Joseph Priestley: the man who drew time

The Joseph Priestley House Museum at Northumberland, Pennsylvania became interested in Priestley's pioneering timelines as a complement to his better known work in chemistry, electricity, biblical scholarship and political radicalism. Boyd Davis wrote this short article for the newsletter published by the Friends of the museum. The article concentrates on the connections between Priestley, his French contemporary Barbeu-Dubourg and Benjamin Franklin at the time of the struggle for American Independence, and Priestley's two key chronographic innovations: the use of drawn or printed lines to represent the duration of lives, and the associated use of dots to show when the dates of such lives are in doubt or dispute. Keywords: timeline, chronographic

Book review. Cartographies of Time: a history of the timeline

A review of 'Cartographies of Time: a history of the timeline' by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. (272pp. ISBN: 9781568987637)

Time machines.

The chapter is concerned with the use of computers to represent historical time visually, typically as ‘timelines’. Research into the sophisticated practice and theory of early modern paper timelines in the eighteenth century reveals the weakness of current practice, especially on the Web. Behind the work of the early pioneers lay a vision of mechanising knowledge. At that time, this proved a productive metaphor, but in our own time the mechanistic properties of computers have tended to encourage an approach to visualising history that excludes all but the crudest aspects. Solutions are needed which use computing in ways that do justice to the demands of historiography

Mapping the unseen: making sense of the subjective image.

It used to be thought that photography, as a kind of automatic mapping, could provide an objective view of the world. Now we are aware of the power of framing and other interventions between what is 'out there' and what is captured in depiction. Perhaps even perception, let alone depiction, shares this subjectivity? The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that different cultures actually see the world in different ways, as evidenced and influenced by concepts in their languages – though this idea has been derided, for example by Pinker. A key difficulty is that the word subjectivity is bandied about without care for its different meanings and without distinguishing the many forms it takes in the graphic image. If into this muddle we introduce the idea of interactivity, still greater confusion easily follows. The chapter brings some order to different kinds and levels of subjectivity by documenting how they are reflected in forms of graphical mapping. In the process, it becomes clear how significant is the change in media technologies from those bound by the conventional rectangles of the page and screen to media which are interactive, pervasive, multimodal, physical and social

'Scratch' locative audio drama - report to BBC executives on trial at BBC FreeThinking 2008

‘Scratch’ investigates the use of physical space as a representation of narrative and dramatic structure. An audio-drama, it is a world-first in being location-sensitive without being tied to any particular place (preceding attempts by others have emphasised location-specific aspects of the genre). Developed in collaboration with and part-funded by BBC Radio Drama, it builds on research undertaken for ‘Dragons’ (output 4). It uses pre-recorded audio on GPS-enabled mobile devices allowing sounds to be virtually attached to locations in an outdoor space. As participants move, they encounter scenes forming a coherent drama which behave differently if the same place is visited more than once. This translocational approach opens novel artistic possibilities exploited through team expertise in narrative, sound design and advanced interaction. It is also significant in the economics of broadcast media as a more viable proposition than the many experimental locative experiences which have been site-specific: this was of great interest to the BBC. The public performance selected for BBC FreeThinking, 1-2 September 2008 in Liverpool as part of European Capital of Culture was reported in a co-authored 2009 conference presentation at ISEA, Belfast, 26-29 August 2009 and in a co-authored short chapter in Spierling and Szilas (eds.) Interactive Storytelling, Springer 2008. Boyd Davis directed the project and devised and undertook the evaluation with 40 trial listeners, reporting to BBC executives (http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/1000/) for whom a second trial was also run in London in 2009. The evaluation used interview, video observation and a questionnaire combining an open question at the beginning with more specific questions later, avoiding channelling respondents' reactions immediately after the experience into issues which might not be uppermost in their minds, while also yielding data capable of rigorous analysis. The evaluation was to provide feedback to the makers of the drama and to guide policy at the BBC. [287] Participants were recruited principally through the publicity for FreeThinking 2008 – mainly via the festival website. The average age of participants was 40. The gender of participants was 20 males, 17 females and 3 null returns. The evaluation strategy was to combine an open question at the beginning with more specific questions later. In this way we avoided channeling respondents' initial opinions immediately after the experience into issues which might not be uppermost in their minds, while also yielding data capable of rigorous analysis. The purpose of the evaluation was to provide guidance for ourselves as the makers of the drama and to guide policy at the BBC on locative and other interactive media. The responses are analysed in the report

