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    16.08.2007

    Seminar Report: Tufte's Presenting Data, Seattle, July 24, 2007

    Update: See http://www.tandoku.com/tufte for a refined version of these notes.
     
    On July 24, 2007, I attended a seminar titled Presenting Data and Information by Edward Tufte in Seattle. Much to process. Key themes:

    ·         Bullets are a despicable form of withholding information

    ·         Do whatever it takes to present the content

    ·         Do not let the mode of presentation harm the understanding of the content

    ·         Handouts are higher bandwidth than slides

    ·         The map is the best content presentation metaphor

     

    Other quick thoughts:

    ·         First and second act were strong.

    ·         The third act was a little unsteady. What did he have at lunch?

    ·         Tony Cuozzo was in attendance. We belly ached and riffed over Ivar’s at lunch as only GSO veterans can.

    ·         My Day With GFS presentation on capacity planning fails on almost all of Tufte’s principles of content presentation (below); rework required! I can’t believe 1,300 people have so willingly tolerated my defective presentation. The next round will be stronger, I assure you.

    ·         Stop by my office to peruse the books, they are beautiful.

     

    Here are my raw notes from the event, transcribed from paper.

     

    1.       Opening

    a.       Chopan and midi-like visualization of piano piece

                                                                   i.      Represents the notes, the patterns, past, present and future in one view

    b.      Has us reading from the books like a bible at church service

    2.       Theme for the day: Do whatever it takes to convey the information

    3.       Info flow practices

    a.       Focus on causality, you can only control the situation by regulating the cause

    b.      Multiple sources of data

    c.       Attitude: Find whatever data you need to convey the truth

    d.      Diagrams are analyses

    e.      Ignore your own style, strengths, tendencies and comforts

    4.       Annotation is credibility and texture

    a.       Linking lines are verbs. Annotate linking lines to add texture to the relationship.

    b.      On an org chart, annotate link lines to differentiate types of relationships

    5.       A cluttered presentation is evidence of bad design, not bad data

    6.       The eye-brain system is high bandwidth

    a.       System runs on 10MB at 16-bit color depth per eye

    b.      Visual information overload is impossible

    c.       The eye is capable of about 1000x bandwidth of a PC display

    7.       The map is the chief metaphor when presenting data

    8.       Provide reasons to believe

    a.       Provide the parenthetical (this is the truth until a better view of the truth comes along)

    b.      Leave the door open to getting trumped by better data; this is progress!

    9.       High resolution data presentation is genuinely interactive

    a.       With sufficient data presentation resolution, each viewer will engage their own cognitive patterns to process the portion that interests them most

    b.      Gets lots of people thinking about your data

    10.   Supergraphics

    a.       Aerial photographs

    b.      Cancer maps

    c.       History of pop music

    d.      Texture, interactive, transparent design, rich, luscious content presentation

    e.      Avoid contraptions

    11.   If your numbers are boring, get better numbers

    a.       It’s about your content

    b.      If your content stinks, then your presentation will stink (duh)

    c.       Boredom is a function of your content, not your presentation

    12.   Graphic layout rule: 1+1=3

    a.       Two lines (1+1) creates a third element, the white space between the lines

    b.      Lower the contrast (gray lines instead of black, for example) to reduce impact

    13.   Bullets

    a.       Profound denial of information

    b.      The slow reveal angers Tufte!

    14.   If you bring handouts and the audience reads ahead, GOOD! GREAT! Your goal as a presenter is for your audience to engage with your content.

