These go to 11

Tufte makes great points in all of his work and I have been a big fan of his for years. I actually always think of the movie This is Spinal Tap when I think of visual display of information and the line "These go to eleven." Tufte is at his best when he discusses both the importance of using good images and visualizations that are actually relevant to the story being told. The book that we are using doesn't have my favorite image that Tufte uses in his work. That is in The Visual Display of Quantatative Information. This shows Napoleon's invasion of Russia and retreat from Moscow. This print visually shows the destruction of Napoleon's Grande Arme'e.

Tufte and Professor Petrik have made me a more critical consumer of the visual elements of texts. For example I am reading the 20th anniversary edition of the book Chants Democratic for a major field readings class and I noticed that the line height in the text was consistently skewed in the middle of the right side pages. Also I noticed in his work and others at the time seemed to create lots of tables. These tables were not very good at making the points that he, and other social historians were trying to make. They would have been better served in using graphs. My guess is that the publishing industry limited this type of work because it was costly. I also noticed that tables, maps and images were often separated from the text that explained their context. This made the impact of the arguments less significant to the reader and decreased the affective element of the arguments. Digital technology allows for better display of visual information and more importantly when it is carefully thought about technology can offer a clear example of the power of the convergence between text and visualization. In short it allows us to think of expressing information in a way that can engage our senses. Tufte's, and Nigel from Spinal Tap, arguments may be debatable but the visual power of their arguments are undeniable. After all...it does go to 11.

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