serial consign

One of the original voices in the now flourishing field of information visualization is W. Bradford Paley. I first came into contact with him in 2002 when I discovered his Textarc project and since this time one of his prints of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has hung on my wall. A textarc is a summary graphic derived from the content of a text, it is similar to an index but it also maps interrelationships between specific words allowing for a hypertextual understanding of subject matter.

The image above is a textarc of McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory 2.0, the second iteration of his networked writing experiment. Wark describes the textarc as:

...more than a pretty picture. I hesitate to say that it is a "useful tool", really because I think it is (and can be something more interesting than that). I see it more as a creative process than as an instrumental one. The "result" it would give you is more of the order of the new writing you can already find in your existing writing.

I think this observation is noteworthy as it speaks to the idea of information visualization as a process you can get inside and manipulate towards altering your understanding of a dataset. All to often we are victims of visual culture, completely willing to surrender our critical capacity at the sight of concise information graphics and slick diagrams. At the end of the day it is important to remember that if the organizational structures being explored in a visualization are not able to be reconfigured the resultant "cartography" is a superficial mapping at best. OMA disciples take note!

I'm going to return to McKenzie Wark in a few weeks after I've digested Gamer Theory 2.1, the print version of the most recent iteration of his evolving text. Wark is one of a handful of authors delving into game culture as a critical rather than entertainment paradigm. I am salivating at the prospect of digging into this text to see how it weighs in alongside Alexander Galloway's 2006 book, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture.

Just to bring things full circle, Bradford Paley and McKenzie Wark have been collaborating under the banner of the Institute of the Future of the Book an excellent think tank associated with the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. These are the thinkers behind if:book, a most excellent new media/textuality blog which I highly reccomend.