In an earlier post I mentioned the Edward Tufte idea of Sparklines.
Sparklines are small, compact graphics that show the change of a variable over time (or some other parameter). Their beauty and utility stems from their small size and ability to relate information easily and intuitively. I encourage you to click to Edward Tufte's site for more information.
There is now a site that makes the sparkline plots for you, at the link above. I hope you'll give them a try and make them part of your own writings. The more they're used the more people will come to understand them. And because Sparklines convey information so readily, the more people will understand the information you want them to understand.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
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2 comments:
Putting data inline could be useful, but I can't see where it would be useful in my communication, even for my scientific discussions that involves data.
The sparklines are a tool for displaying information. It's always up to the writer to decide how to use his tools.
Personally, I haven't used them, yet. But I can see their advantages to showing trends easily where I would have had to present a full graph otherwise.
The real problem with this idea, and others, is that readers are not familiar with sparklines. So, if you use them you have to explain them. That gets harder to do. What's more, there's the initial resistance to new ideas that readers have so that makes it all the more difficult.
Still, those problems always are there. The more we use new ideas the less resistance we'll see.
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