viz.

Image Credit:  Wikipedia

I’m a bit nervous and distracted right now, as I’m in the middle of preparing to go to Ottawa for the CSECS/NEASECS conference this weekend, and anticipating the following weekend’s jaunt to St. Louis for the MMLA Conference.  My plan to manage to stress involves using my blog posts for the next two weeks to examine my paper topics through the lens of visual rhetoric.

For the CSECS/NEASECS conference, I’m going to be presenting a paper on Adam Smith and Edmund Burke entitled “Fragmentary Selves: (Aesthetic) Living with the Man in the Breast in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.”  While the title may be overlong, it’s in part because I’m trying to balance within the paper a discussion of the Burkean sublime and how Smith uses that aesthetic rhetoric to discuss and picture an ideal self that is so responsive to the feelings of others that such a self is in part fragmented by this openness.  The connection that I see between this paper and my work here at viz. is through the trope of ruins.

Image Credit: New York Times

Family trees are distinctively antiquated visual representations, yet they remain ubiquitous. In the past week alone, The Boston Herald published a family tree by the New England Historic Genealogical Society showing that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are related and New York Times ran an interactive tree based on the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak documenting Michelle Obama’s family history.  Both maps include the very familiar hierarchical arrangement of lines and circles or squares.  The Damon-Affleck map cuts right to the chase, foregoing all other strands, and directly linking the actors to William Knowlton Jr. (1615-1655). The First Lady’s genealogy is much more interested in the journey than the destination; each node of the tree has a short description of the family member and links to their genealogical record.  Looking at these two maps, I was led to consider why the family tree endures despite the wealth of technologies available for re-mapping relationships? Why does the old visual arrangement of radiating lines still seem to capture our attention?  And finally, what are we really mapping when we map kinship on a family tree?

The progressive deconstruction of Orientalism is catching up with information technology. Since 1996, the Arab Image Foundation, based in Lebanon, has been amassing a digital collection of photographs from the Arab world.

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)

Check out Madam and Eve, a great cartoon set in South Africa:

If you are teaching comics at all this semester, you might be interested in Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography by Andrew Helfer, Steve Buccellato, and Joe Staton. Slate is serializing the entire text this week. Slate also serialized The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (it’s no longer available) this time last year.