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Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
Edward R. Tufte
*Visual Explanations* is the third of Edward Tufte's celebrated books on information design, turning from static displays to images that explain — how pictures, diagrams and charts can reveal cause, motion, process and evidence. Tufte ranges across vivid cases: John Snow's cholera map, magic tricks, dance notation, weather diagrams, and, most famously, a hard-edged analysis of how bad charts helped doom the space shuttle *Challenger*. His theme is the ethics as well as the craft of showing evidence: display information honestly and clearly, especially when lives or truth are at stake. Self-published through Graphics Press in 1997 with his usual lavish printing, it rounds out his core trilogy and speaks to anyone who must present or judge visual evidence.
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The author
Edward R. Tufte, statistician and Yale professor emeritus, is the leading popular authority on data visualization and the self-publisher, through Graphics Press, of a tightly designed series of books on the subject.
The book
Visual Explanations extends his project from how to display data to how images explain, examining motion, process and causality. Its centerpiece — an account of the flawed charts presented the night before the Challenger launch — became a widely cited lesson in the life-and-death stakes of clear presentation, alongside chapters on Snow's cholera map and the visual logic of magic.
How it has aged
The examples remain compelling and the ethical argument, if anything, more relevant in an age of dashboards and infographics. Some scholars have quibbled with details of Tufte's Challenger narrative, but the broader point about honest evidence endures.
For more context
Read it with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information as a trilogy.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Edward R. Tufte
- Publisher
- Graphics Press
- Place of publication
- Cheshire, Connecticut
- Year
- 1997
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado