3 thoughts on “Links”

1. Visual Rhetoric: Feb 21
   Salvo, Michael J
   Sent: Monday, February 20, 2012 12:20 PM
   To:

   Wow! Our days are rolling by! Only three classes before spring break, and we need to start thinking about our midterm meetings. But this week we meet in the Envision Center. I have been in touch with our gracious and generous hosts, and from what I’ve been told, they are preparing an interesting and valuable introduction to tools for us. In the meantime, I have been playing around with ManyEyes. There’s a deceptive amount of power and variety of visualizations available at the site, and together with the periodic table of visualizations, it’s easy to move through many draft visualizations and try out which ones may fit your data set and what you are finding (seeing?) in the data.

   www-958.ibm.com
   http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html
   http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~salvo/dataviz/

   There are three very smart and brave initial posts on the website from Adam, legge, and 0029, and we as site members know identities of these authors. Don’t let these posts languish: respond to any you find interesting. And post your own ideas to the site. There are so many good thoughts swirling around the class and I encourage everyone to take the plunge and post publicly. And there are many (but not all!) posts of datasets as well as some speculative inquiries into potential data in our DropBox. Please bring links and references to the data you want to use to the Envision Center on Tuesday.

   Readings and assignments for the week will be handled asynchronously. Post to DropBox and I will respond; remember this week’s assignment references Ehses & Lupton. It draws on your strengths and asks you to visually illustrate a rhetorical trope. For example, Magritte can illustrate “paradox” and Foucault expounds at length:

   http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.thisIsNotaPipe.en.html

   I am asking you to create rather than find an illustrated trope, and I encourage you to post your findings on the WordPress site. I understand you may want feedback from peers and from me before posting, so feel free to post to Dropbox first. Respond and you will find response in kind.

   The readings this week return us to familiar ground after a week of data investigation. The Berger book was a piece I first encountered in an Introduction to Media Studies undergraduate class, and it completely blew my mind then. It’s rather more comfortable now, as is his insistent reference to Benjamin. Find that Benjamin essay online here, as well as an update for the age of digital reproduction:

   http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
   Responses: http://bit.ly/xZXgVD , http://1.usa.gov/xbs4Jo , http://bit.ly/yfzIPx , http://bit.ly/ojKzdL (one of my favorites)

   There is so very much to do and so little time to do it! Next week — and our discussion and analysis of Hockey’s Secret Knowledge — is something I have been planning for and preparing for a long time. Please be sure to spend time with the videos as well as the book, and be sure to look back over the 30,000 Years of Art book. Hockney’s arguments are made quite plain if you start with 1420. Benjamin also makes more sense with reference to responses to early photography to the photographic “takeover” of image making in the 20th century.

   So much to do and not nearly enough time in which to do it all!

   -Michael
   salvo@purdue.edu

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2. ________________________________________
   From: Salvo, Michael J
   Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 9:34 AM
   To: Salvo, Michael J
   Cc:
   Subject: Visual Rhetoric: Feb 7

   “The designer has an enormous responsibility: they’re the ones putting the wires directly into our heads.”

   “Helvetica” opens with this among a number of quotes about design, and it brings us and our discussion to ethics quite explicitly. But before I could get there, I wanted to stream “Helvetica,” and was reminded just how many layers of technological mediation that streaming connection relies upon. I had to renew my Netflix login, reset the wireless connection to Wii, and put new batteries in the Wii-mote. It had been a while since I turned on the Wii, and I had to navigate all these layers of designed technology mediation in order to get what I wanted: “Helvetica”, streaming.

   The amazing thing is how much better this connection is now than even 4 or 5 years ago, even with the half hour of settings and resets and reentries of access data it took to get the movie streaming. I remember when people were just beginning to talk about streaming video, and bandwidth was the big question. So much glass (fiber optic cable) was put into the ground in the early 2000s that bandwidth was no longer the question. All the companies that laid the cable were now bankrupt, but the fiber was in the ground.

   But I digress. Or do I? We can talk about that in class: is this a digression?

   Anyhoo, I include the Winner reading on top of everything else to remind us about the challenges of agency in the postmodern. Yes, there is a responsibility on the part of the designer. But part of the designer’s responsibility is not, like Corbusier or Robert Moses, to change human behavior but support human interaction. The modern/postmodern distinction. Ah, but how is that determined? That’s the realm of ethics: what should the designer strive for? From one perspective, the responsibility is to articulate stakeholder need and desire. But how do we represent what people want, and do weforget how people have come to want what they say they want?

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c0VtOdibcI
   http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/your-brain-marketing-135355

   So I include these references to Spurlock’s “Greatest Movie Ever Sold” sorry, that’s “Pom Wonderful presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” to remind that our wants do not spring from nature without necessarily reflecting the interests of others’ messages: our desires resulting from the network of affiliations and inputs into which our awareness is plugged. And some have access to our brains in ways that may make us squirm. (It’s worth spending time with Spurlock’s film, particularly the segment on cognitive marketing which the adweek story above talks about — of course, the adweek story talks about this as if it was the greatest thing in the world.

   And we start with typeface, and the emotional content of type. By digging deeply into typeface, so ubiquitous and seemingly somehow both invisible and inevitable, we begin to reveal the power and reach of design, our human made world. Adweek and Spurlock lay out the pieces on the board for us: what game is being played and what are the stakes?

   Our readings are all about the responsibilities of design, whether designing a typeface, a building, or an institution. In some ways, this week can become an entire semester’s study–which is what the Margolin piece is all about. But we’re trying to cover a lot more. What tropes translate to the visible, the visual? This is the point of the Rhetorical Handbook. So we’ll start small with emotional type, and work our way next week to our rhetorical tropes.

   Let’s start in 227, and perhaps we’ll move from 227 to the conference room after our break tonight.

   -Michael
   salvo@purdue.edu

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3. Links for January 17

   http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

   And of course I didn’t include the links that would actually help you think about and map the field(s) for yourselves:

   A literal mapping of Rhetoric & Composition as a field of study and inquiry:
   http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56822425/comp%20map.zip

   This is a zip file of about 15mb. The unzipped folder contains a full size, full resolution map and smaller versions of the map in .png, as well as alternate file types (gif, jpg, pdf). We’ll want to discuss the content as well as the formatting, as jpg and gif differ in what they can accomplish.

   Most interesting to me is the distance traveled between the 2001 map above and Tirrell’s map here with data through 2008 (be sure to download the Googlemap plugin):
   http://people.uncw.edu/tirrellj/mappingrc/map.html

   Remember Tirrell is mapping only a minuscule portion of the overall map — the scales are vastly different. I would represent Tirrell’s map thus:

   See the argument? I’ve already made my first foray into visual argumentation, asserting that the view I’ve cobbled together here is an accurate representation of Jeremy’s intention. So that’s what I mean about mapping the field: Take whatever portion of the field you see yourself as part and show it in relationship to other parts of the field. You can utilize the images and colors in this map, or break out in other directions. The point is to accurately represent your thoughts about your studies–a small part, selection, or an eagle-eye panoptic view–visually, and in as much detail and sophistication as you can muster. Then write about what you intended to accomplish. I’d like to think my representation of the scope of Jeremy’s mapping is transparent, but it isn’t, and as your maps become more complex, all our intentions will be lost to interpretation. Perhaps.

   So I am hopeful that this email gives you enough detail and direction to get mapping. See you at the Envision Center on Tuesday!

   -Michael
   salvo@purdue.edu

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