viz.

The New York Times has posted an interview with Dartmouth’s Hany Farid, the creator of “digital forensics.” Here’s how Dr. Farid describes the field:

It’s a new field. It didn’t exist five years ago. We look at digital media—images, audio and video—and we try to ascertain whether or not they’ve been manipulated. We use mathematical and computational techniques to detect alterations in them.

In society today, we’re now seeing doctored images regularly. If tabloids can’t obtain a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking together on a beach, they’ll make up a composite from two pictures. Star actually did that. And it’s happening in the courts, politics and scientific journals, too. As a result, we now live in an age when the once-held belief that photographs were the definitive record of events is gone.

Actually, photographic forgeries aren’t new. People have doctored images since the beginning of photography. But the techniques needed to do that during the Civil War, when Mathew Brady made composites, were extremely difficult and time consuming. In today’s world, anyone with a digital camera, a PC, Photoshop and an hour’s worth of time can make fairly compelling digital forgeries.

Dr. Farid makes some other interesting claims as well. Since 1990, the percentage of fraud cases involving photos has risen from 3 percent to 44.1 percent. While the majority of the interview focuses on digital manipulation in scientific research, clearly photographic forgery is becoming a significant problem in all areas of society.

GLOBAL WARMING!

On the heels of yesterday’s post about the art (and absolute fidelity to reality) of scientific photographs, this story from The Guardian describes how scientists from the National Observatory of Athens are investigating sunset paintings “to work out the amount of natural pollution spewed into the skies by [volcanic] eruptions such as Mount Krakatoa in 1883.” Apparently the method has some validity:

They used a computer to work out the relative amounts of red and green in each picture, along the horizon. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. The researchers found most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the three years following a documented eruption.

via Boing Boing

Those of you interested in the rhetoric of science should enjoy The Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, which is supported by the fantastically-named Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimeter. The site boasts some beautiful imagery which, along with the accompanying text, should be able to spark some fantastic discussions about the relationship of visuals and scientific knowledge.

The award-winning digital publication viz. is committed to the intersections of Rhetoric and visual culture. In keeping with its mission to promote visual literacy, the viz. blog presents a daily community forum for discussing  images in the digital age.  The website attracts a steady, significant following with an international audience made up of users from 144 countries and territories.

The website is maintained by the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin by members of the Visual Rhetoric Project Group. The viz. blog is the winner of the Jon Lovas Memorial Weblog Award.

For instructors,  a number of resources are available, such as Teaching, a static page with resources for pedagogy, and the Visual Theory page, hosting content in photography theory, new media theory, and design. The feature Views includes interviews with prominent Visual Rhetoric and Communications scholars.  

Scholars, instructors, artists, photographers, and anyone with an interest in the diversity of Visual Rhetoric and culture are welcome to contribute to the blog or other portions of the website. First time users may contact the editors to set up collaborations or accounts for contributions. For a recent review of viz., see Kairos 13.

Some feminists are all atwitter about Italian Vogue's questionable new "photostory," decrying it as a glorification of sexual violence in theatres of war. (And yes, the spread is pretty heinous on many levels.) But I'd like to submit that the American flags splattered all over these debauched, disturbing scenes function as a none-too-subtle criticism of our government's actions. What do you think?

Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman pieced together a rather precise visual argument by sequencing a series of images from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While we could spend many a blog entry on the imagery of terror and war or on the function of visual images in argument, the Hariman sequence seems to provide an excellent in-class opportunity to dwell on the different persuasive registers present in visual communication and political speeches that invoke the same imagery.

UT’s First-Year Forum text for 2007–2008 will be Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. Yesterday I sat in on a seminar hosted by the DRW where Domino Perez discussed some of the background and context of the issues that the book engages.

One theme of the discussion was the influence of film on the Urrea’s prose, as well as how images of Latinos can both support and trouble Urrea’s arguments. In the wake of that discussion, I thought I would post links to some Latin-American and Border Studies visual resources for use by DRW instructors and anyone else who is teaching a class that deals with these fields.

I’m a big fan of Seth Stevenson’s advertising columns at Slate (he’s going on sabbatical and will be missed). On Monday he posted a new column, where he discusses readers’ submissions for the worst ads on TV. Like a therapist, Stevenson doesn’t so much agree with the contributors as he commiserates with the feelings of anger, betrayal, emptiness and loss directed at or prompted by these advertisements. One question that we can ask ourselves (and our students) is: Why do we care so much about ads? Take this McDonald’s ad for example:

Slate V has posted nine soap commercials shot by recently deceased film director Ingmar Bergman. As Dana Stevens, Slate’s film critic, points out in the commentary below, Bergman’s ads challenged the conventions of most commercials—in one case, Bergman depicts a character being injured by the product, Bris soap.