viz.

The Iowa Caucuses have come and gone, and as we prepare for New Hampshire and the remainder, we have some time to reflect on the visual dynamics of television news coverage of elections. Red and Blue states once had their debut to a national audience, and perhaps we’re on the threshold of a new visual convention.

BEHOLD ANDERSON COOPER’S MAGICAL FLOATING PIE CHART!

Interesting arrangement/focus in the leading photo on the front page of The New York Times:

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Gore finds himself in front here (a little too close) and President Bush smiles, leering over his shoulder. The entire composition feels uncomfortable and, if this weren't the feeling they were going for, I'm sure the awkward photo would have ended up on the (virtual) cutting room floor.

Maybe I'm just feeling seasonal, but it seems they've chosen one of these men as the Grinch:

Wonkette offers a different shot in which GWB is somewhat less creepy.

The New York Times has posted a slideshow by Ward Sutton, “Reading Tea Leaves and Campaign Logos,” analyzing the posters and bumper stickers of presidential candidates.

This poster is a political advertisement for the SVP (in English, the "Swiss People's Party"), a far-right political party in Switzerland that has made anti-immigration policies a centerpiece of its campaign in an upcoming election. The posters have been controversial: the tagline reads "to create security," and the image depicts three white sheep booting the black sheep from the swiss flag, presumably symbolic of Swiss territory.

This video does contain some pretty disturbing imagery of people receiving shock therapy and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. So consider yourself warned before you click "play."

The World Freedom Atlas gathers a number of interesting datasets related to world politics and human rights and converts them into a dynamic map display. Interestingly, the visual display helps to foreground the rhetorical choices made by the authors of those datasets. For instance, the map below displays a country’s governmental structure, ranging from a parliamentary democracy (white) to monarchic dictatorship (dark blue) (Cheibub and Gandhi, 2004). Notice that the U.S., a presidential democracy, falls in the middle of the classification scheme, closer to the dictatorships than Canada and Australia, which are both white, as well as Russia, which is a light teal.

via Information Aesthetics

We’ve known for a long time that politics is theater, but just in case anyone has forgotten, Slate has posted an unfortunately titled slideshow documenting Rudy Giuliani’s many attempts at playing dress up, “Rudy in Leather and Lace.” (Speaking of the title, if this were not a blog that was soley concerned with visual rhetoric, I might be inclined to point out that said title might not be very appealing to any audience, ever, but it is, so I won’t.) Come August, these photos might make excellent fodder for those awkward it’s-the-beginning-of-the-semester-and-we-don’t-know-each-other-and-you-think-rhetoric-is-something-liars-do presentations where we teachers try to illustrate for our students the relevance of what we do to the wide-wide world. Failing that, come October it may provide some inspiration as you consider your Halloween costume (for example, you might write a note to yourself to the effect of “don’t dress up like the love-child of Liza Minnelli and Don Corleone”).

Photograph by Joe DeMaria/Associated Press

Barack Obama has taken some heat for remarks made to a New York Post reporter attacking Al Sharpton (who’s had a lot to deal with lately, thank you very much) which pundits are arguing were made by an Obama operative. Now there’s this: