lament this and say that the depth that was so connected to the old reading – penetrating deeply into a text is fathoming the world behind reality – dissolves in a view without dimensions. But that comes down to rendering a new phenomenon in old concepts. Something like designing the recently invented automobile as a horseless carriage. You see what is missing from the device, but not what you have gained in its place. The new oversight is not, as it used to be thought of, a perspective on an expanse of plain, but penetrates deeply into the transparent and limitless space of data that the world has become. Oversight is: seeing what links or can link the data. Anyone observing the current profusion of data visualizations that help us understand a reality caught in figures – a reality that used to be called virtual but is now becoming more real than the real – knows what I mean: the image has become a text, the real significance of which is in its property of having us understand what it means at a glance. Once we start reading longer, we are in danger of losing our way in incoherent details.
Like text and image, insight and oversight are growing closer together, merging into each other. Perhaps even the old hierarchy will be reversed: reading, then, will be understood as the scanning activity that gains us oversight and enables us from there to gather significance, to choose (gathering and choosing are, after all, two ancient meanings of ‘lecture,’ the Latin root of which means both), and watching will become the word for what we realize when we pause at something for longer than a transitory moment. If you really want to fathom something, you will have to watch. Long and intensively, just like former times with a book in your lap on the sofa.
Max Bruinsma is an independent design critic and editor-in-chief of Items, the Dutch review of design.
7. If Words, Then Reading – Anne Burdick
If interface, then navigation. If disguise, then disclosure. If map, then itinerary. If resource, then use. If environment, then wayfinding. If plan, then practice. If erasure, then reconstruction. If sketch, then animation. If architecture, then dwelling. If capture, then release. If trace, then archeology. If program, then process.
Anne Burdick is a designer, writer, and curator as well as the Chair of the graduate Media Design Program (MDP).
8. Flowing Together – Vito Campanelli
Maybe it’s trite but when I reflect on the evolution of reading modalities I cannot do without thinking that, in the present historic moment, we are witnessing an epochal 'change of status': from the invention of the alphabet to mechanical movable type printing and even to deconstructionism (Derrida, above all), the text was organized into rigid structures that, despite the heterogeneity of their evolutionary trajectories, have come to constitute as many cages. We know that a cage means a condition in which every possibility is ordered to remain confined within it, so that – to take some practical examples – the interpretation of a written text or its reworking, not being able to take place outside that precise form/cage in which the text was shaped, inevitably end in adapting themselves to the rules of the game and to the set of finite possibilities of that very context. The various dominant forms, characteristic of specific ages, have determined the 'thought form' of their time, so that alphabetic writing is a prerequisite for the emergence of historical consciousness; the printed book is crucial for the spread of a generalized confidence in the linear progress of science, without which there would be no industrial revolution; and so on.
The form/cage also assumed the function, somehow, of social glue, in fact, old and new generations, conservatives and progressives, despite the apodictic distance of their instances, have had to confront each other from a common ground: they have had to sit at the same table or – if you prefer – behind the same bars. Today, with the digitization of the text, we see a radical change that – in my opinion – must be identified with the abandonment of all form/cage. The text, in fact, becomes fluid and begins to flow along with other data, therefore, together with any other cultural expression and with contemporary identities and existences. Everything is included in a flow which, by its very nature, denies itself to any stable form. Everything becomes transitory and in this new condition, establishing new rules of the game (a temptation which many cannot resist) is quite like writing on the foreshore: it is something that will last only until the next wave. Obviously in the last twenty years old media forms and metaphors (such as the page of the book) have been mostly used; however – and this is the key point – no one and nothing can prevent the same content (only illusorily fixed in a form) beginning to flow in a kaleidoscopic range of different configurations. Stripped of any structure, without any predetermined and sequential paths, reading becomes a flowing together with the other elements of the flow, creating temporary (even ephemeral and extemporary, if you like) relationships and configurations. Fantastic, isn’t it?
I love this new condition and I believe I have been privileged to have lived on both sides of this epochal 'change of status'.
