Beautiful Evidence

Data Visualization 

Project: The primary goal was to get familiar with the book Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte and visually explain the information space of the book such as the visuals, content, structure, and navigation of the book to someone who is not familiar with the content of the book. The visualization is developed baring the importance of context, structure, connections, hierarchy, scale, time, space, complexity and navigation of the information.

Solution: The moral of Tufte’s work is an ethical way for presenters to present data to maximize the legitimacy of the data and optimize the richness of data for the readers. In this book, Beautiful Evidence, Tufte’s goal is to teach the skills of maximizing the reasoning and decrease the decoding time. He achieves this goal by using different examples to illustrate what can and cannot be considered as legitimate evidence of information. The book consists of 8 different chapters each focusing on different concepts focusing on arrows, comparison, explanation, images, numbers, scale, sparkline, and words. Even though each chapter, focuses on a specific theory depicted in the illustration, the poster is identifying each concept that is present in some of the diagram shown in the book. Each horizontal lines describe a different concept, while the vertical lines represent the concepts that could is identified in each of the illustrations.

Outcome: The most challenging task of this project was to maintain the integrity of the complex data while making the complexity more accessible and understandable. At the same time, making the visual and the narrative both catchy and attractive. It is essential to create a hierarchy to catch the persons attention by the aesthetic features of the image and then clearly communicate the data.

Contributors: Siddhant Patel

Year: 2017

Poster

Click here for the high resolution of the poster

VIsual Voice

Building on the familiarity of the content, an attempt was made to add time as an element to visually explain the content of the book. Along with time as an element, it was important to think about the sequence of information, motion, action, and interaction when presented as a movie on the screen. It was also crucial to control the information shown and in what manner, since the time limit was no more than a minute and a half.