Tufte Case

The use of images in the news has progressively become a bigger part of how we receive our news. The use of images in news reporting is an attempt to convey information to the reader that might be difficult to understand or visualize through text alone. Business news reporting in particular makes effective use of images and graphics to help give the reader a better understanding of what is being discussed. In order for the images to truly be useful the information must be displayed in an effective way. Author Edward Tufte understands this and he writes about this subject in his book Visual Explanations. In his book he provides principles that can be used in the evaluation of articles and their use of images and graphics. Using these principles, three New York Times articles will be analyzed. Through this analysis it can be seen that the articles follow the principles of "Making comparisons", "Considering alternative explanations" and "Assessing for possible errors in the collection of data." These principals will be used to evaluate a sample of three business articles to determine if, according to Tufte's principals, they are effective.

To be able to use Tufte's principals in evaluating the use of images, an understanding of his principals is required. The first principal to be discussed is his "Making Quantitative Comparisons" argument. He famously claims in his book, "compared to what", what is the data being compared to. The idea here is similar to a control group for an experiment. The results must be compared to a "control group" so that the differences in causes and effects can be seen. Tufte uses Dr. John Snow's work on the Cholera epidemic to illustrate this point. John Snow studied not only the people who got sick but also the people who did not get sick. By doing this, he realizes that those who drank the tainted water got sick and those who did not, were healthy. By making this comparison Dr. Snow was able to observe the differences in behaviors between the two groups and determine that the contaminated water was causing the cholera epidemic. It can be seen from Tufte's example that having something to compare data to is necessary to be able to discern useful information.

The next Tufte principal is to be able to consider alternatives explanations and contrary cases. A researcher's work can often become personal often leading to difficulties when encountering data or cases that may not fully support their conclusions. Tufte notes however, that presenting all the information makes a report more credible than one that only presents supporting evidence. After all, Tufte notes "The point is to get it right, not to win the case, not to sweep under the rug all the assorted puzzles and inconsistencies that frequently occur in collections of data."

The third and final principal to be discussed is the assessment of possible