Visualizing politics

This fall I'm designing a new undergrad course called Communication and Visual Politics. During my lunch break today I was googling about for ideas when I came across this. It's a site created by graphic designers that uses your responses to images to "calculate" your political leanings. Here's what they say about their goals:

Visual Ideology is an effort to raise awareness to the use of images in messaging. Given the choice, what images would the general public associate with specific ideas or words? How can one image be more meaningful than another similar image? This project asks viewers to make decisions as to images that best represent their visual definition of political terms or ideas. During this process it is hoped that viewers will begin to develop a better understanding of how visual imagery can influence meaning.

When you launch the site it gives you a series of keywords and asks you to pick the images that you think are the most related to those keywords. Ultimately its calculations are more about political party than "ideology," and some of the images are a bit outdated (think 2004 presidential election). But the concept is intriguing and might be good for students, especially if you combined it with some Lakoff-type stuff about the role of metaphor in politics.

Comments

[c...]

i think it's interesting how the responses don't actually show much difference among who chose what ...

[jim Finnegan]

Great. As a graphic designer it was interesting to take this. Most of the responses were very well balanced. Except for the "Bush". How could you not pick an actual bush? I will pass this around to my staff and get their reaction.

[PeggyPreston]

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