Visual reading

Sunday, July 9th, 2006

I've invested in Edward Tufte's books. After having seen a lot of references to these books on many web logs the last couple of years I've finally bought them.  Now I only have to read them. I've started and until now it has been a pleasure.

As an product manager for an administrative IT compliance system for auditors it was a pleasure to read page 61 on Mr. Tufte's newest book "Beautiful Evidence" (2006). I quote (my emphasis in bold italics):

"... a good system for evidence display should be centered on evidence, not on a collection of application programs each devoted to a single mode of information. Rather than wandering around a bureaucracy of operating systems and applications, analysts should work entirely with evidence-documents. Long ago such was the case:  in the original graphical user interface (developed in the 1970's at Xerox Parc), users say only documents - and never saw an operating system or a free standing application. Text, graphics, tables and mathematical formulas were all inside of documents, not inside of separate programs. 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. Why should the intellectual architecture of our reports and our evidence reflect the chaos of software bureaucracies producing these reports?"