Lecture 7: Visualisation - Making the Invisible Visible

Before we do anything I’d like you to imagine a timeline of your life, all the great moments from birth to now that make up your experiences. Look at that, you’ve just used visualisation! This week, we’re focusing on data and information visualisation and its mission of discovering the unknown by making the invisible visible. What? I know! How awesome does that sound? But what exactly is it? Let's make a character profile…

Name: Visualisation (Data and Information)

Definition: a specific type of visual register that exploits our capacity for pattern recognition

Purpose: to discern and establish relationships you haven’t seen before

Method: using images to draw from data to structure new relationships and new forms of knowledge

Agent number: 006 (because I think if Visualisation was a secret agent it would beat James Bond)

- Visualisation and Examples -

Visualisation is the second main aspect of modes of publishing and is a great visible way to understand how archives are used to create forms of content and expression – to communicate large amounts of knowledge into an easy to read diagram (Newsom and Haynes, 2004). This newfound information has all kinds of impacts as all kinds of arguments are conducted through information graphics. Think about Al Gore and his famous Inconvenient Truth (2006). He uses visualisation all the way from describing global warming with pictures to graphs showing what we as citizens on the Earth are doing about it. What our governments are doing about it. Through information aesthetics to better help us understand out situation, Al Gore helped bring us closer to open governance by picturing climate change – and I mean ‘picture’-ing in every sense of the word. Visualisation has even helped understand public health, for example Dr. John Snow’s use of visualisation as a method in his famous cholera map. Here, he was able to see, through analysing the patterns of deaths and seeing an increase around a particular water pump, that cholera is waterborne and not airborne.

 Mccandless (2010) indicates that “we’re all suffering from information overload, or data glut.” He shows here the act of turning complex data sets into beautiful, understandable diagrams that bring to light once unseen patterns and connections. Essentially, visualisation combines the graphic language of the eyes with the lingual and numeric language of the mind so that we can focus on the information that’s important – but, “failing that, visualising information can just look really cool.”

Visualisation shows us the permeating wireless connectivity of our lives – lives now connected through media, publics and publishing. It helps us sort through the exponential bombardment of information in our lives as we continue to bathe in archive fever. Visualisation thus incorporates into a nexus with archive fever, publishing, and control. Control being the notion that if it is seen, is it then controllable? This mire of concepts opens a whole other discussion that I don’t have space for in this blog, but will definitely be discussed in my upcoming Visualisation Project!

- Wikileaks -

This falls right into the debate on the disclosure of data and information in the news – should it all be available for free? ALL of it? For FREE? And even if it should, would it? A good example for this debate is Wikileaks – all about freedom, speech, and equality. They strive to abide by these values by exposing to citizens information the Government would rather hide. They thus hold the power to force institutions to also abide by these values. Ackerman (2010) includes that “without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” Albeit this argument, Seaman (2010) states that “at the end of the day, society has more right to keep its secrets secret, than does Wikileaks have a right to wreak havoc and keep its sources hidden while doing so.” He suggests that, fundamentally, the mass corporations are what make up society, and, in an age where too much information can hurt, sometimes secrets need to be kept.

- Disclosure of Information: Control -

This brings to light the ambiguous nature of how much information we as publishers (both amateur and professional) should convey. Just because it’s true, does that mean we HAVE to tell every single detail? (Control, we are always fighting for control.) Moreover, how do we even know it’s true? Visualisation, for instance, depends on the variable collected to determine what is seen. Yet, how do we know the variables collected are the right ones? If so, are they accurate, and how selective is the information they give? The fact that we cannot firmly know the accuracy of information lends us reason to question its utility – whether information is always beneficial or perhaps harmful instead. I think we need a balance of information and choice, and yes, information should absolutely be free and available so that we can make properly informed decisions. However, there is a limit to the type of information we have, as good as it is to know, it is inevitable that we as the masses require an element of control so that the economy functions. In this day and age, information is power, and therefore control. Publics are constantly pulling information in different directions in hopes to gain this control, and it is ambiguous just how much information society and institutions should share and keep to ourselves – but that doesn’t stop us from trying to have it all!

