Edward Tufte, An Academic and Otherwise Life
Last night, Professor Edward Tufte came to speak at an IIC seminar. He's a pioneer in the study of visual data representation, and though I haven't read his books, they are reputably beautifully written and crafted (he's designed all of them himself). Well you can read the rest of his impressive CV on his site.
The talk was at a room in the Biolabs, a quite hideous building, and getting to the room involved walking through a narrow hallway flanked with labs and having huge tankards of various gases and things obstructing the way. (It always amuses me to see the little shelves outside each door that serve to hold bottles of Coke and other beverages. Contamination threat!)
He looked very classy in a dark jacket and white shirt, no tie. He spoke of his life, of various "turning points" that got him where he was today, and at the end showed slides of his huge metal artworks (we also got free posters of them). Here're some notes from the talk:
- He began with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
- from the age of 15, he knew he wanted to be a scholar
- his mother told him, there are no shoulders to cry on
- in high school in Beverly Hills, he met people for the first time that were as smart or smarter than him; they'd play classical music games where a part of a piece would be played and instead of identifying the piece, they'd have to identify the conductor
- The Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, where he once had a fellowship, was where people went to finish their books or decide what to do. It was described by some as the "leisure of the theory class."
- on a paper he wrote, one professor noted that a paragraph he wrote had echoes of Veblen. That's when he realized that he should be working in the "big leagues." (This was a theme he focused on a lot. He described the statistician John Tukey as in another league apart from the rest of the brilliant faculty.) He needed to work on "forever knowledge," whereas the most recent book on political science was filled with names and dates like Gerald Ford and 1976, which aren't eternal. He thought that up until then he'd been choosing problems to work on based on whatever came by his desk, or by a hallway chat with a colleague. Problems should be chosen by thought, and he decided to choose ones that were a) important and which b) he could make progress on.
- when trying to publish his first book, Harvard University Press wouldn't print it because it was too expensive to print the charts and images. So he decided to publish it himself. To publish a book you need three things: a garage, a lot of money, and a book designer. He spent a summer working with a designer learning about typography and laying out the book.
- his first three books were set in lead, because there was no digital version of the font Bembo that was of high enough quality. For his latest book he worked with a designer to make his own version of Bembo, "ET Bembo." (eee, type design!)
- he values his "acute sense of relevance," of being able to parse out the most important information from the noise, so that one could start to get "leverage" on a problem. He wishes people can cultivate this skill.
- scholars should be publishing their work. There's a large support system that got them where they were, and they are very overprivileged to do what they do. So to give back, they should show people what they're working on, what they've learned. If you don't publish your work, it doesn't exist.
- when he brought curators to see his art pieces, they'd say "that reminds me of so-and-so": very few people now speak in terms of visual experience. They talk in metaphors, about how something reminds them of something else, not about what's right in front of them.
- his next project is to work on representations in 3 dimensions. We are all used to seeing representations on paper and on screen, but there are always aspects (like volume of space), that they don't adequately capture.
That's the gist of what I can remember. The IIC site should have a video of the whole thing soon. Apparently the video is for internal uses only, according to Tufte's site.
Today I went to a forum about positive psychology and its links with Christianity. I'm too tired from reading, or attempting to read, this, so, til tomorrow.
The talk was at a room in the Biolabs, a quite hideous building, and getting to the room involved walking through a narrow hallway flanked with labs and having huge tankards of various gases and things obstructing the way. (It always amuses me to see the little shelves outside each door that serve to hold bottles of Coke and other beverages. Contamination threat!)
He looked very classy in a dark jacket and white shirt, no tie. He spoke of his life, of various "turning points" that got him where he was today, and at the end showed slides of his huge metal artworks (we also got free posters of them). Here're some notes from the talk:
- He began with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
- from the age of 15, he knew he wanted to be a scholar
- his mother told him, there are no shoulders to cry on
- in high school in Beverly Hills, he met people for the first time that were as smart or smarter than him; they'd play classical music games where a part of a piece would be played and instead of identifying the piece, they'd have to identify the conductor
- The Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, where he once had a fellowship, was where people went to finish their books or decide what to do. It was described by some as the "leisure of the theory class."
- on a paper he wrote, one professor noted that a paragraph he wrote had echoes of Veblen. That's when he realized that he should be working in the "big leagues." (This was a theme he focused on a lot. He described the statistician John Tukey as in another league apart from the rest of the brilliant faculty.) He needed to work on "forever knowledge," whereas the most recent book on political science was filled with names and dates like Gerald Ford and 1976, which aren't eternal. He thought that up until then he'd been choosing problems to work on based on whatever came by his desk, or by a hallway chat with a colleague. Problems should be chosen by thought, and he decided to choose ones that were a) important and which b) he could make progress on.
- when trying to publish his first book, Harvard University Press wouldn't print it because it was too expensive to print the charts and images. So he decided to publish it himself. To publish a book you need three things: a garage, a lot of money, and a book designer. He spent a summer working with a designer learning about typography and laying out the book.
- his first three books were set in lead, because there was no digital version of the font Bembo that was of high enough quality. For his latest book he worked with a designer to make his own version of Bembo, "ET Bembo." (eee, type design!)
- he values his "acute sense of relevance," of being able to parse out the most important information from the noise, so that one could start to get "leverage" on a problem. He wishes people can cultivate this skill.
- scholars should be publishing their work. There's a large support system that got them where they were, and they are very overprivileged to do what they do. So to give back, they should show people what they're working on, what they've learned. If you don't publish your work, it doesn't exist.
- when he brought curators to see his art pieces, they'd say "that reminds me of so-and-so": very few people now speak in terms of visual experience. They talk in metaphors, about how something reminds them of something else, not about what's right in front of them.
- his next project is to work on representations in 3 dimensions. We are all used to seeing representations on paper and on screen, but there are always aspects (like volume of space), that they don't adequately capture.
That's the gist of what I can remember. The IIC site should have a video of the whole thing soon. Apparently the video is for internal uses only, according to Tufte's site.
Today I went to a forum about positive psychology and its links with Christianity. I'm too tired from reading, or attempting to read, this, so, til tomorrow.
11:52 PM
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