Edward Tufte: Envisioning Information

Graphic design often faces the challenge of being seen as an arbitrary and merely subjective art; therefore, I appreciated that Tufte references Eduard Imhof’s Cartographic Relief Presentation, which defines concrete standards to guide and evaluate the way that information is represented graphically. One suggestion, however, that I don’t completely understand is to use colors of nature to represent information. The argument given was that these colors are familiar and coherent, and have a certain “definitive authority”. It seems to me that a palette of colors that are not drawn from nature can still be made to be coherent, and that familiarity with the colors is not necessary for representing information unless that information relies on some association of the color with an element in nature (such as in the use of beige and blue to represent land and water in the ocean map example). I don’t know what the “definitive authority” means.

In the satellite corkscrew diagram example, I found it fascinating that the inspiration for the graphic representation of the satellite orbits came from a physical, 3-dimensional tool (the Jovilabes). It goes to show that even in making a 2-dimensional graphic, taking into consideration what a 3-dimensional representation would look like can help produce more intuitive and illustrative products.

Bodenhamer: Spatial Humanities

In this text, Bodenhamer takes a critical view on GIS in the context of humanities. He acknowledges that when the data being represented is quantitative, precise, and official, it can translate well using GIS. However, one major problem is that this causes GIS to be very biased and convey a false sense of legitimacy to uncertain data, which is often the type that is encountered in humanities. The topic of deep maps was a particularly thought-provoking response to these shortcomings of GIS, although the term is quite broad and ambiguous. I am curious how “deep” maps can get - what levels of depth can be added to traditional maps to convey data that are not best represented using GIS?