Monday, March 17, 2008
Manovich, "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-Sublime"
M anovich, Lev. "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-Sublime." Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools. Eds. Byron Hawk, David Reider, and Ollie Oviedo. Electronic Mediations Ser. 22. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
Why render data visually? Lev Manovich, in "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-sublime," the opening chapter in Small Tech (reprinted from ArtPhoto, 2003), responds to this with an answer that, in spirit, moves beyond the "data epistemology" of a cumbersome, old (perhaps even mythical) scientism. Why render data visually? "[T]o show us the other realities embedded in our own, to show us the ambiguity always present in our perception and experience, to show us what we normally don't notice or pay attention to" (9). By the end of this brief article, Manovich begins to get round to the idea of a rhetoric of data visualization, even if he never calls it this. Despite being caught up in a representationalist framework as he accounts for what data visualization does, Manovich eventually keys on "daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages" as the "more important challenge" facing us. That is, we are steeped now in a new "data-subjectivity."
Manovich provides four sections in his short essay: Visualization and Mapping, Data Modernism, Meaningful Beauty: Data Mapping as Anti-Sublime, and Motivation Problem. The "Visualization and Mapping" section begins with Tufte and Descartes; these are the precedents for the "dynamic data visualization" Manovich wants us to consider as it has spilled over from its origins in the "pure and applied sciences, from mathematics and physics to biology and medicine" to the greater "cultural sphere" (3). Next, Manovich attaches this to a mapping paradigm, considered here as a kind of direct conversion of data into image (1:1 precision in the translation of territory into map). This risks making visualization its own end; I question whether his approach does enough to keep the image open on the side of play, preferring a contingent and flexible (more model- or relay-like) image than one fixed and declarative in its presentation. The section on Data Modernism builds toward an understanding of data visualization as new abstraction. Here abstraction is matched with the same tradition in twentieth century Modernist art: the reduction of chaos into simple patterns. Given my own interest in abstracting practices, I tend to prefer drawing closer parallels between "new abstraction" and network studies. I deal with some of this in the diss; Manovich's take on abstraction might find a small place there. Of course, one of my reservations about "new abstraction" tracing back through art traditions is that it holds onto a faint notion of representable reality as a backdrop against which every movement is defined. Perhaps this is one of the ways a rhetoric of data visualization would do justice to Manovich's interest in subjectivity, agency, and motive, while also offering a greatly expanded vocabulary for complicating strict evaluative rules regarding chart junk and clarity (e.g., following Tufte).
In the third section of the essay, Manovich touches on scale. He describes data visualization as "anti-sublime" as it contrasts with the Romantic art concerned with the sublime." This section seems, again, to position data visualization as an end--an end in an aesthetics and epistemology valuing concretization--rather than a means, a model, or a relay. The stuff on scale is encouraging, but then he ends the section, saying, "Yet, more often than not, the subjects of data visualization projects are objective structures (such as the typology of the Internet) rather than the direct traces of human activities" (7). What's not clear is why this is so or how Manovich knows it. This isn't to dispute his claim as much as to call into question its basis, and also ask how these "objective structures" square with the "data-subjectivity" he introduces in the final section. In the final section, he is concerned with motivations and choices: why this or that design choice when several others are available? An arhetorical treatment of data visualization entertains the prospect that there is always one best way to present the data visually; a rhetorical approach, on the other hand, seems to me to create a situation--a conductive role, an agent, an exigency--in whatever comes between the data and the visualization of it. In other words, while Manovich is concerned that "computer media simultaneously make all these choices appear arbitrary" (7), a rhetoric of data visualization would frame those choices as "available means" rather than an automated function of the computer technology. Manovich: "One way to deal with this problem of motivation is not to hide but to foreground the arbitrary nature of the chosen mapping" (8). Yes, foreground it, but also let the "it" be a "rhetorical nature" in equal measure to an "arbitrary nature."
"Thus data visualization moves from the concrete to the abstract and then again to the concrete" (6).
Cross-posted at Earth Wide Moth.
Phrases: "Platonic schemas" (5), "new abstraction" (5), "reversibility" (6), "organic abstraction" (6), "modernist abstraction" (6), "anti-sublime" (6), motivation (6), "data epistemology" (8), "data-subjectivity" (9)
Postied by at Friday, August 24, 2007
Peeples, "'Seeing' the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping"
P eeples, Tim. "'Seeing' the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping." The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher. Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. 153-167.
Peeples devises a set of maps in an effort to "capture a sense of spatial positioning and the fragmentation of [Wedy] Bishop's position" as the WPA at Florida State in the late 1990's. Postmodern geography influences Peeples' project, allowing him to combine experimental maps and narrative accounts that together present the complex and multiply implicated subjectivities of a WPA whose organizational role is entangled with disciplinary, administrative, and organizational discourses.
In the end, it's not entirely clear where Peeples finds a useful distinction between subjectivities entangled in (and constructed from) discourse and those wrapped up in the material locale itself. The progression of maps tend to highlight the ways Bishop's WPA subjectivity is discursive, and a footnote backs this impression, but elsewhere Peeples seems also to recognize the implicatedness of the material site, such as when he says that "[e]thnographies would help our field better understand the details and complexities of these local spaces" (159) and also when he invokes Porter and Sullivan's Opening Spaces and "Institutional Critique" article--both of which foreground the local and material.
Three of Peeples' strategies here are especially significant for me:
- He doesn't establish a correspondence between maps and models, but he does present the maps as partial isomorphs (in the way Pemberton discusses them): "One of the ways we attempt to see something that is fragmented and dynamic is to place it against a relatively stable background, whereby we can at least mark its movements across space" (154).
- Peeples presents multiple maps: "This approach encourages the development of an expanding set of maps that begin to capture the complexities of WPA organizational subjectivities, rather than leading to a grand, unified image or Theory represented in a single map" (155). Map as monolith is out.
- Finally, he comments on what the map-text complementarity (text, here, not as symbol system or legend): "The text surrounding these multiple maps should, then, comment on what is privileged and obscured in the maps and even suggest what other maps might be possible" (155). The text might also address the limitations of the map, although Peeples doesn't bring this up explicitly.
On subjectivity, Peeples cites Faigley's Fragments of Rationality and Janangelo's 1995 essay, "Theorizing Difference and Negotiating Differends." The maps themselves evoke a number of questions about choices for shading (a gradient backshadow represents something less fixed than an outlined oval) and positioning (cycles giving way to intersections giving way to a periphery of "ideals").
"Rather than use terms such as 'role' and 'identity' that signify stable, unified positions, 'subjectivity' has become a key term because it signifies the dynamism, multiplicity, and fragmentation of people/positions" (153). Here, aligning with terms--subjectivity is preferable to roles and identities because it clicks with the theoretical orientation that ascribes some value to postmodern mapping.
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