serial consign

actually - first thing that strikes me is the total lack of information since scale, source and context are missing. (just feel that he striped it to the most essential visual elements for us to recognize it as a data graph) So this piece is for me a nice reminder how infoviz is a field where nothing is what it seems. As a nice test try google trends with the search terms "physical, virtual" and then check "bush, saddam". Also have a look what countries have the top requests for "I".

Therefor - yeah - if we take the images/info as they are and even project context into them, we are indifferent consumers waiting for the infomachine to feed us.

cheers
markus

Hey Markus,

People were grumbling about the lack of annotation in this project in the comments to the infosthetics post about this project today. I really don't think the point of Text Trends is to be anything but reductionist!

I am quite happy to see a project that eliminates the role of the interface and quashes related interactivity - it is a nice change from the never ending "arms race" of increasingly sophisticated UI's in infovis. Beyond that, I'm not sure if Martin would describe the project as a visualization, I'll be the first to admit that my framing it in that light is my bringing my own baggage (i.e. research interests) to the table. I do think scooting over to Google Trends to "fact check" the data presented in this project is probably a misguided step in thinking about and evaluating this piece.

I totally agree with your observations about how the integrity of an infovis project can waiver once you start questioning the underlying information, bias and framework for interpretation. What really interests me, and what I was getting at with the latter part of my post is the limited attention span with which we cycle through visualization projects on a minute to minute basis. There is a widespread culture of A.D.D. when it comes to this kind of work, one only need look as far as the infovis content on [insert your favourite design blog here] to see what I'm talking about.

For the record, I dig the lack of information and context in this project. It definitely speaks to the tone of Martin's work in general.

I just have a different take on it:

The question I would ask is why does he choose words/topics which are emotional heavy? Can one look at these graphs without making assumptions? Without trying to interpret the rhythms of each year? Would this make sense if he compared the words "lake" and "pond"? And there is the point were the reduction beyond recognition comes in for me: I'm presented with just enough information to actively interpret and judge the raw data without actually knowing anything.

I see your point with the arms race in infovis - but listening to Tufte: "Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data" I think this goes a little too far in simplicity as actually information is lost and/or distorted.

cheers
markus

... forgot to mention that the wrong data for bush/saddam worked as an exclamation mark for me.

cheers
markus

First off, you totally win the "cool subject arms race" for "It's like a jungle sometimes." :)

I can't speak for the artist, but I would guess that his words/topics are part of a larger language game. If you look at Martin's letter writing work he built a project around sending letters with that said nothing more than the text I respect your authority to world leaders and power brokers— again, an open ended use of language. In that project the fun was about the way that people responded to such a direct and undetailed communique.

Ultimately, not knowing more about Martin's goals and perspective on this piece we are kind of spinning our wheels here. I think both of our responses to the piece are perfectly valid though.

Interestingly enough, this is the first time I have ever talked about a visualization on Serial Consign where people have checked the accuracy of the data. I guess the secret is for the designer to mask their data in an complex interface and everybody will be sufficiently bewlidered and/or placated. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" I wonder if that applies to the cult or worship around new school informatics?

Andrew Vande Moere at Infosthetics weighs in about the "data discrepancies" in this piece:

Not sure whether that was meant by the artist on purpose. for instance, if you leave the work up for a while, the legends and graphs start to intertwine. or in other words, the legends seem to appear in a different order than the graphs.

hey Greg - nice place you got here...

I like Text Tends for the same reasons as you, but I also think it's a revealing data visualisation disguised as info vis (I'm going to harp on that distinction again!). Decontextualised search terms contain little "information" (perhaps "Saddam" has more than "war"); but the patterns in this ambiguous data are fascinating and revealed clearly here - eg note the huge spike in "buy" in the last quarter of every year... why?

This is a great counter to highly determined info vis, in which the significance of the dataset has already been decided and is simply being rendered in the most beautiful possible way (especially since Text Trends looks just like this genre).

re. consuming complexity; I think that rather than "info addicts" we are visualisation, complexity or multiplicity addicts - i.e. it's the aesthetics, the process and the meta-information they contain, that we consume, rather than the information visualised in these projects. We consume the *idea* of information, not information itself.

whoops, missed the post on the shifting captions. This puts it closer to straight satire or nihlist relativism (language games again). But the interesting patterns *are* there in the real Google Trends - here's buy v sell

@markus
Thanks for spotting the error with Bush-Saddam; this was a genuine error resulting from changing the order late at night: I have changed it.
M

Hi Mitchell, nice to see you round these parts. :)

Re: your latter point about "the aesthetics, process and meta-information" being what we consume when look at visualizations is bang on! I think that is what I was getting at, because in many ways this project doesn't pander towards raising the bar in any of these arenas. A line graph has become an exercise in minimalism these days..