    15.   Always use annotation as much as possible.

    16.   Tables

    a.       B.E. pp 176 – slops in table, very cool!

    b.      Resort to graphics only to represent 500 or more data points, otherwise use a table

    c.       Performance data always belongs in a table

    17.   Tufte’s all purpose advice

    a.       Steal from the best

                                                                   i.      “Talent imitates, genius steals” T.S. Eliot

                                                                 ii.      Get out of the amateur design business

                                                                iii.      Employ taste in choosing what to steal

                                                               iv.      The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the journal Nature are great sources

                                                                 v.      The NYT has a 30 person data design staff!

    b.      Avoid pitchy, kinky marketing design

    c.       Target documentary presentation of evidence and content

    d.      View design as a research activity, not a creative activity

    18.   Don’t dumb it down or condescend

    a.       “People have not suddenly become stupid just because they come to your presentation.” – Tufte

    b.      Your audience is smart

    c.       They read the newspaper every day and know how to process graphics and tables

    19.   Project management: Employ the wall chart with 11 pt font

    a.       Spatiality overcomes sequential presentation of content

    20.   Break

    21.   Everything interesting is a multi-variate problem

    a.       3 or more variables

    22.   Flatlands: Our task is to boil down multiple dimensions to two for presentation

    a.       Data density and dimensionality go hand in hand

    b.      What’s the bandwidth of your presentation?

    c.       Minimize design admiration time, maximize content messaging time

    d.      Use models when possible to escape Flatland for “real land”

    e.      Build a little model

    23.   Napoleon’s march

    a.       B.E. pp 124

    b.      6 dimensions of data

    c.       Ultimately, an anti-war statement

    24.   The principles of content presentation

    a.       Show comparisons

    b.      Show causality

    c.       Show multi-variate data

    d.      Integrate data, tables, diagrams, graphics, words, references, qualifications in one presentation or diagram

    e.      Document your sources

                                                                   i.      This is what 6 pt type is for!

    f.        A note on these principals

                                                                   i.      There is one meta-principle here: Analytical content design and analytical thinking are the same process

                                                                 ii.      Thinking = design

                                                                iii.      The components of analytical thought processes are the components of content design and presentation

                                                               iv.      This is about turning fundamental cognitivie process into design process

    g.       Serious presentations depend upon integrity, quality and relevance of the content

                                                                   i.      Get better content!

                                                                 ii.      Make sure the mode of presentation does not harm the content

                                                                iii.      “Galileo sounds a lot like Feynman”

                                                               iv.      “Both from Brooklyn”

    h.      Do your important comparisons in adjacent space, and not stacked in time

                                                                   i.      On one page

    i.         Use small multiples

                                                                   i.      Leverage the audiences understanding of a common format

                                                                 ii.      Show all of the data

    j.        Aside

                                                                   i.      Cherry picking is the greatest threat to truth in content design and presentation

                                                                 ii.      The character of evidence should make the point, not the selection of evidence

    1.       Cherry picking is ultimately fraudulent

    25.   Sparklines

    26.   NASA Columbia disaster post-mortem

    a.       Use Powerpoint as a slide projector

    b.      Use handouts, not slides, to convey data

    27.   Presentation advice

    a.       Preparation       

                                                                   i.      Practice! In front of a video camera! Brutal!

                                                                 ii.      Consider improving the content.

    b.      Beginning the presentation

                                                                   i.      Avoid the opening universal joke. Ugh! Ack!

                                                                 ii.      Show up early. Get to know people as they trickle in. Some good will come of it.

                                                                iii.      Open with Problem, Relevance to audience, Solution in about 100 or 200 words

    c.       Ending the presentation

    28.   Tufte has ambitions to sculpt

    a.       Like Judd and Richard Serra

    b.      Cool stuff!

    c.       Does he know Michael Pestel? 

    17:19 | Permalink | In Blog aufnehmen
    11.08.2007

    Using Outlook 2007 with SharePoint to increase knowledge management capabilities

    Premise

     

    E-mail is an effective transient communication medium, an asynchronous extension to the instant messaging model. E-mail is not an effective knowledge management solution. SharePoint is Microsoft’s knowledge management product offering for the enterprise. We should use it as such.

     

    This post is written for a Microsoft internal audience, but should apply to any organization using Outlook 2007 and SharePoint on their corporate network. The principles here extend beyond specific tools, however. E-mail clients are about bringing information to one person. Enterprises will embrace tools to extend knowledge management beyond the e-mail silo into more permanent and generally accessible platforms like SharePoint which will enable a new wave of collaboration across enterprises.

