At the Crossroads of the Senses

Visualizing Synaeshesia as Constellation

At the Crossroads of the Senses interconnects multiple arts, media, and senses, yet even with illustrations and music notation interspersed, the print book cannot render the richly intersensorial texture of the material discussed. This inspired me to create the multimodal digital humanities companion that accompanies this book. The Scalar force-directed connections visualization presented above shows links between all of the content in the DH companion to At the Crossroads of the Senses. It illustrates my notion of synaesthesia as a constellation of historical discourses, scientific theories, artworks, music, multimedia, and multimodal sensations to intimate the lived experience of synaesthesia and multisensory perception. As readers engage with the site in visual, aural, and tactile ways (attentively viewing and listening, zooming in and out, clicking, pinching, and dragging), they can grasp the non-linear crossing of the senses and the arts in a constellation. I thus suggest that the visualizations of the senses and the arts offered in this digital companion emerge as Benjaminian dialectical images of loosely related art objects, ideas, and experiences figured as constellations of blue, red, green, orange, and purple Scalar dots/stars. By following the links in the Scalar visualizations and clicking through to view paths, pages, and media, readers can discover new, non-linear ways of reading the modern senses in literature, music, art, society, and science.

Throughout the digital companion, readers and viewers are invited to explore a variety of Scalar visualizations of its structure and content. Represented as constellations, trees, circles, and grids, they provide different ways of accessing the materials in the companion. The Epilogue revisits all visualizations of the senses and the arts to map out the connections between them.

This page has paths:

  1. At the Crossroads of the Senses – Digital Companion (old) Polina Dimova
  2. At the Crossroads of the Senses – Digital Companion Polina Dimova

This page has tags:

  1. Global Visualizations Polina Dimova

Contents of this tag:

  1. At the Crossroads of the Senses – Digital Companion