Reading by Design

I’ve been reading my Edward Tufte books. Tufte is an unreconstructed empiricist when it comes to information design, seemingly untouched by decades of critical theory in vision and representation. Within that well-circumbscribed field, though, he is a master, and I’ve never regretted a penny I’ve spent on his books, laden as they are with illustrations and examples lovingly selected. I want to touch here, though, on some of his words, not pictures:

We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, avergae, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats. (Envisioning Information 50)

This is from a chapter on Micro/Macro Designs, of which the Vietnam War Memorial is a prime example. The impact of the moument arises from the interplay between the 58,000+ names, each individually rendered and textured (visitors can often be found running their fingers over the etched letterforms) and the visual gestalt of the Wall, its sharp angles emerging from and sinking back into the landscape. What’s interesting here—and I’m not sure whether Tufte himself is on to this or not—is that the paragraph above is itself a model of precisely this kind of micro/macro design. While it can be parsed word for word, the reader lingering over the distinctiveness of each infinitive, it clearly has a cumulative effect as well, one that is apparent from an optical scanning or pass of the eye. We can fully read this sentence without (fully) reading it. It is thus a demonstration of reading by pattern recognition, a popular—though not uncontroversial—explanation for the cognitive modality of literacy.