Responsorial

So far I have been enjoying Mr. Tufte's world of information design. Chapter 1 was especially enlightening: before I read it, I had never really thought about the evolution of information design, nor had I paid much attention to three-dimensional representations of information a' la storm analysis. I do think, though, that Tufte is a little hard on the folks at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After all, they created this videotape (!) in 1990, and even seven years later, when Tufte's book was published, quite a bit had changed in the world of technology. Which is not to say that the missing metrics are necessarily excusable, just that the movie itself represents a leap forward, and should be cut a little slack. I was also quite interested in the sly ways in which information can be manipulated. This is not a new concept, but even so, I was left with a lot to mentally chew over.

Chapter 3 was engrossing both for its content in and of itself, and also for the fact that I would not have thought to compare illustrations for magic tricks to what, it my mind, is the fairly dry world of information design. (My views on this have no doubt been unconsciously shaped by the limits of Microsoft Office) Now that my horizons have been broadened through both Ch.1 and Ch. 3, with my thoughts awash with opportunities for showmanship and misdirection, I find that I have even more ideas regarding how I might frame my information for this semester's projects.