We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and
everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight,
group, pair, merge, harmonize, sythesize, focus, organize, condense,
reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list,
abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate,
distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend,
inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunck, average, approximate,
cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip
through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate,
glean, syopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the
sheep from the goats.
-- Edward R. Tufte Envisioning Information (1990)
p.50