Visualizations and their Value
Scalar allows users to render the data content of their digital book in five different visualizations: radial, index, paths, media, and tags visualizations. I won’t describe each of these visualizations here; I refer you to their descriptions found in Scalar User’s Guide.
Manovich describes two types of visualization: reductive and spatial visualization and direct visualization or visualization without reduction. The Scalar visualizations, as I found them, prove to embody qualities of both visualization types. The first type reduces a data set into “graphical primitives such as points, straight lines, curves, and simple geometric shapes to stand in for objects and relations between them” and utilizes “spatial variables (position, size, shape and more recently curvature of lines and movement)” (6, 7). This kind of visualization aims to represent “only 1% - in the hope of revealing patterns across this 1%” (6). Scalar’s five visualizations, as one can see, render the content into reductive and spatialized representations of circular radials, index boxes, path lines, and media and tag web-networks. Reductionism and spatialization make visible for readers the relations among the various pieces of content. In as much as paths and tags instill in readers divergent reading experiences, these spatial and reductive visualizations usher readers into another kind of experience: the experience of witnessing the journal’s relational and interconnected character.
The second type of visualization, direct visualization or visualization without reduction, seeks to preserve the “original form” of the data. This latter method, Manovich admits, does employ reduction, yet the reductionism, unlike reductive and spatial visualizaton, does not “substitute media objects” with “new objects (i.e. graphical primitives).” The reductionism of direct visualization is of a different order. It entails the visual representation of the data’s original media. The data is not modified into points, straight lines, or other graphical primitives. “Images remain images; text remains text,” Manovich attests, and his example of a direct visualization is the tag cloud, a feature present in Scalar. In what ways do Scalar’s tag clouds cohere with Manovich’s definition of direct visualization? These clouds directly visualize in the sense that these clouds represent words that are really hyperlinks to the original pages, so in this way these clouds directly link back to the original media of the pages. And by this reasoning, it follows that the other visualization formats of the radials, paths, indexes, and the media and tag web-networks do directly visualize by virtue of the fact that they each hyperlink to the original content. If one scrolls their mouse over these visualizations, one finds that their component parts are links.
When discussing examples of direct visualizations, Manovich states, “[I]n order to qualify as a ‘direct visualization’ an image [does not have]… to show all %100 of the original data – every word in a text, every frame in a movie, etc. Out of the three examples I just discussed, only Preservation of Selected Traces does this. Both Cinema Redux and Listening Post do not use all the available data – instead they sample it” (18 emphasis his). Let us adapt this statement and apply it to both reductive/spatial visualizations and direct visualizations. In doing so, we conclude that Scalar visualizations act as “samples” of the original material. What a sample does is that it shows us what the whole is like. A visualization, in this respect, acts as another way for us editors and authors to set up “whole-part relationships.” It is no accident that the platform is called “Scalar,” for readers and editors are dealing with issues of scale. Visualizations present a scale of experience different from the scale of experiencing paths and tags. “Scale” here denotes a “ratio” or relation of experience. The path offers a ratio or relation of experience wherein the ratio between the journal and reader is transformed to the ratio between path and reader. Such is the cumulative experience of Scalar: the purposive fragmentation of the journal into focused particularities of the whole. Through such fragmenting, readers perceive the journal in different scales, scopes, and significances. The knowledge readers produce when encountering a visualization is bound to differ from the knowledge they make when proceeding through a path. Visualizations invite readers to generate knowledge of the journal’s interrelational structure, whereas paths direct readers into forming knowledge of these paths’ thematic or topical angles.
Distant reading, as Franco Moretti famously described it, refers to “where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.” The features of Scalar can be said to be forms of re-distancing the journal into “units that are much smaller or much larger.” Paths, tags, visualizations, and, let us not forget, comments, annotations, notes, media links, and Scalar links bestow upon the audience the experience of re-distancing themselves along diverse scales of engagement. If distance, as Moretti insists, “is a condition of knowledge,” then this re-scaling or re-distancing is the “condition” where knowledge is born and made. Scalar, thus, allows us—editors/authors and readers—to read the very ballad-making process through the generative terrain of distances.
