brainstorms

Thursday November 03, 2005

tufte's six information design principles

note to self: from shermer's sci am article The Feynman-Tufte Principle:

• documenting the sources and characteristics of the data
• insistently enforcing appropriate comparisons
• demonstrating mechanisms of cause and effect
• expressing those mechanisms quantitatively
• recognizing the inherently multivariate nature of analytic problems
• inspecting and evaluating alternative explanations

in brief, information displays should be documentary, comparative, causal and explanatory, quantified, multivariate, exploratory, skeptical.

[tbd: a screed about the sorry state of the open-source information display tools [eg. gnuplot, ploticus, xmgrace et al] i found a reasonably good review of some tools here]