Chapter 4: Layering, Juxtaposition, and Scale

I thought this chapter was really interesting because it explained the process behind many of the design decisions that were made for the Talmud project. It made me more conscious of the way I process differnet streams of information. Traditionally, there isn’t an obvious spatial representation of how we mentally switch between multiple sources of information/different texts. The goal of the project comes down to displaying information from three different texts in a structure that is more intuitive and reflective of parallel thinking that occurs as we build connections between similar texts. To represent multiple texts on the same screen, Small utilized layering and added controls to shift the focal point of the display by varying different font features. I think this also connected well to a lot of the ideas we found in the master thesis, as the changin g of text blur with varying scales/sizes is rooted in interesting technical ideas. I found it very cool how blurry characters were computed in a manner that would require less storage by weighting two images and interpolating between them. It reminded me that the work necessary to have a dynmaic text that has smooth transitions is costly comptuationally and requires lots of work to optimize.