tufte-narrative-and-sequencelisted

# Narrative and Sequence **Source:** *Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative* (VE), Edward R. Tufte, Graphics Press, Cheshire, Connecticut, 1997. Chapters 1–6. ## Overview Visual explanations explain *why* and *how*, not just *what* — they depict process, causality, motion, and change. Two failures recur and both are epistemic, not aesthetic: **dequantification** (images stripped of the scales, labels, and orientation that answer *how many / how often / where / how much / at what rate*) and **disinformation design** (display tactics, borrowed knowingly or not from magicians, that conceal rather than reveal). The governing standard is the same one a scientist uses: show all the relevant data, put the causally meaningful variable on the correct axis, make comparisons within the eyespan, and never drop the cases that fail to confirm the pattern. Tufte's most consequential case is the Challenger launch decision — the 13 charts faxed to NASA the night before never put temperature, the causal variable, on an axis and left out 92% of the relevant temperature data (p.43); seven people died. Sequence and narrative design carry life-and-death weight. > "People can see more clearly if they have the right idea." — Tufte, *Visual Explanations*, p.107 --- ## §1. Images and Quantities — The Dequantification Problem (Ch.1, pp.13–26) The foundational theme of the book: scientific and artistic images routinely shed their quantitative scaffolding. A picture wi