Response to Mark Lombardi influenced by Envisioning Information

See also our thread "Analytical issues in causal diagrams: Barr art chart, Lombardi diagrams, evolutionary trees, and some timelines" at

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000yO&topic_id=1&topic=

-- Edward Tufte, December 31, 2003

Janet Cohen

A show curated by Susette Min at the Apex Gallery in New York in 2000 featured work by Mark Lombardi alongside that of other artists who employ text in interesting ways in their works. Particularly exciting, from an information display point of view, is the work of Janet Cohen, who uses an original method to document baseball games.

Her "Montreal at New York, 7-18-99" consists of nine frames, one for each inning. The rectangular frame corresponds to the area encompassing a batter's strike zone. For each pitch of the inning, Cohen plots a symbol, placing it where she estimates the pitch passed relative to the strike zone. The symbol vocabulary is an expansion on the standard set of notations that people use to score games in ballparks. Pitches for the top of the inning appear in one color, for the bottom of the inning in another. Once a viewer has mastered the language of one frame, using the principle of small multiples they can understand the others.

Here is an example of a similar work, "Kansas City at Baltimore, 4-1-98," from a show also in 2000 at the Clementine Gallery in New York:

-- Timur Friedman (email), March 4, 2004