In Chapter 6 of Envisioning Information, Tufte gives many examples to show how movement can be represented in the flatland. The corkscrew diagrams of Jupiter’s satellites provide much more information than a column of Galileo’s discrete illustrations of the satellite positions, since the satellites are constantly moving, so it makes sense that their movements would trace a continuous line. I found the redesign of the New York/New Haven train schedule extremely informative and really demonstrated how design elements can make data more easily digestible. Tufte points out each specific design failure in the original timetable, and corrects them in the redesign. What other elements of visual communication from Dondis could we apply to the timetable to make it even more effective?

I thought it was very interesting that sometimes showing just a little more information can make it easier to understand a graph, such as the example of the Chicago/Atlanta airplane schedule, in which the two edges of the graph overlap in time, so that the viewer can see a complete day of travel no matter when they begin. It makes me wonder why there are not more maps that repeat elements to show each country in its entirety.. maybe because most maps are extremely eurocentric. It was also interesting that sometimes making information too dense to decipher can be a useful design choice, such as in the example of the Hoboken/New York bus schedule, where lines that are too close to distinguish tell the viewer that the bus is extremely frequent and that they need not worry about the exact times the bus arrives or departs.

Personally, I found the graphical representations of dance movements all quite difficult to understand, probably because it is so hard to document all the possible ways the body can move and I was overwhelmed by the amount of graph-specific notation to remember. I think that dance movements and routines can potentially be effectively represented in conjunction with music by 3D models (either physically or digitally), but I wonder if there is an optimal and not cumbersome way to show dance and music together in the 2D space.