Visualizing the Meltdown

Safia Swimelar found a site with 27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis. I had seen Crisis of Credit Visualized by Jonathan Jarvis and got a bit concerned when I saw How this Bear Market Compares by The New York Times. Which ones do you feel have the most impact or educational value?

General Studies Reading for March

For an introduction to issue of “Visual Literacy” as part of liberal arts education core curriculum, Evan Gatti has polled our members and suggests the following paper:

James Elkins' “Preface & Introduction” in Visual Literacy, (Routledge, 2007). [I have fixed this link to work for Elon machines now. -Tony, March 19th]

Please note that to access this file, you must be using a machine on-campus or be connected to campus through the VPN. You can also read how Elon’s own discuss the role of visual literacy and culture.

Peter Felten’s “Visual Literacy”, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning; November 2008, Vol. 40, Issue: Number 6, pp. 60-64.

Lynn Huber’s “The Bible and Art” excerpted from Mark Roncace and Patrick Gray, eds., The Bible, Popular Culture, and the Arts: Resources for Instructors (Society of Biblical Literature, forthcoming).

In the near future, we will be posting images to illustrate each of these writings.

Making a List of Viz Cult Courses

At our last meeting we talked about sharing the titles of upcoming courses that emphasize visual culture (or literacy) perspectives, pedagogies and practices. We're using the form below to make a list of these. Evan has already got the ball rolling with what she thinks would be appropriate from the Art department. Please go ahead and enter your own ideas!

Add to the "Viz Cult Course Catalog" at Elon

See what courses have already been added! (I fixed it! 5/18/2009)

Cooliris as a Nonlinear Classroom Presentation Program

A professor in my department asked me about creating a nonlinear presentation screen where he could simply touch a slide on one screen and it would display on the primary screen. While PowerPoint and Keynote do have a "presenter view", these programs don't let you view the full light table of slides at once; you must scroll through them. I've read that OpenOffice's Impress has this functionality but I am loathe to use OpenOffice since the last time I tried it (in the early 00's), it was teh suk.

While it is not exactly what my colleague wanted, I'm thinking Cooliris is his best option. A very short demo of this during a Viz Cult meeting last year wowed the audience and quickly won me over. I recently used PicLens Publisher to convert a set of my class slides into a Cooliris-compliant web page. (Of course, many applications would let you do the same.) You can check it out below:

Cooliris Slide Test

Does anyone else have some ideas for doing this sort of thing?

Another Campaign Promise Fulfilled

As promised, we've set up a space for members of the Elon Viz Cult to post items to our site. Please contact Tony Crider (acrider) to have your elon.edu or gmail.com email address added to the blog's author list.