One of things we spent a good deal of time on Friday in the Tufte seminar was his concept of “Sparklines”. Tufte describes them as “Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics”. The idea is that a small (very small) chart of information can be provided in-line with text and serve to illustrate the data behind the text. In the space consumed by just a few words, hundreds (even thousands, with sufficient resolution) of data points can be used to form a chart.

In explaining Sparklines in Beautiful Evidence, Tufte uses several examples. One of these is medical reports that typically provide a test name and then the result value as a number. What this loses, however, is the context for the measurement — is this result high or low relative to the patient’s history? Relative to the normal range?

The image at right shows several examples. First is the typical display for a glucose test’s result (128). The second is a sparkline example that shows the patient’s results over time. In this context, it’s clear that the result of 128 is low relative to many of the patient’s previous results. The third example places a red dot at the point of 128 (the most recent result) and then displays the result value text in red, instantly drawing a correlation between the point on the chart and the value at that point. The bottom example combines a light gray band representing the normal range. The result is a graphic that quickly provides context and history for a test result, using much less space than the text “relatively low for this patient and within normal range” would require.

So can we use Sparklines in applications? First, we certainly are allowed to use this concept. Tufte himself referred to it as an “open-source idea to be freely used”. Next, the question is, how do we use this in our applications?

In searching around for software implementations of Sparklines, I found several. There are implementations for PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, MS Office, and others. Note that the Python implementation, written by Joe Gregorio, is provided online as a “Sparkline Generator Web Application”. It’s a slick interface that lets you fill out a form to set some properties and values, and then provides the URL that would return the resulting Sparkline.

I also found a .NET implementation from Eric Bachtal. He implemented it last year as an HTTPHandler for ASP.NET applications. The results look great on a web page and the code is provided with a license to freely use, copy, modify, and so on. 

For me, I’d like the ability to use this in a couple other ways. First, I’d like a general object API that lets me set some properties (style, colors, size, etc), provide the data, and then get an Image type in return. From there, I’d like to see a control that can be used in a Winforms application — either directly on a form or within a data grid, with the ability to resize and adjust like any other UI control. While the license indicates that it’s fine, I plan to contact Eric to see if he minds me using his work to get a leg up on that effort. I’ll report back here when/if I make progress.

Definitely check out the various examples and libraries above. Each appears to be free for personal use and all but one makes the source available in some form. The MS Office product from Nicolas Bissantz requires purchasing a license for commercial use and no source is provided, but it’s also the most friendly to non-developers and several Sparklines-inspired products are available (including a cool ticker).

I had the opportunity to see Edward Tufte present his one-day seminar on Presenting Data and Information yesterday in Denver. It was a great presentation and well worth the entry fee.

In addition to the 6+ hours of lecture-style presentation, each attendee also received copies of all four of Tufte’s visualization books, including the newly release Beautiful Evidence. Some thoughts:

1. Tufte himself is an engaging presenter. He’s constantly on the move and, as you’d expect from a professor who spends a great deal of time presenting, is very comfortable in front of a large group. You can tell that he’s presented the material a hundred times, but he still avoids sounding bored or appearing to “go through the motions.”

2. He didn’t rely much on “props” or technology (and doesn’t need to). Over the course of the day, there were maybe a dozen different images presented on two very large screens — but I’m pretty sure they were all photographs. There were no slides at all (see more about that below). He had a few physical props he showed, including original first edition prints of the Euclid and a Galileo collection. These latter two were walked around by Tufte and then by two assistants for people on the aisles to see, but the relevant pages had been photographed and were displayed on the two screens for everyone.

3. Most of the content was well prepared and meticulously presented. He presents several “Principles of Information Design” from Beautiful Evidence and spends a good deal of time on each principle. Most of what he was presenting was available throughout his books, so we spent a fair amount of timing flipping to certain pages so he could speak to some of the images and ideas he’d written about. More on this “books as handouts” below. Later in the presentation, we spent a good deal of time looking at technical presentations that had been given at NASA before and after the Columbia and Challenger shuttle disasters.

4. I’m not sure when/if he got a break. During each break we took (one mid-morning break and then an hour for lunch), he would sit at a table off to the side for “office hours.” We could go to him with questions or to have him autograph one of his books. He was doing this in the morning during registration, as well as at the end (for the brief time I was there). As a germophobe myself, I found it interesting that he kept a small container of Purell hand sanitizer nearby at all times. It occurred to me later that if you’re shaking a lot of hands or handling a lot of other people’s books, you probably want to clean your own hands regularly — especially before handling first edition books that are hundreds of years old.

5. Tufte is no fan of PowerPoint (note: extreme understatement). For that matter, he’s no fan of any technology “crutch” a presenter might use, but PowerPoint is that crutch most of the time so its gets the bulk of his criticism. His concerns include:

• Most slides are poorly written. As he put it, “the sentence has served us well for thousands of years and now we’re using a tool that demands bulletpoints with abbreviations and shorthand.”
• Most presenters rely too much on their slides to be their message. He gave various examples of PowerPoint slides being used as the entirety of documentation for some projects (including NASA, where he’s since served as a consultant).
• Most presenters simply read their slides for their presentation, which is also my personal pet peeve. He put it well that “nobody got to be the boss by being a slow reader… so don’t read to them.” I find it maddening that most presenters who don’t present fulltime will too often read their slides. He provided some stats that most of us can read several hundred words per minute, yet we only speak 100 or so… explaining why you always say “ugh… read faster” when sitting through a technical presenter reading their slides.
• Most of the images and design “phluff” (his term from Beautiful Evidence) in PowerPoint presentations isn’t aesthetically pleasing and it detracts from the message.
• Most of the charts/graphs that people use (true for PowerPoint and elsewhere) don’t have enough data points or density to be interesting. They’re only slightly more useful than the same information in tabular form. This was a theme earlier in the day during his “Principles of Information Design,” but the ease with which PowerPoint and other software lets us create charts worsens the problem.
• The final point is the one I found most interesting. If your entire presentation depends on the message being delivered via PowerPoint slides, your message will rarely be received in its entirety. Meetings get sidetracked. “The boss” likes to ask questions that lead to tangents. People show up late or leave early. Schedules get conflicted. By the end of your deck, the entirety of your message has likely NOT been received by all the people you’d like.

So rather than depend on the slides you’ve prepared, Tufte suggest a short handout. His suggestion was a single sheet of 11x17 paper that can be folded in half to yield a 4–page document. Paper has higher resolution than any display, making it easier to organize and present a great deal of information in a relatively small space — especially if the charts/images you use are effective (a single picture worth a million data points).

In doing this, you can speak briefly to your message knowing that everyone in the room has all the information you want them to have — even if they arrive late, leave early, or get sidetracked by tangential questions. Let them read ahead while you present your message… It means they’re interested. A handout also means they can make notes and have something to refer back to later (or read through again when the next presenter is slowly reading through their own PowerPoint slides).

What goes on that 11x17 piece of paper? For that, you’d want to refer back to his books and those Principles of Information Design.

Toward the end of the day, the anti-PowerPoint angle grew a bit old but he had enough distinct arguments and good examples that it wasn’t too bad.

I did come away thinking that if I were the PM for PowerPoint at Microsoft, I’d want to get Tufte on the horn and have the Office unit’s checkbook in hand. “We don’t necessarily disagree with you, Ed… ever been to Seattle?”

After a two-week vacation, we’ve now been home for a week. Work was hectic, but it’s so nice to be back home… in our own beds, a quiet house, not living out of suitcases, etc.