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VISUALIZING COMPLEXITY AND UNCERTAINTY: EXPLORING HUMANISTIC APPROACHES TO GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION
Johanna Drucker (UCLA) on "Parallax Approaches: Non-Self-Identicality vs. Uncertainty"
Friday January 25, 2013 | 12:00 -01:30 PM |

The distinction between humanistic and positivistic approaches to knowledge involves incommensurable differences in basic tenets of belief. As a consequence, interpretative and empirical methods require very different approaches to visualization. Historical reconstruction and visualizations in the field of archaeology often make use of graphic effects that can show uncertainty. In that context, the term usually refers to partial or incomplete knowledge based on the fragmentary nature of the historical or material record, and the visualization is encoded (with differences of tone, color, opacity or other effect) to make explicit where the evidence is lacking and what is speculative in the visualization. But conventions for visualizing a concept like non-self-identicality, the belief that knowledge constitutes its object, are much less developed. One principle that could be put into play is parallax -- the fracturing of visualization into views, slices, segments, that cannot be reduced to each other and can only be read as artifacts of interpretative method.