AndreaLR04

The reading "Narrative of Space and Time" seems to reiterate what our previous reading assignments have told us. Successful clarity in graphs leads to conclusions. Discoveries made by Galileo would not have happened without proper recording of the information he was gathering.
Successful graphics are not only important to realizing discoveries, they are also important to sharing and explaining these discoveries to others. Galileo's star graphs shown in the reading still make sense today. It is most important for a graph to make sense to the uninformed viewer. It is easy to make a graph that makes sense to ones self.
The writing about the scheduling for mass transit was interesting. I feel that schedules are inherently confusing because they are containing so much data in so little, easy to distribute space. Fonts are forced to be small and there is little room for expressive measures. Schedules are especially difficult to the untrained eye. Reading a map or schedule for a transit that you have never used before is a very daunting task. Even the examples of good maps and schedules are confusing to me. With the mix of numbers and lines I think that items like this will never be completely "user-friendly".
I have no idea what details the "Graphic Illustration of Tokyo City" map is trying to tell me, but I do find it very beautiful, and I want to investigate it. I think perhaps if maps and info graphics were made with more design elements, people would have an easier time investigating them, because they have a design to. I lot of the graphs in this reading, as well as the other readings we've had, are exhausting to me, before I even try to dive into them. If something appears ugly and dry, I lose all desire to investigate it, even if I need the document for something I am doing.