The King of Data Visualization

Edward Tufte is the man!

I'll admit I'm a data viz groupie -> I continually strive to come up with clever ways to communicate information through plots or figures. It's way easier than writing 1000 words! ;-)

Make sure you click on the "view slide show" link in the article above- you'll see some pretty good examples of where I have drawn "dated inspiration" for some of the plots I have put together over the years.

I really think that the category of data viz is a burgeoning field - with the advent of the interwebs and all the information it is able to aggregate, we are faced with the challenge of placing meaning or worth to all that data...the computer scientist can extract it, the stats guy can analyze it, but who will present it in such a way that the public can grasp, digest, make sense of, be drawn to? Well, yeah, that's where I think the data viz crew comes into play.

It's just like consumer product type deals, in a way - a product can be the best performing thing ever, but if it doesn't engage the public on an emotional level, well, i don't think it will be super successful. It's the convergence of substance and style that makes a product successful in the mass market, and that is exactly what Tufte's work does...It merges the nitty gritty facts and makes it look cool/better in the process...

It's like Tufte is innately able to appease the two Myers Briggs personality type functions of "N" and "S" with his plots/figures. The spatial relationships of the data and the archaic ways of displaying it with "dots/names" can appeal to the "N's" among us, but the "S's" need something a bit, well, more refined and less conceptual or abstract.

What do y'all make of his work?