The Tyrannyof Edward Tufte

@GabiSchaffzin • gaboosh@gmail.com

Gabi Schaffzin

SXSW Interactive • 09 March 2014 • Austin, TX

#Tuftyranny

Note: all copyrights held by their respective owners unless otherwise noted. For educational purposes only. For questions, please contact gaboosh@gmail.com.

Hi everyone. Before I get started, I just want to clarify that I am not Mindy Kaling.

I’m sorry if there was any confusion. Mindy can be found at the ACC Ballroom D. So I’ll give anyone who wants to get there a second before I continue.

The Tyrannyof Edward Tufte

@GabiSchaffzin • gaboosh@gmail.com

Gabi Schaffzin

SXSW Interactive • 09 March 2014 • Austin, TX

#Tuftyranny

Ok great. Well, thanks for sticking around even after that serious disappointment. I really appreciate everyone fighting the debilitating effects of daylight savings time and showing up to this absurdly massive auditorium. I am Gabi Schaffzin.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinI graduated last May with my MFA from MassArt in Boston. Which, yes, means that I’m an artist. And I know what you’re thinking…oh no…an artist…I thought this was a presen-tation about design or data visualization.

skeptic

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut it’s okay. Cause I’m also a designer. In fact, I am part of a design collective called Skeptic, based in Boston.

skeptic.al

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinYou can find more info at skeptic.al. I swore I’d never make the joke again about not using an Albanian domain name. So I’ll leave it at that.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinI’m also an academic. Or, at least, an aspiring one.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut as a designer, I am quite familiar with Edward Tufte’s work. How many of you have heard of Edward Tufte? Ok. And how many of you actually know him, like, personally? Ok, well, let’s just keep this between us, because if this shit gets back to him, that could be trouble for me.

A Brief Outline

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinNow, I realize that The Tyranny of Edward Tufte is a pretty loaded title.

The truth is, I was alarmed by Tufte’s reaction to the NSA revelations this summer and I’m going to go through that in some detail, but throughout the next 35 min-utes or so, he’s really going to act as a straw man for an argument based more on our cultural privileging of data over discourse and what that means to our subjec-tivity. I’m going to show you why the tweets are an extremely important paradigmatic indication of information design’s dangers.

I’ll review some important historical figures in the information design field and also review some of the criticism which has been levied to this point on informa-tion design—criticism I think falls short.

I’ll finish up by offering some ways that a proposed cultural interrogation of the infographic might go and how I think we can use the products of that interrogation to break data’s privilege.

Edward Tufte

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinIn 1983, Tufte—an economist, statistician, and sculptor based out of Yale—pub-lished his first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (recently released in Spanish, as well). It presents a thorough overview of the history of information design and proposes a set of principles to be used in effective graphics which maintain the integrity of their respective data. Since the publication of Visual Display, Tufte has built up an empire of self-published work and self-orchestrated seminars.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThe New York Times noted in 1998 that,

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “his skills seem uniquely suited to the moment: he knows how to turn seas of in-formation into navigable—even scenic—waterways.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinYou may recognize “Sparklines” — “small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution” meant to integrate the visual representation of data into text-based narrative. These and other mechanisms have made him a mainstay in the information design field, providing him the opportunity to have significant influence over the way corporations and government organizations present data.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo anyway, I went to one of his one-day courses back in 2011.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd, you know, it was okay. I’m sure at least a few of you have been to them. For my understanding of the world at the time, it all made total sense. And I got all four books as part of the registration and got to meet him. He signed one of my books. Very exciting.

My Experience

©Andy Ryan

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo then, about a year later, I was taking a class at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media called Networked Social Movements.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinMy professor, Sasha Costanza-Chock tasked us with comparing an element of Oc-cupy with another social movement and I chose the anti-SOPA/anti-PIPA protests.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd it was actually during a panel at SXSW called “Why Doesn’t Congress Grok The Internet?” when it occurred to me

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinthat I had seen a lot of infographics floating around trying to educate people on the various sides involved in each movement. I wondered if there was a way to evaluate them—compare and contrast their visual elements, measure their strength some-how.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo I went to my trusty bookshelf and I started paging through Tufte’s books and aligning what I saw in various infographics with his six principles of analytical design. But that just felt cheap. Like, I’m going to just choose this one guy who happens to have a huge influence on what we do today without contextualizing that choice.

