Beautiful Evidence
When I got home from work yesterday, I was overjoyed to find two packages I had sent out for. One was a bottle of ginger vodka and the other was Edward Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence. So I sat down for a drink and read the first eighty pages. I am a fan of Tufte, and I have the previous three books in this series so I was eagerly anticipating this one.
A quote from the first page:
Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: We will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the priveleged.
I assume this is support for Tufte’s assertion that both the creation and interpretation of evidence are moral as well as intellectual acts.
For me, I consider most of his examples the antithesis of infoporn.
My favorite chapter so far is the one entitled Links and Causal Arrows. The chapter starts out with a diagram depicting the evolution of cubism and abstract art by Alfred Barr. The vertical axis represents time, increasing as you move down the page. The horizontal axis represents a continuum of non-geometical to geometrical styles:
TODO: Make a rollover imagemap out of this. Show examples of the selected style to the right of the as you move the mouse around to different nodes in the diagram.
I like the style of the diagram because I’m a sucker for classic modern anything, and of course I like causal link diagrams (espeically interactive ones). But then Tufte rolls out this other diagram by Ad Reinhardt that was something of a spoof of this first one (sorry, can’t find a high-res version anywhere):
In this diagram the vertical axis is also time like Barr’s diagram, but in this one time increases as you go up the page. This fits in with his use of an actual tree. The horizonal axis is a continuum of “pure” to “corrupt” art going left to right. There is obviously a moral expression here, as well as his decision to make the furthest right (most corrupt) branch rotting and about to fall off.
As far as causal links go, I’m often torn between wanting to visualize them as a network (and ending up with an intriguing yet ultimately useless diagram that is too complicated for any kind of reasoned analysis) but more often than not plain old sortable lists are much more effective.
not that you need a “second” from a chumpstain…but i wholeheartedly agree with you on Tufte being a badarse. im intrigued buy the projection of morality on art. to me the whole concept of morality is lossed (literal meaning included-chuckle). “Good” and “Bad” seem like archetypes of philosophical remnants long since disproved. yet for some reason we(humans) are still clinging to idea of making a correlative link between those two myths(good and bad) and reality. i watched 2001 sunday and the special features section had an interesting interview with Arthur C. Clarke. He said something to the effect that they’re making of 2001sort of forced the whole neatherthal-near futer-to way far in the future timeline so as to prepare their audience and facillitate their exceptance of taking such a quantum jump and accept the possibility of the unknown. yet there is something about society that forces humanity to ignore this question of “what is possible” on such a consistant basis that they deny the whole rhelm of possibilities. Taking your art topic into this context it makes me ponder how much of this mentality prevents society from viewing art in terms that justify the artworks inherent value instead of measuring its value based the A-moral stance that morality is an equitable measure. FUCK THA POLICE!!!
chumpstain
19 Jun 06 at 9:00 am