Ooooh. I Get it Now!

Madeleine Sorapure's article was simultaneously really interesting to me, and really frustrating. I read it directly after putting the finishing touches on my plans for the next section of my English 102 course, which will be focused on communicating research findings digitally. Including assignments like this would have been so useful, and I'm left wishing there were a way to include an assignment similar to ones discussed here. We'll see what I figure out...

Up to this point, though I strongly encourage students to include visuals in their essays (there's a section related to this in all the rubrics I use), I frame this inclusion as an alternate, and sometimes more useful way to explain information. As this article demonstrates, this is really only the tip of the iceberg as far as possibilities are concerned. Well, really the whole course has been re-stating this in various ways, but for some reason this article finally made things really click.

Sorapure provides three main reasons for including “infovis” assignments in the writing classroom (Or, “The use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition”, according to Stuart Card, as quoted in the text (61).):

• “First, we can recreate and perhaps reinvigorate some of our typical assignments by asking students to reflect, analyze, and argue largely with quantitative information” (59).

• Second, “The unfamiliarity of infovis tools and the fact that they often provide multiple ways to visualize the same information may help students see how software in general influences critical thinking and writing processes” (60).

• Third, “In short, Web 2.0 infovis applications can enable us and our students to make the move from consuming to producing visual representations of information” (60).

I feel that this article hints at another reason, however, which connects to ideas in an article by Peter Elbow entitled “Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshman and Colleagues” that I read recently. In this essay, he discusses the fact that with traditionally structured English 101/102 classes, students are often left able to explain, but not able to “render experience”. He states, “Discourse that explains is part of that accomplishment, but discourse that renders is equally great-equally one of the preeminent gifts of human kind. When students leave the university unable to find words to render their experience, they are radically impoverished” (137). As far as my classroom is concerned, so far images have been mostly for “explaining” up to this point, but they really can do so much more.

For example, the illustrative assignment seen on pg. 66 does so much more than just “explain” something:


Actually, this looks like the visual equivalent to an assignment I used in 101 that asked students to catalog things like what they wrote, when they wrote it, and how they wrote for a full 24 hours and then analyze the data. Instead of just “explaining”, this assignment presents visual analysis of the student's “photographic life”, and communicates elements of experience to the viewer as well. In fact, I bet doing something like this with my writing assignment would help to make some things click that often are a real struggle for some students, such as how much of their time really is spent writing, and what sorts of writing take up the majority of that time.

While collections of visualizations like the ones above don't communicate in the same ways as text by itself, I think it's important that we emphasize the fact that they are capable of doing all of the same sorts of work. They're not just a way to take up space, or a way to show a bunch of statistics in an easy to digest format.