---

Information Is An Art Form

Fonts are everywhere

The Internet is a nice place for font wonks to hang out. They can laugh at other people's typographic blunders, swap alphabets, snipe at famous designers and ban fonts they hate. Why should you care? Because everything you read, every sign, book and logo, is in a font. Fonts are like the air: you don't notice them when they are fine, only when they are mucked up or obscure. "What They Talk About When They Talk About Fonts" Sara Boxer, The NY Times, May 14, 2005

Spell with Flickr

http://www.metaatem.net/words

"Little dark marks"

"How do human beings communicate with one another? For verbal communication at least, there is a sort of folk answer, suggested by a variety of metaphors in everyday use: 'putting one's thoughts into words', 'getting one's ideas across', 'putting one's thoughts down on paper', and so on. These make it sound as if verbal communication were a matter of packing a content (yet another metaphor) into words and sending it off, to be unpacked by the recipient at the other end. The power of these figures of speech is such that one tends to forget that the answer they suggest cannot be true. In writing this book, we have not literally put our thoughts down on paper. What we have put down on paper are little dark marks, a copy of which you are now looking at." Relevance: Communication and Cognition Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson  Blackwell, 1986

Vision is hard-wired to see certain things

"We can do certain things to symbols to make it much more likely that they will be visually identified even after very brief exposure. Certain simply shapes or colors "pop out" from their surroundings. The theoretical mechanism underlying pop-out is called pre-attentive processing because logically it must occur prior to conscious attention. In essence, pre-attentive processing determines what visual objects are offered up to our attention. An understanding of what is processed pre-attentively is probably the most important contribution that vision science can make to data visualization." Information Visualization: Perception for Design Colin Ware  Morgan Kaufmann, 2000

Written language as art

"There are an interesting number of cases where we would have to accept that individual letters, and the way they are presented in typography or handwriting, do permit some degree of semantic or psychological interpretation, analogous to that which is found in sound symbolism, though the element of subjectivity makes it difficult to arrive at uncontroversial explanations. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language Crystal, D.   Cambridge University Press, 1995"

Creative orthography

Verbal artists use the keyboard as their palette. Distinction is sought through font variation: ConneXions, InformationWEEK and net, or by combining letters, numbers and punctuation: .exe, RElease 1.0, Soft*letter, T.H.E. Journal, I.T.1 Magazine. These latter risk malformation by any normalization process that breaks words apart based on punctuation. Sometimes font and spelling changes become one as in this advertisement: "GRAB THIS VNIQUE BVSINESS OPPORTVNITY" (Harris, 1986, p. 107). How far from an ordinary orthography is the substitution of v's for u's? Textual creativity is limited only by human imagination. Here is a short list:

Orthography as a Fundamental Impediment to Online Information Retrieval

"We don't think much in words per se"

"We are a visual species. Television, motion pictures, graphic novels, picture magazines, multimedia, and the World Wide Web are just some examples of the visual media that we're exposed to. It's common to find information on computer menus, restaurant menus, and traffic signs conveyed not through words but through icons. The point is, we don't think much in words per se." Communicating Ideas with Film, Video, and Multimedia: A Practical Guide to Information Motion-Media S. Martin Shelton. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Visual truth is not a truth

From the material found on his hard drive, Bryan Sparks of Springfield Township, Ohio, seemed guilty when he was arrested in 2002. The sexually explicit pictures of minors appeared to put him on the wrong side of child pornography laws. But at his trial this spring, Mr. Sparks was acquitted because no one could tell for sure whether the images were authentic or just clever digital forgeries. "It used to be that you had a photograph, and that was the end of it - that was truth," said Hany Farid, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth College who is a leader in the field. "We're trying to bring some of that back. To put some measure of guarantee back in photography." For Doctored Photos, a New Flavor of Digital Truth Serum Noah Schachtman. The NY Times, July 22, 2004

Photoshop

Whoever said "the camera never lies" was either a prankster, a simpleton or somebody who had never heard of Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop, of course, is the world's most popular photo-editing software (for Mac and Windows). Every time a magazine pastes a movie star's head onto a different body for its cover, you can bet that Photoshop was involved. Such digital manipulation is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb: "My ex-husband was on that trip, too, but I've Photoshopped him out of this shot." A New Photoshop Makes Retouching Reality (Somewhat) EasierDavid Pogue. The NY Times, May 5, 2005

The definitive representation

"A web document, like many other types of documents in electronic form, comprises two components: the code and the view. The code is typically a file containing markup language tags, program instructions and various types of text....The view of the document is what actually appears in the browser window. This is what humans see when they look at the monitor screen and what the creator of the document intended to present. In the authors' opinion, the view is the definitive representation of the document message as it was originally intended to be conveyed to the reader." Visual representation of text in Web documents and its interpretation D. Karatzas & A. Antonacopoulos. In Multidisciplinary Approaches to Visual Representations and Interpretations, edited by Grant Malcolm. Elsevier, 2004

