Hot Dogs and Contextualization
Background
My visualizations compare statistics of three societal “hot-topics”, teen sex, drug use, and crime rates, with the disparate data of U.S. hot dog sales. One of the reasons that I chose this route was simply as a personal exercise in compiling a coherent work from contextually dissimilar elements. There is nothing about a hot dog visually or conceptually that out rightly denotes sex, drugs or crime, and the twisting of an innocent hot dog to merge with these ideas posed an intriguing idea to myself artistically. The main goal of this project’s juxtaposition, however, is to examine the overall effect of data manipulation. Specifically, I wanted to experiment with the divide between the received, image data, and perceived, numerical/textual data, and the power balance between the two.
Since the visualizations themselves are based on the absolute values of the numerical data, in theory any accurate representation of these numbers should provide the exact same information. Nevertheless, our brains still vary the impact of information based on how it is absorbed. As Scott Mccloud mentions in Understanding Comics, “Pictures are received information…the message is instantaneous [while] writing is perceived information…tak[ing] time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language.” This affords visual data great power over perceived information due to the immediacy with which it is taken in. Thus when raw data is channeled into a new form it loses objectivity as it is subjected to the design of the author. Then, as Ben Fry says concerning visualizations creation, "Storytelling winds up being the crux of this stuff." In Fry’s view, which tends to be critiqued by the scientific community due to its invocation of initial bias, he states “I'm much more interested in getting people to think about what kind of story they want to tell, or what kind of narrative they're trying to pull out, and working backwards from that, back to the data.”
Either way, when working with these two forms of information then, it becomes vital to identify the power and subjectivity held by the image against the raw information. In my visualizations, the audience starts with a preconceived notion that there is no correlation between hot dogs and sex, drugs, or crime but still allows themselves to be taken in by the visuals. The “Hot Dogs and Sex” piece, for example, is nothing more than a stacked bar graph, but the visual puns created between the objects lend a visceral significance to the actual objects and synthesize correlation between the otherwise disparate elements.
Within the overall project I sought to further my experimentation by pushing the visual weight of the elements to both extremes, and examine each resulting impact. The “Hot Dogs and Sex” example puts most of its bulk into the visual side, and thus seems to be the most initially striking and evocative of emotional response with the most inter-related elements of any piece. Conversely much less of the information presented in the “Hot Dogs and Crime Clock” falls on the visual side, (especially in the depiction of any correlation between the hot dogs and the criminal acts) and the viewer is left with a more sanitized, detached, and purely intellectual impression of the data. Just a bit of a, “hmm…that’s a lot of hot dogs.” The marijuana visualization then falls between the other two in terms of its balance of visual and numerical data, and perhaps because it does not quite embrace either the emotional or intellectual side comes off a bit more lifeless.
Technical Details
Adobe Caslon Pro (Caslon 540 substitution) was utilized throughout the visualization to subtly supplement the visual advertisement style of the 1950’s-60’s where a lot of the ideas of the classic, American hot dog. I was considering Playbill, Century of Futura, but felt these might have been too overtly referential and distracting from the rest of the work. Careful notice was taken to change any of my stacked text (such as the numerical dates running vertically in the marijuana visualization) to rotated vertical text due to the claims of “type crime” in Ellen Lupton’s book, Type. I also refrained from over-embellishing headings in the CSS of my website design for the same reason.
Dogs and Sex
In laying out and designing each piece, many decisions were made with respect with Dondis’s Primer of Visual Literacy. For example the core of the “Hot Dogs and Sex” visualization is a series of lines set within a firm grid. These lines, as Dondis points out, are “restless, probing… [and] uniquely able to lead the eye across the page.” Combined with the asymmetry of the right and left side of the grid a tension is created across the page and furthers the sexual innuendo.
Dogs and Marijuana
Hot dogs have a deep root within American iconography, and I tried respect both of the idealized views that appear most often in advertising. The first platonic vision of a hot dog is embodied in the profile/side-view utilized in the first and last visualizations. Then, to add a dynamic quality to the middle composition, while also building a bit of rhythm from one visualization to the next, I chose the canted, leading-towards-the-mouth, ready-to-bite perspective for the hot dog/joint combination. Since both the desire of the hot dog and the marijuana cigarette stem from an oral fixation, a unity in theme is also provided by the use of this angle which properly “balance[s the] diverse elements into all of one totality,” (Dondis). Thus, at least visually, the disparity between the hot dog and marijuana them is rectified.
Dogs and Crime
The set finishes with the “Hot Dogs and Crime Clock” because, in my experience, a clock-like device is typically employed at the end of many visualization groups in order to drive home the argument. Interestingly, in this case, the primary emotive power of a statistical clock does not come from the visual manipulation but from a built in bias of the data itself. By creating a false world of absolute, averaged time and space, crime is no longer secluded to certain areas of the country or certain times of the year, and instead is brought to every corner of the country equally and each statistic pulses in an unrelenting pace synchronized to the beat of the clock.
To maintain the emphasis on the manipulated data itself Dondis’s visual theory of economy is invoked, and all the elements are kept to basic forms and shapes. Color is also left out of this composition to reinforce the visual flatness of the elements themselves, and to further accent the base data.