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I really enjoyed this week’s assigned text, Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations. First, it’s different from all the other monographs we endlessly read as graduate students. The book is an interesting exploration of visual literacy, a skill that is often let fall by the wayside, even at the highest levels of education. Tufte’s approach is interesting not just because he wants to teach his readers how to read visual information, but because he is also interested in teaching his readers how to present information visually. Beyond the educational text of the book, it is pleasingly interactive and beautiful to look at, two important components of presenting information that content creators often ignore. I’m reminded of the times I found myself unable to read certain books simply because I found the font choice to be so jarring and poor. Visual disruption can interfere with our willingness or ability to interact with information in astounding and sublime ways.

I found myself particularly taken by the musical streams-of-story presented on pages 90-91. It reminded me a great deal of this wonderful poster by Ward Shelly visually documenting the history of science fiction:

I bought a copy and it’s currently hanging on my wall. The fact that you can only really take in all this information when it’s blown up to a gigantic size says something about the way the information is being presented. The larger size is still problematic – the image expands outside your field of view instead of being too dense to process, or disjointed because it won’t fit in a browser window when blown up. Still, larger is better.  Because the image is organized chronologically from left to right, it is easier to follow the flow of information when you still can see the entire image, even peripherally. Being trapped by the box of a browser window is jarring and unsatisfying.

When I first bought it I sat in front of it and stared at it for what seemed like forever. Initially I found myself captivated simply by the shape and colorization of the image – how did the artist choose such a design, what thought went into the color selection? Does it look like an octopus on purpose? They are both alien and incredibly intelligent creatures, a seemingly fitting choice for a visual representation of science fiction.

This poster arranges information both temporally and categorically, but as I read through the flow chart I also found myself questioning why certain authors/genres had been placed in certain areas, why certain authors and genres are featured over others, among many other questions. I agree with some of the choices and disagree with others. Tufte might say that all of this information has been removed from its context. As an academic I long for footnotes and the more familiar text that explains the artist’s decisions. Somewhere I read Shelly cite Thomas Disch’s book The Dream’s Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. That book is so horrible, biased, and outrageously sexist that I couldn’t finish it, and Shelly’s chart appears to be about one hundred times more intelligent, thoughtful, well-researched, an unbiased than Disch’s pithy attempt. So where is the disconnect? As a fan of science fiction and as a historian, I want breadcrumbs to lead me to the information that helped create this wonderful poster. I want the context. But how would we connect this image to its context? It seems plunking the chart down in the middle of a carefully researched monograph might create the difficulties with correspondence that Tufte reiterates through various examples. How can we explain and justify an image like this?

Tufte’s is a great book to read as we approach the creation of our own informational websites. I want to work with videos, a medium I’ve never tried to present online before, so I’m facing the challenge of how to link that visual content to whatever information I choose to present to my reader. I would love for Tufte to write an updated edition of this book with a chapter on the internet, though I will say that it’s quite remarkable how well his argument holds up over time. Even the spare bits on computers don’t really feel dated. That fact may say just as much about the way humans create and process visual information as it does about Tufte’s insights.

Speaking of visuals, we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of color. Getting color right, both in my webdesign and simply in my life is something that I find to be incredibly important. Society and history load color with meaning, so that we react to color intellectually and emotionally, more often that not without even noticing the way we’re being influenced. The right color scheme on your webpage can not only effect the readability of the site, but create mood and provide subtle context for your content. I’ve found the Color Scheme Designer to be one of the most useful tools there is in selecting colors for my sites. At the very least I can be assured that my color scheme doesn’t clash with itself, which is one step toward producing a successful site. The flexibility of this tool also means that I can go right to selecting the colors I envision, or I can play around and discover new and delightful combinations if I’m having trouble coming up with a design scheme on my own.

So far I have commented on Geoff’s blog.

Here’s my image assignment!

As I’ve mentioned before, I have some experience in fixing up photographs with Photoshop:

This is a picture of my friends’ daughter, Baby C, that I took while visiting them over winter break in California. The kid is a born model. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. Anyway, I was taking pictures in terrible light in my typical amateurish fashion, and without Photoshop I wouldn’t have been willing to show the results to anybody, let alone her parents. But now I think she can start building a portfolio. Eat your heart out, Tyra Banks.

The Photoshop work above does not represent any sort of serious departure from the original RAW image. As you can see from above, my adjustments came down to correcting the lighting and making the colors pop. That little girl did the rest of it on her own. In a way then, our assignment this week was a great departure from erasing the dust on my sensor from the picture and making the best of a terrible flash.

This is the first assignment that at times left me feeling quite defeated. I still can’t get the coloring right on my main lady’s face – she looks like someone attacked her with foundation then left her to die, such is the terror in her eyes and skin tone. I tried so many ways to make it look natural and failed quite miserably.

