viz.

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

Viz: The Future

First, a little background. For those of you who don't know, the re-design of the CWRL's Visual Rhetoric page as Viz and the addition of a blog was John Jones's idea. We revamped the site and added the blog in the spring while both he and I were working as the visual rhetoric developers for UT's CWRL. John was recently selected to serve as a CWRL Assistant Director, which is a two year position. He will continue to contribute to the blog, but his duties as an AD may limit those contributions. I will continue to serve as a visual rhetoric developer for the next year. Here's what you can expect to see on Viz over the course of that next year. 1) We will continue to add theory articles to the site. 2) We will continue to add assignments and bibliographic entries to the site. 3) The blog will get bigger and better. 4) We will add blog contributors and add a section to the site that will include brief bios on each contributor. 5) We will try to upload a non-copyrighted version of the visual rhetoric PowerPoint presentation we developed for use in UT's RHE 306 and RHE 309K/S classes last year, including the infamous Facebook Ambush. So, at a minimum these are the additions we're hoping to making to the site over the next year.

Dartmouth has a very interesting website I just discovered that documents the manipulation of photos with examples spanning photography's history. The site is well worth checking out. Many of the examples provided touch on sensitive issues, making them potentially rich for an in-class discussion of what's at stake (rhetorically, politically, journalistically, historically) when photos are manipulated by photographers, news editors or political leaders.

The reappropriation of the word "queer" from a pejorative term to a term of self-identity and strength for the gay community has been well documented. It's worth pointing out though that another symbol currently associated with the gay rights movement, a pink triangle, is itself reappropriated from its much more menacing origins in Nazi identification systems. The pink triangle was, like the more well-known yellow Star of David, used to mark a population the Nazis deemed threatening, in this case homosexual men. Trusty Wikipedia has a brief discussion of the phenomenon with lots of relevant links.

I recently discovered the photography of Nina Berman and have been completely bowled over by it. Her photos of soldiers wounded in Iraq are some of the most emotionally wrenching I've seen, masterful examples of the emotional impact photos can have, regardless of what you think of the current war. I have a feeling that her images will be long remembered for how powerfully they document the wounded (as opposed to deceased) casaulties of the war in Iraq. The series "purple hearts" and "marine wedding" are especially powerful.

My take on visual rhetoric is largely informed by my prior career with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In the UT Visual Rhetoric Presentation I have a slide that depicts a photo from the Cuban Missile Crisis alongside a picture from Colin Powell's Presentation to the UN.

With the summer recreation season fast approaching I wanted to put the Lawnmower People to work this week with a public service announcement. If you golf, take stock:

In what is perhaps more of a testament to my simplicity than anything else, I have to admit that these goofy lawnmower people crack me up. I would like to point out though that not all visual texts make arguments. I find when teaching Visual Rhetoric units that students initially want to see ALL images as arguments, whereas images like these really depend on the accompanying text to make any warning/argument clear, at least in the case of more complex warnings.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to uphold a ban on "partial birth" abortions, I thought it would be worth mentioning how visual rhetoric is employed in the abortion debate, particularly by pro-life partisans. Anyone who has spent much time on a large university campus has likely seen the images of protest I'm referring to in demonstrations once or twice a year, protests often coordinated by off-campus religious groups. In their most confrontational manifestations, the groups frequently employ large signs depicting very, very graphic images that they claim show aborted fetuses.

I recently incorporated the Garry Winogrand photo below into an in-class writing exercise. The exercise is essentially the same as one that I came up with when helping Brooks Landon teach his Prose Style course at the University of Iowa a few years ago. Keep reading to learn more about the writing exercise.

I bring a photo in to class, usually one that depicts something weird, something that probably has a story behind it but that doesn't make that story explicit. I project the photo and don't tell the students a word about it, not when it was taken, by whom, nothing. Then the students have to write about the photo. It's a creative assignment and in this case I was trying to get them to think about form. Specifically, after a workshop on the subject in the prior class, I was asking them to write "cumulative" sentences. Cumulative sentences, for those of you who aren't prose style junkies, are described in Francis Christensen's essay "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence." So, the photo was just a prompt to get the students writing in a new mode that we had been working on. The exercise went very well and my students generated some whacky, but stylistically adventurous, prose. If I get their permission, I will post some of their writings in the comments soon.

I may as well kick off the lawnmower people with a double-shot, since I intend to add these images periodically when the whim strikes. A second genre of lawnmower people signs depicts these generic beings not in the agonies of bodily harm, but doing things that are forbidden.