Forbes: Obama's Data Visionary

Before Edward Tufte came along, no one would have suspected that "data visualization rock star" could be a job description.

But Tufte's seminal, self-published 1982 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has become the bible for graphic design in every medium from newspapers to corporate reports, focusing on what Tufte calls "intense clarity": displaying as much data as clearly and honestly as possible.

President Obama, it turns out, is a Tufte fan too. Earlier this month the administration announced that Tufte would join the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, tasked with tracking the distribution of the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed in 2009. Tufte's assignment: to make Recovery.gov an easily readable Web site, even while quantitatively tracking hundreds of individual stimulus projects around the country.

Forbes talked with Tufte about his Sisyphean government project, how companies can apply his lessons to making sense of their ever-swelling stores of data, and his excitement about the iPad.

Read more.

(Gregory PS: here is a very effective Tufte-style "V" infographic from barackobama.com showing increasing job losses during the last year of Bush administration and decreasing losses in the first year of Obama)