The Thesis: texts and machines

This opening chapter focuses on how research knowledge is represented in the dissertation as a textual format. It sets the dissertation in two contexts. Borg discusses its historical formation within the technologies of the pen and the typewriter; Boyd Davis analyses the changes produced by digital technologies, offering counter-arguments to the claim that the predominantly textual thesis is a poor representation of research knowledge. He advances evidence-based arguments, using a synthesis of recent technological developments, for the additional functionality that text has acquired as a result of being digital and being connected via international networks, contrasting this with the relatively poor forms of access available even now using pictures, moving images and other non-textual forms. The chapter argues that the dissertation is inherently contingent, changing and changeable. While supervisors may expect their students to produce a dissertation that resembles the one they wrote themselves, changes both in the available technologies and in the kinds of knowledge the dissertation is expected to represent are having a significant effect on its form as well as its content. Boyd Davis is co-editor of the book in which this chapter is published, which has its origins in an ESRC-funded seminar series, ‘New Forms of Doctorate’ (2008–10), that he co-devised and co-chaired. The work grew out Boyd Davis’s questioning of methods and formats for research knowledge in his introduction to, and editing of, a special issue of Digital Creativity, entitled Creative Evaluation, in 2009. This followed a peer-reviewed symposium on evaluative techniques within creative work supported by the Design Research Society and British Computer Society, which he devised and chaired. Related work on forms of knowledge in interactive media appears in an article with Faiola and Edwards of Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis, for New Media and Society (2010)

Just In Time: defining historical chronographics

The paper is historical in two respects, both concerned with visual representations of past time. Its first purpose is to enquire how visual representations of historical time can be used to bring out patterns in a museum collection. A case study is presented of the visualisation of data with sufficient subtlety to be useful to historians and curators. Such a visual analytics approach raises questions about the proper representation of time and of objects and events within it. It is argued that such chronographics can support both an externalised, objectivising point of view from ‘outside’ time and one which is immersive and gives a sense of the historic moment. These modes are set in their own historical context through original historical research, highlighting the shift to an Enlightenment view of time as a uniform container for events. This in turn prompts new ways of thinking about chronological visualisation, in particular the separation of the ‘ideal’ image of time from contingent, temporary rendered views

A Word about the Weather: depiction and visualisation

‘Finally, a word about the Weather.’ With these words, the BBC Trust began an unusual paragraph in their 2007 report on impartiality (BBC Trust 2007:53). The advent of a new three-dimensional visualisation of the weather in May 2005 had prompted immediate criticism. The images suggested northern Scotland was on the periphery, while south-east England was in the forefront. In its own odd way this controversy touches on an important issue in visualisation and depiction, and on the relationship between those two things. This was a paper for the AHRC IT Methods Workshop ‘From Abstract Data Mapping to 3D Photorealism.’ The workshop title could be taken to imply that abstract data mapping (visualisation) and photorealism (an extreme form of depiction) are as far apart as can be, perhaps even that they are opposites. By contrast, this paper explores some aspects they have in common. Boyd Davis argues that it is productive to think of depiction as a form of visualisation, and to think of it as therefore subject to many of the same design considerations

Design, history and time: New temporalities in a digital age, eds. Zoë Hendon and Anne Massey (Book Review)

This 2000-word invited review discusses each chapter and the overall concept of Hendon and Massey's book, which brings out the use in many cases of a single object as a source of semiotic, social and political analysis. One of the things that emerges as most clearly “designed” in the volume under review is history itself. When Herbert Simon proposed in 1969 that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” he was thinking about designing the future. This volume emphasizes how we design certain pasts to suit and shape our chosen narratives. It is a truism of historiography that histories are selective and formative. What this fascinating collection adds is a perception that the design of history is as important as the history of design, and that it takes a multitude of forms both tangible and intangible. Those who succeed in designing the past may control the future

Media Space: an analysis of spatial practices in planar pictorial media.

