Tag Archives: visual communication

Science’s exquisite corpse and other interesting science communication developments

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The ‘exquisite corpse’ is a game that surrealists started playing in the earlyish part of the 20th century, according to the wikipedia essay here. I first came across the game in a poetry context. I was part of an online poetry organization and someone suggested (as I recall) that we start an exquisite corpse project on our website. Nothing much of came of it but I’ve always found the phrase quite intriguing. The idea is that a group of people play with words or images individually then put the pieces together to construct a final work.

Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog has been featuring an art/science exquisite corpse project by Tim Jones. Billed as an experiment in science engagement, Jones and his colleagues (at the Imperial College) have created videos of two  members of the public, a science communicator, and a scientist talking about a drawing they’ve each created that expresses what they each think is important abou science.  What you’ll see are the interviews, the pictures that the people drew, and an exquisite corpse of science, if you go here.

Tim Jones has now invited more people to participate for the biggest art/science project in history (maybe) to create a bigger exquisite corpse of science. If you’re interested go here to Tim Jones’s site or you can read about it here at 2020 Science.

I came across a way for scientists to publish workflows and experiment plans  at myExperiment.

BBC4 has been conducting an experiment of their own, visualising radio. In this case, it’s a science show that’s cast over the internet. They’ve blogged about the project here.

All of this makes me think back to the interview that Kay O’Halloran (July 3, 6, and 7, 2009 postings) gave me on multimodal discourse analysis and Andrew Maynard’s bubble charts (June 24 and 29, 2009). It’s exciting to explore these new and rediscovered techniques and to think about how we perceive the information being conveyed to us.

One last bit, there’s been an announcement from Lord Drayson, UK’s Science and Innovation Minister and Chair of Ministerial Group on Nanotechnologies that the government is seeking advice for a national nanotechnology strategy. From the announcement on Nanowerks News,

Industry, academia and consumer groups were invited to use a new website to help develop the strategy, building on and consolidating the existing research and consultations that have already taken place. The website will gather views on core issues including research, regulation, innovation and commercialisation, measurement and standards and information as well as on the anticipated impact of nanotechnologies on a wide range of sectors. The aim of the strategy is to describe the actions necessary to ensure that the UK obtains maximum economic, environmental and societal benefit from nanotechnologies while keeping the risks properly managed.

The rest of the announcement is  here and the project website is here.  (NOTE: Consumer groups will have their own website although members of the public are welcome the new website is really intended for academia, industry, and NGOs.)

Happy weekend!

Kay O’Halloran interview on multimodal discourse: Part 1 of 3

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I am thrilled to announce that Kay O’Halloran an expert on multimodal discourse analysis has given me an interview. She recently spoke at the 2009 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa as a featured speaker (invited by the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing). Kay is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore and she is the Director of the Multimodal Analysis Lab. (more details about Kay in future installments)

Before going with the introduction and the interview, I want to explain why I think this work is important. (Forgive me if I gush?) We have so much media coming at us at any one time and it is increasingly being ‘mashed up’, remixed, reused, and repurposed. How important is text going to be when we have icons and videos and audio materials to choose from? Take for example, the bubble charts on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 blog which are a means of representing science Twitters. How do you interpret the information? Could they be used for in-depth analysis? (I commented earlier about the bubble charts on June 23 and 24, 2009 and Maynard’s post is here. You might also want to check out the comments where Maynard explains few things that puzzled me.)

As Kay points out in her responses to my questions, we have more to interpret than just a new type of chart or data visualization.

1. I was quite intrigued by the title of your talk (A Multimodal Approach to Discourse Studies: A paradigm with new research questions, agendas and directions for the digital age) at the 2009 Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences held in Ottawa, Canada this May. Could you briefly describe a multimodal approach for people who aren’t necessarily in the field of education?

Traditionally, language has been studied in isolation, largely due to an emphasis on the study of printed linguistic texts and existing technologies such as print media, telephone and radio where language was the primary resource which was used. However, various forms of images, animations and videos form the basis for sharing information in the digital age, and thus it has become necessary to move beyond the study of language to understand contemporary communicative practices. In a sense, the study of language alone was never really sufficient because analysing what people wrote or said missed significant choices such as typography, layout and the images which appeared in the written texts, and the intonation, actions and gestures which accompanied spoken language. In addition, disciplinary knowledge (e.g. mathematics, science and social science disciplines) involves mathematical symbolism and various kinds of images, in addition to language. Therefore, researchers in language studies and education are moving beyond the study of language to multimodal approaches in order to investigate how linguistic choices combine with choices from other meaning-making resources.

Basically multimodal research explores the various roles which language, visual images, movement, gesture, sound, music and other resources play, and the ways those resources integrate across modalities (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory etc) to create meaning in artefacts and events which form and transform culture. For example, the focus may be written texts, day-to-day interactions, internet sites, videos and films and 3-D objects and sites. In fact, one can think of knowledge and culture as specific choices from meaning-making resources which combine and unfold in patterns which are familiar to members of groups and communities.

Moreover, there is now explicit acknowledgement in educational research that disciplinary knowledge is multimodal and that literacy extends beyond language.

The shift to multimodal research has taken place as a result of digital media which not only serves as the object of study, but also because digital media technologies offer new research tools to study multimodal texts. Such technologies have become available and affordable, and increasingly they are being utilised by multimodal researchers in order to make complex multimodal analysis possible. Lastly, scientists and engineers are increasingly looking to social scientists to solve important problems involving multimodal phenomena, for example, data analysis, search and retrieval and human computer interface design. Computer scientists and social sciences face similar problems in today’s world of digital media, and interdisciplinary collaboration is the promise of the future in what has become the age of information.

Have a nice weekend. There’ll be more of the interview next week, including a bibliography that Kay very kindly provided.