viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot of viz. 

Elizabeth's post earlier this week on visual representations of Twitter reminded me of a blog entry from about a year ago by Emily Bloom, who often highlighted New Media pedagogy in her blog posts, and who contributed a wonderful New Media Pedagogy and Visual Rhetoric page.  You can see Emily's "Visual Tweets" entry reposted after the break, or you can link to the original Visual Tweets post and the comments from September 2009. 

Start of Emily's original post:

Image credit: From YouTube
H/T to A Mutual Respect

Full confession: I just joined Twitter about 30 minutes ago. However, for considerably longer, I've been curious about the significance of Twitter's text-based 140-character format. Although Twitter contains some visuals such as profile pictures and links, it is primarily a print-based medium. The viewer experiences Twitter posts, or tweets, as a wall of sentences. While tweets are themselves primarily textual in nature, two recent videos offer visual interpretations that play with the relationship between image and text.

The first, by http://markfullmer.com/ ">Mark Fullmer, uses the 140-character constraint of tweets to take on the most iconic of American genres-- the road odyssey. In the video for Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey, Fullmer voices these micropoetic tweets over black and white footage of the passing scenery. The video begins with the image of a twitter feed, but most of the subsequent imagery focuses on the western landscape. Once on the road, Fullmer shows himself jotting his words onto a pad of paper as he drives. In the sense that Fullmer writes rather than texts his words on the journey, tweets become a poetic constraint rather than a new media per se.

Image credit: From The Washington Post on YouTube
H/T to Kevin Bourque

A very different visual interpretation of tweets is the Washington Post satire of celebrity tweets called “Twits." In this series of visual/text juxtapositions, actors read celebrity tweets with all the pomp of a Masterpiece Theatre production. Emphasizing the grammatical mistakes, bizarre punctuation and tonal oddity of these tweets, the actors illustrate not only the strangeness of celebrity but also, the absurdity of our interest in them.

Together, these videos led me to think about the nature of the tweet and the kinds of restraints, opportunities and follies it engenders. As Fullmer says in Tweet Tweet, “A tweet is not a text, not haiku, not a telegraph. Stop. A tweet is.” I’d be interested to see what other kinds of visual rhetoric and poetry the tweet may inspire. Is there any way to visually capture the back-and-forth quality of tweets? Can a visualized tweet recreate the immediacy of the ever-changing updates?