| THIS CHAPTER of
Tufte’s Visual Explanations provides examples of attempts by engravers,
illustrators, and graphic artists to make the spatial character of pictures
serve narrative functions. It is a catalogue of illustrations (and discussions)
showing all-at-onceness; showing what has never been brought together before
for contemplation; showing the current state of the art of the how-to-do
capacity of pictures; showing images combined in context and overview;
showing story-telling possibilities in pictures with accompanying narrative
agendas for readers. This chapter also includes discussion on the "inventory
of parts," "confections portraying verbs," "real objects in a concocted
universe: compartments, imagined scenes," and impossible scenes. Tufte
discusses famous compartmentalized seventeenth- century frontispieces;
the compilation of images by reason of analogy, metaphor, and visual and
verbal parallelism; and good and bad computer screen design. This treatment
of image and text passes under the rubric, "What collages are for art,
confections are for the design of information." And Tufte makes the point
that "Like perspective, confections give the mind an eye. . . . [They]
place selected, diverse images into the narrative context of a coherent
argument. And, by virtue of the architecture of their arguments, confections
make reading and seeing and thinking identical" (000). Highly entertaining,
with many a semiotic syntax of paradigms to press the temporal limits of
the spatial. (Jean Jacobson.) |