viz. - political rhetoric

How USA Really Voted on November 6

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 15:10:56 +0000

What a wonderful map! This IS the popular vote on November 6, 2012. John Nelson gave us this map, and we thank him for it. It's called a "pointillist map:" one blue dot for every 100 votes for President Obama, randomly distributed in the county in which the votes were cast. One red dot for every 100 votes for Mr. Romney. You've heard of purple states? Well here's our purple country. Click the link on the image credit to find a large and hi-def version of this map. Then meet me back here, won't you?

I'll be candid. There's an irrational part of me that wants the result of an election to match how much blue or red there is on the map. I know that's not how it works. This time, the state-level electoral college map came out pretty evenly red and blue. But take a look at the county-level map:

Image Credit: Wikipedia

As usual, it looks like a sea of red with a few islands of blue, and yet, as we all know, President Obama was elected for four more years. I realize that it's a question of population density not geographical space, but now, at long last and thanks to Mr. Nelson, I can see that.

Mr. Nelson tells us he was inspired to make this kind of map by his advisor, a Professor Kirk Goldsberry. Here's a pointillist map of the 2012 presidential election Professor Goldsberry did of the Dallas Fort Worth Area:

Image Credit: Kirk Goldsberry/KK Outlet

The top map shows red and blue dots for Mr. Romney and President Obama respectively. The bottom map shows voters by ethnicity. (Can you guess? Try and then click the link to find out.) What a revelation! Of course, pointillist maps are only one of the new mapping techniques to show election data, but they are a powerful one. Looking at John Nelson's map I find myself thinking: so this is who we are.

Image Credit: IDV Solutions

One thing we seem to be is country and city. Do you notice how there is a ring of red around the purple-blue cities? That seems to hold true around the nation.

Colorful Geographies of Beliefs

Calliope — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:31:22 +0000

Image Credit: MIT Technology Review

This electoral map, created by Princeton mathematician Robert J. Vanderbei, uses a spectrum of colors between blue and red to represent the ratio per county of Democrat to Republican votes. The height of the verticals indicate the number of votes in each county. Vanderbei's representation of the U.S. votes by region accounts for nuances in the data that other red-and-blue-state maps miss: the political dividedness of certain counties, the intensity of partisanship in others, and centers of strong voter turn out. From a visual standpoint, the map is eye-catching because it is purple. Purple is not a color usually associated with political belief. But other data crunchers, looking to complicate our picture of national voting trends, have unveiled maps this year with a similar palette. See my fellow viz. contributer Chris Ortiz y Prentice's post for an electoral map that also reveals (through pointillism instead of 3-dimensional modelling) the nation's purplish complexion.

It might be mere coincidence that Chris and I both decided to write about visualizing ideological regionalism; but it's possible that our posts register an increasing need to redraw and redefine assumptions about voter demographics. That said, I'll leave the actual work of redefinition up to political analysts and turn to the far more obscure aims of this entry: to discuss the rhetorical role of color in images that chart belief systems and controversial policies.

The distribution of color in Vanderbei's map implies that political allegiances are not as ubiquitous in some regions--like the South and Midwest--as one might suspect. It even gives the impression (which may be misguided) that Americans are politically moderate, since variegation in color usually expresses in-betweeness instead of extremes. But let's talk about the map's predominant hue for a moment. Purple is not a color that Republicans, Democrats, or Greens, for that matter, would claim, probably because it doesn't have any patriotic or environmental associations. The main things that come to my mind when I think of purple are grape juice, Lisa Frank, and Skittles. I also have the unreasonable expectation that anyone who is wearing a purple shirt should be friendly and easy to approach. I'm pretty sure that everyone has their own set of responses to this and other colors--some responses may be arbitrary or psychological, and some culturally-determined. And yet we rely on colors to codify politically important groups and ideologies. The fact that colors have both a particular and universal significance for most people is what makes assigning them to maps like Vanderbei's a rhetorically interesting (and potentially dicey) practice.

Image Credit: The Pew Forum

I looked at some graphics by the Pew Research Center for its project on Religion and Public Life to see which colors are presently being applied to other sensitive attitudes and beliefs. The creators of the chart above, which explains current state policies on gay marriage, chose an earthy palette of green, yellow, tan and white to represent the four main legal positions: states that allow it, states with constitutional bans, states with statutory bans, and those with no legal stance. It's conceivable why green was chosen to mark the states that have or will shortly legalize gay marriage. Green is typically the color of environmentally-friendly and/or socially-conscious causes and gay rights is an issue that fits with this progressive platform. It's interesting that the none of the other colors are linked to political parties, though. The color used to denote the most restrictive of the four positions (states with constitutional bans on gay marriage) is a sallow yellow shade. Conscious color choice? You decide.

The think tank's news story about the rising number of Americans who do not identify with any religion is striking for its lack of color. The article includes illustrations and graphs (one depicts the ratio of religious to non-religious individuals in the U.S. with a map-shaped group of gray and black figures) but they are all monochromatic and colorless. Does the term that the editors use to refer to this growing group--the 'nones'--necessitate such a color scheme? I wonder if non-religious people identify with the possible valences of this term and the corresponding color coding (anonymity, absence, indefiniteness)?

Image Credit: The Pew Forum

Lastly, we have one of the only sources I found floating around on the Internet that specifies which Christian denomination has the leading number of adherents in each U.S. county. (The map was updated in 2010, but I couldn't access it for free online). I'm taken by this map because of the way it differs from the one at the beginning of the blog post. The people who built this visualization opted to portray the adherents of each religion as unified and undifferentiated by using flat colors. And the data they collected indicates that most churches hold sway in contained areas of the map--the Baptists in the South, Lutherans in the midwest, and Mormons in and surrounding Utah. Interestingly, the map-makers assigned the two most dominant church bodies, the Baptist and Catholic religions, colors that correspond to the main U.S. political parties. It's worth reflecting whether one can look at a map like this without seeing the color-coded territories as translating to votes for liberal and conservative candidates.

Image Credit: valpo.edu

I Turn My Camera On, Then My Photoshop

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:51:58 +0000

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

H/T: Crushable

While I’ve done some recent fangirling over Ryan Gosling and Benjamin Franklin, I would have never imagined I could be in a photograph with them. At least, not until I saw Everett Hiller’s holiday party photographs, into which he Photoshopped various celebrities.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

According to Hiller, “Every year my wife and I throw a party and when I send out the photos I add famous people.” The results are extremely entertaining and include some amazing guests: everyone from The Rock and Tom Cruise to George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Hiller’s photographs represent an unusual extension of the kind of fan culture in which Gosling, Whitney Houston, and I Made America participate. While the joke lies in the juxtaposition of major Hollywood celebrities with the homely setting, these recontextualizations act like fan fiction. For example, if Shia LaBeouf is known for his alcohol-fueled antics, placing a bleary-eyed picture of him next to a smirking man builds new stories from established canon. Having an impeccably besuited Neal Patrick Harris amidst drunken revelers winks at his How I Met Your Mother character Barney Stinson, who always takes perfect photographs. Positioning Ryan Gosling among everyday partygoers expands on established Gosling meme fanon, in which Gosling is happy to talk feminism and typography with you.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

However, these kinds of images also build or serve to make arguments about the nature of the celebrities included. For example, many Republicans accused Obama in 2008 of being a “celebrity” who was out-of-touch with Americans because he was “worr[ied] about the price of arugula”—and they’re still making that argument today. The above image, which integrates Obama in the middle of a middle-class (and otherwise white) party, visually argues that Obama is a Regular Joe who exists on the same level as his fellow citizens. The surprise of the guy in the green hat behind him even naturalizes him into the setting insofar as it would probably be a huge shock for most of us to meet Obama in some guy’s living room.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Outside of a political context, however, picturing Tom Cruise cackling while posed on a piñata reinforces the narrative of Cruise as a crazed Scientologist, a narrative that has been used to criticize Scientology’s practices. These photographs work based on an idea of celebrity that is simultaneously near and far: celebrities are both just like us and stand out in the crowd. Hiller’s Photoshopping makes the famous blend in naturally and unnoticeably with their surroundings but also invites viewers to play a game of Where’s Waldo, looking to see how many late-night comedians stand in the background. As Joseph Roach defines celebrity as the possession of “it” or “the arresting, charismatic power of celebrities,” these photographs arrest the celebrities within a visual frame and encourage the viewers to sympathetically merge themselves with them.

Image Credit: Newsweek

This seems like a pretty benign use of Photoshopping technology; however, the placement (and displacement, in the case of Hillary Clinton) of celebrities in new contexts can have the power to shock and disgust. The above image created by Newsweek to grace their magazine cover drew outrage from those who thought Tina Brown was tasteless to put a dead Princess Diana next to the daughter-in-law she will never know. The accompany story, which imagines how Diana might have been at 50, is a kind of fanfiction, but the picture’s power meant that more people focused on it. What we can see from this is that while anybody with the money can create any sort of fictionalized image, Photoshop’s rhetoric is governed by decorum. Using the technology to make funny pictures is fine, but it’s not allowed to pervert truth—probably because it’s so easy to do just that. If perception is reality, Photoshop is a powerful actor in the war of words—and a valuable tool for retooling actors.

Panem et Circenses: The Hunger Games and Kony2012

David A. Harper — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:31:21 +0000

Image Credit: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]

I found myself watching The Hunger Games at the urgent behest of my eldest daughter, a staunch tween member of “Team Peeta.” Before the movie, we had made a bargain that I would read the entire Hunger Games series and take her to the film if she would read Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It seemed like a good deal at the time. While The Hunger Games movie didn’t put her in mind of Shaftesbury, she did direct me to the image below:

Image Credit: iFunny.mobi

Like the best jokes, this one works on several levels. Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games series, makes the Roman “bread and circuses” connection explicit in the third novel when Katniss is informed that “in the Capitol, all they’ve known is Panem et Circenses.”[2] Indeed, “Panem” is the name of the fictional nation that uses the annual Hunger Games as a strategy of control. My initial assessment after reading the series was that Shirley Jackson’s famous 1948 short story “The Lottery” had mated with Stephen King’s prescient 1982 sci-fi novel The Running Man and produced dubious offspring. But I left the movie musing that it is somehow too easy to assess The Hunger Games as a commentary on a culture obsessed with cheap, voyeuristic reality TV. In a way the books never could, the movie takes advantage of the social and visual experience of going to the movies to breathe new life into the “bread and circuses” paradigm.

In an article for Huffington Post, Greg Garrett noted that The Hunger Game’s dystopia evokes both 1930’s Depression-era America and the Roman “bread and circuses” tradition. Garrett writes, “So long as we are distracted… we may forget for a moment about our own lives, our own hunger. We may forget that we live in a nation that is less free than it was a decade ago, a nation with fewer societal safety nets, a nation with fewer opportunities for young people.”[3] Well said. But let’s face it; the majority of Americans have never known anything more than metaphorical hunger. Turning our gaze toward our own very real problems is a start, but only a start. To do only that is to become a Panem Capitol dweller who realizes she lacks freedom. Breaking free of the thralldom imposed by our own enticing bread and circuses requires we turn our gaze outward and recognize responsibilities extending beyond the borders of self, town, state, or nation.

The theater where my family viewed The Hunger Games was a trendy one that serves meals during the show. While we waited for our group to be seated, the people in front of us consumed two pitchers of the theater’s own microbrew. Once inside, we were treated to a menu mimicking foods found in the books. No, not squirrel, berries, or any other survival food found in the impoverished districts or the arena. This was high-end Capitol fare, like lamb stew with plumbs and some purple melon wrapped in prosciutto. In typical American fashion, the portions were huge. All told, my family probably spent over $100.00 to sit in stadium seats watching a decadent society watch starving children kill each other for sport.

Image Credit: People.com

That purple prosciutto melon was a tip off to what sets The Hunger Games phenomenon apart. It casts the movie audience in the role of Panem Capitol dwellers watching the games. The effect is emphasized by how rarely the movie shows Capitol citizens reacting to the action in the arena. Instead, we stand in for that audience, watching the carnage directly or through the mediation of the charismatic game show host, Caesar. The outlandish Capitol fashion (think Eighteenth-century meets Lady Gaga) may be meant to distance these people from us, even dehumanize them, but as the movie rolls on we become them.

Shaftesbury recognized that the difference between being a “spectator” or an “actor” is perhaps only one of degree. The Hunger Games has us watch colonial children kill one another while we participate in our own consumer culture of excess. God forbid you were out refilling your eight-dollar popcorn tub and missed Thresh bashing little Clove’s head in against a giant metal cornucopia.

Image Credit: Netroots Foundation

The tricky thing about a movie about bread and circuses is that it can become simply another circus, particularly if the audience remains unaware of their complicity. What are we forgetting – what are we being distracted from – by this particular circus and by the more ubiquitous barrage of media white noise? I couldn’t help but reflect that only about a week prior to the release of The Hunger Games the viral social media campaign “Kony2012” had filled our feeds and prompted anxious articles in The Atlantic,[4] The New York Times,[5] ForiegnPolicy.com,[6] and in other mainstream media outlets. The rapidity with which critiques of Kony2012 surfaced revealed a deep mistrust for new social-media fueled activism, as well hinting at even less savory reasons for lashing out at the video.

For a moment, Kony2012 brought our attention to the plight of child soldiers, real starving children who kill one another. Of particular impact is the moment nine minutes into the film, where the filmmaker attempts to explain Joseph Kony to his own five-year old son. The moment has power precisely because, in order to expose the exploitation of children, the filmmaker exploits his own son. It is uncomfortable, but it is meant to be. When we watch fictional children fight in the Hunger Games arena, however, we are partaking in an entertaining diversion, both within the framework of the fiction that makes us a Capitol citizen, and in our role as real consumers of media. A little more discomfort might be in order.

Shaftesbury wasn’t arguing for the abolishment of the theater in 1711, no more than I am denying the value of entertainment. I study Renaissance and Eighteenth-century literature for most of my day, so for me to take such a stance would be absurd. But I do think we should reflect upon what it means to be identified not with the rebellious underdogs of District 11, but with the effete, privileged citizens of the Capitol who move from one distraction to the next as children kill each other and the temperature rises.

Works Cited

[1] Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 447.

[2] Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay. (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 223.

[3] Greg Garrett, "The Hunger Games: Why It Matters"

[4] Max Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012"

[5] Josh Kron and J. David Goodman, "Online, a Distant Conflict Soars to Topic No.1"

[6] Joshua Keating, "Guest Post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)

The City upon a Hill at Halftime: Detroit, Unions, and the USA

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:43:30 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While baseball is more my sport, I haven’t missed watching the Super Bowl for the last couple of years. If nothing else, I enjoy analyzing the Super Bowl commercials—and this year’s Chrysler commercial featuring Clint Eastwood presents an irresistible opportunity to discuss some interesting controversies. Both conservative critics like Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Goldstein and liberal ones like Michael Moore and Charles Mudede have read the commercial as promoting Obama’s reelection campaign. The ad’s copy and visuals directly connect the fates of Detroit and the auto industry with larger economic and political trends, as you can see:

One of the commercial’s early phrases, “It’s halftime in America,” sounds very similar to the phrase from Reagan’s famous ad, “It’s morning again in America.” However, the commercial’s tone is not nearly as triumphal. While both ads feature morning scenes, Chrysler’s surrounds theirs with images of a grizzled Clint Eastwood walking down a dark alley, his face only visible at the commercial’s end. The bright daylight surrounding a man sitting on the edge of his bed is juxtaposed with a commentary track that declares, “People are out of work and they’re hurting, and they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback.” The commercial attempts to play on the kairos of both the Super Bowl halftime and America’s economic recovery. And while the Giants and Eli Manning managed to come back after the football game resumed, I want to think about how both the commercial and the conversation surrounding it think through the “comebacks” of Detroit and the American automotive industry at large.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The Chrysler ad’s argument invites America, in the midst of economic crisis, to look to Detroit and companies like Chrysler for inspiration. The commercial’s copy makes the argument explicit:

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again. I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems that we’ve lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead. But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one, because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times—and if we can’t find a way, then we make one. All that matters know is what’s ahead: how do we come from behind? How do we come together, and how do we win? Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And what’s true about them is true about all of us.

The visuals double the words: instead of a waving American flag, we see a flag for the city of Detroit. The images of happy industry are those of African-American men in a plant, wearing safety goggles and manufacturing shiny cars. At the commercial’s end, we see all of the people who were getting ready for the day now relying on Chrysler cars to transport wood to construction sites or children to school.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While both Eastwood himself and Chrysler’s marketing chief Olivier Francois have explicitly denied that the commercial promotes Obama, the copy and accompanying video do implicitly argue that Detroit’s rebirth—enabled by the auto industry bailout—presents a good model for the rest of the country. The warmly-lit unionized auto plants are directly contrasted with images of television news talking heads and protesting Wisconsin union members, in which cold colors predominate. Even the black-and-white pictures of families and firemen visually set these people apart from the others, turning them into models for the rest of us. Detroit thus takes from the rest of America its role as “the city upon a hill.” It is the reborn economy that America can follow, through the purchase and support of American labor and American-built cars.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

However, this message contrasts strongly with common images of Detroit as a ruined and ruin-city, and conservatives are reacting strongly against it. Clint Eastwood, the paragon of a rugged, silent conservative American masculinity, is now being attacked as “a spokesman for welfare queen Chrysler.” While Chrysler’s slogan, “imported from Detroit,” attempts to play with the stereotype that imported cars like Toyota and Honda are superior, some commentators are reading it as “the signature Obama haughtiness” which prefers a European socialism to American capitalism. In a political moment where Republicans reject unions as anti-American (despite a long history to the contrary), this commercial directly challenges these scripts.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

It’s interesting to contrast this year’s commercial with the 2011 Chrysler Super Bowl commercial featuring Eminem, which also embraced this slogan, incorporated some of the same images of Detroit’s ruin, and also boldly proclaimed Detroit’s identity as “the Motor City” where “this is what we do.”

The important difference here, I speculate, is that the older commercial merely tries to reverse an association between Detroit and cheap cars—pairing the language of “luxury” with images of grand old Detroit buildings—this year’s commercial dares to proclaim Detroit more than just “a town that’s been to hell and back,” but a model for America’s future progress. The language of American exceptionalism is frequently and commonly invoked in advertisements, but what makes American exceptional and what parts of America can be exceptional or “American” is always heavily negotiated and contested during an election year. This commercial and its connected visuals (like the map on YouTube which shows people watching the ad across the country, drawing lines of connection between the viewer and the USA) argue powerfully for “the values we hold in Detroit … and the values we think our customers identify with,” but those values implicit can’t be uncritically accepted during an election year when Republicans are campaigning against a President they call “almost un-American.” Likewise, a commercial that seeks to conflate the “they” of Detroit with the “we” of America can’t be accepted by politicians who explicitly rejected the auto industry bailout. This commercial—unintentionally or not—signals the beginning of not just the Super Bowl’s second half, but also the contentious election season ahead.

The SOPA/PIPA Blackout: Two Ecologies of Discussion

Ty Alyea — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:08:00 +0000

Image Credit: Al Jazeera Stream

As we discussed yesterday, January 18's SOPA "blackout" generated a massive reaction that catalyzed a collapse in legislative support for the Congressional Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Today, I will explore how some analysts are currently using images to depict SOPA's notoriety on the web during the blackout and, additionally, chart out SOPA/PIPA's relative obscurity in the realm of primetime television news before the blackout.

Image Credit: Media Matters

In the months before the blackout, SOPA and PIPA receved very little coverage by organs of the mainstream television media such as MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN--all of which are owned by parent companies that were in favor of the bill's tough legislative stance against piracy. MediaMatters.org -- a left-leaning media watchdog -- released a study demonstrating that SOPA was mentioned in two prime-time segments released between October 26th, 2011 and January 12th 2012. This is less than one-twentieth of the coverage devoted to the British royal family and the conduct of Tim Tebow, the quarterback for the Denver Broncos. SOPA coverage was also dwarfed by coverage of Alec Baldwin's confrontation with a flight attendant and Kim Kardashian's divorce.

Image Credit: GeneralSentiment.com

Looking at the circulation of Internet discussions about SOPA, Steven Kwon's study (published at GeneralSentiment.com) highlights the tremendous size of the SOPA/PIPA blackouts as internet events. As pictured in the image at the top of this article, the SOPA/PIPA blackout received more buzz on the web than some of 2011's most hyper-mediated events; it received more attention than the 2011 super bowl and Oprah's finale combined.

It is possible that the absence of televised attention toward SOPA and PIPA had a negative impact on the bills. On one hand, it fed into a growing opinion that media companies wanted to push the legislation through without public consent. On the other hand, this neglect did little to foster support for the bills. Steven Kwon argues that less than 1% of twitter-driven traffic offered support to SOPA or PIPA.

Image Credit: GeneralSentiment.com

The Octopus of Antwerp and Other Cold War Maps: Critical Cartographies I

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Life Magazine via Newberry Library

This is not the post I meant to write. My graduate research has increasingly involved reference to Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, a magisterial attempt to combine statistical data and cartography into an analysis of late-nineteenth century urban London experience. I had intended to post on Booth's groundbreaking "poverty maps", and the updated maps created by the London School of Economics (you can see their side-by-side comparison here). In my research for the post, though, I came across John Krygier's Making Maps blog, and I've become fascinated (and sidetracked) by the surprising power of cartography. Inspired to think about how maps and mapmaking critically constructs the world, what follows is a subjective and fairly non-rigorous tour of Western cartography during the Cold War era.

Take that oil-pump / octopus above, from January 26, 1953. The polemical intent is fairly obvious--as the Newberry website points out, the ostensible purpose of the map is to display the flow of goods from "independently-minded Western Europeans" behind the Iron Curtain. But the over-the-top representation of Antwerp as somehow both an organism and machine adds powerful ideological content. And the sheer clutter of stuff depicted on the map--food, oil and ships falling from the tentacles, clusters of spies, communist soldiers, and factories in Berlin--creates an sense of overwhelming profusion. The map inverts our expectations, crowding the Communist Bloc with Western goods while leaving the rest of Europe almost blank. It's a sublime example of Krygier and Wood's argument about the purpose of mapping.

Image: C' est ne pas le monde, Krygier and Wood

In "This is Not the World," a comic book-cum-manifesto, Krygier and Wood argue that far from neutrally or even ideally indexing or "representing" the world, maps are arguments, propositions about the organization of the world. This is the central axiom of critical cartography--that each map represents an explicit set of choices that add up to argumentation. Like any other text, then, maps are open to reading, porous, and require critical distance.

Image: Time Magazine via Newberry Library

Undoing traditional expectations, R. M. Chapin's map, made for Time's October 2, 1950 issue, positions the viewer's eyeline from just behind Moscow. As the Newberry Library notes, the "progressively diminishing color intensities on the map suggest" blood "seeping downhill" from the USSR. It effectively repositions the viewer's gaze and, in its delirious shift in perspective--east faces up on the map--provokes anxiety. "Reading" the map forces us to recognize the distortions, even as we appreciate the skill, utilized by the cartographer.

Image: Saturday Evening Post

The above map, from the Saturday Evening Post, March 23, 1963, depicts presumed radioactive fallout from a hypothetical enemy attack. The (recent) map below, designed by Richard Miller, shows actual radioactive fallout in the US, dispersed by wind patterns, from nuclear tests in the American Southwest 1951-1962. In this case the Defense Department's propaganda tool disguised as "public safety" bulletin eerily mirrors the elegant argument produced by 21st century environmental and liberal narratives. Miller, however, replaces the shades of crayon-scribbles of red with provacatively neutral black, creating a beautiful inkblot of radiation across the US.

Image: Richard Miller via Making Maps

Finally, two images from my new favorite cartographer (how many times in life does one get to say that?), William Bunge. The more I learn about Bunge the more interesting his life seems--pioneering cartographer, radical Marxist (later Stalinist), environmentalist, beloved teacher, anti-academic, and all-around provocateur. The interested are highly recommended to read an excellent blog post by Zachary Forest Johnson that includes a fairly thorough mini-biography and lots of images, here. The following two images need little more comment than Bunge provides. They come from his pioneering Nuclear War Atlas (1988), a book committed to demonstrating how geography could become "the queen of the peace sciences." As Forest Johnson notes, the book suffered from poor timing, coming out just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism in East Europe, but nonetheless its images are startlingly compact and elegant.

Image: William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas, via Indiemaps

Though our society today faces radically different challenges than Bunge's late-Eighties western world, his conception of the liberating, peaceful power of geography remains essential. Especially as computers make cartography available to a much wider spectrum of users, understanding the critical power of maps becomes paramount. Next week I hope to examine how a few of Bunge's followers and admirers have taken up that task.

Cairo and Perspective

noelradley — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:44:49 +0000

Lefteris Pitarakis Via New York Times

Since protests began one week ago across Egypt, the media has published many photographs of iconoclasm against images of President Mubarak, or images depicting the scale of the protests in Cairo. I'd like to raise the question of how representative images from this week are using one-point and two-point perspective, and how that perspective informs our sense of the unfolding events.

Screenshot from Saturday's New York Times

The three images in this post were included in Saturday's New York Times print edition. All three shots were taken Friday, January 28th in Cairo. In the second image (above) taken from a distance in Tahrir Square, the battle between protestors and riot police is framed within ominous symbolic and literal signs of Mubarak's government. The height of the statues and the architecture of the bridge creates the scale, making the crowds of human actors seem vast, and yet simultaneously diminutive? Two-point perspective furthers the unsettling paradox of an emergent populace protesting within an existing power structure. Our eyes move in two directions: to the left, along with police and protestors, and then also to the right, into the smoky haze and background of imposing government buildings.

Screenshot from Saturday's New York Times

The third image (above) uses one-point perpective to capture a row of protestors kneeling for prayer in the streets. The orientation of the shot insinuates the immense number of protestors, while communicating the depth of spiritual quiet. What we see in the closest part of the frame appears to be replicated ad infinitum, with all the optical persuasion of a hall of mirrors. This image works in much the same way as the lead image by Pitarakis (top), which captures civilians standing on the row of army tanks (also in one-point perspective). The image of the tanks is different from the scene in prayer, however. One difference is the vanishing end point: in one, the eye moves toward halos of city lights at night; in the other, the eye finds dark, billowing smoke. Do these images attempt to organize and find order in the protests? Why did the NYT choose so many compositions of this kind? Are these compositions tied to a need to see Egypt through Western eyes?

Launching into our semester with BagNewsNotes

noelradley — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 02:49:35 +0000

Image Via BagNewsNotes

We on the viz. team are researchers & instructors at the University of Texas, interested in all things visual. With the return to blogging for the spring semester, we'd like to begin by introducing BagNewsNotes, a site doing vital work to deconstruct the visuality of contemporary political news.

The image and commentary from Saturday (above) is representative of how BagNewsNotes reads between the lines to find what's really happening with daily media images. The photograph catches U.S. Representative Giffords with her husband on the roof of the Tucson hospital, as Gabby is being transported to Houston for further treatment. BagNewsNotes publisher and contributor, Michael Shaw comments on the virtual intimacy of the photo, created by Giffords' "presence and absence" in the frame. In the weeks since the shooting deaths of six people and the wounding of thirteen others in Tucson, Giffords, writes Shaw, has become "a national icon larger than herself."

Image Via BagNewsNotes

A post earlier in January does a close reading of photographs from the memorial service in Tucson, sensing a "potential" shift towards bipartisanship, evidenced by Obama's meditative posture and by the assemblage of previously embattled political figures, who "line up (respectfully) in a row."

Image Via BagNewsNotes

The commentary and slideshow of images from Sarah Palin's January 12th speech performs a psychoanalytic reading of her non-verbal expressions (Shaw is trained as a clinical psychologist). Palin's "anger, resentment, and exasperation," Shaw notes, belie emotions that would seem more apropos to the circumstances, such as "compassion."

But BagNewsNotes does more than penetrating visual analysis, which indeed it does well and persistently. What ultimately gains the site its authenticity is that while it deconstructs visuals from mainstream contexts, it simultaneously constructs alternative images of the American political landscape. The site does this primarily through documentary photography and audio slideshows, featured in the section called Originals and in the section called Salon, respectively. The growing archive of images are contributed by established photojournalists, such as Nina Berman, Jeremy Lange, and Alan Chin.

We were particularly interested in the coverage of the mountaintop removal controversies ongoing in Applachia (see the Mountaintop Mining Watch series by Antrim Caskey). We were also struck by the slideshow posted in October from New York Times photojournalist Michael Kamber, who speaks about documenting the Iraq war and about what others don't want seen.

Image Credit: "Military Censorship" BagNewsNotes and Michael Kamber

With the various kinds of image work on the site, BagNewsNotes potentially sets up a constrastive schema between mainstream news media coverage and documentary photography, a long-standing and complex question for those in the field. It's a question we will continue in conversations with Shaw and his staff, as we begin collaborating with BagNewsNotes this spring. Thanks for reading as we launch back into our work, and stay tuned for a variety of projects and topoi forthcoming.

White House, Green House

EmilyBloom — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:30:33 +0000

Image Credit: The New York Times

Nestled between the white monuments of Washington D.C. is a new dash of green. On September 17th, Washington D.C. opened a weekly farmer's market near the White House. This opening, ceremoniously attended by Michelle Obama as well as hundreds of shoppers, led me to think about the ways in which the First Lady has championed the sustainability movement. One of her first ceremonial acts as a resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was to plant a garden. The White House website includes a film about digging this garden and compares Michelle Obama to Eleanor Roosevelt, the only other First Lady to plant produce on the White House lawns. In her remarks at the opening of the Farmer's Market, Michelle Obama refers to the White House gardens as "one of the greatest things that I've done in my life so far" and describes supporting the Farmer's Market as an extension of her commitment to making healthy food more widely accessible.

Together, the White House gardens and the adjacent farmer's market represent a distinctive "greening" of the First Lady role. Rather than directly entering the health care debate as Hillary Rodham Clinton did in 1993, Michelle Obama argues that her emphasis on healthy eating is an important part of the discussion of health care. In her speech to the farmer's market, she said, "I've realized that little things like a garden can actually play a role in all of these larger discussions. They make us think about these issues in a way that maybe sometimes the policy conversations don't allow us to think." How do the Washington D.C. farmer's market and the White House garden participate in conversations about such issues as health care and economic stimulus? Is Michelle Obama advocating policy by digging gardens and shopping locally or are these photo ops merely obfuscations of policy discussion?

The White House website offers numerous examples of Michelle Obama's visual and spoken rhetoric on the subjects of sustainable gardening and healthy eating that could make for interesting classroom discussion.

Voodoo Nation

dsmith — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:22:59 +0000

As the nation moves closer to election it should not be necessary to reflect on the largely epideictic mode of the McCain-Palin campaign. It’s impossible, however, not to look at how far out and downright creepy things have gotten. Images surrounding this campaign are bizarre, and they show us how desperate politicians tap into voter anxiety and fear. While the Arizona “maverick” senator professes change for America, his campaign thrives on images of self-mutilation, leaks unsubstantiated claims that link Obama to terrorism, and, with Palin, pledges oath to a convenient form of “feminism” that professes submission to primitive religious practices and atavistic rituals of spiritual expulsion. The anti-Enlightenment freakery of the McCain-Palin ticket is now spinning itself out of control.

Kenneth Burke was no stranger to the relationship between magic and rhetoric. In the Rhetoric of Motives, he based his claims of identification largely in this psychic realm, wherein properties are evaluated, consumed, and digested in an unconscious drive toward singularity. With this work in mind it’s safe to say that persuasion, at the level of national election, does not only (or often enough) work through careful deliberation, but through images constructed to form a psychic shit storm that stirs up voter anxieties and prejudices. McCain’s narrative of heroism (panned in this Rolling Stone article) and Palin’s wolf-pack feminism, however, are now beginning to lose some luster as reports of witchcraft and spiritual warfare erupt around Palin and her submission to a Kenyan pastor in 1995.

Many by now have seen images of Kenyan “witch hunter,” Thomas Muthee, praying over Palin in a 2005 Assembly of God service in Wisilla. The New York Times even printed a recent article about this. Others in the media—particularly in the blogsphere—have reported on the event along with other incidents surrounding Palin and her religion’s odd and violent messages. Muthee, reports The Nation’s Max Blumenthal, recently told the Wisilla congregation that “[w]e come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits!” Indeed, claims pastor Muthee, “[w]e stomp on the heads of the enemy!”

Palin’s response to a New York Times reporter indicates how far the American Right has drifted from our national, Enlightenment-based foundations: “My faith,” she said, “has always been pretty personal.”

It is perhaps satisfying to know that American politics can inspire spiritual battle—but I worry about the Dark Forces out there in that warfare. McCain now seems to thrive in a wilderness so extreme that the results of next week’s election will reveal a new vision of national identity. Recent polling suggests that it’s unlikely that he’ll win, but he has nonetheless set in motion an irrational and violent potential in the electorate that even goes beyond what G. W. Bush brought to national politics. A president always represents an imagination of ourselves, to a large extent. I doubt we’ll wake November 5th a Voodoo nation, but the zombies of the far-right hate wing of American politics will still certainly be alert to their next claims on our national attention.

Rock the Vote

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:02:39 +0000

Obama supporters have been called fanatical and naive but something that we've also noticed is that they are also rather musical. MK noted the Will.I.Am video and McCain parody here and Tim posted the somewhat...let's say cheesy...response from Clinton supporters here. Starting with the "Obama girl"'s song (who, it turned out later, didn't vote), and helped along by the accessibility of web publishing, Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.

Here in Texas we've got two new videos hitting the tubes. The first attempt to argue against the widely held conception that Clinton is the candidate for Latino (and in this case Mexican American) voters:

The corrido emphasizes Obama's humble roots, flashes pictures of him in crowds of people, and argues "his fight is our fight."

The second, recently composed by Austin singer Kat Edmonson:

The video asks the question "What would you do if you were president?" and flashes to different people holding their answers in the form of cardboard signs. What intrigues me about the Will.I.Am video and these two latest incarnations is the various ways that they argue an identification with Obama, in the "we" "our" and (notably missing) "I" that signifies a corporate or cooperative identity.
It makes me think of the larger ideas of collaborative composition that inhere to ideas of New Media and Web 2.0 and I think it is interesting to consider how this "new idea" for politics that people attach to Obama might be a larger "new idea" of culture.

The Serious Side of Sarcasm

Jillian Sayre — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:18:38 +0000

Is sarcastic, rather than bitch, the new black? To build on our discussions of the image of women in politics (see John's post about Michelle Obama's halo and Tim's recent post about Hillary and/as the Devil), I find the discussion of the two women's "edgy" humor to be quite interesting and I think it affects the way that their images are produced and read.

Katie Couric, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and now Newsweek have all noted how Obama's rhetoric contrasts with the optimism and hopefulness of her husband's campaign. But while most of these sources will present the trait as positive (albeit dangerous), the Times for instance called Obama "Outspoken, strong-willed, funny, gutsy", Clinton is considered dour or angry.

The funny thing is, the visual argument seems to be presented in the opposite manner. Newsweek's profile of Michelle Obama featured a good deal of "stern" pictures, despite the frequent mention of her humor in the text (she pokes fun of her husband, makes frequent jokes that not everybody gets). Despite a few nostalgic young Obama shots (and the cover which features a controlled smile on a woman who seems almost to be physically restraining herself), most of them looked like this:

both images property of Newsweek

Hillary, on the other hand, as Tim's devil picture indicates and as Jon Stewart has pointed out, seems discomforting in her happiness, the "hard-nosed realist" who enjoys lambasting hope and faith. When she makes these sarcastic comments in speeches and during debates, she smiles, even laughs. While I think we would agree that this normally says, "hey, joke here!" it is read by these critics as over-rehearsed or abusively cynical.

Perhaps what I am most intrigued by in this debacle is the disjunct of rhetorical strategy and analysis. While Obama's serious posture is productively rebellious, making her a thoughtful as well as humorous (Newsweek says that she's not the expected "Stepford booster, smiling vacantly at her husband and sticking to a script of carefully vetted blandishments"), I think Clinton joyfully produces her barbs so that the listener is encouraged to hear her and laugh along, a sort of benevolence. The effect, though, is suspicion and distance; these critics argue that her smiles actually isolate the audience and I wonder what context creates this reading.