Historical Figures

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin I realized I needed a stronger grounding on the guys who came before Tufte.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo I went through these other guys. Not just the ones who had used information graphics like William Playfair in 1786

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinor Jon Snow in 1854. These are favorites of Tufte’s and others when talking about the first examples of information design.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut I’m talking about the ones who were doing more than just visualizing data—I mean the ones developing their own information design methodologies or philoso-phies and telling everyone about it.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinWillard Cope Brinton’s 1914 Graphic Methods for Presenting Fact (published by The Engineering Magazine Company) is an extensive guide to the formal consid-erations of information design. It’s also available in full on archive.org, as it’s in the public domain.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAlso, he dedicated the book to his mother. Which is awesome.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnyway, Brinton places strong emphasis on the benefits of presenting facts in a “clear and interesting manner” and he even prepares information designers for the eventual virality of their work:

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “Charts which present new or especially interesting facts are very frequently cop-ied by many magazines”.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBrinton goes on to follow his 30-point checklist for graphic presentations and

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin25-point set of rules for presenters with a final reminder:

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin“When graphic methods are more widely used for portraying quantitative facts, there will be a tremendous gain to accuracy of thought as well as a great saving of that most valuable thing in the world—time”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinNext up is Otto Neurath, a founding member of the Vienna Circle’s logical positiv-ist movement. He believed that the expression of fact was of utmost importance, es-pecially in a Europe having recently been ravaged by World War I. During his ten-ure as director of various local museums in Leipzig and Vienna, Neurath designed exhibits for citizens that explained statistics and policies about local communities and their various economic and social concerns. Confounded by the complexities of expressing statistical knowledge through verbal language and the rules which accompany it, Neurath turned to a system of pictograms, designed and arranged (sometimes alongside written language) with a logic he felt unattainable through words alone. These pictograms addressed, too, his struggle to convey relevant information in a clear manner, to be consumed and understood by an international

audience—a “de- babelzation” of sorts.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinNeurath eventually titled this mode of information transfer the International Sys-tem Of TYpographic Picture Education, or Isotype. Neurath set out to take on the practicalities of building Isotype into a truly interna-tional language (all the while dodging the oppressive regimes of the pre-World War II nations of Europe) by building a team of designers–

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinmost notably of whom, Gerd Arntz, had significant influence on the eventual look and feel of

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinIsotype’s famous wood cut aesthetic.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinNeurath’s system was built around the premise that language exists as an object tied to nature, though still formed by the observer of this nature. This belief can be explicitly seen in Isotype’s strong emphasis on the role of what Neurath called the “transformer.” As Robin Kinross writes in his book of the same name,

Neurath developed the notion of transformer to describe the process of analysing, selecting, ordering, and then making visual some information, data, ideas, implications.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “Neurath developed the notion of transformer to describe the process of analysing, selecting, ordering, and then making visual some information, data, ideas, implica-tions.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThis process was a detailed one, with the transformer working with stakeholders and subject matter experts, gaining a strong understanding of an issue before build-ing the Isotype pictograms to represent it. This included considering the audience of the language and what symbols would better resonate with them.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinWhen a disciple of Neurath’s, Rudolph Modley, took his knowledge of Isotype to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, he opted not to include the role of trans-former. Instead, his goal was to reach as broad an audience as possible by bringing, for example, the pictograms to school children as “symbol sheets.” In doing so, he alienated Neurath.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBecause Neurath knew that by closely controlling the production of his books and posters, his Transformer (in many cases, it was his wife, Marie) would ensure the proper message was being communicated. Here you can see some of Marie’s sketches after she met with key stakeholders during a diagram’s development. Of course, some may argue that the “closed” nature of the system is what led to Isotype’s eventual fading into obscurity.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThough next time you look at a handicapped parking space or bathroom symbol, you can think of Gerd Arntz. (At MassArt, we always appreciate a bit of typography humor.)

