America's Next Top Information Professional

As you may know, I am not a fan of PowerPoint. I think it is rarely used well, and more commonly used as a crutch for poor presentations or teaching. Edward Tufte doesn’t like .ppt either, and is much more articulate about the reasons why. Tufte is a statistician and astute observer of information design, and I’ve been enjoying his book, Beautiful Evidence,  particularly the essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.”

Tufte makes a strong case that PowerPoint funnels all kinds of presentations into a simplified business pitch. His specific charges include the low-resolution of information, the one-way sequencing of slides, the lack of listener participation, and fragmentation of content. As one example, he gives a case study of a presentation given to NASA officials prior to the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. In investigations after the explosion, it became clear that the threat had been recognized by some staff and consultants. However, decision was on information that filtered up a path of communication moved between siloed departments and multiple levels of authority. These barriers were only exacerbated by the form in which the crucial information was presented. He provides a disturbing two-page spread of one slide from this presentation, carefully annotated. The lack of concrete data is disturbing, as is the seemingly hierarchical display: presumably, the important stuff is big and at the top, right? It is a convincing argument that the content of technical reports does not fit into the flexible form of PowerPoint. As he writes, “formats, sequencing, and cognitive approach should be decided by the character of the content and what is to be explained, not by the limitations of the presentation technology.”

It struck me that Tufte suggests the simple solution of bringing a short report or notes to a meeting. Not a printout of the information-impoverished slides, but a handout with relevant charts, graphs, or other information. That way, listeners can flip back and forth as they go, take notes, and really participate. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how interactive paper can be.

In another section, Tufte looks at the failure of .ppt when it comes to complex displays of information such as charts and tables. He gives the example of John Graunt’s early tables of life expectancy and mortality. These diagrams present thousands of items of information in a form that permits the reader to make comparisons between various causes of death and various years. As I was reading, I realized that you could call these tables a sort of aggregation, to put it into the lingo of our current module in LIBR 559M. I’ve been struggling with an adequate definition of aggregation as it applies to information, and Tufte certainly add some nuances. Effective aggregation does not mean simply dumping items together. Instead, it enables comparisons, brings items together without diminishing or distorting the content. Just as Google Wave permits greater contextualization of conversations, a proper table or diagram can give context for the information displayed. I’m curious what Tufte would think of some of the other tools we’ve looked at in this course. He has written about iPhone applications, but I want to know what he thinks of Google Wave. Certainly he’s gotten an invite, right?