a high-level preview, and describe it as such. List your unknowns, and how they integrate with the rest of your vision. By casting the document in this light, you present what you have, and you aren’t sweating the fact that you haven’t answered certain questions (like quantifying the size of market, or your 5-year cash flow projections) that keep so many would-be entrepreneurs from getting off the mark. And for G*d’s sake, offer a written document. Illustrations and charts are to be encouraged, but slides will fudge your thinking. See Tufte. Clear, succinct thinking based on what you know today - that’s what they want, so give it to them. […]