Xref: utzoo alt.hypertext:857 comp.multimedia:372 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!rex!ukma!s.ms.uky.edu!jpenny From: jpenny@ms.uky.edu (Jim Penny) Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.multimedia Subject: Re: Images vs. Text Message-ID: Date: 18 Apr 91 16:40:55 GMT References: <34980@athertn.Atherton.COM>> <1991Apr17.204748.8994@agate.berkeley.edu> Distribution: na Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences Lines: 111 thom@garnet.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) writes: >In article jpenny@ms.uky.edu (Jim Penny) writes: >>Scott McGregor Asks: >> >> deleted stuff... >> >>Now an addendum: >> >>I do not deny that pictures are useful. >> >> deleted stuff... >> >>There are useful reasons to use pictures in a computer interface: >> >>1) The intended audience could be pre-literate. >>2) The intended audience could come from the writer's culture but >> be non-literate. >>3) The intended audience could simply prefer seeing the pictures, >> either as a relief from a day spent looking mostly at words, >> or as some part of a religious belief. >>4) The intended audience might not read the writer's language. >> >> deleted stuff... >> >>Secondly, if it takes a long time to decode a word, it is not because it >>takes longer for a word to be seen than a picture. Decoding the >>meaning of a picture will take at least as long, and since most of us have >>a great deal of practice decoding words, it will probably take longer to decode >>the picture. >Granted I 'culled' from Jim's thoughts/words, but what the hell, it's email >right? >1 Point: >The primary means of communication today is TV, print isn't even close, words >are the 'illustration' on TV, not pictures. Pictures aren't just useful, they >are indispensible. I disagree with this assertion. Every time someone brings this up, the networks start to belive it, and turn off the sound. This generally leads to shows which are vastly unpopular. NBC has done it at least twice, heavily hyped for football games, and both have been big ratings losers, this despite the fact that the sound was not turned off completely, only the announcer's voice was removed. I believe that the words are an integral part of the television (and movie) experience, and probably the most important part of the experience. I could easily conceive of a television dispensing with the pictures (in fact I call it a `radio'), but find it hard to believe that many people would watch television without the words. In fact, I think that it is the presence of the words, and equally the music which tell us how the pictures are to be interpreted. I know that for me at least, horror films are much less horrifying without sound. To paraphrase ``I'm Gonna Get You Sucka'', a superhero aint't nothing without his music. Watching CSPAN without sound would qualify for alt.boredom (of course my wife asserts that it does with the sound on.) >1 Question to Jim and the other 'text leaners': >Can you and do you draw? >************************** >My guess is that you can't and don't because you can't. It took you at least 10 >years to learn to use words well -- words are much more difficult to learn to >use than pictures. Some one learning to use a picture language or a >text/picture language will have to expend some energy -- tool using is tough. I am not real good, but can draw representational art to the point of recognizability. I am especially not good at drawing things from memory or imagination. I have worked at it sporadically over the years, but find that I am better at plastic arts. I do quite a bit of wood working as a hobby, and do like to use both low relief and chip carving as decorative touches. Further, I have real interests in computational geometry, which has a strong graphic component, and must frequently draw as an aid to the imagination. 2) For the picture leaners--Wouldn't it be better to communicate by a series of moving statues? After all people have historically had a great deal of difficulty understanding perspective? I think that we are just passing through a phase in which two-dimensional substitutes for four-dimensional stuctures are used as a matter of convenience. ;-) >The only reason there are computer screens with only text on them is because of >technical limitations, not because text is better. My guess is that even in >research areas we will 'run' the experiment and 'see' what the experimenter >'saw' in the first place, and if we can't 'see' it, it's because it we have a >different 'view'. There will be 'connecting text' for the visualizations and >the auralizations, but it will be just for illumination. I think your guess is wrong. Even in the most mundane cases, features are simply too hard to detect without first being told what to look for. I have sequences of pictures having only 8, 10, 12,... 20 lines (or equivalently segments) in them. I would be glad to email them in PostScript from to anyone who thinks that they can decode the meaning of say the first 3 in each series. In the work that I do, and I suspect in the work that most of us do, pictures are relegated to illumination for very good reasons; it is simply impossible to convey most things without textual explanation, and in fact the amount of explanation is usually large. Try to draw a picture of a continuous non-differentiable curve, or of a quark or to illustrate the difference between the strong and weak operator topologies. Show these pictures to an untrained audience-- how far do you think they will get in perceiving the meaning. >--Thom