Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Visuality

677
"Pictorial mapping and textual mapping are two very different methods of representation. Cartography as a pictorial form operates by simultaneity and juxtaposition; verbal text is syntactically linear and narratological. As such, each form of communication can do something that the other cannot. Neither is superior, and both are complementary to the other"Note.

Human beings are descendants of organisms that evolved for hundreds of millions of years to sharpen spatial and visual cognitive affordances, hundreds of millions of years before before Homo sapiens sapiens evolved the facility of language as a primate of the Pleistocene, through semantic cognition.  Vastly more grey matter of the human brain is dedicated to visual processing than semantic processing.  In short, our minds are far more adept and efficient at parsing and reading visual forms than they are at interpreting natural language.  It makes sense then, to use forms of visualization to convey very complex information, such as the collective lives and processes of a global metropolis of millions of individuals and countless sites and moving parts.

As a situational cognitive materialist studying historical human action, I have been inspired to both account for, and utilize the visual-spatial affordances of the embodied human mind. This has led me to engage with work in the cognitive neurosciences, from Schneewind to Lakoff, and participate in the emergent field of visual studies, and the much older field of art history.  There my debts are many but especially to Erwin Panofsky and the acid criticism of Art Forum in the 1970s. 

This empirical and human scientific perspective does not end at an analytical or interpretive stance.  It also drives the presentational, representational, and narratological structure of Ghost Metropolis.  In other words, I practice what I preach.  Visual, spatial experience of the past is important, and remains so today.  I adopt visual communication in order to profit most from the human cognition of my readers.  The textual, spatial, and visual dimensions of the past are here presented simultaneously and in parallel.

I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps.  These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work.  These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past.  So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together.   

Visuality is not  intrinsically narratological.  Images do not operate intrinsically on a sequential reading, with any kind of plot or story, no beginning or end.  Rather, images are read by shape, form, juxtaposition, and simultaneity.  

However, visual images can also be assembled into a sequential series, and this is a method of expression that I have used extensively in Ghost Metropolis.  I have created, curated, and arranged many sequences of images, which reference each other in various ways.  My captions, and the relationship to my textual narratives helps to explicate the narrative relationship, but the visual progression can also speak for itself in the deep syntax of visual form.  Thus, intertwined with the textual narratives are visual narratives.  A major form of visual narrative in Ghost Metropolis are the sequences of images and maps that are built into every narrative essay. These are assembled specifically for that essay, so there are, in principle, 40 visual essays to match the 40 narrative essays, so they are most properly called "visual narrative essays."