tufte-sparklineslisted

# Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics ## Overview A sparkline is a small, high-resolution graphic embedded directly in a sentence, a table cell, or beside a number — a "dataword" with the same intensity of visual distinctions as a printed word. It shows the full shape and history of a measure at word scale, not precise read-off values. The core problem it solves: a lone number or a recent-change column has no context, so readers over-weight the latest value (recency bias); a sparkline puts the current reading inside its entire past in the space of a word. The chapter is titled *Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics* in *Beautiful Evidence* (printed **pp. 46–63** — chapter plate p. 46, title page p. 47). All page citations below are the book's printed page numbers. **The goal in one line: de-ceremonialize the data graphic.** Tufte's stated end-point (p. 63) is that data graphics stop being a *special occasion* — a framed thing in a separate place, captioned "Fig. 17-B" on some slide. The variable that changes is **frequency, not quality**. Charts are events; sparklines are everywhere. Every design rule below follows from wanting data graphics to be as unremarkable as words. --- ## §1. Definition and the Three Properties Tufte builds the term from a clinical example. The most common data display is a noun plus a number (`glucose 6.6`). A single number gains meaning only in context, so replace it with a data-line of the patient's last 80 glucose rea