Monthly Archives: February 2013

Venn Diagram

Is the Venn Diagram the only/best way to represent information to a illiterate or corporate audience? Answer: no, but close. In Designing Visual Language Chapter 7 the author took an in depth analysis of the different forms of the visual representations of information. Although, he had many interesting points, his argument seemed very basic and largely based off of works of other authors. She or he could be a new professor who is not really saying much, yet still needing to contribute a little something to get her or his 15 minutes of fame. Many of his concepts are widely accepted theories of the design world and industry. One example of this same analysis of information is the book Universal Principles of Design which summarizes many of the similar design concepts.

I personally found this post to be targeted toward individuals who did not understand what function pie charts serve in comparison to bar graph. In my perspective, I felt that this reading was very rudimentary (almost like learning garage band, when more than half of the class has apple computers).

The main element which really caught my attention, was their coverage of so many versatile ways of presenting visual information (they even put a 3d model!). It is applicable to corpus analysis because of the massive amount of information which could be interpreted. In the future, I personally believe that these graphs will be the basis for rating and reviewing books, articles and blog posts. Based upon the use of vernacular or style, a graph will represent the style of writing for a mass audience.

Visual representations of information are essential because we have the technological capabilities to produce such comparative images.  In a time of America, time is money, so sitting down with accountants or inventory personnel to track progress and statistics numerically is not appealing or worth that amount of time. However, the challenging part is retaining a level of accuracy while at the same time relying on visual images and graphs for the primary source of representing this data.

Universal Principles of Design

The Article “The Visual Rhetoric of Data Displays:
The Conundrum of Clarity” by — Charles Kostelnick reviews the utilization of visual rhetoric of data display in the context of a 50 year process of democratization of rhetoric analysis. One of the main points which Kostelnick emphasizes, is the importance of clarity in relation to graphs, charts and visual representation of information. The culture in which this new generation of people are emerging into, will be filled with humans who respond more quickly and accurately to visual representations of information.

One example of this type of cliche visual representation of information is Social Media Revolution 2012 on You Tube

httpv://youtu.be/ZQzsQkMFgHE

These type of posts perpetuate a visual culture which has existed in Art, since the renaissance: visually speaking to the uneducated masses. The type of information which Tufte conveys, speaks exaclty to the population which can afford internet access, yet are not rich enough to afford private education.

This rational, efficient rhetoric of data design
embodies an intrinsic ethical component because it
implies that readers deserve a full, unadulterated
disclosure of the data and that designers have a
moral imperative to provide it. This imperative was
illustrated at least as early as 1914 by Brinton’s
Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts [17], in which
he exposed deceptive practices of displaying data
by explaining the underlying flaws and how readers
could identify them to avoid being hoodwinked.
The moral imperative of clarity culminated in the
early 1950s with Huff and Geis’s classic How to
Lie with Statistics [18], which demonstrated how
designers, unconstrained by graphical standards or
professional oversight, can manipulate charts and
graphs for their own ends. Caveat rhetor: Unwitting
readers need to protect themselves from these
practices and arm themselves with the interpretive
tools to unmask deceptive data design.

Another prevalent point which Kostelnick brings up, is the type of aesthetic desing, modern internet users are experiencing. The desing theme that many contemporary web designers are incorperating into their designs adheres to post modernism. Some progressive artists and critics would even claim that people are interacting with more minimalist themes and post-post modern themes. One website which really supports this argument is  the Mercedes Benz sponsered website The Avant Garde Diaries.

Corpus linguistics is a incredibly specific field of study with grave implications on how post-modern individuals read text and incorporate with text on the internet. A few examples of these avenues are “critical discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, English language teaching and socio-linguistics” pg 52. One aspect of corpus linguistics is the analysis of language patterns. Through using devices such as lexicography, concordance analysis and semantic prosodies analysis scholars can infer from language patterns ideologies, points of views in relation to English language teaching or scholarship.

As more texts are converted into digital files and become accessible on the internet, companies and web sites will have the unique ability to use corpus analysis on these texts. One example of this presently occurring is the Harvard+Google text conversion program. 

“The Harvard University Library and Google are collaborating on a project to digitize a large number of Harvard’s library books that are out of copyright and to make them available to Internet users. The project, which is one of several collaborations between Google and major research libraries, could bring millions of works to the web.”

The advantage of digital conversion, is being able to use corpus strategies to analyze various texts. In Chapter 5 Svenja talks about how these strategies will effect the reading experience. By using corpus on literary texts scholars can infer an authors individual style or the context of his or her own work. The goal for these types of ‘strategies’ is to attain correct interpretation based upon word frequency. One example of this is in the Heart of Darkness where ‘vagueness’ was a common theme. However, I would like to note that this work is incredibly deep and has an incredible amount of layers. Another goal for corpus programmers is to analyze poems and fictional works. 

Heart of darkness

“It becomes clear from examples above that the omission of reporting clauses in the ‘free’ forms can make the assignment of narratorial perspective some what difficult…. the syntactic similarities of free indirect speech and indirect thorugh add further to this complication, since we cannot always be sure who is speaking or indeed whether a character is speaking or thinking”

But this objective is inherent.

However, this is where it gets tricky. What is “correct interpretation”? In my personal opinion, I feel that the essence of reading a fiction or a poem is for private and subjective interpretation. Corpus linguists must be cautious when using this type of devices to interpret text and “remove” the narrator from his or her story. It is interesting that Svenja brings up Corpus’ ability to distinguish the narratorial perspective. If the reader is able to distinguish what is the author’s interjection and what is genuinely from the character’s point of view, than characters or concepts can take on their own essence inside of stories void from the authors own perspective.