     

    Problem

     

    Microsoft employees (and the rest of the corporate world) frequently use e-mail to fill knowledge management gaps.

     

    Recommendation

     

    Microsoft employees, teams and organizations should leverage Sharepoint shared document libraries, Wiki libraries and blogging capabilities to move knowledge management functions out of e-mail and into SharePoint.

     

    Sub-problem

     

    Undoing fifteen years of business habits and culture built around the utility of e-mail is difficult. The inertia is pretty overwhelming.

     

    Solution

     

    Integrate SharePoint knowledge consumption and proliferation with existing e-mail usage patterns and habits.  SharePoint’s RSS feeds combined with Vista’s RSS subsystem and Outlook’s RSS and Search Folder capabilities make that task trivial. Good. Here’s how.

     

    Configure your Outlook client to display RSS items inline with e-mail items. This action is non-destructive and can be backed out. This is important to note as people get nervous when you monkey with their Outlook configuration, which is a big obstacle to the overall goal of moving knowledge management out of e-mail to SharePoint. 

     

    1.       On the File menu, click New, Search Folder

    2.       Select Create a custom Search Folder

    3.       Click Choose to specify custom criteria

    4.       Give the folder a name (I recommend “Inbox with RSS” but any name will do)

    5.       Click the Browse button to specify the source folders to include in this search folder

    6.       Uncheck Mailbox at the top level of the list

    7.       Check Inbox and RSS Feeds

    8.       Click OK to accept the search folder customization options

    9.       Click OK to create the new search folder

     

    Configure Outlook to open your Inbox with RSS folder as your default mail view. When you start Outlook,  by default, your Inbox is displayed. Use this procedure to instead display your Inbox with RSS folder instead.

     

    1.       On the Tools menu, select Options

    2.       On the Other tab, click Advanced Options…

    3.       Under General Settings, next to Startup in this folder text box, click Browse

    4.       Locate and select the Inbox with RSS folder

    5.       Click OK to accept the options

     

    Subscribe to some SharePoint RSS feeds. When you see the Feeds button turn orange in the IE toolbar, you can subscribe to a feed of content at the current URL. There are five types of feeds to seek out:

    ·         Blogs. Usually the voice of an individual or a team.

    ·         Wikis. Great for intra- and inter-team collaboration and drafting documents.

    ·         Document libraries.

    ·         Calendars.

    ·         Announcement lists.

     

    That’s great, but which feeds are interesting? An OPML file is a list of RSS subscriptions that can be exported and imported. This is a great mechanism for sharing lists of feeds. Here’s what to do.

    1.       Get someone with a good subscription list to export an OPML file for you

    2.       Open Internet Explorer (both IE and Outlook share a common feeds list)

    3.       On the File menu, select Import and Export to open the Import and Export wizard

    4.       Click Next

    5.       Click Import Feeds and click Next

    6.       Select the OPML file saved locally and click Next

     

    Profit

     

    RSS feeds are like distribution lists. One-to-many communication. Use them to keep in touch with your team and other teams in your workgroup and organization. Keep in touch with other groups that you have no working relationship with.

     

    Problems

     

    There are some limitations and constraints, both technical and cultural, that we must overcome to truly embrace SharePoint as a knowledge management solution.

     

    1.       The Outlook 2007 form used to display RSS feed items does not identify the feed the item is associated with.

    2.       The Reply button is disabled when viewing RSS items, but you can forward.

    3.       Outlook 2007’s presence integration with Communicator does not work on the RSS item form.

    4.       Outlook 2007 does not provide a facility to export or otherwise share Search Folders. Instead of following the steps listed in the Solution section of this document, wouldn’t it be nice to send around a file with a message like, “To get RSS inline with e-mail, double click the attachment to add a new Search Folder to your Outlook folder list.”

    5.       There’s a chicken/egg, critical mass component to this culture change. Slow and steady wins the race. This change will take years to take hold. My goal is to get my workgroup to adopt some of these recommendations. That is why this blog entry exists.  

    12:03 | Permalink | In Blog aufnehmen