Vito Campanelli is new media theorist and teaches Theory and Technics of Mass Communication at the Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale'.
9. Highway Drugs and Data Visualization – Catalogtree
Experts do not need visualization to be able to read data. A musician can hear the music as he reads a score. The rest is at the mercy of graphics and audio.
A few years ago we were working on a project about the motorway between Arnhem and Nijmegen , the A325. We used a series of silk-screen prints to show various aspects of the motorway. Where did the most accidents occur? Where did people drive fastest? Which approach and exit roads were used most? We made use of data that the province collected 24 hours a day at various measurement points along the road. Three civil servants worked in this measuring department: one was responsible for traffic counts, using a computer system dating from 1977, one was responsible for speed measurements on a system dating from 1992 (not compatible with the former), and a third was the coordinator of the other two.
We kept in touch with them by telephone and e-mail and asked for interesting data. They were pleased to help. They went out in a mobile measuring unit to take measurements that they then sent us by mail. We received an enormous e-mail with tens of thousands of figures, separated by commas. A completely abstract jumble of figures that was explained in the subject line of the mail: ‘Look, a monster tailback!’
A frequent misconception in data visualization is that treating data subjectively is tantamount to lying. It is often said that data must be presented as objectively as possible, but to our minds that leads to an exact reproduction of the original data set. That is perhaps the best method if you’re dealing with the top ten best selling books, but if the visualization represents tens of thousands of pieces of data, that makes a good interpretation impossible. To be able to tell a story means that it is necessary to place the emphasis somewhere, to make an editorial choice, so that the reader understands what is being told without having to be an expert.
Another misconception is that a visualization must be clear at the first glance, otherwise it has failed. We once drew a map about drug transports between South and North America . It had to show which drug cartels were active (around twenty such cartels), what they were transporting (various types of drugs, weapons, money, people), how they were transporting them (various means by land, by sea, and through the air), which routes they took, and which alliances they had formed in order to work efficiently. A fairly complicated map of course and one which required some effort from the reader if it were to be fully fathomed. A data visualization can easily have a higher information density than the written word. Yet nobody glancing at a page covered with words expects that the content is immediately clear. You have to read it first.
Although those provincial civil servants didn’t need our visualizations to know what was happening on their roads, they nevertheless derived considerable pleasure from our silk-screen prints. They quickly replaced the art in the corridors which had been purchased by the province. ‘Well’, they said, ‘this is art that actually means something!’
Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross run the multidisciplinary design studio 'Catalogtree', specialized in making information visualizations.
10. The Revenge of the Gutenberg Galaxy – Florian Cramer
Let’s be clear, reading is not limited to alphabetic language, but is actually any act of visual or tactile perception involving interpretation of signs: graffiti tags, photographic images, sickness symptoms. Since human perception always, inevitably, involves interpretation, the line between perception in general and reading in particular is perfectly blurry.
Even reading versus listening is a questionable distinction. Our understanding of spoken words is highly modulated by visual reading – the so-called 'McGurk effect' describes how we misperceive a spoken word when the speaker's lips suggest a different word. In a world with intelligent beings, forecasting a future without reading might be futile. But it’s worth asking how we read now, and what kinds of reading we are moving towards.
Following the semiotician Charles S. Peirce’s three basic types of signs – iconic (based on semblance, whether a portrait painting or an onomatopoetic word like 'bang'), indexical (based on traces; smoke as an indicator of fire) and symbolic (abstract numbers, the alphabet or morse code) – 20th century media theories generally predicted a crisis of symbolic symbols in favour of icons, going from the mass medium of the book to the mass media of cinema and TV.
This prediction became the bottom line of the Frankfurt School 's critique of the culture industry, of McLuhan's TV-centric 'global village' after the 'end of the Gutenberg Galaxy', and of the 'iconic turn' declared by art historians since the 1990s. Even the development of symbolic machines appeared to follow this route, as computers evolved from the (symbolic) command line to an (iconic) graphical user interface. The future of culture, and of reading, once seemed inevitably
