[alt.hypertext] People who can draw Images vs. People who can't Text

thom@garnet.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) (04/19/91)

This is a response to this initial posting 
<jpenny.671843702@s.ms.uky.edu> <1991Apr17.204748.8994@agate.berkeley.edu>
<1991Apr17.225701.26678@convex.com>

My point which Jim seems to think has something to do with Football or Cspan on
TV without sound -- not sure how this conclusion was reached -- was that part
of what is going on in this discussion is that 'visual dyslexics' are trying to
talk about visual images. The people telling us that pictures aren't that
important can't and don't draw, they haven't been trained -- it's aproblem with
schools not with the individuals.

People who play music 'can' and 'do' talk about music differently than people
who 'can't' play or read music.

People who can draw talk about visual images differently than people who can't
do anything more than cut and paste from the scrapbook. When I say draw I'm not
limiting drawing to the use of pen and paper, I'm also talking about those
folks skilled in using mathematical notation to manipulate 'visualization' of
physics, chemistry, etc -- people who 'have been' thinking and using visual
expression to greatly extend their written expression ... showing not just
telling.

And finally, people who can't read and write don't think or talk about reading
and writing the same way that folks who can read and write do.

My guess is still that most of the people discussing this issue of images vs
text can't and don't draw in any fashion because they can't -- we are talking
about more than just page layout, we are talking about true visual expression
which extends from the walls of Altimar to modern day scientific visualization.
Text is not better than pictures, pictures are not better than text, sound is
not better than both text and pictures, all of them together provide expanded
channels of communication, more information -- sorta like an orchestra in tune.

--Thom Gillespie

nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo) (04/23/91)

In article <1991Apr18.191452.5677@agate.berkeley.edu> thom@garnet.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) writes:

> People who play music 'can' and 'do' talk about music differently than people
> who 'can't' play or read music.

Yes.  And presumably atonal music communicates something to people who
have a deep understanding of music, but often fails to communicate
anything to people who don't.  Indeed, what the ``average'' person may
get from a piece by even Mozart or Beethoven, let alone Schoenberg,
may be quite different from what the ``musically adept'' person may
get from the same piece.  The former might be distinctly impoverished
compared to the latter, or it may simply be different.

Now let's carry this analogy back over to visual images.  You are
claiming, if I understand you correctly, that those who are ``visually
adept'' can both express more and richer information in a visual
medium than those who are, let us say, ``visually inept.''  But is
this information necessarily going to be accessible to anyone who is
using the medium?  It's an encoding/decoding problem--you can encode
as much information as you like in subtle nuances of perspective,
shading, layout, etc., but how many people are going to pick up on
those nuances?  And how many people are going to interpret them in the
way you intended them to be interpreted?  As with music, what a
``visually inept'' person gets out of a rich picture may be distinctly
impoverished compared to what a ``visually adept'' person gets.

This analogy is a bit abstract, and not entirely reasonable, so let me
back off and try to clarify and expand on my views.  As with most
things, they are pretty close to the fence, rather than clearly on one
side or the other.

* Images and text are both incredibly complex media.  We often fall into
  the trap of thinking that text is necessarily precise and restricted,
  while image is much less so.  But while a word is unambiguously made 
  up of certain letters, all the levels beyond that (from polysemy and
  syntactic ambiguity all the way to conceptual ``fuzziness'') can 
  provide a good deal of imprecision and richness.

* 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.

* In artistic arenas, a good deal of study has gone into the analysis
  of art--what certain things convey, and why they convey what they do.
  Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your bent), there's a
  good deal about art and image which don't appear to be expressible or
  analyzable, mostly because of what we might call ``differing tastes.''
  Different people view art in different ways, and that's that.

* As I said above, text is also imprecise in this way, even in context.
  In this arena, the difference is not so much in ``aesthetics'' as it
  is in conceptual structure.  Different people have learned slightly
  different concepts because of their differing experiences.  And some
  concepts which are labelled with single words are so complicated that
  not everyone could possibly agree on their definitions, because the
  concepts which they rely on are themselves different.  (For instance,
  try to precisely define "freedom," "honor," or "justice.")

* 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.  However, the extent of that extra
  communication may not be all that much greater than what could be
  communicated by a certain amount of extra text.  Anything richer than
  that might not be communicatable to a visually inept person.

To draw all this together, my point is that people who are visually
adept can use more pictures, and people who are not can use more text,
and there's no reason to believe a priori that one approach is better
than the other.  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.

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.  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.


nj

mcgregor@hemlock.Atherton.COM (Scott McGregor) (04/24/91)

In article <NJ.91Apr22103749@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU>,
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