Principles of Graphical Excellence
Edward Tufte explains the term “graphical excellence” in “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”.
A graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data. It gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. It is always multivariate and always tells the truth about the data used.
He provides some examples of these principles Raw data would span over multiple pages if used as text only, while they are neatly converted to useful information when used on maps. Here, each county contains information about cancer mortality in U.S.
This is the famous work of Dr. John Snow, who plotted the clusters of cholera outbreak in central London in 1854.
Tufte further provides examples of time-series graphs. Apparently humanity had been sharing information in time-series form since the 10th century. It might be even earlier than that, but we don’t have earlier examples.
My favorite is William Playfair’s chart of imports and exports to and from United Kingdom in the 18th century.
According to Tufte, the following graph is the best statistical drawings ever created. It is created by a french engineer Charles Joseph Minard and shows Napoleon’s march to Russian beginning at the Polish-Russian border.
The following is my personal favorite. It shows the relationship between temperature and the thermal conductivity of copper. Each line is a result from one laboratory and the discrepancy is mainly due to impurities in the samples of copper.
