Graphics in Science

BishopBerkeley writes "Nature has an interesting nugget about the second meeting of the Image and Meaning Initiative which was held at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is about the use of graphics in presenting scientific data. I am also a big advocate of using nice graphics in scientific presentations, but I also agree with Felice Franel, the founder of I-M, that not all images are meaningful scientifically. In fact, one encounters (and I am ashamed to admit that I have published) images that look nice but have no scientific import at all. One very cool Harvard physics professor, Eric Heller, produces wickedly beautiful (and meaningful) images of quantum mechanical models. These images have made the covers of Science and Nature, and are featured in his online art gallery, which was reviewed in the New York Times in 2002." And of course, any mention of graphic information should not go by without a big shout out to Edward Tufte.

Comments

Re:who made this tuft guy czar

[Knuckles]

" Why does this tufte guy get so much credit (...)"

Might have to do with the fact that he was a professor of statistics, graphic design, and political economy at Yale.

so little

Did you read his 3 main books on scientific graphics (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Envisioning Information; Visual Explanations)? They are very insightful books with a wealth of examples that are very inspiring.

opinions on design (...) by definition are subjective matters

Bull. This might be true if you talk about art, but we are not. You can easily do experiments that show that viewers have an easier time extracting information in a specific graphic design than in others.

once we stop kow towing to the tuftewrongs, we might get somewhere

Sure, but please show specific examples where he is wrong