ENGL 4182/5182: Information Design & Digital Publishing » September 18th: The Whole Document

September 18th: The Whole Document

Announcements

Plan for the Day

We’ve got a few things to do today, so below is a list:

Design for Information Ch. 2

Although we aren’t going to focus so closely on all the different types of visualizations and their wide variety, this book gives us ways to think about creating abstractions for information. I wish it had more of a cultural discussion, but we’ll supplement that in class. After all, why do we need to create visuals displaying all this information?

Network: an organization, system, or group of connections. Notice the definitions for dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.

  • p. 47: “network scientists focus on the connections that bind individuals together.”
  • p. 48: “most networks observed in nature, society, and technology are driven by common organizing principles.”
    • “network science…focuses on the study of patterns of connections in real-world systems.”
    • What are some networks you observe or are part of?
  • p. 49: “A network is a simplified representation that reduces a system to an abstract structure capturing only the basics of connection patterns and little else.”
  • Nodes and Links
  • p. 49: “A node can be a machine, a person, a cell, and so on.” Nodes are anchors on a network.
  • p. 51: “Links are described by any kind of interaction between nodes.”
  • Unweighted vs Weighted links
    • Where do you find weighted links represented?
  • p. 55: “Node-link representations use symbolic elements to stand for nodes, and lines to represent the connections between them.”
    • “Most networks…are of abstract data…and do not have a priori spatial properties for positioning elements in the visualization.”
  • Challenges
  • p. 58: “labels carry important information, enabling one to understand what it is being revealed, from scales and measurements to categorical information.”
  • p. 58: focus + context techniques are used most often in interactive maps (e.g. Google Maps)
  • p. 58: “Good continuation is the tendency to construct visual entities out of visual elements that are smooth and continuous, or connected by straight or smoothly curving lines.”
    • I often just call this “continuation.”
    • Notice the nodal connections on the bottom of p. 58 (black enclosure)
  • What can we learn from a diseasome?

Meirelles quotes Ben Shneiderman’s claim that “new network science concepts and analysis tools are making isolated groups, influential participants, and community structures visible in ways never before possible” (p. 63). It’s the job of technical writers to make sure these structures are not just visible to experts but also to semi- and non-technical audiences that need effective, efficient information.

We’ll return to the Case Study “Community Structure: Universal Exposition, Milan, 2015” (pp. 78-81) after we discuss icons, indexes, and symbols (and, of course, time permitting).

Ethos, Pathos, Logos

We go over this every class, but you need to have the vocabulary to talk about visual rhetoric. Therefore,

  • Ethos: appeal or presentation of one’s character or credibility.
    • Titles: M.D., PhD, Sir, Dame, Dr., Count, etc.
    • Occupations: Physicist, President, General, etc.
    • Brand Recognition
  • Pathos: appeal to emotions; evoking emotional responses.
    • appeal to fear
    • appeal to patriotism
    • appeal to desires
  • Logos: appeals to logic or facts in a message.
    • Syllogisms
    • Deductive arguments
    • Implicit or explicit message that “if you’re smart, successful, important, etc., you wil do something” (i.e., quit paying more for…)
    • Graphs, statistics, legal codes

Please consider the above elements when doing your assignments and use the terms in your discussions and memos.

I have a couple flyers to critique, assuming we have time.

Supratextual Elements

Supratextual elements will help us consider the whole document. This term comes from Charles Kostelnick’s “12-cell schema of Visual Communication.” For those of you who have Tim Peeples Professional Writing and Rhetoric, the entire table is on p. 274. Below is an incomplete version of the table:

A 12-Cell Schema of Visual Communication

Alphanumeric/Symbolic
Spatial
Graphic
Intra- 1. Micro-level textual form: style, size, weight, etc. 2. 3.
Inter- 4. Serial and segmenting devices: headings, letters, numbers; typestyle variations showing textual structure {bulleted lists or consistency of bold text} 5. 6.
Extra- 7. Decoding devices: legends, captions, labels, numerical description of data. 8. 9.
Supra- 10. Macro-level serial and segmentation devices: section titles, numbers; page headers, pagination. 11. 12.

We’ll focus on column one, Alphanumeric/Symbolic, so I didn’t bother confusing you with the rest of the table.

Practical Piece: Let’s learn how to put tables into Dreamweaver. Insert –> Table

Visual Perception, Culture, & Rhetoric

I have a special page (linked to more special pages…why not “specialer“?) for this discussion, so let’s head over to the Visual, Perception, Culture, & Rhetoric page for some fun!

Chapter 4: Repetition

I know you all read Ch. 4 in The Non-Design’s Design Book, so let’s talk about that a bit. Thinking about our discussion above, what can we say about visual perception, visual culture, and visual rhetoric with regard to the chapter’s guidelines?

Future Fun

Keep up with the syllabus and read Ch. 3 in Design for Information and Ch. 4 in The Non-Designer’s Design Book for next week (9/25). Turn in your Business Cards and Letterheads before you leave. Next week, I’ll set aside some time to let you workshop Document #2: The Flyer OR Advertisement.

Can you believe it’s just two weeks before the midterm exam (10/02)? Unbelievable. Well, you have nothing to fear if you’ve been coming to class and reading. The midterm will attempt to cover all the reading and design concepts we’ve discussed in class. Anything from Design for Information (Ch. 1-3) and The Non-Designer’s Design Book (Ch. 1-5 and Ch. 8) may be included. The exam’s format will be multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true/false, short answer, and an essay-ish question where you’ll need to explain something in a concise and efficient way.

We’re going to focus more on nuts and bolts in our next full class (09/27), so I want you to bring in or find links to whole documents that you feel are either effective or ineffective. I’ll ask you to comment on them on your webpages, so try to find documents that you feel you can discuss in terms of ______, _______, and ______. Guess what three words go in the blanks above?