five computers

the death of books

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

- Mark Twain

It seems that some universities are moving away from physical books, switching entirely to electronic textbooks. My initial reaction is that this is just a little bit crazy. Electronic reference materials have a place, but I have a real difficulty with only electronic textbooks as being the best approach. Certainly there is a financial justification and a reduction in the physical weight the students have to carry. There is no doubt an advantage for the book stores, having to carry less physical inventory and ship it around the country.

But none of this takes into account how you interact with a physical book. It just isn't the same having the material online or on a PDF in a laptop. A screen is harder to read (a good laptop screen is still less than 100dpi, books and print are 300dpi or more) and as it is a lower resolution than printed material, you can only see a small amount of the information at a time. Diagrams and accompanying text are often hard to see all in one place. This is part of the reason why reading on a screen can be so tiring. Also the backlit text is harder on the eyes than reading from a page. The second drawback is how you physically interact with a book - flicking quickly through pages, marking pages with a highlighter, inserting post-it notes, curling up in a chair to read a book, spreading several books and notes out across a table. All of these metaphors may eventually be replaced with digital analogues that are as powerful or more so, but it seems we are quite far from that time.

The Amazon Kindle is probably about as good as this gets just now and from what I can tell, it still falls far below a good hunk of printed tree. The Kindle does have a higher resolution screen, which helps with reading for a long time, but the screen is small and the navigation feels clunky. Laptops are worse.

I do find a lot of value in online reference books. I've had a subscription to O'Reilly's Safari for over a year now and have found it to be invaluable, particularly when traveling. I can have access to a variety of reference texts, easily searchable, almost always available (if you have an internet connection). However, I've never been able to read any of the books I have on my Safari subscription, for more than a few pages. It just doesn't seem to work for me. No doubt I'm destined to become a relic in my views on reading, but it seems that we approach reading on a screen differently to a book. I'd love to have some sort of larger Kindle device, linked to a Safari subscription. Some way to really read those books on Safari, rather than just treating them as reference works. It always feels that this is just right around the corner, yet we never quite get there.

edward tufte and presenting data

I was lucky enough to attend a seminar from Edward Tufte, a couple of weeks ago, on the Presentation of Data and Information. Edward Tufte is probably best known for the book 'The Quantitative Display of Visual Information' and was an engaging and entertaining presenter. He has a very different style from the normal Powerpoint-driven presentation approach. In fact, much of his work is railing against the uses and abuses of Powerpoint and similar slide techniques.

The main take-away I got from the whole day was that if you have to communicate complicated data sets or information, that you really need to consider how people will use and interact with the data first. Too often, we go straight to presentation software and start trying to work out how to express the information in slides, rather than taking the time to consider if there are other, better ways to impart the information. Tufte was very keen on the concept of a 'super-graphic' which is a data rich, high resolution physical handout that lets participants see and consider a lot of data at once. A map is a great example of a super-graphic, or the weather page in a typical newspaper. A key part of this is that paper is much higher resolution than a typical computer screen (72dpi to 600dpi means you can show a whole lot more data in the same space). This is why multiple display screens are really useful for serious work. It also means that printing out and sharing data is a great way to get information infront of people in a meeting, rather than drip feeding it from slides)

I compare this idea to another guide I saw in the same week on creating powerpoint presentations that admonishes that there should never be more than 8 numbers on any slide or graphic. Tufte's response to this was repeatedly 'when did we become so stupid, just because we walked into a business meeting?' People handle large, complex data displays every day in the real world. People read and study sports scores in a newspaper, or financial reports without any trouble at all.

Let the data drive the presentation format, rather than the presentation software drive how the data is displayed.