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Subject:GIFS of charts from Tufte's talks From:"Matthew B. Hicks" <matt -at- UNIDATA -dot- UCAR -dot- EDU> Date:Mon, 30 Jan 1995 01:40:09 -0700
Hi. For anyone who wants to see them, I made scans of a couple of small
images that I had of charts used in Edward Tufte's talks. One is the
previously mentioned chart of the demise of Napoleon's army during its
march on Russia. The other is a chart used by John Gotti's defense team;
I've included a short explanation of what Tufte said about this chart.
Anyway, you can find the links to these GIF images near the bottom of my
homepage at:
I hope the image quality is good enough to give you a feel for what the
originals were like; we have a pretty crappy scanner.
I didn't actually attend a Tufte seminar, but I did see him speak at a
SIGDOC conference I went to. He was given some kind of an award. For his
talk/acceptance speech he printed up handouts on the backs of some
rejected covers for his book _Envisioning Information_. I took the images
from one of these handouts.
He's quite an interesting guy. He started his own publishing company when he
couldn't find anyone to print his first book on graphics the way he wanted it
done. He sees graphics as words, and considers his books to be sort of
invisibly subtitled as "graphics as nouns" and "graphics as verbs," and he
was in the process of writing one that treated graphics as adjectives. (I may
not have the order quite right, this was more than two years ago and I'm
recounting from memory.) The books themselves are beautiful. Comments on
_The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ include:
"One of the best books you'll ever see" -Datamation
"The century's best book on statistical graphics" -ACM Computing Reviews
"A visual Strunk and White" -The Boston Globe
The books are available from:
Graphics Press
P.O. Box 430
Cheshire, CT 06410
Standard disclaimer: I have no connection to Mr. Tufte or the Graphics
Press other than having seen Mr. Tufte speak and having looked over one
of his books.
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Matt Hicks, Tech. Writer, Unidata * I may not agree with what you
Boulder, CO, (303)497-8676, ******* say, but I'll defend to the
matt -at- unidata -dot- ucar -dot- edu ************* death my right to mock you.
