What if there are wolves and minotaurs?

A key issue I face in my own research is not getting lost in the word-woods.  I stray from the path a lot --  on purpose to see what’s out there --  but I need a method charting what I do.  It’s more like cartography sometimes, but how do you draw an accurate map from eye level of the forest floor?   How do I achieve that sought after syntopical reading when I’m lost inside a text or cluster of texts?   How do I know what the next village is reading and saying?  Being able to “zoom out” (or up) and see the lay of the land lets me see the bones of the world. The patterns become clearer, but I also know where I want to rezoom.  The advantage of big data is
that we can prospect, but when we identify a likely spot (based on pattern recognition, perhaps), we still need to drill down, put our work under the microscope.  There’s so much more to say when we look through the magnified lens.  Right?  But, perhaps we do need the lens turned the other way --  the telescope can look outwards, but also back to earth, across oceans.  The far seerer, the closer seer, the across seer, we need them all.  What the visualization tools do is let us, not to be stunningly obvious, is see the connections and shapes.  A massive value is letting us externalize the data we are juggling --  out of our heads – and onto a medium that lets us entertain a and b and c … and so on simultaneously.   There’s no accident in the advice to sketch out or draw a problem in math.  ( Or even in other course.  This is a neat page for ideas and visual literacy. Have a hover over the elements.  I’m currently flailing my way through a stats course (it’s one of the language options in the English PhD program –along with coding,  boo-yah!) and the drawing of problems instead of words (words, words, words) is shockingly (for a writer) making it easier.   (In fact, the math and charts are what I get right.  The
true or false language based concept problems are where I struggle.) 

Let’s say data and texts are labyrinths a top labyrinths.  (You can call it a web, but they’re sticky and have spiders.  Sorry intertubes. ) The ideas we try to read across them (synoptics)  get fuzzy and dizzyingly tangled the more we describe them. (I say this as a writer and reader who can get lost almost instantly in a text based adventure, but does not get lost in visual mazes in games).   Gods and green monkeys, there’s up and down, and the 4^th dimension and parallel universes when wetry to be synoptic.  Creating databases helps and recording work in Refworks, Endnote, or Zotero eases it some, as does writing in Scrivener, but how still to make connections?   How do we even remember?  The murder boards we see in all the cop shows show this “make a connection”  visually in practice --  both the old school ones and the “wave your hand”  digital ones.   I’ve wrestled with color codes, post-its, multiple spreadsheets.  Other writers make dioramas and story scrapbooks to help with concepts (as opposed to narrative story boards).  I have enough trouble  with my own GIGO storage methods, but trying to deal with others structures?  Yikes.  Easier to study their structures than to use them.

I often imagine the labyrinth as really made of thread.  What if I jiggle this line?  What moves? Where is it connected?  What did it cross and set up a vibration?  What if I unravel the structure and am left with a huge mess and snarl?  What if thread is touching the minotaur and he notices me?  A labyrinth implies design and structure  --  one that’s intended to frustrate  --  but also to protect and guard. The visualization lets us stand atop the tower and see the maze.  (A modern day minotaur would probably have a laser network, and gps.) 

Of course I can’t remember the novel, but a few years ago I read about a “blocked” academic who attended a conference with his breakthrough “article”  --  a woven color coded timeline tapestry of Ulysses.  Meta and visual.  As a digital humanities tyro  at the time I was stunned that someone would think of such a creative thing and, while admiring the idea, assumed the novel was satirical.  Now I’m not so sure. 

 So what does it do for us --  all that work we do to describe in words, is that gone with an image?  Is the “thick”
description of sociology superceded? Or is visualized data new stuff to analyze?  Is it just a twist  on visual rhetoric?   I don’t think so --  I think the inclusion of data makes a substantive difference.  The manipulation
of meaning approaches a greater level of concreteness in visuals.  We can more readily imagine how it’s shape
might change --  if we could touch it.    And, if we are the creator of the visualization, we can change it.   At the
most basic level we can put our data into Pivot Tables in Excel and add and remove variables in whatever permutations we wish.    But the visualization of data frees us not just from words, but from numbers.   Yes, knowing how, much, how big, how many is dandy --  and super useful when visualized  (although places like FB
simply use Wordle to impute a false significance to occurrence rate) --  but what we are gaining is the connectivity
of the data. 

Maps!  Oh how I love them.   They’ve been the digital humanities since before we were digital.  (BTW, one of my

colleagues will wag his index finger at a board and say ‘this digit is the only tech I need.’ Best joke!)  Just look at
the packed info in these guys at one of my favorite blogs!    

My own work focuses on manga, in particular on on-line versions and scanlations, so the One Million Images article both elated and depressed me.   The budget needed!  Holy moly.  How does one do this as a non-funded scholar?  I’m often more focused on the language and translation  --  which with Japanese characters offers an
intriguing challenge --  as well as on copyright / intellectual property   and fan culture issues.  I’m also interested
in the appropriation issues involved in manga --  of culture --  and, in yaoi, of sexuality.   A method for mapping and visualizing countries of origin of readers and native languages would be interesting.   I’m wondering how appropriation issues and digital humanities might work together.  It feels rich, but I need to go deeper into understanding what these tools can do.