Visualizing Federal Data

There's a great piece in the new issue of Washington Monthly about visual data guru Edward Tufte and his work with federal agencies, most recently the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, on how they display government information to the public.

Tufte has gained quite a large following over the past several decades, and his books on how to present data visually have sold millions of copies. Tufte's work on Recovery.gov completely changed the way the RAT Board decided to present its data on how Recovery Act dollars were being spent. In the Washington Monthly story, Joshua Yaffa details Tufte's meeting with board chairman Earl Devaney in early 2009:

And so, that April, in an office building blocks from the White House, Tufte spent a few hours with Devaney looking at sketches of some of the displays the board was preparing. Devaney showed Tufte a prototype of Recovery.gov, the site that catalogs all the projects funded with federal stimulus money around the country. Thinking about it now, Devaney remembers that the proposed pages were full of "classic Web site gobbledygook, with lots of simple pie charts and bar graphs." Tufte took one look at the Web site mockups that the board's designer had prepared and pronounced them "intellectually impoverished."

It was a classic Tufte moment: a spontaneous and undiplomatic assessment that immediately struck everyone in the room, even the designer himself, as undeniably true. The site would get a wholesale redesign. The model, as Tufte explained it, should be the Web site of a major newspaper, with Devaney and his staff as reporters and editors. "I told them that it isn't an annual report," Tufte told me later. "It shouldn't look stylish or slick. It's about facts." As Tufte and Devaney talked, a number of staffers gathered in the hall, waiting for the meeting to finish. "The guys from the IT department had lined up outside my door to shake his hand and say they met the guy," Devaney remembers.

This isn't the first time Tufte has critiqued federal agencies' work: Back in 2003, he excoriated NASA for relying on simplistic data analysis presented in PowerPoint prior to the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia.