viz. - cartoons

Our Friend the Atom?

ebfrye — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:35:17 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot, Our Friend the Atom, via YouTube

Megan's and Cate's recent posts have highlighted multiple visual representations of the current crisis in Japan. Concurrently, there's a lot of talk these days about the future of nuclear power in the U.S.--what we should do about our existing nuclear power plants, whether nuclear energy is the way to go, what we might do in the face of a nuclear catastrophe. These issues have been rather dormant in recent years. However, as we look ahead in considering our options, it's also worth looking back at the rhetoric that made us somewhat comfortable with nuclear power.

Cold War culture is rife with material that attempts to mask the threatening aspects of nuclear material (i.e. bombs) when used by the Soviets (Duck and Cover cartoons, this film made specifically for Austin, TX) . Less often discussed are those media that may have sold us on our (eventual) destruction. Sometimes such propositions come from unexpected sources including... Walt Disney.

This gizmodo post introduced me to Walt Disney's atomic fetish in the form of his 1957 film Our Friend the Atom. Predictably, the blogger is quite baffled by the film's endorsement of how "radioactivity could be used for things like making bigger, safer agricultural products (just put radioactive particles in the soil!) or creating better livestock (give cows radioactive food!)." Yet, in addition to the kind of scientific exploration the film advocates, I'm also taken by its downplaying of its own rhetoric, as WD insists, "We don't pretend to be scientists. We're storytellers." Instead, a German scientist emerges from the corner to narrate the discovery of the atom, which was "almost like a fairytale":

Image Credit: Screenshot, Our Friend the Atom, via YouTube

This coupling of atomic energy with images from familiar fairytales is a powerful tool to make nuclear science safe in the minds of the general public, particularly those Baby Boomers who would be planted in front of the television set:

Image Credit: Screenshot, Our Friend the Atom, via YouTube

In a fifth-grade science kind of way, there are multiple attempts to explain how we engage such energy. Here the German scientist demonstrates using a geiger counter:

Image Credit: Screenshot, Our Friend the Atom, via YouTube

We also have images such as this one, which, remarkably, look a lot like what we're seeing on the news these days as our present-day institutions try to explain to us how nuclear power plants work:

Image Credit: Screenshot, Our Friend the Atom, via YouTube

Yet, we end with this guy, granting all our wishes "to create food and cure disease":

Image Credit: Screenshot, Our Friend the Atom, via YouTube

The film is available in five parts on YouTube and runs roughly 50 minutes. Here's the first installment:

Using Xtranormal to Model Argumentation

ladysquires — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:20:21 +0000

If you are a graduate student in the humanities, chances are someone has already forwarded this video to you to remind you what a stupid, stupid life choice you've made. In case you've been spared, the gist is that a naive undergraduate is asking her cynical professor for a recommendation for grad school and gets an earful of everything that is currently wrong with academic apprenticeship in the humanities, including exploitive labor conditions and terrible job prospects. It's one of those "funny because it's true/sad" sorts of things where you don't know whether to laugh hysterically or burst into tears. On second thought, it's probably not the kindest thing to post on a Monday morning. Oh well, too late.

Anyway, the program used to create this video is called Xtranormal, and it's a simple text-to-video program that allows you to select characters and a setting, input dialogue, and create your own cartoon. In the wake of the "I want to go to grad school" video, other academic bloggers have been creating their own, such as this one by Tenured Radical called "I Want a Raise":

In addition to its potential for academic self-flagellation and catharsis, it strikes me that Xtranormal could provide a fun and easy platform for various classroom projects, including:

* Arguing both sides of an issue by creating a dialogue about the controversial issue the student is researching for class
* Creating class presentations
* Modelling a teaching scenario in which one character has to educate another character about a particular problem or concept being discussed in class.
* Creating dialogues that anticipate and refute possible objections to an argument the student expects to make in a paper.
* Modelling different types of argument.
* Exploring the relationship between audience and how an argument ought to be made.
* Creating Socratic dialogues

Students can select characters ranging from suited professionals (as in these videos) to historical figures to anthropomorphic animals. They can add music, a laugh track, and play with camera angles. The possibilities seem pretty endless and the potential for fun pretty high. I would love to see what students might present to one another.

Darwin in (Endless) Circulation

emcg — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:54:49 +0000

Anticipating 2009 as the Year of Darwin,* Olivia Judson offered this suggestion last year: let’s get rid of Darwinism. She criticizes the Darwin-centric focus of both specialist and popular discourse as “grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology.” Judson’s complaint, of course, is nothing new: as a peeved St. John Mivart notes in Man and Apes (1873), “Again, the doctrine of evolution as applied to organic life…is widely spoken of by the term ‘Darwinism.’ Yet this doctrine is far older than Mr. Darwin…”

Image Credit: Cartooning Darwin

H/T: Seed Daily Zeitgeist

While preparing to teach this week, I came across a couple of intriguing resources that help to explain how the figure of Charles Darwin entered circulation as a scientific celebrity, an icon of sorts, beginning in the late 19th century. They suggest the active role of popular visual culture in the intertwining of Darwin with evolution, even as the meanings of that term remained multiple, fragmentary, diffuse.

The offerings on the site Cartooning Darwin range from humorous depictions of the evolution of the fashion plate in the 1870s to pacifist commentary during World War One. To make sense of this fascinating-but-idiosyncratic collection, you might consult “Darwin in Caricature,” a paper by Darwin biographer Janet Browne. She notes two trends that emerge in these late-Victorian popular images: the association of Darwin with evolution (as in the 1890s advertisement for Merchant’s Gargling Oil above), and a sense that, even if not discussed in Origin of Species, human origins were the real evolutionary story. Browne's study illustrates a broader point: influence in the circulation of scientific ideas is not unidirectional, moving exclusively from specialist elites to popular culture.

Similarly, the exhibit Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts, which was at the Yale Center for British Art earlier this year, reveals the power of artistic images to shape non-specialist understandings of evolution. The exhibit traces how evolutionary theory proliferates, adapts, and mutates as it is interpreted in paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures from major European and American collections.

Image Credit: William Henry Simmons

H/T: The New York Times

Although Endless Forms offers an important argument about the interconnectedness of scientific and artistic modes of vision, its title and framing perpetuate a decidedly Darwin-centric perspective. As historian of science James Secord argues in Victorian Sensation: “Even those who contextualize and deconstruct Darwin’s work are inevitably reinforcing its centrality.”

Alas: I’ve done my part to reinforce Darwin’s centrality here and in an earlier post.

*In case you’ve missed the steady stream of anniversary-related ephemera, such as Mrs. Charles Darwin’s Recipe Book, February 12th was the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth. Next month marks the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Origin of Species.

Madam and Eve

Sarah Wagner — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:52:25 +0000

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

In another blog entry, I confessed to having learned most of my Vietnam War-era history through Doonesbury. It's true, and I'm not ashamed. Like The Daily Show, history with concurrent criticism isn't such a bad thing. When I started reading this strip, I was sucked in immediately, mostly because of the chance to get an alternate world view. I started looking up things like the phrase "bring me my machine gun" and learning about Zimbabwean/South African relations before it come into the American news cycle. Very cool.

The Simplicity of a Line

Sarah Wagner — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:22:43 +0000

Cartoons—your everyday, old-fashioned ones—are one of my true loves. I haven’t studied graphic art theory, I don’t get into manga, I have no idea who the radical artists are out there. I think it’s a great medium, full of possibilities for telling stories, presenting viewpoints, making people laugh and think. Heck, I learned most of my Vietnam-era US political history from reading old Doonesbury books. Graphic novels? I’ve read two (V for Vendetta and Fun Home) and loved them. But let’s just say I’m a casual but enthusiastic lover of the comics.

This one is called Spot the Frog by Mark Heath. I learned about it from another website, where someone who follows these things more actively said this was one to check out. So I did. I loved it—but couldn’t quite pinpoint why. There’s always been something about its cuteness that’s more than just cute. And then I saw the first panel of this strip. I was immediately homesick for Maine’s winters, for the beauty and quiet that lie all around, even surrounding our largest cities. I know this snow, I know that sun. I can tell you just about what month it is, and the temperature; I know what I’d be wearing if I were there. The simplicity of Heath’s two lines for snow covered hills not only allows me to fill in the scene with my own memories, but it is the scene. The simplicity is there in real life—those hills are just two lines, no detail, no movement, absolute silence.

Except for the frogs. They’re just silly.

[Mark Heath stopped the strip this past July, but they’re still running old ones at comics.com. You can find the one above here.]

Police should use caricatures to identify criminals

John Jones — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:52:46 +0000

The Guardian is reporting that a study by Charlie Frowd, Vicki Bruce, David Ross, Alex McIntyre, and Peter J. B. Hancock at the University of Central Lancashire published in Visual Cognition found that subjects were able to identify a caricature of a person’s face 40% of the time, but could only identify the same face in a police sketch 20% of the time.

via Boing Boing