Sparklines to be in ConTeXt?

Sparklines to be in ConTeXt?

[Tobias Wolf]

Hey,
what do you people actually think about E. Tufte's Sparklines?²
They are a great and innovative thing in my mind; both in the
information mediating and the typographic sense.
There's a bare-bones LaTeX package on CTAN, but when I think about it,
this technique could find a perfect place in ConTeXt's framework (say
MetaPost, XML, Scripting and so on. There's even some kind of Ruby
implementation³).
- Tobias

² http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1
³ http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/sparklinesForMinimalists.html

Re: Sparklines to be in ConTeXt?

[Brooks Moses]

At 01:47 PM 7/31/2005, Tobias Wolf wrote:
>Hey,
>what do you people actually think about E. Tufte's Sparklines?
>They are a great and innovative thing in my mind; both in the
>information mediating and the typographic sense.
>There's a bare-bones LaTeX package on CTAN, but when I think about it,
>this technique could find a perfect place in ConTeXt's framework (say
>MetaPost, XML, Scripting and so on. There's even some kind of Ruby
>implementation).

(For those who haven't heard of the idea, it's basically a word-sized 
graphic that would go in a table or sentence, and provides an at-a-glance 
sense of the "meaning" of the data.  For instance, on a table of stock 
values, one could include mini-graphs of the last month's prices for each, 
allowing one to immediately see which stocks were having big changes, or 
whether a particular stock's change was meaningful, or such.  Read the 
links below for more details.)

In my opinion, they seem like a useful idea for some things, though I think 
there's a temptation to try to pack too much information into one.  There 
was quite an interesting pair of threads on Tufte's forums about them, here:

  http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001Eb
  http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR

The particular temptation that I saw was that they _aren't_ a substitute 
for a full graph -- they're only a substitute for the information one gets 
at the first glance at a graph.  In the thread, it seemed that some people 
were trying to put so much information in them that one would need to spend 
time studying them to read them, and that misses the point.

Personally, I haven't yet written anything that seemed to provide a good 
use for them, so I'm sort of waiting to have a real opinion on them until I 
actually find a place to give them a proper try-out in a "real-world" 
situation.

In any case, I do agree that MetaPost is probably one of the best ways to 
implement them, and ConTeXt's MetaPost integration should make it quite 
easy to organize such implementations.

- Brooks

Re: Sparklines to be in ConTeXt?

[Tobias Wolf]

>The particular temptation that I saw was that they _aren't_ a substitute
>for a full graph -- they're only a substitute for the information one gets
>were trying to put so much information in them that one would need to spend
>time studying them to read them, and that misses the point.

> Personally, I haven't yet written anything that seemed to provide a good
> use for them, so I'm sort of waiting to have a real opinion on them until I
> actually find a place to give them a proper try-out in a "real-world"
> situation.
> 
> In any case, I do agree that MetaPost is probably one of the best ways to
> implement them, and ConTeXt's MetaPost integration should make it quite
> easy to organize such implementations.

To clarify, my question wasn't a request or anything. I see it in the
same position as you, a toy used in exploration of some concepts that
nonetheless seem to be based on some valid points. One of them being
that the data and the text shouldn't be too disparate, floated far
afield,  and another that the content to presentation ratio should be
maximal. These Sparklines cannot replace a full-blown figure but
afford to approach data more in the sense of reading than in the sense
of deciphering.

I asked here because everything about it screamed ConTeXt (also
considering that the favourite command here seems to be \input tufte).
Thought this meme must have infected some here.
- Tobias

Re: Sparklines to be in ConTeXt?

[Hans Hagen]

Tobias Wolf wrote:

>I asked here because everything about it screamed ConTeXt (also
>considering that the favourite command here seems to be \input tufte).
>Thought this meme must have infected some here.
>  
>
-) 

i didn't know tufte had a site; seems that a new book is coming in 2006 

how about a sparkline contest .. 

Hans 


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                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                             | www.pragma-pod.nl
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Re: Sparklines to be in ConTeXt?

[Hans Hagen]

Tobias Wolf wrote:

>Hey,
>what do you people actually think about E. Tufte's Sparklines?²
>They are a great and innovative thing in my mind; both in the
>information mediating and the typographic sense.
>  
>
Can you be a bit more specific? You mean small and/or condense inline graphics? (btw, a variant on such in line graphics can be found in "concrete mathematics" (dices)

What kind of support is actaully needed? 

Hans 

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
     tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                             | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------