##Response to Chapter 6, Narratives of Space and Time, Edward Tufte

The author makes two essential points that stand out for me: that the myriad of different kinds of data (e.g., arrays of annotated numbers, information densities, type and image) makes for a challenging display in the flatlands of two dimensions; and that an audience of diverse viewers–some of whom might be considered subject experts (e.g., travel agents), while others are not–means that visualizations must be accessible to many people, with many different capacities for interpreting these visualizations, at once. In the example of Galileo’s representations of star positioning observations, anyone with a simple key can decode his descriptions. The same is true for the later visualization of moon positions in orbit (p.100). As the author suggests, these and other visualizations in this chapter are also useful in showing longitudinal, temporal data (making them narrative, since they transmit narratives of events in sequences). As a consequence of their visualizations, these narratives may showcase patterns that are multifunctional in nature, and that show in many ways. Here, it is important to provide adequate space for visual interpretation (as Tufte points out later in the example of the New York to New Haven travel table), with consideration for all elements of visual representation: size, typography, column separation. I appreciate the later example, as well, of Playfair’s “spill[ing] out” of outlying data, an approach I’ve seen recently in visualizing data that goes beyonds the bounds of the expected of “usual” (such as those representing scales of temperature change over the past century). The example of dance notations is particularly elegant in its representation of three-dimensions in a two-dimensional display, and in incorporating both text and image in a “unified” fashion (e.g., with text actually being “shaped” to represent bodily movements); this reminds me of a less-visually-complex “blocking” notations used by stage managers in theaters, where the staging of a show must be documented.