The information design guru Edward Tufte will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. “This panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds.”(Tufte)
Mission statement: To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information.
As an information design instructor, my students were assigned readings from Tufte’s books when we discussed graphical integrity. His books have always been an interesting companion to read alongside writings about contemporary artists who use statistical gathering and information design techniques in their work (such as Hans Haacke and Mark Lombardi).
In my own practice, Tufte is a sobering reminder that being expressive and representing data are not a good team.
From his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:
Much of twentieth-century thinking about statistical graphics has been preoccupied with the question of how some amateurish chart might fool a naive viewer. Other important issues, such as the use of graphics for serious data analysis, were largely ignored. At the core of the preoccupation with deceptive graphics was the assumption that data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant. It is hard to imagine any doctrine more likely to stifle intellectual progress in a field. The assumption led down two fruitless paths in the graphically barren years from 1930 to 1970: First, that graphics had to be “alive,” “communicatively dynamic,” overdeocrated and exaggerated (otherwise all the dullards in the audience would fall asleep in the face of those boring statistics). Second, that the main task of graphical analysis was to detect and denounce deception (the dullards could not protect themselves).
Of course false graphics are still with us. Deception must always be confronted and demolished, even if lie detection is no longer at the forefront of research. Graphical excellence begins with telling the truth about the data.” (P.53)
I find this passage interesting in contrast with this quote from John Cassidy’s article about Timothy Geithner in the March 15 New Yorker:
The hardest part of the job, Geitner often says, is getting people to comprehend the inner logic of a financial-rescue operation, and the unpopular actions it entails. In fact, his problem may not be economic illiteracy but its opposite: Americans understand all too well what has happened. Financial crises have a way of revealing aspects of our economic system that otherwise remain obscured, such as the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington, the hidden subsidies that financial firms sometimes receive from the Fed and other government agencies, and the fact that vast profits that firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman generate depend in part on an implicit agreement with the taxpayer. When ordinary Americans are confronted with these realities, they get angry.
Be careful with those infographics!
Sources:
Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment, March 5, 2010
John Cassidy, No Credit, Timothy Geitner’s financial plan is working—and making him very unpopular. The New Yorker, March 15, 2010