David Hockney: Secret Knowledge

A new expanded edition of David Hockney's Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters was recently published, with a quote for the back cover from my review of the original edition at this website .

I've decided to teach an experimental two-day course this summer in Palo Alto, California (about 45 minutes south of San Francisco) on Thursday-Friday, July 12-13. The course will consist of a chapter-by-chapter close reading and commentary on all four books: On day 1, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information. On day 2, Visual Explanations and Beautiful Evidence, and possibly some material from volume 5 in progress. Over the years, in the one-day course, I've concentrated on certain practical topics (showing financial data, interface design, flow charts, PowerPoint, and so on) and on the most recent one or two books. In contrast, this try at a two-day course will accept the organization of the books as written, which is on strategies of display (for example, escaping flatland, small multiples, layering and separation, integration of evidence, evidence corruption) and not on particular technologies of display (interface, slideware, animations) or particular topics (financial data, medical data). The two-day course is the theory of analytical design with examples; the one-day course, examples with some theory. Both courses stress a close reading of visual evidence. In the two-day course, I can show more videos and rare books associated with the material in the four books. I can talk more informally about the books and describe what I was trying to do in a particular chapter or example. Since the two-day course will surely be smaller than the one-day course, there will be some opportunities for questions during the class and, like the one-day course, during office hours before the course and during lunch. One other relevant property of the two-day course is that students have to set aside two full days devoted entirely to the four books without interruption. There is probably about 20% direct overlap with the one-day course. Students will be shipped the books in advance in order to do some reading assignments before the course. All four books must be in hand both days. The course is not divisible; students should take the course for two days; one fee covers both days.

"The Look of It" By Virginia James Tufte, from Pieces: Embroidered by Memory When Edward Rolf Tufte, our son, was five or six, just after we moved into the house we built in Phoenix, his father, Edward E. Tufte, a civil engineer, equipped the youngster with rather fancy drawing materials and tools--T-square, geometrical templates, assorted pencils, pens, inks, and paper. I remember ERT asked for some "grap paper." At first he had a very small child-size chair and a good-sized table with the legs sawed off to the proper height. As he grew taller, he had a special junior-size drawing board with legs, and a desk. These were next to the big green chalkboard that covered about half of one wall in his room and provided space for drawing as well as working out long math problems or the intricacies of English grammar, sometimes with the help of one or the other of his parents. One day when I was emptying the wastebaskets, I happened to notice a crumpled drawing lying on the top of the wastebasket from his room. I smoothed it out, liked the look of it, and laid it on my desk. My Royal portable typewriter was sitting on the desk, in its carrying case with the lid open, and later that day I picked up the drawing and tucked it behind a bracket inside the lid. It stayed there unnoticed for I don't know how many years, perhaps twenty or thirty. I probably came upon it when I was about to get rid of the manual typewriter a few years after I had bought a Smith-Corona electric portable. By the time I mailed the drawing to ERT, as I recall, he was teaching at either Princeton or Yale. Some years later I saw the drawing, beautifully framed, in his living room, and he told me that his wife (graphic design Professor Inge Druckrey) had liked the look of it and taken it to a framer. As to how old he was when he made the drawing--and threw it away--I would guess six but I don't know exactly. I still like the look of it, no matter what the age of the artist.

Many new medical interventions look good when evaluated by survival time but fail when evaluated by mortality rates. See a fine article in The New York Times here, an article that would appear in no other newspaper. Alvin Feinstein, my colleague at Yale, made the point for years that early diagnosis makes treatments look good because early diagnosis leads to longer survival times--but often with no improvement in mortality rates.

Several good contributions (from another thread) on workarounds for Excel's chartjunky graphics are posted below. Years ago several of my students hacked Excel to do sparklines; the hack was such that Excel never knew it was doing good graphics. poshlust = Russian for pretentious banality

These small pieces that sit on a table were completed over a series of really cold winter days--thus "winter table pieces." The warmer the weather, the larger my artworks. And conversely. Movies (by Andrei Severny and ET) of 2 table pieces (click arrow at lower left of each screen to play): Next a stainless steel piece, asymmetric and tranquil. In the third piece, shown below, the vertical stainless steel plane is engraved and also scribed with lines and curves on both sides. The gestures in the metal grinding recall the color gestures in Sonia Delaunay's work, although Nature's colors from sunlight on stainless steel are richer and and more subtle.

Edward Tufte, "An Academic and Otherwise Life, An N = 1," Wednesday, February 21, 2007, 7.00 pm, at the Biolabs Seminar Room (#1068), at 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge. A nostalgic account of ET's education and careers in statistics, political economy, analytical design, landscape sculpture, book publishing, and consulting. The themes are influential teachers, turning points, and lessons learned. A question session will follow the talk.