Tufte has posted some of the material from his upcoming Beautiful Evidence book that covers his concept of 'sparkline.' Sparklines are essentially tiny graphics that can convey trends very quickly, and in some cases they can provide very specific data. They aren't earth-shattering -- most of them look like shrunken versions of familiar information graphics such as stock graphs -- but the idea that it is now very easy to embed such high-information-density graphics directly into our text is a good proposition.
Tufte briefly covered these when I saw him speak, but it's nice to see his written text, which I prefer to his speaking.
