One of my favorite ever books is book by a chap called Edward Tufte, and called 'The Visual Display of Quantitate Information'. Two things about the book.
1. It's basically about how numbers can be displayed to help people understand what numbers are saying. There are some beautiful examples of both helpful and unhelpful diagrammes and pictoral representations.
2. It's a really well made book, basically Tufte struggled to find a publisher who would a. publish the book, b. deliver the production values he was aiming for. So he published the book himself and it's just really, really nice. The printing quality is fantastic.
But... if a book is not going to be sold on it cover... this is the book.
This post was sparked by a post I saw which had looked at visual representation of voting in the US election, the post can be found here. Hat tip Andrew Sullivan... again.
The picture, above right, is a really great piece of work. It looks at the voting on a county by county basis, and distorts the map of the US because gives greater space to areas of higher population. What then presents itself if a purple country with swathes of red and blue running through the more rural or urban areas.
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