I’ve become increasingly aware of citations as a research tool to dig deeper into a topic and the importance of attributing credit to scholars for their work. Of particular interest to me, are the links and citations in Lev Manovich’s “What is Visualization?” and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “More Scale, More Questions: Observations from Sociology.” In both articles, we are exposed to visualization methods in “cultural texts, […] poems, paintings, music compositions, architecture, or, more recently, computer games, generative artworks, and interactive environments.”
In Manovich’s piece for example, the advent of information visualization, has allowed us to observe historical events that are expressed artistically, to exhibit “many moments spread across time and bringing all of them together in one single moment to create something new.” A timeline of events in history are cleverly displayed to remind us of our country’s economic struggles and advances, its cultural trends, its tragedies, and successes. The progression of these images in this timeline of magazine covers also reflect advances in technological developments, such as with the use of drawings, paintings, photography, “contemporary software-based visual(s),” via color, clarity, and hue; namely from applications that were once only available in black and white.
Although “synecdoche” is referred to in Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux example, I feel that in the Manovich Mapping Time exhibit, also remind us that many Time Magazine covers are meant to associate something larger than just what we see in an image. In my view, these associations are often taken for granted, including the time it may have taken for both the original work to arrive at its final “edition” and the effort of the digital humanist(s) in reimagining this work. This exercise has caused me to be more “mindful” of the creators’ goal(s) of achieving reactions of awe from those of us (or at a minimum me) that study or observe their work.
This brings me back to the relevance of citations of the written word, but with a somewhat different significance. Here I’m more interested in McMillan Cottom’s argument on how:
“Sociology has developed a diverse toolkit to identify, measure, and analyze various forms of text with an attention to political economy. This includes content analysis (e.g., newspaper content), organizational analysis (e.g., texts produced by institutions or organizations), and quantitative narrative analysis or QNA (e.g., a sociological complement to distant reading).”
She cites: Franzosi, Roberto, Gianluca De Fazio, and Stefania Vicari. “Ways of Measuring Agency: An Application of Quantitative Narrative Analysis to Lynchings in Georgia (1875–1930).” Sociological Methodology 42, no. 1 (2012): 1–42. Where the structure of sentences and the use of grammar has provided an understanding of literature by aggregating and analyzing data. Rather than reading things “up close,” the authors of this article insist that by reading a book (i.e., a Victorian novel), one “can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature…because the sample size is too small.” Furthermore, the grammar of a particular era, as written in literature, newspapers, police logs, etc., have properties or nuances that the reader can’t detect without the aid of computers and coding, which “provide graphical representations of the relationships between social actors taking advantage of… the subject-verb-object (“SVO”)” and their modifiers, to produce a powerful “story grammar.” Here’s an example of the sourcing of “massive amounts of data” to produce one of the maps of the lynching atrocities in Georgia between 1875 and 1930:
