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October 6, 2006
Edward Tufte Seminar Not Worth Admission Price
Today, I attended a one-day seminar by Edward Tufte, grandfather of contemporary thinking in the area of data visualization and quantitative presentation. Well, I attended most of it...by 3:30, I was so bored and put off by the off-topic meanderings that I left.
In short, I was disappointed. This man, whose four books are seminal and excellent, had a very uneven five-and-a-half hours of presentation. While the morning part was pretty good -- it offered several useful tenets of visualization that most in the audience could probably make use of straight away -- the afternoon was a waste.
I really don't care about his sculpture or his opinions on managerial failings within NASA...that's not why I paid $270 (group rate) to attend the lecture. Rather, I was wanting to take away more pragmatic, immediately useful design principles and hoping that he'd spend most of the time walking through many of the examples that abound in his books to illustrate how he thinks about particular visualization examples and tasks.
Instead, we got long-winded and overly drawn-out discourses on just a very few of the better-known examples. Add to that the time wasted on rather pointless displays of two rare books that Tufte owns (do we really need to see the actual book, or was he doing it just to prove that he owns such rare and expensive antiques?) and you end up with about 2 hours of useful content spread over most of a day.
But then, I guess nobody would pay $360 (regular price) for a 2-hour monologue, even if it included all four of Tufte's books.
If today's presentation were a graphic, it would have a few pieces of useful, interesting information surrounded by lots of wasted space and pointless artifacts.
Yes, he's a very smart guy, and yes, his published works are both practically useful and aesthetically beautiful. But, after looking forward to this seminar for months, I just wish that the course today had been of the same high quality as the ideas and books that elevated Tufte to fame in the first place.
Comments
Craig : I too have been a long time admirer of his books and would have been equally disappointed. Sounds like he should stick to the written and graphical works. Keep up the blog - I browse often. Andrew
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at October 7, 2006 7:56 AM
Thanks for blogging this! I've become intrigued by Tufte's work and am almost done with his first book. I have some reservations for some of the sciences in regards to his work, as I feel it has a Bauhaus feel to it. I.e., minimalism = beauty. I feel to some extent (being a devil's advocate as well) that this is not always the case. For instance, I have a problem with the lack of a 0-point for graphs using the dash-dot approach. He loses the fixed point of Zero in the graph, and the scientist must immediately question "does the scale go to zero on the left corner?" Very disconcerting. I have other small issues with his sparklines, but I haven't reached those discussions yet in my reading, and so I must not comment at this time. :)
In general I agree with his concepts, but feel the show their most usefulness in combating the use of graphics in popularized media, and not necessarily in the every-day science world- one issue is quite simply the lack of tools to produce his charts. I definitely won't be making 10 of those charts tomorrow merely due to the difficulty of doing so. Not to mention I would increase the ink on the graphs a bit so that visually they are easier to read (so the older prof's don't have to squint).
Finally, I must agree with another online users' comment regarding the organization and usefulness of his website. It's painful to wade through the myriad of blog-like posts on the website, which often have interweaving aspects to other threads.
I have the tendency to feel that Tufte's work has been popularized (rock-star-status) because it is a definitive work and calls into question a lot of statistical data presentation. He may be a first in this. If so, he deserves accolades. I appreciate the work. However, I think it is a mistake to feel it is not to be questioned at times. Certainly someone who purports to educate should question whether $300 per head is a useful price-point for educating. It certainly will price his education out of the hands of most of the poor students in america. [Being one, I can safely say I won't be going to any of his talks. And likely, I will only be reading his books (albeit beautiful) in the library.]
Cheers!
-Allen
ps- don't mean to be negative... but in light of all the positive discussions about Tufte, someone surely must have some negatives to say. I appreciate your post because it keeps me from dumping change on a talk that would do much better to feed me this month in the form of hard cash. ;)
Posted by: a11en at October 4, 2007 12:03 AM
I have been in the business of presenting information for 37 years. I attended the Tufte seminar in Chicago in June. Two things I came away with (besides the pretty books). First, he is very full of himself. Second, he has no grasp of the real world.
I think that if you had absolutely no understanding of how to present information to a client or a larger audience, and you were one of those people who should be prevented from ever using Powerpoint, you might be awed by Edward. On the other hand, if you have even the slightest understanding of how to present data you would see how little depth there is to his perception.
Whew. Glad I got that off my shoulders.
Posted by: Sabrina Simon at July 16, 2008 10:19 PM