Reading Response: Assignment 1

Tufte Article:

I have read some Tufte before, and in the past I have been either somewhat bored with what he had to say or felt like he was on a bit of a soapbox, preaching “his way or the highway”. This article has a bit of an undertone of his righteousness, however I think that the underlying idea of addition by subtraction and the ratio of “data-ink” to “useless-ink” is both interesting and useful. While he seems to be stressing an extreme of almost none of what he calls useless-ink, I think the real ratio for a display that is both informative and attractive lies somewhere around 50/50 to 70/30 in favor of data-ink.

Christiane Paul Article:

This article was interesting in that it both analyzed the existence of some sort of database in almost every form of new media art as well as giving a plethora of examples. The article does feel a bit dated, but that is somewhat unavoidable it seems in this day and age, and is somewhat unfair seeing how it appears to have been published in or around 2004/5 based on the examples. I thought that it was interesting how the article mentioned different types of databases beyond the normal relational databases and gave examples of these.