Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Allison Schifani, @LitPlus Visualization Project

 1. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P., 1984. 

Emerging from the long trajectory of materialist criticism, Certeau's text offers a theory of everyday human practices. His particular concerns throughout this work are language, space (particularly city spaces) and practice--or perhaps better put in the terms of the theory he follows, praxis. The work offers a materialist spatial theory and a model of reading quotidian formation and response to spaces as well as a way to think through the urban center as a kind of sign system (though his work is not per se semiotic). One key moment in the text which has been taken up by many cultural theorists, geographers and critics who followed him is his "Walking in the City." In this section Certeau develops a theory of urban practice directed by the pedestrian who articulates alternative paths to those imposed by the superstructural elements of the urban environment--i.e. to those of the urban planner. In this theory the walker in the city articulates his or her own spatial text. This move is typical of the text which seeks, from the moment of its dedication page, to describe the very real powers of resistance and speech Certeau believes already belong to "the ordinary man."

2. Harris, Jonathan and Sep Kamvar. We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion. New York: Scribner, 2009.

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar developed the web-based visualization application, We Feel Fine, using Processing (a subset of the Java programming language). The online version was launched in 2006. The almanac serves as a print companion to this dynamic and aesthetically engaging project which visualizes human emotions in the blogosphere. By crawling blogs and pulling sentences containing the phrase "I feel" or "I am feeling" and coding the following content on a scale aimed at capturing a broad range of emotion, the project harnesses data that it can then present as an active, emergent map of human feelings expressed by bloggers. The text details the creative and technical processes used by Kamvar and Harris to develop and build the application and offers a collection of images and quotations culled from a mass of blogs in the production of the project. Included are observations about the emotions as they are expressed, en masse, in the visualization. The text is divided into eight sections (including the central six, aptly titled "Who," "What," "When," "Where," "Why," and "How") and includes a "partial and simplified version" of the source code used to extract feelings from the web. The text is as highly designed as its online predecessor and offers an interesting example of the movement of a project from medium to medium. In addition to detailing the project itself, the Almanac also offers a number of visualizations such as tag clouds, component diagrams and maps as well as a brief "lit review," an annotated bibliography in which Harris and Kamvar respond to the academic literature on emotion with their own findings.

3. Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire: Graphics Press, 1983.

Divided into two parts, "Graphical Practice" and "Theory of Data Graphics," Tufte's 1983 text provides a historical review of "graphical practice" in the two centuries leading up to the 1980s followed by a detailed theory of information visualization. His analysis and discussion is paired, throughout, with examples of data visualization. These examples are carefully critiqued by Tufte, some winning his approval and some suffering his condemnation. The text does not (a fault, no doubt, of the moment of its production) address interactive, web-based visualizations but does engage thoroughly with static, one-dimensional visualizations, the relationship between the data set and the visualization, the composition of the visualization as well as its communication with the viewer. The work this text does is distinctly practical. Tufte has concrete suggestions for improving visualizations and specific reasons for the success or failure of the visualizations he discusses. This does not, however, prevent him from offering a very clear interest in the aesthetics of information. The final subsection of Part II of the text is devoted to aesthetics and techniques. As he writes in the work's epilogue, "it is better to violate any principle than to place graceless or inelegant marks on paper."

4. White, Michelle. The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship. Boston: MIT Press, 2006.

Michelle White develops a theory of internet spectatorship with careful focus on the body. Examining the particular place of the body in a long trajectory of aesthetic theory, White aims her study at the contemporary spectator (that is, the 'web surfer'). Her work in this study refutes popularly (and sometimes academically) conceived notions of internet spectatorship as instant, virtual and materially vacant by examining not only the archive of works on spectatorship, vision and art but also contemporary practices (such as the always-on in-home web cam) and popular texts (such as the conversations produced in online chat rooms). The Body and the Screen is deeply invested in new media technology and its implications on and articulations through the gendered body and as such she draws on feminist psychoanalytic theory, queer theory to offer new theoretical models of engaging the internet as a visual and textual space without either fantasizing about a bodyless digital future or yearning nostalgically for a bygone age of concrete material existence. The text also includes a large number of screen shots and visual objects which White reads and analyzes. Because many of these shots and objects are, by now, considerably dated, they offer at once a small node in the genealogy of internet practices as well as help to present a way of reading internet spaces as a humanist scholar.

5. GitHub: Social Coding

Github is a repository for open source software projects as well as corporate or private applications. It allows for easy collaboration between developers and offers a large database of open source code. While in large part this site is geared towards expert users to develop software in collaboration with one another, it could prove quite useful for those hoping to learn to program and to offer an interesting set of texts ripe for analysis for those whose interests are not software-building per se, but rather humanist inquiry into the process. For users who are not themselves programmers, GitHub can offer the data as text to be analyzed and examined. The site also offers tools to help visualize the collaborative process, including the network graphing application shown below. It also includes developer profiles and may serve non-coders as a site to find field-specific expertise.