References:

Ackerman, B., 2010, “Bradley Manning’s Inhuman Treatment,” CIF America, Apr11, accessed 24/04/2013 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/11/bradley-manning-julian-assange>

Bender, L., Burns, S., David, L., Chilcott, L., Ivers, J. D., Skoll, J., Strauss, R. and Weyermann, D. (Producers), Guggenheim, D. (Director), 2006, “An Inconvenient Truth,” United States: Paramount Pictures

Mccandless, D., 2010, “The Beauty of Data Visualisation,” TEDtalks, Aug 24, accessed 24/04/2013 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLqjQ55tz-U>

Newsom, D. and Haynes, J., 2004, Public Relations Writing: Form and Style. p.236

Seaman, P., 2010, “Why Wikileaks Is Bad News,” 21^st Century PR Issues, Dec 23, accessed 24/04/2013 <http://paulseaman.eu/2010/12/why-wikileaks-is-bad-news/>

Lecture 6: Give me your attention! ...If you still own it.

 Attention. It is a basic human need, to receive attention and, naturally, to give attention. This of course comes hand in hand with distraction; when giving attention to something, you are getting distracted from something else.  Linda Stone (Jenkins, 2010) notes this as “continual partial attention,” where we are never completely focused on just one thing. The notion of attention and distraction is highly important in media – you could spend long hours researching and creating a perfect advertisement, but to no avail if no one gives it attention. As such, today’s economy encompasses more than just the material resources but also the collection, arrangement and distribution of material life, that is, the materiality of our experience. Essentially, we’re in a world where we and media strive to organise and control experiences such as our real-time attention, perceptions, sensations and thoughts. Consequently, what we look at, listen to, touch, leads to the way we think and ultimately act. This in turn affects the social environment in the way we relate to each other, and the political sphere through change in thought and thus required development in law and governance. Attention has now become a source of power, and a kind of currency, with the exponential increase in information accessibility and compilation, and thus competition for attention. Today’s media seeks to explore where people place their attention, so as to manipulate it back to them and hence increase circulation.

The modern material life economy is not only about who owns your attention but also the new possibilities for sharing subjects for others’ attention – to seek other’s attention for yourself. Goldhaber (1997) supports that we people use the Internet to gain praise and, thus, attention, from our peers. These peer recommendations “make it possible to find fresh and useful signals amid the overwhelming noise of the Internet,” seen through the rise and confidence of information from social networking platforms (Rheingold, 2009). The Internet has accordingly become a channel for the free exchange of ideas to build collective experience (Kinsley, 2010), which brings forth the idea of the Internet as commons.

Commons are, fundamentally, shared property between a society with shared responsibility for maintenance, like a public park. Enter the notion of ideas and thought as commons – as these translate to information that can be vital to the development of society. There’s an ongoing debate about whether publishing should have open access, namely copyright and patents. We can see the results of the new concept of ‘intellectual property’ that sparks massive law suits (Apple vs Samsung anyone?). The political sector has decided, albeit that ideas are free, to temporarily allow authors the right to make money from their creations as a vote of motivation. Enough so that the information can be sophisticated when it reaches the stage of entering into the public domain. It will be interesting to watch the progress of information, attention, and the commons, as technology inspires the convolution of information. Perhaps we could reach the ideal of “open architecture (Kahn and Cerf, 2004),” whereby media converges and all information is open? I think not – humans have a need for power, and information is power we will not want to easily share. Yet, nothing is predictable! I hope I’ve been able to catch your attention for the duration of this post! Or at least partial attention…I can settle for that in our technological context.

