I stumbled over Edward Tufte’s Sparklines this morning. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is one of my favorite books and his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint helped shape my point of view that PowerPoint is contributing to the intellectual degredation of contemporary society.
Sparklines are an awesome new way to display high densities of quantitative information. Tufte nailed it once again – hopefully we’ll start seeing these pop up all over the place. Fortunately there’s already a PHP Graphing Library up at Sourceforge and O’Reilly’s xml.com site has a good article with Python code up.