Visualization of Information

I recently felt that a mouse is getting obsolete. It is not that the mouse itself has not seen any innovation. It has. The dirty and inaccurate ball has been replaced with a laser light, trackballs, graphic tablets. But it still creates carpel tunnel syndrome and fatigues the arm. We still find it hard to move that pointer to the exact "X" on the window ,and if by chance we missed the "X", something bad happens. It is embarassing that the most advanced species on earth needs to communicate with the most amazing inventions on earth through a small rodent! A new interface needs to be developed.

Anyways, one thing lead to another, and i started reading "Envisioning Information" from Edward R. Tufte. An interesting book, its about how humans have captured various data and tried to share that data with others by representing in various forms on paper.

Tufte's books include The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.

The problem with presenting information, as explained by Tufte, is simple -- the world is high-dimensional, but our displays are not. To address this basic problem, Tufte offered five principles of information design:

• Quantitative thinking comes down to one question: Compared to what?
  
• Try very hard to show cause and effect.
  
• Don't break up evidence by accidents of means of production.
  
• The world is multivariant, so the display should be high-dimensional.
  
• The presentation stands and falls on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content.
  

The book also shows how Galileo mapped sunspots on a circular disk and recorded the same over many years, which helped him see a trend. It shows how the japanese used train maps on paper to show multi-variate data. Take a look at how the train map was created:



How many variables are captured in that diagram? I am sure we could be more clever and add more dimensions to it. But it can quickly be overwhelming.

People have come up with ingenious methods of solving the problem of showing multi-dimensional data on two-dimensional screen/paper (Flatlands).

Here is an interesting article about a talk given by Tufte.

The latest book by Tufte is called "Beautiful Evidence".

More later.

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