Amuses

Visuals

I often have to find ways to express ideas without words. Many people simply not like reading. This may be because they are already overloaded with information. Or because they simply prefer other ways of communication. Have fallen out of the habit of reading or were never much good at it (a surprising number of managers are dyslectic, in my experience). Or don’t want to be inundated with information about a topic that they do not understand/have no knowledge about/are not interested in.

One group is exempt from this very general statement: philosophers. They live, breathe, and dream text. Also, they have nothing other than text. No diagrams, no visuals, perhaps the odd cartoon, but that is about it. Books, papers, articles: text, text and text. But that won’t stop me trying to find ways to visualise philosophical issues as well. Meanwhile, I browse visuals just for the fun of it. Below are a couple. I don’t understand them all, but wow, are they pretty.

Promises, promises

Before I do, I promised to post my presentation for the Skills&Methods seminar, you know, the pièce de résistance that was one the main outputs of that seminar. I already posted the draft version of the article in another post. The presentation is quite different though. Don’t feel obliged to look at it, but if you do, make sure to look at in in presentation mode, so you don’t miss any of the animations and the little cyber-criminal quiz (where you have to point at little circles to make up the match; you will see. Use page-down to go from slide to slide, and click to see the animations within the slide. Anyway, here is the link. The file is 24 MB, so the best thing is to right-click the link and save it. If you are on a PC. Faster that way.

Intermezzo (the real reason for this post)

You probably thought that I am spending my “holidays” (only the day-time job) catching up on those wonderful philosophy books that I have been collecting. Well, so did I. But we were quite wrong. I just like collecting books. So what did I do? Except for sweltering in the heatwave like the rest of Europe? Well, I have been playing with my Wiki. You know, the one called concepts, which you can go to via the menu at the top of this blog). It is filling up quite nicely, but what I was playing with was not so much the content, but the construction. I have spent a great many hours getting this bit of machinery to work. So I thought, if I have to do that again, I will have forgotten it all, so I’d better write it down. And then I thought, that would be true of all the “tools” I use. From my citation system to my note taking routines to my internet sources or my WordPress tips, it adds up to quite a bit. Perhaps that is is true for many people. But Husband and I have just spent very pleasant evenings watching new episodes of Lewis that has just become available on our provider. We thought. Towards the end we confessed to each other that we had probably seen them before. Years ago. So better not to rely too much on the good old memory. I have created a another sub-site, next to concepts, called tools. Here I have started to share my notes about my bag of tricks. If you subscribe to this blog, you will not be notified because it is separate from this blog, which is probably just as well :-). Have a look, it is pretty (and very different from this one).

Back to the visuals. Below I included a few I liked. In the next weeks I will post a collection of good sources on the tool-blog, on this page.

Stray beauties

“Nuclear Slowdown” by Valerio Pellegrini, Wired UK
Source: https://www.columnfivemedia.com/the-75-most-creative-infographic-design-examples-of-2017
Source: https://public.tableau.com/profile/adam.e.mccann#!/vizhome/BeatlesAnalysis/BeatlesAnalysis
Author: Adam E McCann
Source: https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/trumps-holding-companies?tab=featured&topic=newsroom-use-cases
Author: CNBC Digital, used in a story about Donald Trump’s holding companies.
Source: https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/visual-history-formula-1
Author: James Smith

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