“Reality is manipulated in many ways and does not lie around waiting to be glanced at” (Gad & Jensen, 2010, p. 71)

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ENGL 5614

Spring 2022

Chris Lindgren, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Data Visualization
Department of English, Virginia Tech

On Visualizing Scale
(draft, subject to change)

How do we "see" scale? How do we make our reality conspicuous with increasingly larger and bigger datafications of it? What happens when we tokenize it to render claims and evidence about our particular groupings of life, all of which are much larger or smaller than what we can "normally" perceive? This course explores these questions by drawing upon multiple frameworks and methodologies to study the rhetorics, consequences, and potential futures of visualizing our datified lives. We will examine how the boundaries that data and information set impact the conditions of what we know and how we come to know it. This includes understanding the visual rhetorics of data itself, its visualization, as well as the impact these relationships between "seeing" data and communicating it impact audiences across intersections of gender, race, and class.

To accomplish this aim, we will first define the field of visual rhetoric more broadly by reviewing its exigencies and definitions. From there, we will "make conspicuous" (Roundtree, 2013, p. 106) any new connections and boundaries possible between visual rhetoric and areas such as critical data studies, Black feminism, decoloniality, and accessibility / disability studies.

Throughout the course we will also learn some fundamental data and information design practices that use the Python programming language and Google's Colab interactive notebooks.

(Potential) Texts

Visual Rhetoric's Exigencies

  • Blakesley, D., & Brooke, C. (2001). Introduction: Notes on Visual Rhetoric. Enculturation, 3(2). http://www.enculturation.net/3_2/introduction.html
  • Brumberger, E. R. (2005). Visual rhetoric in the curriculum: Pedagogy for a multimodal workplace. Business Communication Quarterly, 68(3), 318–333.
  • Foss, S. K. (1982). Rhetoric and the visual image: A resource unit. Communication Education, 31(1), 55–66.
  • Foss, S. K. (2005). Theory of visual rhetoric. In K. Smith, S. Moriarty, G. Barbatsis, & K. Kenney (Eds.), Handbook of visual communication: Theory, methods, and media (pp. 141–152). Routledge.
  • Lamp, K. (2011). “A City of Brick”: Visual Rhetoric in Roman Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 44(2), 171-193.
  • Olson, L. C. (2007). Intellectual and Conceptual Resources for Visual Rhetoric: A Re-examination of Scholarship Since 1950. Review of Communication, 7(1), 1–20.
  • Rosner, M. (2001). Theories of Visual Rhetoric: Looking at the Human Genome. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 31(4), 391–413.
  • Roundtree, A. (2013). Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination. Lexington.
  • Walsh, L. (2015). The visual rhetoric of climate change: The visual rhetoric of climate change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 6(4), 361–368.
  • Wolfe, J. (2015). Teaching students to focus on the data in data visualization. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 29(3), 344–359.

Critical / Foundational: Scale & 'Matrices of Power'

  • Selections from Adams, Vincanne, Ed. (2016). Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Duke UP.
  • Chun, Wendy H. K. (2021). Discriminating Data. MIT Press.
  • Collins, Patricia H. (1990/2009). Black Feminist Thought. Routledge.
  • DiCaglio, Joshua. (2021). Scale Theory: A Non-Disciplinary Inquiry. U of Minnesota Press.
  • Du Bois, W. E. B. (1908). "The Princess Steel" published in PMLA, 130(3) (2015)
  • Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

Background image: Robin Hübscher's haptic data visualization prototype.
CSS Grid template modified from Barefoot's Codepen.