non-verbal

the title of this blog has been "words make everything better" for letsee... how long now? just a bit shy of two years.

I really believe that, you know.

and quite honestly I prefer words very much. handwritten ones are extra nice. words happen to be my favourite language.

but they aren't the only one. nor do they stand alone or unembodied.

this semester I'm in a visual rhetoric class, and every week we pick apart sets of images according to different theories. the other night we were looking at Olympiad posters going back to 1924, and analyzed them with our newly learned semiotic perspective. signs and signifiers and signifieds. so complex and lovely and subjective.

our assignments have been rather fun for this class. I got to interview a handful of random people about the photos they take and keep on their phones. and for my research project, I'm studying food photography as it appears on pinterest.

last week, I worked on creating a visualization of a rather quirky set of data. the parameters of this assignment were very open-ended. Dr. Kimball just wanted us to be creative and explore ways of applying all the principles of effective visual representation we've been reading about.

here is what I created. it comes with no specific title, no context. just "emails sent." it's a graph of a few dozen emails, the dates they were sent, their relative word counts, and a few other random details. I've been showing the lovely thing off since it was finished. what do you think? you can look even closer at the bigger, cooler pdf version over here, if you like.

numbers. colors. shapes. these can be languages too. (we could start talking about how letters and numbers are really just certain kinds of shapes, if we wanted. even the codes we use are encoded, decoded.) I don't know what I was trying to mean, with all these blues and greens, circles and lines. but it does mean something, and possibly many somethings. my own authored meaning (if it exists at all) is only one. so make what you will of this.