References:

Goldhaber, M. H., 1997, “Attention Shoppers!’” Wired, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/es_attention.html>

Jenkins, H., 2010, “Multitasking and Continuous Partial Attention: An Interview with Linda Stone (Part One),” Confession of an ACA-Fan, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://henryjenkins.org/2010/11/multitasking_and_continuous_pa.html>

Kahn, R. and Cerf, V., 2004, “Terranova,” Network Culture, Pluto Press, London: Ann Arbor, MI, p. 55

Kinsley, S., 2010, “The Technics of Attention”, Paying Attention, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://payingattention.org/2010/10/12/the-technics-of-attention/>

Rheingold, H., 2012, “Attention”, Prezi presentation, July 24, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://prezi.com/dwbns6kt3fza/attention/>

Week 5: Archive-ception

Archives. What are they? Basically, something that records any and all happenings. Archives I come in contact with are, for instance, my collections of books, music, and movies. My movies are also divided into video cassette, DVD, and digital libraries – archives within my archives – archive-ception (in reference to the movie Inception, if you haven’t watched it, you must watch it now)! Through this week I’ve come to develop a further sense of archives and their impact on society. Publishing is fundamentally archives written by, for, and about publics. Following Parikka (2013), we are becoming an “information management society”. However, are archives helping preserve or rather distort our world? From what I gather, archives help us further understand concepts, yet at the same time, these concepts we are understanding may not necessarily be completely correct. Still, it does not stop us from exponentially creating archives – something called ‘archive fever’.

Archive fever. What is it? It is a theory and also a practice. Howard (2007) indicates it as a kind of desire, one that attempts to recover moments of initiations – and to locate and retain a variety of beginnings. Basically it’s the notion of constantly making more and more and more and more and more archives (just typing that makes me feel like I should be breaking out into a sweat). Humans have evolved from nmeme and anmesis (natural archiving – or memory), to an increasing dependence on hypomnesis (unnatural archiving, for example books). Stiegler (2003) states that there is a crisis in the modern “ecology of mind”, as mnemotechnics (that is, media) flourishes, spreads and interferes with what we once easily defined as ‘natural’, our ‘culture’, and even our ‘selves’. Sit back and think for a minute, who are you? With everything on your phone, your music, your videos – so many archives to deal with, is that you? I’m confused too. Does who we are as an interpretation from our archives define who we truly are? Derrida (1996) articulates that archives are both destructive and conservative, in other words, it destroys what it is trying to conserve. Subjects cease to be the events they were, and instead become part of a new order formed by the varying perspectives in varying archives.

Interpretations of Derrida’s Archive Fever spread across platforms and perceptions – namely books, web articles, and even a movie (Derrida, 2002). Archivists archiving archives about an archive about archives (Inception­ overdose anyone?). Enszer (2008) interprets from Derrida that archives appear to have authority, with the nature of an archive being both authoritatively transparent and concealed. Archives are finding enhanced power in that it essentially defines not only our past, but also our future – what we record becomes who we are, and who we will be. Imagine, for instance, me. My archives say I am a University Undergraduate, one-dimensionally, that is who I am. However, the day I complete and obtain my Degree, I am, to the world, a University Graduate, and will be so in the future. But is this all I am? The information all around us that we are constantly archiving becomes increasingly confusing and disorganized as it expands exponentially. With the rise of archives, so have come the need for infotention. However, even something derived from the need to organise can become messy. #too #many #hashtags

References:

Anon. (n.d.) ‘Derrida: Text Citations’, The Derrida the Movie web site, date accessed 10/04/2013 <http://www.derridathemovie.com/readings.html>

Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression Chicago:University of Chicago Press

Enszer, J. R. (2008) Julie R. Enszer (personal blog), ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida’, November 16, date accessed 09/04/2013 <http://julierenszer.blogspot.com/2008/11/archive-fever-freudian-impression-by.html>

Howard, S. (2007) ‘Reposted: Archive fever (a dusty digression)’, Early Modern Notes, September 25, date accessed 09/04/2013 <http://emn.sharonhoward.org/2007/09/reposted-archive-fever-a-dusty-digression/>

Parikka, J. (2013) ‘Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology’ in Ernst, Wolfgang Digital Memory and the Archive Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1-22

Stiegler, B. (2003) ‘Our Ailing Educational Institutions’, Culture Machine, date accessed 09/04/2013 <http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/258/243>