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThe work of Nigel Holmes as an “explanation designer” (a moniker he gave him-self) is characterized by an “embellishment of data graphics” as well as a consider-ation for the fashionable techniques of the time.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAn illustrator by training, Holmes defined the infographic style of Time Magazine from the late 1970s through to the mid-1990s, when a press without photographic access to the front-lines of the Gulf War sought out ways to accompany their war related news with graphics features.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinHe is an outspoken proponent of constructing engaging infographics with more than simple graphs and charts. Tufte calls his stuff “Chart junk.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBrinton shows up in Tufte’s books once in a weird table about…

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin ”chartjunky graphics”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd you won’t find any mention of Neurath, though there is a reference on Tufte’s site which came from a contributor. Anyway. This is all to say that I discovered this whole world of guys who were very strong predecessors to Tufte. Important figures to understand, mostly because of the difference between them and Tufte. So I started thinking a bit bigger—about the field of information design as a whole. About the way both a designer approaches her understanding of that field and also where the purpose of visualizing data plays into all of this.

The Tweets

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut before I get to that, I think it’s about time I got to the tweets—after all, that’s why we’re here and I’m already 45 slides in. So let’s do that.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinWhen news of the NSA’s secret PRISM program broke on June 6, Dr. Edward Tufte was one of the countless Twitter users to post a link to the Washington Post’s cov-erage on his stream. He, like many others, expressed his negative feelings: “Dread-ful spy-PRISM deck sets new record for most header logos per slide: 13.” A few minutes later,

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin he noted that the “List of spy- PRISM collected information includes nearly every-thing, except PPT decks. No useful information at all?” His final public-facing tweet of the night reads,

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “PRISM ‘providers’: classic PPT statistical graphic: 13 logos, 10 numbers, 9 bub-bles, 1 giant green arrow.” and included the hashtag “#powerpoint”.

Taken by MrMiscellanious, released under the PD via Wikimedia Commons.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinTufte, of course, should have no reservations using the #powerpoint hashtag and doing so with authority: among the consulting gigs he can list on his resumé sits a 2003 stint with NASA “on technical presentations for shuttle risk assessments, shuttle engineering, and deep spaceflight trajectories.”

© NASA

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinHis expertise was sought after the organization deemed internal communication processes partly at fault for the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster: the high risk of burn-up during reentry was outlined in a PowerPoint presentation given by a team of Boeing engineers after debris caused damage to the shuttle’s wing during lift-off, but the risk was disregarded by higher-ups. Tufte’s conclusion—that a technical document,

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin rather than a slide deck laden with a “bureaucracy of bullets,” would have been more effective in saving the lives of the astronauts on board—

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinled him to pen his 2006 essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. Described by the author as “notorious,” it presents a scathing critique of Microsoft’s slideshow creation software and has since been cited by at least hundreds of others

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin (747 times, according to Google Scholar).

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThe day after the PRISM story broke, Tufte posted again, this time opting to link to The Guardian’s coverage: “Ridiculous Prism PPTdeck [sic] surfaces serious issues about the government character.” Now, it seemed, he was ready to present his judgement on more than just the visuals leaked by NSA contractor turned whis-tle-blower Edward Snowden—this time, Tufte was upset with the way the govern-ment was behaving.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd who could blame him? As details about what PRISM enabled the government to collect, store, and analyze emerged, it became clear that it is time for a public discussion about the true state of our privacy in an always-on, always-connected world—much like the discussion occurring here at SouthBy.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinYet, Tufte still could not resist referring to the NSA’s PowerPoint slides. His tweets about the “dreadful” deck began making the rounds, posted on sites such as tech-focused Mashable and

