McCandless at TED on beautiful data

The seductive power of visualizing data, beautifully explored by David McCandless. Many great moments - near the end, he touches on the requirements of and desired aesthetic preferences for the visual image - for balance, for symmetry, for beauty - and how simply obeying them can cause a change in thought. To what extent is thinking dependent on images it likes to believe are merely helpful utilitizations? How can we know if the beauty of data usurps truth?

rosetta holographs

. . . sound does not travel in waves, . . .

Purposive representation of groups

Clay Shirky has an intriguing thought about formalizing and legitimating groups:

to create a corporate form that allows groups to come together easily and quickly in the ways now made possible by our digital and social tools, while giving those groups the legitimacy that incorporation provides, which includes the ability to raise and spend money, to offer and enter into contracts, and to adopt binding forms of governance.

My interest is more in how groups can be represented and interact with other groups - how systems of groups are represented and defined.

One thought that has occurred to me, and I am curious what others might think, is to look at something like the AllVoices map, above. Suppose your neighborhood - the one where your body, not your avatar, actually lives - wanted to share and explore common issues, problems, with other neighborhoods in your area.

Such a map could serve to show which other neighborhoods in your locality (however defined - county, city, state, province etc.) were bringing up news from their locations. This would be the awareness function.

Then, the various items posted by the neighborhoods could be tagged and searched -- enabling discovery of common ground. "Oh, they have the same problem with speeders/road deterioration/code enforcement laggardness etc. that we have!"

Then those neighborhood groups could move into a forum where ideas, best practices, planned actions are shared. "We will all meet next Tuesday at the county - bring your brickbats."

etc.

[add: Neighborhood" is merely par exemple. Could of course be any kind of group or constellated entities seeking relations with other entities with similar concerns.]

Not Weinberger's fault

When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so luscious and inviting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting. When it was discovered that the curtain itself was painted on the surface -- the curtain was Parrhasius' painting, Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat. Wikipedia

Certain recent posts here at IMproPRieTies might seem rather random. What could Everything is Miscellaneous, JSTOR, the White House Press Corps and the Extraordinary and Plenipotent Roland E. Arnall possibly have in common? I'm not sure. All I know is, after reading David Weinberger's book, and writing a bit about it, a certain stimulus deriving from that reading seemed to propel me to "voice" certain, uh, reservations I've had about, among other things, the JSTOR Fortress of Knowledge.

Weinberger's take on miscellaneity is provocative. Even with Mr. Plenipotentiary Arnall - not that David in any directed way "caused" my interest in him - but when, in EiM, he speaks of shifting from an Aristotelian order of proper nomenclature, personhood and taxonomy to multiple, more open orders that are not so much contesting each others' claims but rather learning how to play well with each other, and to discover that knowledge resides between, not in, knowers, one of the first flags for me is the potential for fraud.

The space of fraud is the space between what something is said to be and what it "really is." Under an Aristotelian mode of knowing as representation, fraud is certainly possible -- and begins perhaps with the stories of Zeuxis, an artist Aristotle apparently did not care for, fooling the eye of the beholder -- but this falseness can be checked, unveiled, dis-covered through a penetrating effort of investigation (or by sheer chance); it can be seen to be other than the truth.

These considerations I think apply meaningfully to Journalism's failing to coincide with itself: News becomes news of the reception of the news of the reception of the... en abîme.

If everything is miscellaneous, it becomes ever so much more difficult to differentiate claims about some thing from the thing, because, per the argument, things per se, essences, no longer anchor the realm of signs. Metadata would appear to become increasingly difficult to distinguish from data - what is said about things replaces things with more of what is said about things: Reality dissolves into a welter of voices about reality, internet intercourse upends the stable epistemology of traditional discourse, rendering efforts to arrive at "truth" more problematic. Instead of a truth model of veil/unveil, we have -- no, in Weinberger's sense, we are becoming -- Parrhesian: all veil.

Obviously I'm still trying to figure out what David is saying, and why I'm finding what he's saying so provocative. While I wonder about these things, I'd be curious to hear whether other readers of the book find themselves provoked into vocalizing a bit more than usual.

And lest I forget, there's an interesting looking article about Aristotle and the Painters by Graham Zanker. Would have loved to have read it, but it's inside the anal crevass of JSTOR.

Evidence of news

More than sensory information can be visually represented:

via indexed

More from Reuters on mapping the news. They are also building a crisis map sensitive to issues of hunger, health, war and natural disaster around the world.

Some other maps, modes of visual representation, that could be mashed to offer layered visual representations of news:

• concept mapping
• networks (visual complexity)
• indexical (and hilarious - from which the above)
• live datalogical
• taggable
• information design
• yahoo piratical
  

More suggestions? This doesn't even scratch the surface.