I work for a government agency and I am not a lawyer. Our legislative regime is defined through statutes (Acts), regulations and protocols. Basically the statutes specify the broad legal provisions while the regulations flesh out the details and the protocols provide additional guidance. The statutes reference themselves, the regulations reference the statutes and the protocols reference the statutes and the regulations.

What I am interested in is techniques for explaining unwieldy statutes and regulations to lay persons (which includes the regulators who have to enforce the regime) and for representing dependencies between statutes, regulations and protocols. The latter is particularly germane as we are in the process of major legislative revisions. Although I am interested in plain language translation of our statutes I am mostly interested in graphical depiction of the legal framework.

I thought I'd start by sticking the table of contents of our primary statute and regulation side by side on a piece of E size (33" x 44") paper and drawing arrows. I have also thought of using flow charts and cross-functional flow charts to illustrate the regime with annotations that reference the specific legal provisions.

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.

I am trying to produce a graphic for a popular magazine showing how, through overfishing, various species of fish are now physically smaller than they were 50 years ago. My notion was to have an outline of a fish--a tuna, say--and within it a smaller outline showing the smaller modern size. In the 1950s tunas weighed an average of 163 pounds, today 82. Shrinking the larger outline by 50% is clearly wrong, but what is right? (To complicate matters further, I'd like the tuna to be proportional to other pictured fish--a 278 pound marlin, for example.)

Today's New York Times had a (front page) article on a change in e-mailing to the President/White House; from a direct e-mail to an eight step process through as many web pages appearing to require "qualifying" and a forced choice of topics.

Please critique and comment on this change and medium from your perspective as a communicator and a web-architect. Thank you, J. D. McCubbin

Baseball is a game that, like chess, is built upon a progression of situational "moves" as well as upon the athleticism and fundamental skills of its players. For that reason, appreciation of the development of a game contributes a large part to the enjoyment of the spectator.

The system for scoring baseball developed by Henry Chadwick is known to be sublimely elegent for its compression of game information into an easily readable, and easily adaptable format, allowing scorers to keep a running diary of the game's progress and statistics for reference during and after the game.

The scorecards published for use in scoring, however, very often offend the eye with crude, heavy grids and obtuse relationships between groups of items. I wonder if you have found any scorecards to admire, or ever tackled the design for one yourself.

I realize that this question/comment seems somewhat removed from the strict discussion of analytical design and displays of evidence. Maybe not.

I wonder, in your sculpture, what you bring from your "analytical graphics" procedures, and, equally important, what you choose to leave out? Your "information" work is at the service of the data, that is, it's aesthetic content is subsumed by concerns about efficient transmission of relationships. However the sculpture is driven by "private" sets of data, or at least by impulses that are not specifically efficient in intent. Language becomes fuzzy when talking about fine art, I suspect because the viewer or participant is, in fact, free to contribute personal associations to the experience. As students of the visual arts, we are trained in the intepretation of data that is specifically personal. There is, of course, the listing of formal characteristics (medium), but realistically, a viewer's appetite is for work that is not demanding or reliant on concrete data, but is instead indulgent of emotive wandering.

What is different about your "stance" or mental posture when you view your analytical work and your sculpture and prints? I'm not so much asking about the look of a thing, but the demands of a thing.

I attended your workshop in Atlanta in June (after the course, I asked you about the dressage rider on your website, if that "rings a bell") and enjoyed it very much. A few days later, I saw the Mark Lombardi drawings that are touring a few museums this year. Even though there is service to concrete data in his work, there is also a deliberate effort to ensure that the work is referred to as art, (emphasis on paper quality, hand execution, etc.). One's analytical side would disqualify a chart or graph for using data of questionable nature, however I doubt that I would penalize Lombardi's work if a link or two was found to be questionable. I would still have the "art stuff" to fall back on. I would offer the work of Sol Lewitt. His work is notable for its attempt to introduce the legend, or guide to its content and execution. His concern about the de-mystification of the art object has been consistent and unerring. I too am an artist. My work is essentially geometric, in most cases using "pseudo-random number" tables for its execution and internal structure. (note: while I would like to offer images of my work, it's a bit like looking at an Ad Reinhardt painting on a monitor)

Is there a level of rigor that, once achieved, pushes an object or situation out of the realm of art towards the status of a science. Where's that line, what's that level? I am not wondering about qualitative judgements, just questions about posture and expectation.

Or is this just a question about the perception/existence of content? Or the expectations of content?

Any thoughts?

Robert Patterson

Given the massive amounts of multivariate data, compounded by other factors such as weather, track conditions, competitors, etc, I would imagine that tremendous effort has gone into the data display, especially when one considers this must all be interpreted for a car racing around a circuit.

Wired magazine did a good article the other year, but there wasn't any information on the information displays.

We recently fled in the middle of a disastrous Steve Earle/Jackson Browne concert because the overwhelming and continuously loud amplification. Largely absent were variations in dynamic range, a major element in any communication. It was almost all continuously, hurtfully loud. It was impossible to hear, let alone understand, the words. Indeed, I've never been to a popular music concert where the sound was too soft. Aren't there sound checks where the main performers walk around the room to get a sense of what the audience might be hearing? Driving home from the concert, we experienced such a relief at the richness and subtlety of the sound of the CD playing.

There is a thoughtful article on this matter by Lewis Segal of the Los Angeles Times who goes to many concerts (to be "endured rather than enjoyed" because of the over-amplification):

As a critic, you're supposed to identify and highlight the most significant achievement of an event, and sometimes that responsibility involves acknowledging that music artistically outweighs dancing -- as in a collaboration between cellist Yo-Yo Ma and choreographer Mark Morris at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in 1999. Conversely, critics and audiences sit through a lot of awful music in their hunt for great ballet performances. But what happens when sheer volume obliterates not only the dancing but also nearly all the qualities of the music itself?

Amplification in the theater has changed from its original mission: to allow audiences to hear what would otherwise be inaudible and to make it possible for the artists onstage to monitor themselves and one another.

Today, other priorities determine the sound levels we encounter. For example, midway through Viver Brasil's first act, a call-and-response passage briefly featured the unamplified singing of six dancers onstage. Surprise: They could be heard perfectly unplugged. But hearing isn't believing anymore, and the need to make the company's music seem not merely natural but oh, wow, awesome left everyone else in Act 1 singing and playing into microphones -- even a drum ensemble powerful enough to waken the ancient Orixa gods.

In our culture, many people live with music every waking moment, but it's rarely live or acoustic. So when we do encounter live music, we expect it to match what we accept as the norm: the presence, detail and intensity of recordings. We've come to prefer processed music to the real thing. (continue reading)

Here is a brilliant essay by Charles Rosen from his new book Piano Notes. Although Rosen only discusses the relationship between the performer and the audience for classical music, his thoughts are relevant to all public performances. The performer's greatest reward is an intensity of listening by the audience. Note the subtle analysis of the performer-audience relationship, a deep analysis that gives us something to think about even in workaday teaching and business presentations.

The essay is long and should be printed out, in order to be read with the appropriate care and intensity that the essay deserves. Magicians have written a great deal about performer-audience relationships (see chapter 3 of Visual Explanations), but Rosen's essay is the best discussion I've ever seen on performers and their audience. [this link is now broken; good link below]