3. Review
• Timeline pops out in the category view in
Carrington theme
• If you are still having problems, share your
spreadsheet with me (Gmail name =
ontoligent)
• If you have events, you could use one!
4. Overview
• From visualization to visual literacy
– To “establish a critical frame for understanding
visualization as a primary mode of knowledge
production” (Drucker)
• PowerPoint as an entrée into this topic
– We know PowerPoint is a problem; we want to know
why
• Key Question
– What do we need to know about visual media to be
effective digital scholars?
10. Media are always embedded
in culture. Science was
made possible by exact copy
printing, a visual language
(Ivins 1953)
http://21st.century.phil-inst.hu/2002_konf/Nyiri/web_ivins.JPG
11. A language of science was
created in the 19th century
that was linked to the rise of
nation states and bureaucracy
William Playfair
30. Technology is not neutral
“Technology has properties--affordances--that make it easier to do
some activities, harder to do others: The easier ones get done, the
harder ones neglected.”
“Each technology poses a mind-set, a way of thinking about it and
the activities to which it is relevant..The more successful and
widespread the technology, the greater its impact upon the
thought patterns of those who use it, and consequently, the greater
its impact upon all of society. Technology is not neutral, it
dominates.”
Norman, Donald A., Things that Make Us Smart, Perseus Books, 1993, p. 243
See http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB
31. paradoxes
• Computers are based on mathesis, or logico-
mathematical thinking
• And visualization is based on computing
• Ergo, mathesis precedes graphesis
• But, mathesis rests on graphesis
– The iconography of mathematical symbols
– The products of mathesis must always be
visualized with forms that have a rhetoric