Clever instrumentation can't create a definitive representation

THE PICTURE PROBLEM; ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY MALCOLM GLADWELL. The New Yorker. New York: Dec 13, 2004 At the beginning of the first Gulf War, the United States Air Force dispatched two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets to find and destroy the Scud missiles that Iraq was firing at Israel. The rockets were being launched, mostly at night, from the backs of modified flatbed tractor-trailers, moving stealthily around a four-hundred-square-mile "Scud box" in the western desert. The plan was for the fighter jets to patrol the box from sunset to sunrise. When a Scud was launched, it would light up the night sky. An F-15E pilot would fly toward the launch point, follow the roads that crisscrossed the desert, and then locate the target using a state-of-the-art, $4.6-million device called a lantirn navigation and targeting pod, capable of taking a high-resolution infrared photograph of a four-and-a-half-mile swath below the plane. How hard could it be to pick up a hulking tractor-trailer in the middle of an empty desert? Almost immediately, reports of Scud kills began to come back from the field. The Desert Storm commanders were elated. "I remember going out to Nellis Air Force Base after the war," Barry Watts, a former Air Force colonel, says. "They did a big static display, and they had all the Air Force jets that flew in Desert Storm, and they had little placards in front of them, with a box score, explaining what this plane did and that plane did in the war. And, when you added up how many Scud launchers they claimed each got, the total was about a hundred." Air Force officials were not guessing at the number of Scud launchers hit; as far as they were concerned, they knew. They had a four-million-dollar camera, which took a nearly perfect picture, and there are few cultural reflexes more deeply ingrained than the idea that a picture has the weight of truth. "That photography not only does not, but cannot lie, is a matter of belief, an article of faith," Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner have written. "We tend to trust the camera more than our own eyes." Thus was victory declared in the Scud hunt--until hostilities ended and the Air Force appointed a team to determine the effectiveness of the air campaigns in Desert Storm. The actual number of definite Scud kills, the team said, was zero. The problem was that the pilots were operating at night, when depth perception is impaired. lantirn could see in the dark, but the camera worked only when it was pointed in the right place, and the right place wasn't obvious. Meanwhile, the pilot had only about five minutes to find his quarry, because after launch the Iraqis would immediately hide in one of the many culverts underneath the highway between Baghdad and Jordan, and the screen the pilot was using to scan all that desert measured just six inches by six inches. "It was like driving down an interstate looking through a soda straw," Major General Mike DeCuir, who flew numerous Scud-hunt missions throughout the war, recalled. Nor was it clear what a Scud launcher looked like on that screen. "We had an intelligence photo of one on the ground. But you had to imagine what it would look like on a black-and-white screen from twenty thousand feet up and five or more miles away," DeCuir went on. "With the resolution we had at the time, you could tell something was a big truck and that it had wheels, but at that altitude it was hard to tell much more than that." The postwar analysis indicated that a number of the targets the pilots had hit were actually decoys, constructed by the Iraqis from old trucks and spare missile parts. Others were tanker trucks transporting oil on the highway to Jordan. A tanker truck, after all, is a tractor-trailer hauling a long, shiny cylindrical object, and, from twenty thousand feet up at four hundred miles an hour on a six-by-six-inch screen, a long, shiny cylindrical object can look a lot like a missile. "It's a problem we've always had," Watts, who served on the team that did the Gulf War analysis, said. "It's night out. You think you've got something on the sensor. You roll out your weapons. Bombs go off. It's really hard to tell what you did."

"Documents are interfaces"

"Design is in transition. This is most evident in the domain of publishing. No longer can we view publishing as the creation of static printed documents. Instead, 'documents are interfaces, used to access and navigate through collections of information' [Haimes, 1994]. Documents are interfaces that must dynamically reconfigure themselves based on their content, the medium in which they are displayed, and the intended use of the information they present. The Architecture of Information: Interpretation and presentation of information in dynamic environments L. M. Weitzman MIT, 1995"

Haimes, R. "Document Interface" interactions, (October, 1994), pp. 15-18

Writing is visualization

"Writing systems consist of rules for creating a visual representation of language and can be broadly categorized into alphabet-based systems and ideograph-based systems....Human beings understand symbols, such as letters, digits, punctuation, and so on, while computers like to deal with numbers. A computer stores and reproduces text by assigning numbers in its memory to represent glyphs. A glyph can be a letter, number, symbol, or ideograph from any writing system. Building Websites for a Multinational Audience Linda Main. Scarecrow, 2002"

Organizational semiotics

"Organisational semiotics is one of the branches of semiotics particulary related to business and organisations....This study is based on the fundamental observation that all organised behaviour is effected through the communication and interpretation of signs by people, individually and in groups. The functions of creating, reproducing, transmitting, transforming, preserving and manipulating signs have always been performed with the aid of various technologies." Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering Kecheng Liu. Cambridge University Press, 2000

Text is illusory

Imagine a world where every word of every online article leads you directly to everything you did and didn't want to know about that word. Sound good to you? That is the plan at liquidinformation.org, whose welcome mat is a movie of a foaming, roiling ocean, followed by the ominous question, "What happens when you unleash text?" The creator, Frode Hegland, a researcher at the University College London Interaction Center, working with Mikhail Seliverstov, a programmer in Russia, wants to turn every word of every online text into a hyperword, a word you can click on to get, well, more words. A Trail Leads to a Tangent of a Tangent, of a Tangent Sarah Boxer, The NY Times, February 10, 2005

Images are illusory

What do these pictures mean?

 

I could continue amassing examples, but at this point I had a really bothersome hang nail, so I stopped. If you want me to assemble more examples of how information is art - and art information - just ask.