viz.

The good folks over at Information Aesthetics recently posted a link to Wiki Mind Map. The site provides a mind-map-style outline of topics in Wikipedia.

Right now the site appears to be able to search the German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Indonesian versions of the encyclopedia. It can also search www.self-qs.de, which appears to be some sort of German dictionary (perhaps a German-speaker can help out here).

Following up on Nate’s post about retouched photos, The Daily Show has revealed some contemporary presidential image-retouching:

Slate has posted a slide-show essay by Mia Fineman on the work of photographer Ryan McGinley. [This link may not be suitable for work.] Fineman makes the argument that McGinley’s work has been coopted by advertisers because he “has essentially created a successful lifestyle brand—a stylish fantasy of youth, beauty, and hedonistic fun” which they find appealing. The photos and analysis could be the start of a fruitful discussion of commercialism and art.

On Monday, the BBC reported on a “six-month research project” that revealed that “MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education” while Facebook users “come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.” In a Tuesday blog post, Clay Spinuzzi pointed out that the research project in question was not intended to be taken as scholarly research. While it is generally a good idea to take any BBC report on science with a Gibraltar-sized grain of salt, one should ask, why did so many others accept these results (Clay lists SmartMobs and BoingBoing as posting favorable comments)? I think the answer has more than a little to do with the visual aesthetics of the two sites.

Libraries: They aren’t just for reading anymore

 
Meghan Sitar of the University of Texas Library System forwarded a link to the virtual poster session at the 2007 American Library Association conference. The title of the session is “Eye to I: Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy.”

We are proud to announce that viz. received the 2007 Mastery of Electronic Media in Education (MEME) from the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Check out the announcement on the CWRL’s website.

Read/Write Web reports here on reCAPTCHA, a new initiative that makes use of CAPTCHAs, those mangled images, like the one above, users must decipher to sign up for online accounts and services. The program substitutes questionable scans from book digitization pro

Jerome Krase at BrooklynSoc.org passed along a photo gallery comparing an artist’s rendering of the Fulton Street Mall in Brooklyn versus the mall itself.

We’ve posted a new article in the theory section of the site. “Ekphrasis: Image and Text” outlines the discussion surrounding the use of ekphrasis and relates that history to the interconnection of images and text. Enjoy!

We’ve known for a long time that politics is theater, but just in case anyone has forgotten, Slate has posted an unfortunately titled slideshow documenting Rudy Giuliani’s many attempts at playing dress up, “Rudy in Leather and Lace.” (Speaking of the title, if this were not a blog that was soley concerned with visual rhetoric, I might be inclined to point out that said title might not be very appealing to any audience, ever, but it is, so I won’t.) Come August, these photos might make excellent fodder for those awkward it’s-the-beginning-of-the-semester-and-we-don’t-know-each-other-and-you-think-rhetoric-is-something-liars-do presentations where we teachers try to illustrate for our students the relevance of what we do to the wide-wide world. Failing that, come October it may provide some inspiration as you consider your Halloween costume (for example, you might write a note to yourself to the effect of “don’t dress up like the love-child of Liza Minnelli and Don Corleone”).

Photograph by Joe DeMaria/Associated Press