Blog 4: Information visualization & distant reading

Information visualization is a part of your everyday life. it is used in everyday communications. It is said in the book that "all information visualizations are metrics expressed as graphics" (Drucker 86). In order to completely understand information visualization, you need to be able to read visualization, and in order to do that you need to be able to understand the semantics of graphic formats. They explain in the book how a bar chart means something different than a pie chart for instance. When reading Problems of Scale in "Close" and Distant" Reading it states, "distant reading refuses the richness of the singular literary text in favor of the production of knowledge on an enlarged scale" (Jin 2017). This statement shows scale as a visual perspective. The project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon shows like a web of names and when you press on a name it shows what they were and how long they lived. It is a great example of distant reading because there is no literary text. Another project that shows distant reading is Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow. This project is about tracing the emotional waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each dot is one tweet, and each color is a feeling. There is no literary text in this project at all. It uses visualization as a way to communicate. Both of the projects show how you can use visualization to communicate instead of a literary text. I think using voyant tools for distant reading would be cool because I am a visual learner so using distant reading to look at projects like the projects discussed above would be very helpful. As stated in the reading What Is Distant Reading, "distant reading might prove to be a powerful tool for studying literature..." (The New York Times). Something like distant reading would definitely be a powerful and helpful tool to use when looking at literary projects for people who are more of visual learners.