Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 592.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 06:58:40 +0000
From: peter storkerson <pstork@tiac.net>
Subject: Re: 14.0590 cognitive effects of formatting
This is a very large but, theoretically at least, poorly charted region.
Tuftes work is elegant, along with Bertins Semiologie Graphique.
Unfortunately, while these are good on the level of functional readability
and visual hierarchy, they are largely a-theoretical on the levels of
meaning making.tufte's is very much a rule book of good practice. Put
simply, they presume meaning making and the communicative devices used that,
at some point, need to be questioned.
There are probably 3 types of sources: Cognitive psychology, communication
design (my field), and semiotics. Much of the work in psychology deals with
images mostly as illustrations. The very good work is generally on too
anatomical a level to be directly used to understand meaning making so
you'll have to make the connections, but it is invaluable. Communication
design is lacking theory because it's at a difficult epistemological
conjunction.
You might look in the field of visual semiotics I think that the majority
of work in that field is as much about the approach as results. With respect
to documents, this material seems to function on a symbolic or critical
level, i.e. the sign systems used and how they might function, not how they
come to be recognized and chosen. This is not the same as the cognitive
level, which is anatomical, i.e. what are the cognitive affordances offered
by a given set of resources (text, diagram, image, movie, etc.) : 1 What a
presentation is: i.e., what are the strategic characteristics that affect
its meaning.
2 How does a presentation build a cognitive object .
3. What are the cognitive affordances of different modes of communication.
Here are some references:
Lanigan, Richard: Phenomenology of Communication
Scott, Richard: On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic. Central The Central States
Speech Journal Vol. XVIII, #1
Visible Language, V. 26, # 3-4 (all articles)
Kosslyn, Jeffrey. Image and Mind
Proceedings of the 9th Euro mini conference on Human Centered Processes,
<www-hcp99.enst-bretagne.fr>
(blowing my own horn) www.tiac.net/users/pstork/ Narrative and diagram,
Context and Interpretation
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