Xref: utzoo alt.hypertext:874 comp.multimedia:390 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!amdcad!jetsun!pyramid!athertn!hemlock!mcgregor From: mcgregor@hemlock.Atherton.COM (Scott McGregor) Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.multimedia Subject: Re: People who can draw Images vs. People who can't Text Message-ID: <35096@athertn.Atherton.COM> Date: 23 Apr 91 20:07:03 GMT References: <1991Apr18.191452.5677@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: news@athertn.Atherton.COM Reply-To: mcgregor@hemlock.Atherton.COM (Scott McGregor) Followup-To: alt.hypertext Distribution: na Organization: Atherton Technology -- Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 153 In article , nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo) writes: [many well worded, and valid comments worth reading removed....] >* In scientific arenas, however, a good deal of effort has been put into > making text and language precise, through carefully controlled definitions, > symbol systems, and so on. No such effort has been put into making > images similarly precise, because that's not what images are for. Minor nit. In quite many scientific areas, substantial effort has been made to make images languages precise. Examples include Electronic schematics diagrams, VLSI layouts, Civil engineering drawings, architectural blueprints (including wiring diagrams, etc.) and even structured analysis and structured design diagram languages. Both scientific textual terminology and image terminologies tend to cover vary narrow domain areas. Both are frequently supplemented with other non-precise annotations to convey related information for which no existing precise terminology exists. >* Now, despite what I said above (about ``visually inept'' people not > being able to get everything out of something drawn by a ``visually > adept'' person), it is certainly true that a visually adept person > can communicate more with an image than a visually inept person can, > even to a visually inept person. One thing that becomes readily apparent to everyone who attends my visual literacy class is that almost everyone has a high level of visual literacy in "viewing" graphical designs devised by experts. Often this is substantially higher than their own "creating" literacy. My class focusses primarily on business and technical information in graphical forms--not traditional art. For these activities, drawing skills in class are relatively unnecessary. Software tools for creating graphs and charts, for choosing type fonts, colors and gray scale shades exist and can be used by most attendees with little or no training. In fact, most participants have already created many diagrams, slides, charts or graphs in the past. Frequently their examples of their own past work show only a little understanding of how to use graphic elements to effectively convey their messages. However, when shown images created by experts, they instantly recognize the ones that are good examples, and which convey information effectively, and which are bad examples. So while "artistically inept" individuals may not be very successful conveying information visually, and may therefore under value visual media in general, they still do get most of what experts want them to get when they view expert created work. In other words, a person may be much more "artistically inept" than they are "visually illiterate". I have found this is not unlike verbal literacy. Many children have a hard time composing clear sentances on their own (some adults still do -- please accept my apologies!). But these same children are often very capable of recognizing clear and precise communications created by others, and they have no difficulty distinguishing good examples from bad examples. This is independent of whether the verbal communications that they have mastered are primarily oral, or are also textual. Like so many things, language skills can be mysteriously acquired without the ability to knowledgably exercise the skills. Many of the key visual literacy concepts are acquired very early, and seem to be independent of cultural background. It is quite likely, (though not yet proven), that most of these result from regular physical behavior of objects in the world around us, and from genetically selected visual recognition patterns wired in our brains. Textual and verbal communications do not share the strong physical world ties, and have evolved many important conventions which are effective for talking about conceptual world (as opposed to physical world) objects. The visual principles that do apply to these sorts of non-physical world object behaviors seem to be much more culturally conventional and learned (like their oral and textual counterparts). Because text and verbal communications are almost strictly conventional, they do not work well for individuals who do not know the conventions. In the area of real world objects, their tends to be common agreement as to attributes across cultures (though the sounds or marks on the paper are different). Non-physical concepts do not map nearly so clearly across cultures and even individuals, and visual representations of these concepts are almost totally conventional and subject to the same sorts of problems as their textual and oral conventional counterparts. While visual literacy (at least at the instinctual recognition level) is high, artistic capability (the ability to apply visual literacy principles) varies considerably from culture to culture. Western educational systems are primarily more dominated by text (text being relatively cheaper and faster to reproduce for centuries). Thus more highly educated individuals tend to exhibit greater verbal literacy in their production skills. Artistic skills, outside of advertising, industrial design, TV production and a few related fields, has tended to be under-emphasized by western educational systems and businesses. On the other hand, even in most western societies, the number of college educated individuals is typically a small minority. The larger less educated majority is often much more visually (and often artistically) literate than the educated minority often recognizes. The success of visual communications media for reaching the masses, is in part a reflection of their greater tolerance for, or even greater desire for, visual communication. emphasized > I think more people are linguistically skilled than > are visually adept; thus, it is easier for people to get more subtle > information from language than from image. But this can only be > verified empirically. The evidence strongly is that this varies between subcultures. Among groups with limited vocabulary skills, well chosen images may be as powerful, or more powerful for communication. Whether subtle information can be conveyed at all without education to a group not already knowledgable about such subtleties (and knowledgable about conventional means for indicating them) is highly questionable. It appears that understanding subtle concepts may be inextricably linked to understanding their conventional representations whether those are textual or schematic. > Of course, none of this applies to things which can only be >communicated with imagery (or animation). But I don't think this has >anything to do with visual adeptness. I would claim that it does have to do with visual adeptness, but that most people have this level of adeptness and most such imagery and animation is produced by experts (due in part to expense) so this hides this reliance. > A more useful topic of > discussion would be an attempt to find that boundary--what must be > represented with image versus what can be represented with text--rather > than worrying about whether one should stay on the text side of that > boundary (because one is visually inept) or on the image side (because > one is visually adept). Once we determine that general area, then > we can individually fiddle with the boundary line, depending on our > various skills. Clearly one of the results of the CYC project, as well as some of Minsky's work is that linguistic understanding and reasoning is an extremely complicated, long-length learned experience. The problem of communication is to convey something with a minimal amount of time and effort. The strongest way to do this is to rely on past experience and use shorthands that refer to already understood concepts (like using a filename to act as a representation for the file's contents). To the extent that there is shared experience there can also be learned conventions which implement these shorthands. These conventions might be visual, textual, or verbal. Among different communities and individuals the conventions might fall in different classes, again based upon past experiences (such as education, learning a particular written language, etc.). This suggests no pure boundary to what can and cannot be conveyed visually or textually, that it is dependent upon the shared backgrounds of sender and receiver. It also calls into question the belief that subtle concepts could be conveyed in any media in the absence of considerable prepatory educational work on the sender and reciever. and of course that educational process is a major focus for western scientific culture. Scott McGregor Atherton Technology mcgregor@atherton.com