Week 1 Blog Post (Claire Saunders)

This passage of the text particularly interested me because it caused me to think about art and language in a new way. Digital_Humanities argues that language and visual content are not interchangeable, but instead different methods towards different ends. I was particularly fascinated by the idea that both words, rather than being a distinct medium, are simply a different kind of visual content. Both direct representational images and written words are symbols meant to communicate information, whether that be a narrative, an emotion, or a set of data. Instead of a picture being worth a thousand words (or the other way around), comparing words (one kind of image) to photograph (a different kind of image) might as well be comparing apples and oranges, or comparing spoken word to written word.

This passage also relates to my interest in the combination of text and graphics in graphic design and web design. The idea that the graphics and text that I would combine are not entirely different things but just different visual tools I can use will definitely affect the way I think about my projects in the future. For example, when combining text and images, I might combine them in a more complex or woven-together way, or warp the text to focus more on the image of the text than the content of the text itself. By looking through this lens, I also might focus more on fonts than I otherwise would. When creating a digital collage, for example, considering words as part of the image may affect the forms and shapes in the image.

This term, I am eager to learn more about data analysis and visualization, as it’s something I haven’t had much opportunity to work with in the past. I think that effective communication of data through visualizations is an important skill, particularly in the digital age.