Also, interestingly, I ended up finding a color version of my photograph in a book after I’d started coloring. I detail my response to that discovery and how it influenced my work in my image assignment, but even knowing what the colored photo looked like and striving to emulate it, my picture still ended up looking radically different. If I had been able to make the tones look a bit more naturalistic, I could probably start a whole kurfluffle as to which photograph is correct. Luckily for the history community, I am not that skilled. My coloring of the photo vs. the coloring in the photograph I found presents two radically different meanings, something I’m still thinking about.

I did enjoy the assignment, though as I noted in my narrative, Photoshop is a lot more fun when you are free to meander through  your image manipulation without structure. This was the first time I had guidelines and requirements from outside being imposed upon my work. Actually, interestingly enough, my brother’s girlfriend asked me to take some head shots of her this weekend. It marked the first time I’d ever shot and edited head shots for professional use, and I actually used a lot of the techniques I learned in this class to edit her photos, most helpfully burn and dodge. Being on familiar ground, working with photographs I’ve taken, I felt more comfortable and, in fact, I also felt frustrated because I had too few guidelines to work with for the head shots. I’m still not sure I produced an adequate finished product.

There’s a key lesson: research and ask for help. I spent so long trying to get the vignetting to work and so far I’ve failed miserably to recreate our exercise in class. Now I am going to ask for help! I take solace in knowing that I can create transparent backgrounds without crying most of the time. Now I will stand and and wait for my trial by fire. Well, not wait exactly. I’m sure I’ll change the vignette and my lady’s face about 4 million times between now and then.

That reminds me! One of the greatest skills you’ll ever learn in Photoshop is when to stop and let an image be finished. It’s a lot like writing in that way, actually.

Edit: So far this week I have commented on David’s post.

Points if you can see the person.

I truly loved the Errol Morris article that we read for class today. I remember last semester in CLIO I discussing how schools don’t really teach visual literacy – I know I didn’t begin learning how to read visual sources until I entered college, and then only in certain courses. These articles are deep visual literacy – Morris and his interviewees not only read the images as presented but investigate the history of the creation of the images and the changing meaning/uses/understanding of the images over time. This approach is deeply historical and should go far to prove that images are valid historical sources. And, just like any print source, they are biased, their creation is complicated and perhaps unknowable, and their legacies are unique, changing, and completely their own. Even their creators lose control over them.

Reading the article I initially had to laugh because my first reaction was, “Have these people ever known a photographer?” Anyone who’s ever known or been a photographer knows what a strange business making images is (and what quirky and dedicated people it attracts to do it well). The camera is an extension of the eye, and therefore it comes with all its same limitations and biases. I do a lot of nature photography, which initially to me seemed a pretty objective subject. But I also remember the day that I realized in order to take a good picture you don’t look through the camera and photograph what you see, you have to see the shot first, then look through the camera and try to recreate it that way. This in and of itself is a manipulation. What about that stretch of coastline do I want to capture? How to you manipulate the framing of the image, the focus, to convey that meaning? Should I include the little purple flower in the shot, or does leaving it in the frame add a bit too much life? Including it or not means moving the lens an inch, but its a different photograph either way. But I’m not manipulating the scenery. What if I include it in the shot but crop it out in post? What if? What if? Which picture is the “real” one?

In my own photography I found I liked desolation – huge sweeping landscapes dominated by overwhelming natural features, devoid of people. Most of my photography looks this way, but I was photographing at national parks, often crowded ones, though you’d never know it from the images I shot. The Pacific Ocean made me feel small, so I wanted my photographs of it to do the same – when people appear it’s one lone person photographed from a far distance to emphasize the isolation.

North Shore at The Great Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore, Point Reyes, CA. This image has been altered.

And that brings me to the issue of test shots. Dr. Petrik said it last class – don’t keep 500 pictures of seals when you only have 8 good ones. It’s so easy, especially now, to take a million pictures and pull out the 3 the hit capture that you wanted. The idea of a man moving around a skull a bit and playing with light and exposure doesn’t bother me. Because that’s what photographers so. I’m an amateur, but my friends who are professionals, dear god it can be tedious to be around them even when they’re not shooting in a studio. They’re not working for the FSA, but they’re mind’s eyes is equally active trying to document the world around them. A photograph is a memory of “physical reality,” but it’s also a memory of a mood.

At the end of the day “getting to the bottom of it” can become just as muddy as with any other source. Photographs are not objective representations of the truth, just as print is not. But this difficulty does not disqualify visual sources. Instead, it makes them deeper, richer, because as we explore their meaning, their construction, the change in that meaning over time, the way we remember them, we learn even more about history. Every step of the way teaches us something. We just have to learn to do the leg work.

<strong>I commented on Margaret’s blog this week.</strong>