Johanna Drucker’s essay presents an interesting view of information visualization as it applies to the humanities. Rather than use the rigid charts, graphs, and coordinatized maps of statistics and natural science, she advocates the use of more fluid and warped methods to show the more subjective information found in humanities that necessarily involves interpretation and the viewer’s own point of view.

I found Drucker’s idea of capta intriguing. At first I didn’t understand distinction between data and capta but as the essay progressed I came to a good understanding of the difference. I think the fundamental difference is that the idea of capta make no assumptions. Drucker says that data - like measurements of the physical world - come with the assumption that the information we’re interested in exists already and all we need to do is gather it. Capta, on the other hand, acknowledges that the information gathered was interpretted and even created by the observer. Capta offers more in impressions and expressions of world whereas data comes from measurements.

Drucker’s visualizations of capta are neat because they are able to show confounding factors that are often absent in data representations. The bar graph of male and female populations in different countries after paragraph 11 is a good example - the blurriness of bars or the intermingling of their patterns show a more complete picture of the populations of the countries because they don’t purport to be a definitive record of how many individuals are in each country. Rather they show as much as they can in terms of relative sizes of populations, along with some indications of factors that need to be interpretted by the viewer.

Visualizations of capta in general seem to contain a lot more information than visualizations of data in the essay. I wonder if this is always true.

The ideas of spatiality and temporality are also interesting, although I don’t like their definitions. “Temporality = time as a factor of X” is too unclear. After the reading the whole essay, Drucker’s given definition seems fitting, but on its own it doesn’t mean anything to me. Perhaps a better definition would be, “how time is perceived with respect to factor X”. That said, I do think using spatiality and temporality in visualizations gives a great effect. The warped images and swirling arrows gave me a quick but thourough sense of what information was being presented.