Readings:
Chapter 1 of Visual Explanations book (Tufte)
Cleveland & Cleveland, The nature and types of abstracts
Surrogation: making things smaller.
Physically smaller, informationally smaller.
(mini-diplomas, microfilm, driver's license, bibliographic record ...)
Distillation: meaningful, not random.
Making it complete, we'll do that in a few weeks.
(name surrogates?)
Abstracting represents the content (remember this, content comes up later!).
Other kinds of surrogation represent the form, or the intellectual attributes.
(C & C refer to indexing. what is indexing? indexing means you represent the content by using a few terms that are gleaned from a pre-existing list of terms)
Abstracts may either be more "abstract" (conceptual) or more specific than the item they are representing.
picture vs. word: which is more specific, which matches the user's mental models best?
Abstracts as surrogates: help users deal with too many documents but also an important point: help deal with a knowledge base (an aggregate, of course) rather than with individual pieces that may not be significant alone.
(backs of books / dust jacket blurbs : abstracts as adverts)
Surrogates as boundary objects: e.g., translate the small bit rather than the whole thing. Not just different languages but different jargons, argots, etc.
Another interesting categorization:
By Internal Purpose:
indicative, informative, critical
indicative: tells you what you will find out when you read the item
informative: tells you what you would find out if you read the item,
which you won't now because you have the information already
critical: tells you whether or not the item is worth your time
You might want to think about this distinction in the purposes of item surrogates when you do the first assignment. It may be a helpful way for you to think about the surrogates you see.
Also good to think about who created a given surrogate (remember learning about bias in junior high or high school?)
pp. 14-15 a lovely visual example of the prime shift from "miniature pictorial representations of the physical world" to dimensions that refer "only to themselves."
The world is multivariate and much representation has to occur in two dimensions.
But notice the illustration on p. 16: it's not just the dimensionality (the little guys with poles, the trees) that changes, it's the encoding that has changed as well. In this case do we see a confounding of direct labels and self-representing scales? Are the poles object of known size or do they stand in for direct labels?
we need scale, orientation, labels ...
Think about a verbal surrogate like an abstract: do you want to know how long the abstract is, or how long the item referred to is? Do verbal surrogates represent objects with direction? what about temporality? What about dimensions?
Visually distracting elements : not only visually distracting but also intellectually distracting. Desirable? Perhaps.
Visual representations informed by the wrong metaphor: a surrogate created in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, using the wrong techniques; or, good science, bad art? (hey, I hadn't yet turned the page when I wrote that, but let me add Tufte's words: "Terrific television but lousy science.") Depends on what science is ... and that's a vital issue in representation: how does the representation affect the integrity of the underlying process??? See esp. the sidebar on p. 24., and Tufte's words on "imprisoned" knowledge.
Plus, it looks like a whale.
But anyway ... "extravagant dequantification". Lovely phrase.
And things aren't all bad, as even Tufte admits.