The thesis analyses the visual space displayed in pictures, film, television and digital interactive media. The argument is developed that depictions are informed by the objectives of the artefact as much as by any simple visual correspondence to the observed world. The simple concept of ‘realism’ is therefore anatomised and a more pragmatic theory proposed which resolves some of the traditional controversies concerning the relation between depiction and vision. This is then applied to the special problems of digital interactive media. An introductory chapter outlines the topic area and the main argument and provides an initial definition of terms. To provide a foundation for the ensuing arguments, a brief account is given of two existing and contrasted approaches to the notion of space: that of perception science which gives priority to acultural aspects, and that of visual culture which emphasises aspects which are culturally contingent. An existing approach to spatial perception (that of JJ Gibson originating in the 1940s and 50s) is applied to spatial depiction in order to explore the differences between seeing and picturing, and also to emphasise the many different cues for spatial perception beyond those commonly considered (such as binocularity and linear perspective). At this stage a simple framework of depiction is introduced which identifies five components or phases: the objectives of the picture, the idea chosen to embody the objectives, the model (essentially, the visual ‘subject matter’), the characteristics of the view and finally the substantive picture or depiction itself. This framework draws attention to the way in which each of the five phases presents an opportunity for decision-making about representation. The framework is used and refined throughout the thesis. Since pictures are considered in some everyday sense to be ‘realistic’ (otherwise, in terms of this thesis, they would not count as depictions), the nature of realism is considered at some length. The apparently unitary concept is broken down into several different types of realism and it is argued that, like the different spatial cues, each lends itself to particular objectives intended for the artefact. From these several types, two approaches to realism are identified, one prioritising the creation of a true illusion (that the picture is in fact a scene) and the other (of which there are innumerably more examples both across cultures and over historical time) one which evokes aspects of vision without aiming to exactly imitate the optical stimulus of the scene. Various reasons for the latter approach, and the variety of spatial practices to which it leads, are discussed. In addition to analysing traditional pictures, computer graphics images are discussed in conjunction with the claims for realism offered by their authors. In the process, informational and affective aspects of picture-making are distinguished, a distinction which it is argued is useful and too seldom made. Discussion of still pictures identifies the evocation of movement (and other aspects of time) as one of the principal motives for departing from attempts at straightforward optical matching. The discussion proceeds to the subject of film where, perhaps surprisingly now that the depiction of movement is possible, the lack of straightforward imitation of the optical is noteworthy again. This is especially true of the relationship between shots rather than within them; the reasons for this are analysed. This reinforces the argument that the spatial form of the fiction film, like that of other kinds of depiction, arises from its objectives, presenting realism once again as a contingent concept. The separation of depiction into two broad classes – one which aims to negate its own mediation, to seem transparent to what it depicts, and one which presents the fact of depiction ostensively to the viewer – is carried through from still pictures, via film, into a discussion of factual television and finally of digital interactive media. The example of factual television is chosen to emphasise how, despite the similarities between the technologies of film and television, spatial practices within some television genres contrast strongly with those of the mainstream fiction film. By considering historic examples, it is shown that many of the spatial practices now familiar in factual television were gradually expunged from the classical film when the latter became centred on the concerns of narrative fiction. By situating the spaces of interactive media in the context of other kinds of pictorial space, questions are addressed concerning the transferability of spatial usages from traditional media to those which are interactive. During the thesis the spatial practices of still-picture-making, film and television are characterised as ‘mature’ and ‘expressive’ (terms which are defined in the text). By contrast the spatial practices of digital interactive media are seen to be immature and inexpressive. It is argued that this is to some degree inevitable given the context in which interactive media artefacts are made and experienced – the lack of a shared ‘language’ or languages in any new media. Some of the difficult spatial problems which digital interactive media need to overcome are identified, especially where, as is currently normal, interaction is based on the relation between a pointer and visible objects within a depiction. The range of existing practice in digital interactive media is classified in a seven-part taxonomy, which again makes use of the objective-idea-model-view-picture framework, and again draws out the difference between self-concealing approaches to depiction and those which offer awareness of depiction as a significant component of the experience. The analysis indicates promising lines of enquiry for the future and emphasises the need for further innovation. Finally the main arguments are summarised and the thesis concludes with a short discussion of the implications for design arising from the key concepts identified – expressivity and maturity, pragmatism and realism