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin the Washington Post’s Wonkblog.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinEventually, one enterprising designer, Emiland De Cubber took it upon himself to redesign the presentation altogether.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinHis new deck offers a clean, modernist approach to the notorious PRISM slides: complete with iconography from The Noun Project, a cool, toned down color scheme, and logical slide “builds” which outline the progress of PRISM over the past six years.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThe tone of the copy is probably a bit more sardonic than that which you would find on any official NSA work (regarding the $20 million budget, De Cubber offers, “it’s worth it. Come on, that’s a lot of data.”)

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinand the presentation finishes off with a self- promotion for his services as a free-lance slide designer

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin (according to a tweet from the designer, he has received more offers for work than he has time to respond to, let alone take on)

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut De Cubber’s version of the slides also begins with an admission that the NSA “can do whatever [they] want with [his] data.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin But not with [his] eyes.” And what will they do with his data (and it’s fair to assume they have it—the NSA has since claimed that they are only targeting “foreigners”; De Cubber is a French-man based in Paris)?

ComparisonsCausality, Mechanism, Structure, ExplanationMultivariate AnalysisIntegration of EvidenceDocumentationContent Counts Most of All

1.2.3.4.5.6.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinWell, if the NSA analysts in charge of making sense of De Cubber’s data have read Tufte’s fourth book, Beautiful Evidence, then they will take into consideration his six principles of analytical design

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd even though they are dealing with the virtual trails of faceless human beings, they will have also read in Beautiful Evidence that

Evidence is evidence...the intellectual tasks remain constant regardless of the mode of evidence: to understand to reason about the materials at hand, and to appraise theirquality, relevance, and integrity.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “Evidence is evidence...the intellectual tasks remain constant regardless of the mode of evidence: to understand to reason about the materials at hand, and to appraise their quality, relevance, and integrity.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd after they’ve made sure that their charts and graphs are proportional, that their sources are cited, and that their comparisons are clear, then they will present it to their higher-ups who, in turn, will take part in what Tufte calls

intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information.” But first they will continue to collect the data, because if they don’t, there is no “intense seeing” to be done.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinTufte’s rise to subject-matter expert has been built on convincing people that data is true when it’s presented with quality, relevance, and integrity. So he tells people how to do just that. Never mind that they may become so hungry to do so that they begin to monitor our digital activity—

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinlook at that silly green arrow!

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThroughout his four main books, Tufte’s focus is on making sure that data is presented empirically—not confused or muddled or hidden, but communicated effectively so that it is understood, consumed, and, perhaps, acted-on.

A better cognitive style for presentations is needed…a style that respects, encourages, and cooperates with evidence and thought.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “A better cognitive style for presentations is needed,” he concludes at the end of the PowerPoint essay, “a style that respects, encourages, and cooperates with evidence and thought.” Evidence and thought, but not reflection.

Reflection

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo. What’s so important about the opportunity for reflection?

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin“In our current state of “technological forms of life,” argues Scott Lash in Critique of Information,

information shrinks or compresses metanarratives to a mere point, a signal,a mere event in time”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “information shrinks or compresses metanarratives to a mere point, a signal, a mere event in time.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinNarrative and discourse have given way to the “very byte-like” message—

[No longer room for] the sort of legitimating argument that you are presented with in a discourse, [and power, which] was once largely discursive…is now largely informational”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin there is no longer room for “the sort of legitimating argument that you are pre-sented with in a discourse” and power, which “was once largely discursive...is now largely informational”; when speed and brevity become qualities of communication which are heralded above such forms as narrative and discourse, the parties who either store or convey the most information in the shortest amount of time also hold the greatest amount of power.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinTufte, to be fair, does not seem to condone the behavior of the NSA. A number of posts on his site seem to be wary of the way search engines or corporations collect our data (be it meta or otherwise) without our knowledge, and his recent tweets do not suggest he feels any differently about PRISM.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThough, oddly, he hasn’t posted anything on his site about the NSA recently. Four results.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinI could not tell you when they were posted, because he includes no date stamps. I suppose I could try to contribute something, but getting on the site is harder than getting a SXSW panel.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAccording to the site

