I spent two winter weeks re-reading chamber plates with Mara Ilyen, not for nostalgia, but because the old evidence has a useful silence. Each curve records a charge, a field, a loss of momentum; no dashboard can soften the bright fact that something passed through the liquid and changed direction.
Leave the black field intact
A better instrument today may be less talkative. It can expose provenance, show uncertainty, and let the reader keep a little doubt in view. When the archive leaves room for darkness, the luminous line becomes a sentence, not a decoration.