Review: Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (metaLABprojects; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis, at first glance, seems to be a straightforward history of data visualizations. The vast majority of the book is devoted to tracing the histories of various kinds of information visualization, such as tree graphs, maps, bar charts, and the like. Scores of illustrations accompany this discussion, making the book a fine introduction to the history of information visualization. Behind the historical aspect of the book, however, lies the assertion—actually Drucker’s main thesis—that humanists have fundamentally misunderstood what data is and what visualizations can represent.
The book opens with a foreword defining some of Drucker’s key terms (including graphesis, to which I will return shortly). The first three chapters (“Image, Interpretation, and Interface,” “Windows,” and “Interpreting Visualization :: Visualizing Interpretation”) set forth the history of the graphical forms that lie…
When Henri Lefebvre published The Urban Revolution in 1970, he sketched a research itinerary on the emerging tendency towards planetary urbanization. Today, when this tendency has become reality, Lefebvre’s ideas on everyday life, production of space, rhythmanalysis and the right to the city are indispensable for the understanding of urbanization processes at every scale of social practice. This volume is the first to develop Lefebvre’s concepts in social research and architecture by focusing on urban conjunctures in Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dhaka, Hong Kong, London, New Orleans, Nowa Huta, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, Sarajevo, as well as in Mexico and Switzerland. With contributions by historians and theorists of architecture and urbanism, geographers, sociologists, political and cultural scientists, Urban Revolution…
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