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “About 30% of submitted contributions are posted; after publication, about half survive the occasional reviews of published items.” But, like I said, we’re being fair here. I haven’t tried to contribute. And Tufte never explicitly supports the illegal collection of data.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinHe probably agrees with danah boyd when she notes that

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “what’s at stake has to do with how power is employed, by whom, and in what circumstances.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut as ‘the da Vinci of data” (a moniker bestowed upon him by the New York Times), he should know that the power is employed here through not only the col-lection of data as evidence, but also the eventual presentation of that data as truth through information design.

Criticism

So where does the current state of criticism surrounding information design stand?

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin Well, “The appeal of information design,” write design theorists, Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel, “is that it offers instant credibility...[it] is rational and au-thoritative, classified and controlled to within an inch of its life: everything in its place and a place for every thing. Label it information design and it looks serious. Number it and it looks scientific.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin“But it’s a false authority,” they continue, “particularly because we buy into the form so unquestioningly. ... Information design has become its own legitimizing force, regardless of its content or context. It’s modernism run amok: form masquerading as content.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinYou know, Helfand and Drenttel are right: this IS modernism run amok. And it is a false authority. But when they write that, they’re not pissed about it like I’m pissed about it. They’re pissed about it cause they’re designers in a design studio and they don’t like what this “lab chic” as they call it is doing to the studio. For example, they question design education’s role in this:

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin why is it a scientific aesthetic that they have embraced, especially considering a weak understanding of the field of science itself? But they never doubt why design-ers are turning to a scientific aesthetic. They’re never wondering what is so effec-tive, so seductive about the form. That’s what I struggle with. How can we better understand the infographic’s defacto status as a representation of truth? A status that threatens the value of discursive power in favor of informational.

An Example

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd here’s an example of that in action. I’m not sure how many of you have heard of a company called Shape, Inc.

MIT Institute for Universal Knowledge & Understanding

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinShape, Inc. Is a corporation spun off from the MIT Institute for Universal Knowl-edge and Understanding: a group at the Media Lab charged with the mission of giving humans the tools to better appreciate one another, specifically through the accurate dissemination of one’s values and belief systems. Some of the world’s finest data scientists paired with equally as talented information designers spent years figuring out how to communicate visually what would otherwise take countless hours to understand.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinNew Shape™ is a 3D object, completely independent from any broadcast medium or channel.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinYou just need a small magnet implanted in each of your shoulders, and the form will float above your shoulder of choosing, ever morphing to the inputs and out-puts that affect who you are.

So to clarify, this company is proposing, in essence, a 3D infographic. It pays atten-tion to the things you say, the things you hear, the things you do, the things you eat, where you eat, how you eat. This is self-quantification taken to the next level: it’s self communication. When you have a shape with you, you can be understood.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinIf you go to shape-inc.com, you can watch a video about the product, which I will play for you now.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinVideo can be found at: https://vimeo.com/57235084

UNDERSTOOD.YOU.

SHAPE-INC.COM#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin

Ok. Who here has heard of Shape, Inc. before. Ok, now put your hand down if you know me. Ok. None of you have heard of it because it’s fake. I made it up. I’m sorry. Because, like I said, I’m an artist. Shape, Inc. is an art piece. Ugggggh. Art.

YOUTOPIA.