Manovich describes two types of visualization: reductive and spatial visualization and direct visualization or visualization without reduction. The Scalar visualizations, as I found them, prove to embody qualities of both visualization types. The first type reduces a data set into “graphical primitives such as points, straight lines, curves, and simple geometric shapes to stand in for objects and relations between them” and utilizes “spatial variables (position, size, shape and more recently curvature of lines and movement)” (6, 7). This kind of visualization aims to represent “only 1% - in the hope of revealing patterns across this 1%” (6). Scalar’s five visualizations, as one can see, render the content into reductive and spatialized representations of circular radials, index boxes, path lines, and media and tag web-networks. Reductionism and spatialization make visible for readers the relations among the various pieces of content. In as much as paths and tags instill in readers divergent reading experiences, these spatial and reductive visualizations usher readers into another kind of experience: the experience of witnessing the journal’s relational and interconnected character.
The second type of visualization, direct visualization or visualization without reduction, seeks to preserve the “original form” of the data. This latter method, Manovich admits, does employ reduction, yet the reductionism, unlike reductive and spatial visualizaton, does not “substitute media objects” with “new objects (i.e. graphical primitives).” The reductionism of direct visualization is of a different order. It entails the visual representation of the data’s original media. The data is not modified into points, straight lines, or other graphical primitives. “Images remain images; text remains text,” Manovich attests, and his example of a direct visualization is the tag cloud, a feature present in Scalar. In what ways do Scalar’s tag clouds cohere with Manovich’s definition of direct visualization? These clouds directly visualize in the sense that these clouds represent words that are really hyperlinks to the original pages, so in this way these clouds directly link back to the original media of the pages. And by this reasoning, it follows that the other visualization formats of the radials, paths, indexes, and the media and tag web-networks do directly visualize by virtue of the fact that they each hyperlink to the original content. If one scrolls their mouse over these visualizations, one finds that their component parts are links.
When discussing examples of direct visualizations, Manovich states, “[I]n order to qualify as a ‘direct visualization’ an image [does not have]… to show all %100 of the original data – every word in a text, every frame in a movie, etc. Out of the three examples I just discussed, only Preservation of Selected Traces does this. Both Cinema Redux and Listening Post do not use all the available data – instead they sample it” (18 emphasis his). Let us adapt this statement and apply it to both reductive/spatial visualizations and direct visualizations. In doing so, we conclude that Scalar visualizations act as “samples” of the original material. What a sample does is that it shows us what the whole is like. A visualization, in this respect, acts as another way for us editors and authors to set up “whole-part relationships.” It is no accident that the platform is called “Scalar,” for readers and editors are dealing with issues of scale. Visualizations present a scale of experience different from the scale of experiencing paths and tags. “Scale” here denotes a “ratio” or relation of experience. The path offers a ratio or relation of experience wherein the ratio between the journal and reader is transformed to the ratio between path and reader. Such is the cumulative experience of Scalar: the purposive fragmentation of the journal into focused particularities of the whole. Through such fragmenting, readers perceive the journal in different scales, scopes, and significances. The knowledge readers produce when encountering a visualization is bound to differ from the knowledge they make when proceeding through a path. Visualizations invite readers to generate knowledge of the journal’s interrelational structure, whereas paths direct readers into forming knowledge of these paths’ thematic or topical angles.
Distant reading, as Franco Moretti famously described it, refers to “where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.” The features of Scalar can be said to be forms of re-distancing the journal into “units that are much smaller or much larger.” Paths, tags, visualizations, and, let us not forget, comments, annotations, notes, media links, and Scalar links bestow upon the audience the experience of re-distancing themselves along diverse scales of engagement. If distance, as Moretti insists, “is a condition of knowledge,” then this re-scaling or re-distancing is the “condition” where knowledge is born and made. Scalar, thus, allows us—editors/authors and readers—to read the very ballad-making process through the generative terrain of distances.
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