Tufte_Sparklines

1. In some of the larger examples of Sparklines, (i.e. “Bumps chart” that is a tally of women’s collegiate rowing contests at the University of Cambridge, England pg.56) are there ways to minimize the text further without losing comprehension of the Sparkline data? At what point do Sparklines begin to speak for themselves? Are smaller graphics embedded into the text more successful?

 

2. “Just as Sparklines are like words, so then distributions of Sparklines on a page are like sentences and paragraphs. The graphical idea here is make it word like and typographic…” pg.63

Would the adoption of Sparklines into architectural language be simple? Are there situations that Architects could face where Sparklines would not be beneficial to use? If so, what are they?

 

3. Tufte lays out a series of guidelines on how to design and produce Sparklines including: The Aspect Ratio, Dequantification, Production Methods, Unintentional Optical Clutter, Resolution of Sparklines, and Resolution of Layouts of Multiple Sparklines pg.60-63

Are there other factors that you can think of that would allow Sparklines to become an easier to adapt method of communication? What are they? Why do we not see data laid out in this format more frequently?

 

4. Tufte used examples of how Sparklines can communicate data within cartography, brain research, molecular biology, 16thc. engravings, sports statistics and economic/financial data. In what specific applications should Architects use Sparklines? (i.e. Client information sharing? Site Analysis?....)

 

5. “Why go to a special place to construct a data graphic? To lay out a report? Segregating information by its mode of production, convenient and profitable for software houses, too often becomes a corrupting metaphor for evidence presentations.” pg. 61

As aspiring Architects, we have access to many software programs that allow us to explore enormous amounts of data. Even with some overlap in capabilities, there are still, in many ways, separations of word, number, image and graph. How do we mitigate this moving forward?