viz. - Visualization

Vizualize Your Health!*

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 19:28:02 +0000

Image from "Apple Cores Are a Myth" on www.theatlantic.com

One of my favorite things about yoga class is when the instructor, Iva, talks about how the various poses transform the inside of the body. In butterfly pose, she tells you about the rejuvenation of your spleen, kidney, and stomach meridians (i.e. channels of energy that run through the body according to Ayurveda). When you find yourself in a handstand, and it feels for a few seconds like floating, it’s probably because it’s one of the only times your organs get to hang upside down and all the blood in your body can recirculate. Twisting, as many a hungover yogi will know, detoxifies your body and wrings out your organs. Yoga instructors say these same things over and over, and after practicing for awhile, it’s hard not to believe them.

Whether or not any of these phenomena are true matters little. By moving in a certain way, and focusing your attention on imagining vitality and energy infiltrating your insides, you transform the way you feel; coming out of the posture is all the proof you need. You feel rejuvenated, refreshed. You notice that everything seems to work better. It could be due to the exercise, the endorphins, the accelerated heartrate. Or, as I opine, it could be the simple fact that you pictured the inside of your body growing more vital, more energized. And that mental visual is all it takes.

Image from The Association for Meridian & Energy Therapies

I learned something new this week and I’d like to share it with you all. You. Can. Eat. The. Whole. Apple. Core, seeds, and all. Thanks to the new Lowest-Common-Denominator appeal of The Atlantic, this is is a major discovery that will help you feel less wasteful, more satisfied, and really smart around your friends. Not only that, if you eat an apple this way—from the bottom up—you’ll also see that the core itself isn’t the chewed on stub you’re usually left without a garbage can for. Actually, it’s a lovely little green star.

Back in the time when people were still trying to figure out what to eat and why (which is eerily exactly like, uh, today), some Euro-Christian thinkers determined that foods often resemble the part of the body they serve. They called it the Doctrine of Signatures and blames it on their god’s (annoying) perfectionism. So, walnuts look like brains. And because of their omega-3 fatty acids, they’re brain boosters (plus, did you know they’re natural antidepressants?). Celery and rhubarb look like bones and help to strengthen your skeletal system. Have I blown your mind yet? How about sweet potatoes and the pancreas, tomatoes and the heart, mushrooms and ears, and of course, the eye that appears when you cut into a carrot? Grapefruits and oranges are supposed to look like breasts. Just check this handy chart (published in Time magazine in 2003, so take that with a grain of salt). The apple star is a bit more mysterious. But everyone knows that apples are all-around good for you, right?

Image via www.quora.com

To tie these several ramblings together: cultures as disparate as Eastern medicine and Christian theology suggest that visualizing how the foods we eat and the way we move benefits our interior body can actually benefit the body. Whoa! You’re welcome for the apple thing. You’re gonna be the queen of the lunch room.

*None of this is based on actual science, at least not in my version (in fact, most scientists say the Doctrine of Signatures is best used as a mnemonic device), but I say who needs science when you have your imagination?

We're Watching You - Google Analytics and viz. Readership

Cate Blouke — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:34:32 +0000

Screen Shot of Google Analytics dashboard view for viz.

Earlier this semester, we here at viz. decided it might be nice to get a better sense of who we were talking to. As good rhetoricians, we felt it might be pertinent to know more about our audience. So we installed the handy-dandy (free) Google Analytics tool for tracking all sorts of information about our readership. The results have been surprising at times, reassuring on the whole, and ultimately quite useful for thinking about how better to serve you, our readers. The following is a discussion of both Google Analytics itself and the trends we've noticed on our site over the past few months.

Screen shot of daily readership graph

First and foremost, the Analytics tool will give you cold, hard numbers. You can track the number of visits, the time spent on the site, and whether the vistitors are unique or repeat customers. We have between 300 and 800 visits per day here at viz., and over 20,000 views each month. While we're pretty happy with these numbers, no self-respecting academic would object to increased readership. So we've been thinking about ways to broaden our audience and make the site more accessible/searchable - even though we've been pleased to discover that our readership stretches well beyond the continental United States.

Screen shot of the analytic map of viz. readership's geographic distribution

That's another thing Analytics can do - track from where in the world visitors are accessing the site. And, of course, being Google, it gets pretty specific...

Screen shot of the analytic map of viz. readership in the United Kingdom

Analytics will also tell us how people are making their way to the site. One thing we discovered is that our post titles could use some work - Google's search function picks up first on page titles, so the more specific we can be, the more likely it is unique visitors will discover our work. One of our most visited pages, is a post from last February that comes up when people search Google for "Diane Arbus." Analytics will tell us which pages on the site are getting the most hits, and how people are getting there - both in terms of the referring site and the keywords they use to find the page. While it will give us this information for the site as a whole, we can also narrow it down individual pages.

Screen shot of analytics source break-down for Ashley's post on athletes and body images

Another one of our top-trafficking pages, Ashley's post on athletes and body images, is garnering attention from a wide variety of sources. While we plan to work on increasing our Facebook and Twitter presence, our three most popular pages (at present) are an interesting indication of the ways in which we can better shape our content.

You may (or may not) have noticed some tweaks we've made to the page this semester, and we've got plans in the works for a more significant overhaul next year. One thing we did was move our tag cloud to the upper right hand corner of the page. As a result, one of our top three most visited sites is the page hosting blog posts tagged as "political cartoons."

We've become much more conscientious of tagging this semester, especially given Noel and Megan's work with the Steve-in-Action project, investigating the connections between composition and social tagging.

We also made it easier for readers to re-post articles by adding this widgit at the bottom of every page. We've seen some great results in terms of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites where people are sharing our work.

While perhaps this shouldn't have been as surprising as we found it, visitors are accessing the static content of the site more than we had realized. Our teaching and visual theory pages are apparently being used fairly regularly, so we plan to continue to update those resources and make them even more useful.

In the four months since we began tracking this information, the launch page for visual theory has receieved nearly 1,000 visits - not bad, but it could be better. Did you even know we had a theory page available? It's in the menu bar at the top of the page, along with the teaching link that will take you to lesson plans our contributors have generated over the years, and the views link that hosts various interviews we've conducted with photographers, game designers, and other visual rhetoricians. We've got plans to revamp these pages next year, starting with the teaching page. Aside from our daily visual analyses, we plan to bring you more (specifically) pedagogically applicable content.

It's been a good year here at viz., and we're glad to know a bit more about who's out there. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you again soon!

Visual Budget

ebfrye — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:31:31 +0000

Image Credit: screenshot of Visual Budget, kickstarter.com

Visualizations are a necessary part of the way the media interprets government spending for the average viewer. Those of us who are not math whizzes, who may have trouble keeping our own accounts, find a simple graph or pie chart to be a useful aid. However, those representations often present an oversimplified view. Enter Visual Budget, a "cutting-edge data-visualization web site" that attempts to explain the nuances of government spending to the common citizen.

Apparently, even visualizing the budget can get pricey, hence the project's appearance on kickstarter.com. As much as I'm intrigued by the project's interactive features, I'm also interested in the rhetoric being used to promote the project. Here's the pitch:

One of the creators stresses the need to make the experience of the budget "cinematic." An animation director says, "It's all about storytelling." This is a striking contrast to the tendency of mainstream news media outlets to explain the budget in pared-down, "just the facts" terminology. But, I ask, does a shiny, suped-up visualization have the power to make us more informed and ultimately better citizens?

Mapping Religious Adherence: Association of Religion Data Archives

ladysquires — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:45:12 +0000

(Image Credits: Association of Religion Data Archives)

What do people mean when they say that the United States is a religious nation, or even a Christian nation? The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) compiles data taken from census records and surveys to provide comprehensive information on expressions of faith throughout the nation. Of particular interest to this blog is the impressive interactive map database that allows you to choose and compare data sets in order to gain specific information about rates of adherence, denominational affiliation, and demographics. I have used these in my Literature and Religion class to help students begin to think about the relationship between faith and other socio-cultural forces, such as immigration patterns and socio-economic changes in a region.

