viz.

Louisville Cardinal players react to Kevin Ware's leg injury during March Madness.  Image Credit: Yahoo Sports

I’ll admit, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night listening to the Boston police scanner, following as closely as I could the developments in the Boston Marathon bombing.  In the wee hours of this morning, I thought about documenting the dozens of news items (as well as widespread speculation across message boards and social media) to take a tally of how much of the information proliferating in the uncertainty of Friday morning would be disproved by Friday afternoon. 

As I began the project, it soon proved futile—there was far too much information and I ran into (as I might have anticipated) problems discerning journalistic fact from fiction right from the get go.  It was only when I stopped documenting and trying to quantify the evidence that I began to think about the relationship between violence and speculative practice and assemble a quite different archive.  [GORE WARNING: the images beyond this cut are NSFW and may shock and disturb some viewers.  Discretion is advised.]

Image Credit: IDV Solutions

What a wonderful map! This IS the popular vote on November 6, 2012. John Nelson gave us this map, and we thank him for it. It's called a "pointillist map:" one blue dot for every 100 votes for President Obama, randomly distributed in the county in which the votes were cast. One red dot for every 100 votes for Mr. Romney. You've heard of purple states? Well here's our purple country. Click the link on the image credit to find a large and hi-def version of this map. Then meet me back here, won't you?

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

With 24 hours to go, media outlets projecting the outcome of election day are covered in geographical maps of states and counties painted starkly in red and blue.  I’ve enjoyed the responses of armchair intellectuals like Randall Munroe, who playfully reinterprets the red/blue divide to create a complex and comprehensive visual history of the Republican and Democratic parties.  The proliferation of regional and ideological divides across multiple media this week urged me to explore two important questions in visual rhetoric: What does it mean to visualize a geographical boundary?  And what does it mean to visualize an invisible line?  (I would be remiss not to mention the enormous amount of border studies that exist in postcolonial and Anglophone literature and criticism—but today on viz I will try to confine myself to a discussion of the visualization of intranational borders.)  Here to help me is the photography of Colin Stearns, Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons. Stearns' current project is photographing the Mason-Dixon line in order to capture "this border of cultural distinction at the places of its occurence."  Each of his photographs contain the invisible interstate line somewhere within their composition.  I'll also put Stearns in dialogue with William Byrd II, the 18^th century commissioner of the colonial line between North Carolina and Virginia. 

Image Credit: Kevin Lau

The image above of feline Lefty sporting an "I Voted" sticker is not, as some activists might worry, evidence of voter fraud. Rest assured, cats and other domestic animals are not posing as voters. Lefty's message is much less nefarious if vehement: "YES, I am talking to YOU! GO VOTE TODAY!" I already wore my "I Voted Early" sticker last week, thanks to the early voting available in Travis County, Texas. And I look forward to seeing fellow citizens from across the nation sporting "I Voted" stickers tomorrow regardless of their choices inside the voting booth.

Image Credit: Commission on Presidential Debates

Despite its vaguely governmental-sounding name, the Commission on Presidential Debates is a private, non-profit corporation funded by a handful of businesses, as described by George Farah. The Commission serves to accommodate the Republican and Democratic Parties' desire for a relatively controlled event—control which drove the League of Women Voters to withdraw from hosting the debates in 1987. One of the long-standing contributors to the Commission is the Anheuser-Busch corporation (owned since 2008 by the Brazilian and Belgian conglomerate InBev). While watching the debates, I couldn't help but notice the similarity between the eagle that hangs above the heads of the candidates and the Anheuser-Busch eagle, both of which draw on deeply set US political imagery.

Image Source: Unknown

In last week's debate, one of the more memorable moments was Mitt Romney's vow to cut off government funding to public television despite his appreciation of both Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. Because he would neither raise taxes nor borrow money from China, Romney argued, he would cut programs like PBS. I suppose Romney intended the statement as a bit of red meat for his base—those who would rather their tax monies not go to PBS—and perhaps also for the putative independent/undecided voter who also distrusts such government spending. I also suppose that for such audiences the line worked. However, for other audiences, Romney's enthymeme provoked an outcry, because those audiences do not share the unstated premise in his argument that PBS does not merit continued funding. Sesame Street lovers (and Romney haters) across the web responded with a torrent of photoshopped images criticizing Romney's position.

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

Almost every male speaker to the September Summit of the General Assembly of the United Nations wore a suit and tie. It is easy to overlook this fact, so widespread is the convention, so rare the defiance. But what heads of state wear in front of one another shows something peculiar about the modern nation state. Leaders are, by and large, drawn from the cultural and economic elite. What all this suit-and-tie wearing indicates, however, is that the ruling class of the modern nation-state must subscribe, or seem to subscribe, to middle class or “business” virtues, like hard work, entrepreneurship, merit, and self-effacement. When a male leader chooses not to don a suit and tie, a choice made by President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pictured above), he is really saying something: but what, exactly, is he saying?

Image Credit: Huffington Post

At issue from the moment Romney stuck his neck out as a Presidential hopeful,  his extraordinary personal wealth has become one of the primary issues covered by various news media as we march closer to the November election.  Epitomized best, perhaps, by a cleverly Photoshopped image that initially made rounds as a campaign gaff, “RMoney” has anything but hip associations—rather, it has inspired vast discussion about the rhetoric of prosperity and philanthropy in the midst of economic recession, both real and imagined. 

Image Credit: Reuters

As we’re in the middle of another presidential campaign, I thought I’d devote my inaugural viz. post to an aspect of visual political rhetoric: photos capturing politicians with odd facial expression or in odd poses. One of the better known examples of this phenomenon is the above photo of John McCain from the last debate in the 2008 presidential campaign. In the still image, McCain stands behind Barack Obama, seeming to lurch after him while disrespectfully sticking out his tongue and reaching out with his hands. I want to stress “seeming,” though, because viewing McCain’s movement in context offers an alternative explanation.

Image Credit: I Made America

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one person to distract herself from work, Facebook provides. Through the The Second City Network I found a video entitled “Founding Fathers History Pick-Up Lines.” Clearly, I couldn’t resist. I was deeply amused to watch Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and John Adams seduce modern women with such lines as “It’s not the Louisiana Purchase, but it will double in size,” “Never leave for tomorrow what you can screw today,” and “I take the virgin out of Virginia.” The full video below features many more salacious lines, some of which might not be SFW: