Data Visualization and Defunct Visual Metaphors

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This dossier concerns the relationship between visualization as a mode of knowledge-production and vision as a (visual) metaphor for knowledge. It looks at the history of data visualization and its relationship to epistemology, particularly renderings of statistical data. Key moments in the history of statistics and data visualization are discussed, with a particular focus on so-called political arithmetic and the decline and re-emergence of visualization techniques as an effect of complex quantification methods and computing, respectively. The dossier advances the argument that visual metaphors are fundamentally inadequate for the contemporary forms of data acquisition, analysis, and knowledge-production that are endemic to the informatic mode. The persistence of visual metaphors for surveillance is considered alongside the increased incidence of opaque data capture and mining, practices which do not lend themselves to familiar metaphors or renderings. The dossier concludes with a critical discussion of the use of data visualization techniques in artistic interventions which seek to make this process more legible.

Visualization and Cognition

Although any discussion of the complex relationship between vision and epistemology may well begin with Plato, as does Martin Jay's influential book on the treatment of vision in twentieth century French theory, this dossier will take a different path. It instead follows the unique methodology developed by Bruno Latour in his discussion of "Visualization and Cognition," wherein he argues for the careful consideration of representational techniques in the production of scientific facts. His concern, like that of this dossier, is with the way in which inscription practices both make legible their objects of study and how these same inscriptions are then discursively marshaled in support of specific scientific claims. In other words, Latour examines "the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper," (3) as "[n]othing can be said about the rats, but a great deal can be said about the figures [which reductively represent them]" (15). Latour is careful to acknowledge that such claims teeter on the brink of triviality, but responds by insisting that it is upon the basis of representational efficacy and economy that truth claims obtain their final status. Inscriptions should not be dismissed as mere visual aids; they provide the necessary grammar for the representational transposition of objects or phenomena into a semiotic system. Whether this happens to be mathematical or graphical or both, the meaningful specification and analysis of objects or phenomena must pass through a process of rendering. As Latour notes: "If scientists were looking at nature, at economics, at stars, at organs, they would not see anything […] Scientists start to seeing something once they stop looking at nature and look exclusively and obsessively at prints and flat inscriptions. In the debates about perception, what is always forgotten is this simple drift from watching confusing three-dimensional objects, to inspecting two-dimensional images which have be made less confusing" (15).

Vision as Visual Metaphor

Eye of Providence

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Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera

Manovich: "I am a mechanical eye" -> subject-less machine vision http://www.manovich.net/Vertov/digitalconstruct.html

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Dollar Note

Early Visualization

Friendly

Political Arithmetic

Playfair

Rise of Formal Modeling and Computing

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Liminal Metaphor (Thanks, guys!)

The Persistence of Vision

Levin

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The Cover of David Lyon's The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society
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The Cover of Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century
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Logo of the defunct Information Awareness Office

The Capture Model

Agre

Artistic Interventions

Manovich

Data visualizations as the new metaphor?

http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#

http://feltron.com/index.php?/content/2007_annual_report/

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/