Color and Information: I found this reading to be incredible interesting, because unlike some of the other readings we have done thus far, the topic is more present in out everyday lives. One doesn’t have to be an academic or a researcher to have some experience with conveying information with color. Yet, despite how salient this topic was, I found myself a little surprised by the observations Tufte laid forward. It’s really easy to see a graphic or image and this that it’s bad, but not be able pinpoint exactly what it is that is confusing, but Tufte was able to bring to light several rules that I never thought about greatly impacted how effectively information was shared. For example, when

Narratives of Space and Time: Reading this chapter, I think I could appreciate some of the challenges inherent in trying to represent 4 dimensions in a 2 dimension space, however, I was not altogether convinced that some of the alternatives Tufte offered were better. For example, his rework of the bus schedule inspired by Ybry’s work , while a little more visually appealing than a standard schedule, made it a little difficult to tell precisely when a bus was supposed to arrive. Sure it had times broken down into 10 minute intervals which was sufficient when looking at when the bus was supposed to leave Hudson Place Terminal, but the arrival time at the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, and especially the arrival at 14th and Washington are further down the page away from time labels making it difficult to trace the timing. For something like a schedule where I think the typical user wants to know precisely when their bus is leaving to plan around it, I don’t think this a better practice.

The Potential of Spatial Humanities: As with many of the texts that we have read this semester, I was a little surprised by how much this piece challenged my current way of thinking about mapping. Mapping was one thing that I thought was pretty straight forward and not very contentious because I always thought that 2d representations was fairly representative of the real world without much room for argument. But as Bodenhamer explains, I didn’t realize how much information can truly be lost and never really gave much thought to how other cultures, and even just other people interpret what is being shown.