As I was reading this text and looking at the illustrations, I was particularly compelled by how Tufte leaps between images whose function is to represent information and images that are more designed to be received as art. The act of presenting these works in parallel allows the reader to see the fundamentally artistic qualities that are involved in representing information and the kinds of considerations of an audience that is always involved in creating these images. The design decisions involved in representing information on a flat plane are not entirely aesthetic, nor are they entirely functionalist, but are somewhere in between. And conversely, this text surprised me with how much functional value one can draw from pieces that would typically be considered art-objects.

I was most drawn to the chapter on Layering and Separation, particularly how Tufte extrapolates Josef Albers’ piece “One Plus One Equals Three or More” because I have often found myself thinking about different acts of layering information at different moments in my life. As a game designer, I also have to think a lot about layering information. Obviously interactive games are a completely different environment than what Tufte is working with here with layering, but I think that there are some relevant connections between how game designers deal with information, and how we imagine similar kinds of representation in the digital humanities and beyond, as they are both interactive mediums.

Designing a game that’s meant to be played in the first-person means that you have to constantly ensure that a player can see the information that you want to present them, whether that information is instructions, hints, representations of the player’s health, values of time, maps, etc. At the same time, you need to consider that presenting the player with any visual information will inherently obscure other aspects of gameplay, and thus needs to be represented very strategically. To approach this kind of information presentation, there are a few different registers to play with to layering data: diegetic, non-diegetic, and meta.

Representing information diegetically means putting it in the gameplay space, while non-diegetic information is represented in the two-dimensional space of the screen and is separate from the “world” – like UI pop-ups, or instructions that are presented via text that doesn’t move with the player. And meta representations are like non-diegetic ones but maintain the fantasy of the game. To make this more concrete, consider representing a player’s health value. A diegetic strategy could involve the player walking over to a doctor character who tells you your health status. A non-diegetic strategy would be a simple health meter overlaid on top of the screen. And a meta representation of health would be that the screen starts to tint red when a character’s health gets low, which presents the information in non-diegetic space but maintains the game fantasy.

This was a very long-winded way of describing that I think there could be some valuable lessons to borrow from this kind of thinking as we develop interactive work in the digital humanities. When should we layer information or other interfaces on top of representations of data, both non-diegetically and in ways that are meta? When should the representations of data be interactive themselves, in a mode that is more diegetic? How does each of these ways of representing and interacting with information create the “1+1 = 3 or more” effect differently?