Tufte I don’t have much commentary to add to Tufte except that it is a very useful guide for thinking through visual design. It certainly reads as prescriptive at times, and Tufte likes to make universal claims as if they are unequivocally true (and perpetually quote dead white men to back them up). It would certainly be worth exploring the social construction of these design principles—Tufte tends to apply a scientific/essentialist lens to determining their origins. Still, this text is extremely valuable as a guide, rules of thumb that could then potentially be broken, once understood.

I mentioned dead white men flippantly, but I genuinely enjoyed the historical information and references in the Tufte. For example, I didn’t know that symmetric layout convention preceded asymmetric (83). The footnotes also provide excellent examples such as the Chou Pei Suan Ching Chinese mathematics book on 84. And Tufte makes clear the influence of the Bauhaus on today’s design language through repeated references. So I think even a historically-minded design scholar would find use in the references and footnotes here.

Bodenhamer First of all, great definitions of epistemology, ontology, and positivism (18-19). Second of all, I had no idea about the contentious history of GIS in academia—though I’m not entirely surprised as it typically reflects an extreme form of positivism.

I like the phrasing: “The real question is how do we as humanists make GIS do what it was not intended to do, namely, represent the world as culture and not simply mapped locations?” (23) He doesn’t reject GIS or accept it unconditionally, but instead asks how it might be a tool for critical humanities. He posits some examples, and I could see the “deep mapping” concept especially useful for some of the group work in this course, as a frame and a guiding principle. Though I wish there were more thinking through solutions to this postmodern challenge.

Side note, it’s interesting that this article is all about space and geography, and yet it uses “the West” as a monoculture. Especially curious is the contrasting of “Western” and “American Indian” approaches (20)—I suppose in this conception, indigenous culture in the Americas is neither Western nor Eastern.