The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte

Tufte is also an accomplished grand-scale sculptor, in addition to being a thought leader in information visualization and the author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", and several other books. His gallery ET Modern has recently opened in New York.

by NPR Staff, June 4, 2010

LISTEN NOW (Scott Simon talks with Edward Tufte)

Edward Tufte has a big backyard that stretches for hundreds of acres near Cheshire, Conn. Over the years, he's filled that space with giant metal sculptures as big as the trees.

Dear Leader, by Edward Tufte

"I think it was Richard Serra who said that the market for big, outdoor landscape pieces is like the market for Canadian experimental poetry," he says. "So I can never be accused of being market-driven in the art world."

Tufte is an accomplished grand-scale sculptor, but he is perhaps more famous for making charts, graphs and diagrams beautiful. He's been called the "DaVinci of Design" and the "Minister of Information." His books - with titles like The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - are widely read by Web architects, scientists and basically anyone else who's interested in presenting data creatively and clearly.

And, the new edition of Microsoft Office will include a Tufte creation: the "sparkline." It's a small graphic, the size of two short words, which can be embedded in text to depict stock markets or baseball stats.

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