SHAPE-INC.COM

Building A Provocation

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut it’s art that looks like design—it uses the language of experience to build a provocation.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinIn fact, as part of the project, I decided to start throwing these Shape, Inc. stickers all over town (and don’t worry, I have more for you)

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAlso, I took that last photo a couple of months ago. In true Boston fashion…the entire sign is just sitting in a pile of black snow right now. Which pretty much rep-resents everything I love about Boston.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnyway, I also put up some posters. There’s a wall in Cambridge that allows graffiti, so I figured that would be a good place to start. My wife prefers I not get arrested.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo my colleague Fish McGill and I go and we’re putting up these 50 Shape, Inc. posters and we get heckled. I’ll play you a quick clip of this guy coming up to us and yelling at me.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinVideo can be found at: https://vimeo.com/80705087#t=4m3s

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinI was then searching around Twitter afterwards and sure enough, someone was pretty pissed about this art…which looked very much like corporate advertising…

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd of course, the next day, they were torn down.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinBut I ALSO got an email on the website! This dude is psyched! He can’t wait for the product to launch.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThis is a very very small piece and a very very small start. But it IS a start. It’s ab-surd. And it’s weird. And I honestly hope it is not predictive. But it’s an example of how I propose to inspire a dialogue about the hegemonic properties of information design’s aesthetic—by garnering affect. Getting people to react. To want to know more. To ask questions.

Cultural Interrogation

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAt the heart of my work is a proposed cultural interrogation of the infographic—that is, a real examination of the form and its reductive and seductive qualities.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThis might happen through the lens of people like Ian Hacking, who sees statistics as part of a

great bureaucratic machinery…thinking[ing]of itself as providing only information, but it is itself part of the technology of power in a modern state.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “great bureaucratic machinery…thinking[ing] of itself as providing only informa-tion, but it is itself part of the technology of power in a modern state.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinIn his 1980 essay entitled “How should we do the history of statistics?” he writes of an avalanche of numbers, about the shaping of the character of social facts by statistics.

The erosion of determinism and the taming of chance by statistics does not introduce a new liberty…The argument that indeterminism creates a place for free will is a hollow mockery.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin“The erosion of determinism and the taming of chance by statistics does not intro-duce a new liberty,” he writes. “The argument that indeterminism creates a place for free will is a hollow mockery.

The bureaucracy of statistics imposes not just by creating administrative rulings but by determining classifications within which people must think of themselves and of the actions that are open to them.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThe bureaucracy of statistics imposes not just by creating administrative rulings but by determining classifications within which people must think of themselves and of the actions that are open to them.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAn interrogation of the relationship between the infographic and the subject, through the lens of semiotics, would also seek to understand how the form con-structs meaning.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo using Roland Barthes’ connotative operations of information design’s various aesthetic properties may be useful. Basically—though not doing the theory jus-tice—Barthes argues that connotation, or what meaning you derive from a word, symbol, image, etc, connotation always happens. You can never simply see some-thing for what it is.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo while I don’t seek to argue the reliability of the data upon which these graphs were drawn, I absolutely think they hold connotative meanings beyond simply numbers. Gold bar charts accentuate the representation of wealth, red lines repre-sent the flat-lining of wages. Metrics related to size, proportion, area—these are all connotative operations, and I think they are worth a much deeper understanding.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinWe could also look to Lacan’s mirror stage. That’s been an invaluable and oft-used concept for the development of film studies theories, particularly in its connec-tion between a sense of longing, or “lack”, felt by the viewer and the satisfaction provided by the film. If our infographic viewers are drawn to visuals that lay out a seemingly decisive argument, maybe the infographic’s scientific aesthetic satiates a dearth of stability or sureness in our lives.

© Florian Hirzinger

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinOr maybe we try to understanding the infographic as technologically enabled object. While the history of the form traces back to well before the invention of the personal computer or Internet—as I’ve already pointed out here—technology has enabled the form’s rise to prominence from the perspective of both ability and necessity.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinTechnological advances have put the tools to mine and visualize data—once requir-ing powerful computing hardware and complex software packages—into the hands of the lay-designer.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAnd the proliferation of automatically collected data throughout society has turned the organization of this data into a necessity.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinSo maybe we use Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer—a piece that focus-es on the ways that the camera obscura changed the way we perceived our world. Perhaps we now require a scientific-looking argument before we’re willing to assign any validity to a discursive position?