The map above shows proportional rates of religous adherence for all denominations nationwide. The darker a state is, the more religious it is. It is perhaps no suprirse that the Midwest and parts of the Deep South show the highest rates of adherence, but it is perhaps a bit counterintuitive that parts of the Northeast--New York and Massachusetts in particular--seem to be roughly on par with Mormon-dominated Utah and Oklahoma and is actually more religious than any of the states that constitute the Deep South. As you compare this map to maps that show adherence to specific denominations, a story begins to emerge.

As you can see here, Evangelical Christian affliation tends to be concentrated in the area we think of as the "Bible Belt," not exactly a surprise.

Perhaps equally unsurprising is the fact that Catholicism tends to be concentrated in the Southwest and Northeast, areas which are known for thier concentrations of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. This suggests that is, indeed, the high rate of Catholic affiliation that is driving the suprisingly high proportion of religious adherence in the "Godless North." In fact, proportionally, there are more Catholics per 1000 people in the Northeast than there are Evangelicals per 1000 in the South. What this data cannot tell us, however, is what adherence actually looks like. People may express a cultural or familial affiliation with the Catholic Church, for example, even if they haven't attended mass in 15 years. Religious adherence is, after all, often as much about cultural identification as it is about faith.

The database allows literally thousands of possible comparisons and allows you to examine data down to the state and county level. One can look at rates of religious adherence and compare them to demongraphic data on immigration, gender, voting trends, crime rates, proportion of men to women, urban vs. rural population concentrations, rates of new housing development, percentage of kids in private vs. public school, occupations, education levels, and how long it takes people to get to work in the morning. For example, below I took a look specifically at Texas and compared overall rates of religious adherence to the age of the population.

This is a comparison I don't quite know how to interpret. It shows rates of religious adherence becoming higher where the population is younger, when common wisdom suggests that younger generations tend to be less religious than their parents. Perhaps it is significant that the younger counties tend to also be border counties where the proportion of people who immigrated here in the last twenty years tends to be much higher. Age might simply be a correlation or it might indicate higher levels of cultural cohesiveness, where children identify with the values of their parents much more strongly.

This one, however, isn't really a surprise. The Evangelical Lutheran Church tends to be associated with higher concentrations of descendents of German and Scandinavian immigrants, and as you can see, it tends to be particularly concentrated (though the numbers are obviously statistically small) in that area between Austin and San Antonio usually associated with German heritage.

I could go on and on. If you do anything with religion, this is a great site for students to explore and play with. It is extremely user-friendly and has the potential to challenge what we think we know about religion in the United States. It also presents an excellent opportunity to talk about how we interpret data, correlation vs. causation, and statistical significance.

Peripheral Vision

emcg — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 03:28:55 +0000

Image Credit: Drew Berry/The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Via The New York Times

On Monday, the science writer Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide, skyped into my “Literature and Biology” classroom. During his virtual visit, Lehrer shared many smart, engaging ideas (bonus: he’s also rather comely!). However, the take-away was that innovation often comes from those on the periphery of a field, which makes for a compelling, practical reason for openness and conversation across disciplines.

I thought of Lehrer’s comments the next day when reading “Where Cinema and Biology Meet” in this week’s “Science” section of the Times. While the article and accompanying video provide a fascinating overview of molecular animation as an emergent visualization tool, I want to focus on what I’ll call the tsk-tsk-ing section of the piece, which airs some scientists' doubts about the value of these animations for "actual scientific research," as they can "quickly veer into fiction."

Image Credit: BioVisions, "The Inner Life of the Cell"

This skepticism resonated with Lehrer’s take on Carl Sagan, whom one of my students named as a favorite science writer—i.e., the mistaken idea that Sagan's lucidity and popularity somehow threw his scientific credentials into doubt, and that, more generally, accessibility is inherently incompatible with accuracy and rigor. By turning attention to a more synthetic, experiential model of cellular processes, these short films help us to see in a way that supplements rather than supplants other approaches to visualization. And if they simultaneously inspire the general public through an immersive, "Hollywood," experience, all the better.

Ultimately, these animations support Lehrer's claim that moments of insight often come from the unexpected influences that jolt us out of our disciplinary tunnel vision. For Darwin, it might have been the volume of Milton's collected works that accompanied him on his Beagle voyage; for Robert Lue, a Harvard cell biologist quoted in the article, it might be the Death Star scene in the original Star Wars.

Better Living Through Visualization

emcg — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:24:43 +0000

Image Credit: Christian Behrens, "Flight & Expulsion"

On the heels of touring the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s visualization lab, I thought I’d highlight a new social-media platform for data visualization. Launched earlier this month by GE and SEED Media Group, visualizing.org is a collaborative space for visualizing complex issues like climate change, human migration, and food insecurity.

As the editors explain, “The site is open and free to use. Everything you upload remains your sole and exclusive property and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. Simply put, this means that anyone can share, copy, remix, or build upon the visualization as long as: (i) it is used non-commercially; and (ii) the visualization’s creator and source are credited.”

Image Credit: U.K. Government

Given the open-source nature of the site, offerings are necessarily uneven or idiosyncratic. For instance, while browsing, I encountered a playful series of vampire venn diagrams and a fanciful but enigmatic visualization titled, in all caps, “A_B_ PEACE & TERROR ETC. THE COMPUTATIONAL AESTHETICS OF LOVE & HATE.” However, the content curated by the site’s bloggers is so far consistently intriguing. They highlight innovative visualizations such as the UK’s new Google Earth layer to predict the effects of climate change and Christian Behrens' work on migration, which uses the same data set to generate several different visualizations, calling our attention to the function of graphic design in guiding our way of seeing.

Image Credit: Cause Shift, "Food Insecurity, Obesity, SNAP Participation and Poverty"

In addition to providing visualizations for classroom analysis, visualizing.org offers a space for students to share their own image productions, perhaps even the infographics that Cate contemplates in her latest post. Of course, the hard work of constructing and supporting such an assignment still remains, but the site would provide opportunities for students to get feedback from a larger community of graphic designers, beyond what an individual instructor can offer as an “infographics noob” (to borrow Cate's expression).

Image Credit: Rozina Vavetsi, "Languages of the World"

The site's rhetoric is perhaps over-optimistic, promising pie-in-the-sky social change via open-source pie charts: “By giving visual form to the often abstract systemic underpinnings that lie between broad concerns like health, energy, and the environment, we hope to generate actionable knowledge that can be used to improve lives.” Nonetheless, visualizing.org is an easy-to-use and potentially powerful platform for collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to visualization. At the same time, its open access allows us to add to the current science-and-society agenda: how might we visualize data related to our interests in English, rhetoric, and composition studies?

Visualization, Texas-Sized

emcg — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 21:17:47 +0000

Image Credit: TACC H / T to Scott Nelson

In my very first post for viz., I marveled at Ben Fry’s visualization tool The Preservation of Favoured Traces, which helps us to visualize Darwin’s revision of Origin of Species over six editions. With a background in computer science, statistics, and graphic design, Fry had managed to approach the problem of visualizing textual history with striking economy and elegance. In my post, I wondered about the unorthodox solutions (and research questions) we might discover if we engaged in digital collaborations with designers and engineers. This question resurfaced yesterday as I toured the visualization lab at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

The centerpiece of TACC’s visualization lab is the world’s highest resolution tiled-display (at 307 megapixels), a 15 screen x 5 screen array of 75 30-inch flat panel monitors named Stallion. (All of the equipment has a Texas-kitsch moniker: e.g., Rattlesnake, Mustang, Horseshoe.) Other areas of the lab included a 20 x 11-foot flat screen mini-theater and an 82-inch 3D back-projection display. A partitioned collaboration room allows small groups to develop visualizations.

On our tour, we viewed samples of both art projects and scientific simulations that reinforced how (to quote the TACC web site) “visualizations generated by supercomputers can immerse you in data, visually.” Upon entering the darkened space, we were confronted with photographer Ricardo Meleschi’s one giga-pixel panoramic image of downtown Austin; a controller allows visitors to zoom in on a street sign or the inside of an apartment with remarkable (and rather invasive) clarity. The lab has also hosted two digital art exhibitions. Of the art pieces we viewed on Stallion, my favorite was one by Bill Haddad that riffed on the security-camera set-up of the monitors, offering faux surveillance footage of campus buildings and outdoor spaces manipulated to look like it was being taken in real-time. Clearly, though, collaborations with scientific researchers have been the lab’s focus: for example, we saw simulations that predicted, respectively, the path of Hurricane Ike and the patterned spread of the H1N1 virus in the U.S.

Image Credit: TACC H / T to Scott Nelson

As an instructor, I can be admittedly dinosaur-like, feeling that we should be clear on our pedagogical goals first before considering the technologies that enable us to achieve them. But as I stared at a sophisticated molecular model out of a pair of fancy 3D glasses embedded with a microchip, my techno-skepticism vanished, and I wondered why the chemists should have all the fun. When I asked Visualization Lab Manager Brandt Westing if the lab had worked with researchers in the liberal arts, he responded that this was a population the lab would love to collaborate with but that it was difficult to get the word out. All UT faculty, staff, and students have access to the visualization lab, which includes extensive training and support from TACC staff. Maybe we should just start dreaming up projects, albeit necessarily clunky and unsophisticated ones at first, and use the technology to see new questions and patterns?

Ultimately, though, my visit to TACC’s visualization lab raises larger questions than whether or not one absolutely needs to use supercomputers to do research in rhetoric, writing, and literature (the answer, alas, is probably “no”). More broadly, the lab is a high-tech space that invites us to think about the role that visualization (even if unabashedly low-tech) might have not only in presenting our research but also generating and investigating our research questions.

Mannahatta my city

emcg — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:52:54 +0000

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

Next month, I’ll be making a long-awaited trip to New York City, my adopted hometown. To prepare, I’ve been studying Adam Platt’s latest restaurant reviews, reciting Walt Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” nightly like prayer, and spending quality time with landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta Project.

A digital map of the island as it appeared in 1609, when Hudson first sailed into New York Bay, this visualization tool offers an intriguing argument about the city’s ecological future.

The (cleverly named) Mannahatta Project slyly repurposes the technologies employed by Hollywood disaster flicks to recreate the island’s former biodiversity and to model the 55 different ecosystems the island once supported. The model also takes into account the activities of the Lenape, whose 5000 years of settlement and cultivation also impacted the island's ecology. Project Director Eric Sanderson's TED talk provides an accessible overview of the complex, decade-long process of spatial layering, “geo-referencing,” and spinning of Muir webs involved in trying to re-capture the island's remote ecological past.

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

Sanderson insists that the project's goal is not to lament the loss of the 1609 Mannahatta but to see today's Manhattan anew, to come to understand the city as a habitat, with its own dense, resilient networks. Sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, the Mannahatta Project is pitched as a tool that will allow us to design sustainable cities. I.e., by digitally reconstructing Manhattan Island as it might have been in 1609, the Mannahatta Project opens up a cognitive space for imagining what (else) New York might become. Sanderson’s visualization of Manhattan in 2409 shows rooftop gardens growing produce, city-dwellers on bikes, streams instead of sewers, and greater popular density to leave space for reclaimed green areas. No longer would one have to choose, as in Whitman's 1865 poem, between "Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs...Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus" and Nature's "primal sanities."

Returning to the question Noel posed two months ago: does the Mannahatta Project work as a new, creative visualization of ecological crisis? Is the message too buried, indirect? Have we altered the landscape too drastically for an effective (and affective) recognition of Mannahatta in 1609 as our city? I think that the site's exploration tool succeeds in appealing to New Yorkers' fierce turf loyalty, allowing visitors to select a particular city block and access information about its former (and current) native wildlife. The project works to make these landscape alterations personal, intimate, but I'm curious if it has the same appeal for non-New Yorkers.

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

P.S. Sanderson has also authored a shiny coffee-table book: Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.

Visualizing GDP

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:47:33 +0000

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

The Hit & Run blog, incidentally, is a product of the libertarian publication Reason, which, regardless of what you think of its politics, is a good place to troll for stories pertaining to visual culture. I also like to use to site to dig for news stories to use in rhetoric classes, because they are frequently argumentative and also because they tangle the typical left vs. right allegiances many of my students follow blindly, which I find allows me to open up controversies like immigration in productive ways. Again, this isn't an endorsement of the blog's specific politics, but definitely is an endorsement of its detail-oriented, non-mainstream news coverage.