viz.

We at viz. are happy to announce the launch of our "views" section, in which we will post interviews with prominent scholars in the field. Our initial post is an interview with Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, the authors of No Caption Needed. Check back for additional content in the coming weeks.

Right off the bat, I want to say that I'm not accusing contemporary political cartoonists of creating racist depictions of Barack Obama. But I do wonder, is that tough to avoid? Political cartoons typically accentuate the subject's features in unflattering ways. They're caricatures. Remember George W. Bush's enlarged ears? The problem is that, with the nation's first African-American President, cartoonists have to avoid a whole history of racist cartooning. They have to simultaneously do what they've always done, which is make fun of the most powerful person in the world, but without referencing a racist visual history.

Consider this racist cartoon:

(Image from the Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum)

Much was made of the crowds that attended President Obama's inauguration in Washington, DC last week.

As evidence of remote sensing's (that is, satellite image's) greater role in public consciousness, check out this image of the crowds gathered for the historic moment, shot at one-half meter resolution. (One-half, or.5, meter resolution means, more or less, that the smallest units discernible in the image are .5 x .5 meters, about the size of a person from above. The resolution is roughly equivalent on the NIIRS scale, which is the military/intelligence community's rating scale for remotely sensed image interpretability.)

Increasingly news organizations are citing remotely sensed images in their reporting. Whether this is a techno-fad or provides a legitimately new and informative perspective on events, I'd be curious to hear readers' opinions on.

Image courtesy of GeoEye (click link for a larger resolution photo, as well as additional remotely sensed images)

We are happy to announce that Viz. will be adding a new category of content to its permanent content area in the very near future. We will be unveiling an "(re/interview" section in which we will have transcripts of interviews with prominent visual rhetoric/communication scholars, as well of reviews of some of their work. Our kick-off of the section will be an interview with Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, the authors of the book and blog "No Caption Needed." Check back in a week or two for the new section and the re/interview, which we will announce on the blog as well.

The Copyranter, a blogger I'm becoming more and more of a fan of, recently posted these images from an Italian ad campaign for stove-top coffee makers. The title of the ads, or the slogan paired with them is, "the bite of coffee."

A UT Information Science student, Will Martin, has come up with what I think is an ingenious way to reference glyphs. Will uses a tag cloud to associate words with the pictures in the glyphs. So, if you're trying to find out what a glyph with, say, an alligator in it means, you simply visit Will's tag cloud and click on "alligator," at which point all the glyphs containing alligators will show up. This seems to me like a really useful and intuitive way to use our alphabetic system to reference a glyphic system, like the Egyptian one here, when the user is unfamiliar with the glyphic system at hand.

In Oregon, one of the 49 states that I am not from, Democratic Senate candidate Steve Novick has released a few campaign ads that cleverly play on two of his attributes that might otherwise be construed as weaknesses, his 4'9" height and his prosthetic hand. A friend forwarded me a link to a Huffington Post blog entry about the ads. I have embedded the actual ads below.

I like to use short videos like these in my rhetoric class to get students talking about basic rhetorical principles, such as how a person develops a particular ethos, and what the ramifications of that ethos might be for various artists.

I've always thought that the best graffiti is on train cars. Maybe it's not always the best graphically, but I like the statement--not only has the tagger tagged, but the canvas is mobile and likely to get pulled all over the country, set forth into the world. It's bold. Not as bold as the graffiti on interstate signs where some kid crawled out on a metal pole over 80 mile-an-hour traffic, but bold nonetheless.

Over the summer I was unfortunate enough to require a reconstruction of my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). As I was wheeled out of the clinic in an anaesthetic haze, my doctor handed me a series of photos not unlike the ones below.

Students in my Rhetoric of Spying Class recently read sections of the 9/11 Commission Report, along with the graphic novel version of the report (for a thorough discussion of the graphic novel version and its critics, including some great links, click here).