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinOr we could go back to Scott Lash. In Global Culture Industry, which he wrote with Celia Lury, they emphasize the concept of “play” when considering our under-standing of the ways in which we exist and interact with today’s cultural objects. The two also offer that contemporary culture produces objects that should be understood both for their simulacra and inventive nature. So an object of visual culture produced to be perceived as based on highly complicated data-sets, with viral distribution in mind, could be understood with the same simultaneity.

Theory + Practice

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinNo matter what approach we take, though—the infographic’s power is in its visuals. And so it’s so important that this interrogation be one that involves both theoretical and practical elements.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinJames Carey, in his 1990 essay, Communication As Culture, writes that

Things can become so familiar, that we no longer perceive them at all. Art, however, can take the texture of a fabric, the design of a face, and wrench these ordinary phenomena out of the backdrop of existence and force them into the foreground of consideration.”

“

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin “Things can become so familiar, that we no longer perceive them at all. Art, how-ever, can take the texture of a fabric, the design of a face, and wrench these ordinary phenomena out of the backdrop of existence and force them into the foreground of consideration.”

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinAs I see it today, information design’s effortless permeation as de facto representa-tion of what is “true” thanks to a culturally hegemonic privileging of scientific fact, numbers, and data over meaning making through discourse has become an ordi-nary phenomenon, one that the majority of us are not questioning.

We Need More Provocations

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzin We need more provocations. So. Where do those provocations come from? Well, I think they could come from a lot of places. But I’ll tell you where I’d like to start.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinTwo years ago I was sitting in a panel at SXSW called “The Moral Psychology and Big Data Singularity”—I was excited. Here was a guy that was going to talk about how we feel about all this data being collected. Which was a gross misread of the session description.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinWhat I actually got was a 45 minute lecture from a researcher at USC on how com-panies and scientists alike are able to predict what kind of food you’d like based on how you vote…and a bunch of other things about you. So I got up and asked a question. I’ll play you back the audio. Audio can be found here: http://www.gaboosh.com/sxsw2014/MoralPsycholog-yAudio_trimmed.m4a …No. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think the academy is the place for that. I think the academy is the place from whence a provocation comes. Where we

wrench these ordinary phenomena out of the backdrop of existence and force them into the foreground of consideration. And I don’t want you to say “but it’s fact” or “because, science!”

This Is The Holy Grailof Manipulative Form

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThe infographic isn’t popular because it is true. It is popular because it is seductive. It just so happens to be purported as true. And that’s the danger. We’re sucked in and we believe it and that is the holy grail of manipulative form. It’s important to understand why. This is why we need a cultural interrogation of the form. Because in healthy discursive spaces, every position has a counter position. I’m not here to tell you that I do or do not think the infographic should be made. I honestly do not know the answer to that. And as a practitioner and theorist, this is

usually the part of the presentation when I reach an existential crisis. And I pay a guy back in Boston $20 twice a week to deal with that. My goal is to take this to a PhD program that will let me combine visual practice with visual theory. If I can do that, maybe I’ll be back here in a few years with a more insightful answer to that question. But I do know that we need to change the way we study it and think about it and understand it.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinYou know, I was looking through my notes from that Tufte seminar and I saw this. It’s a bit faded as it’s written in pencil—for you youngsters, that’s kinda like Snap-Chat but it takes a little longer and sometimes you have to sharpen it.

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinIt says that information designers must work with the spirit of inquiry, defined by Tufte as “whatever it takes to explain something.” What a disappointing statement. Whatever it takes to explain something. Like spy-ing on our emails or text messages. I don’t know. The way I prefer to explain something is by talking. And listening. And questioning. And so I hope you leave here today willing to question how power is exercised over us through the use of the scientific aesthetic. We need to build provocations that

break that power. And that can’t be done without a better understanding of why it does to us what it does.

Thanks.

Works cited available upon request.

gaboosh.com/tufte_survey

#Tuftyranny @GabiSchaffzinThank you.

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