Visualizing Knowledge

During the first ARTStem seminar, we talked quite a bit about the power of various art forms to give visual, tangible form to the knowledge that humans discover and create, including scientific knowledge. One of the places this came up was over at Duke University where we visited their immersive virtual environment and sound labs. In both, art (combined with technology)was helping translate one type of knowledge into a different form. Movement into sound, history into image, etc. But ultimately, one of the challenges I think most the group recognized by seminar's end came down to this question: How do we translate the playful, free-wheeling, imaginative conversation that the 4-day event allowed for into something more enduring? Put another way, if we created meaningful knowledge during the seminar (knowledge of each other, of our two institutions, of the different 'disciplines' we represent, how do we represent (i.e. RE-present, present again) and even recreate it in other places, even in our classrooms? That's a tough nut to crack, and one I suspect we'll be playing with a lot in the months to come.

However, one of the other participants, Jason Romney (a sound designer at UNCSA), had a cool idea on the last day of the seminar. He copied-and-pasted the text from some of the group's correspondence and blog material into a "word cloud generator." Word clouds are pretty interesting things, because they effectively take something fundamentally non-visual--a conversation--and turn it into an image. The terms used most often in a conversation (minus the usual suspects of "a," "an," "the," and other mundane words like that) are given more prominence and weight in the image. So a quick look at the cloud tells you a lot about the focus of the conversation. It's not a perfect, seamless translation. But thinking about how this little technological process both captures and fails to capture the intricacies of human conversation is, itself, worth thinking thinking about more.

Using the free online application, Wordle, I tried to recreate Jason's spontaneous image-creation. Here it is as a .jpg. I think it does a pretty good job illustrating the ideas that flowed during the seminar. (image credit: http://www.wordle.net)