viz.

The Copyranter, a blogger I'm becoming more and more of a fan of, recently posted these images from an Italian ad campaign for stove-top coffee makers. The title of the ads, or the slogan paired with them is, "the bite of coffee."

A UT Information Science student, Will Martin, has come up with what I think is an ingenious way to reference glyphs. Will uses a tag cloud to associate words with the pictures in the glyphs. So, if you're trying to find out what a glyph with, say, an alligator in it means, you simply visit Will's tag cloud and click on "alligator," at which point all the glyphs containing alligators will show up. This seems to me like a really useful and intuitive way to use our alphabetic system to reference a glyphic system, like the Egyptian one here, when the user is unfamiliar with the glyphic system at hand.

In Oregon, one of the 49 states that I am not from, Democratic Senate candidate Steve Novick has released a few campaign ads that cleverly play on two of his attributes that might otherwise be construed as weaknesses, his 4'9" height and his prosthetic hand. A friend forwarded me a link to a Huffington Post blog entry about the ads. I have embedded the actual ads below.

I like to use short videos like these in my rhetoric class to get students talking about basic rhetorical principles, such as how a person develops a particular ethos, and what the ramifications of that ethos might be for various artists.

I've always thought that the best graffiti is on train cars. Maybe it's not always the best graphically, but I like the statement--not only has the tagger tagged, but the canvas is mobile and likely to get pulled all over the country, set forth into the world. It's bold. Not as bold as the graffiti on interstate signs where some kid crawled out on a metal pole over 80 mile-an-hour traffic, but bold nonetheless.

Over the summer I was unfortunate enough to require a reconstruction of my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). As I was wheeled out of the clinic in an anaesthetic haze, my doctor handed me a series of photos not unlike the ones below.

Students in my Rhetoric of Spying Class recently read sections of the 9/11 Commission Report, along with the graphic novel version of the report (for a thorough discussion of the graphic novel version and its critics, including some great links, click here).

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

The Hit & Run blog, incidentally, is a product of the libertarian publication Reason, which, regardless of what you think of its politics, is a good place to troll for stories pertaining to visual culture.

Viz: The Future

First, a little background. For those of you who don't know, the re-design of the CWRL's Visual Rhetoric page as Viz and the addition of a blog was John Jones's idea. We revamped the site and added the blog in the spring while both he and I were working as the visual rhetoric developers for UT's CWRL. John was recently selected to serve as a CWRL Assistant Director, which is a two year position. He will continue to contribute to the blog, but his duties as an AD may limit those contributions. I will continue to serve as a visual rhetoric developer for the next year. Here's what you can expect to see on Viz over the course of that next year. 1) We will continue to add theory articles to the site. 2) We will continue to add assignments and bibliographic entries to the site. 3) The blog will get bigger and better. 4) We will add blog contributors and add a section to the site that will include brief bios on each contributor. 5) We will try to upload a non-copyrighted version of the visual rhetoric PowerPoint presentation we developed for use in UT's RHE 306 and RHE 309K/S classes last year, including the infamous Facebook Ambush. So, at a minimum these are the additions we're hoping to making to the site over the next year.

Dartmouth has a very interesting website I just discovered that documents the manipulation of photos with examples spanning photography's history. The site is well worth checking out. Many of the examples provided touch on sensitive issues, making them potentially rich for an in-class discussion of what's at stake (rhetorically, politically, journalistically, historically) when photos are manipulated by photographers, news editors or political leaders.

The reappropriation of the word "queer" from a pejorative term to a term of self-identity and strength for the gay community has been well documented. It's worth pointing out though that another symbol currently associated with the gay rights movement, a pink triangle, is itself reappropriated from its much more menacing origins in Nazi identification systems. The pink triangle was, like the more well-known yellow Star of David, used to mark a population the Nazis deemed threatening, in this case homosexual men. Trusty Wikipedia has a brief discussion of the phenomenon with lots of relevant links.