Forklifting visual politics

This week's topic in the visual politics class was the use of graphics to visualize and inform. On Tuesday we discussed Edward Tufte's wonderful essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, in which Tufte argues that PowerPoint oversimplifies, weakens reasoning, and nearly always corrupts the visualization of statistical data. With that fresh in our minds, yesterday we tackled a case study: Colin Powell's 2003 address to the U.N. You'll recall that Powell not only lied and misrepresented the case re: WMDs in Iraq, but he did so while using PowerPoint.

In class we systematically worked through several sections of the speech, paying special attention to how Powell set up each of the slides. We considered how he verbally authorized the information represented on the slides and we examined how the slides themselves were constructed. Not surprisingly, there's a reciprocal relationship between the words and the images. Powell uses his words to validate the images and uses the images to substantiate his words. I believe they call that a vicious circle.

I was feeling pretty good leading the students through all of this, and then we got to this image. One of the students raised his hand. "What's with the forklift?" he asked.

Hmm, good question. What is with the forklift? In setting up this slide Powell talks about the so-called "decontamination vehicle" and "cargo vehicles." Nothing about a forklift. A quick search of the speech text on a student's laptop produced no reference to a forklift in the entire speech. Why label the forklift (if indeed that's what it is)? Now the students were excited, and they developed the following theory:

In this section of the speech Powell argued that this satellite image captured "unusual activity," insinuating the Iraqis were trying to outrun inspectors. Labeling the forklift does several things. First, you use forklifts when you are loading and unloading; thus the presence of a fuzzy object labeled "forklift" offers additional nonverbal evidence for Powell's verbal claim of "unusual activity." Even though he doesn't mention the forklift in the speech, the label creates an association of movement. Second, the students argued that labeling the forklift establishes the apparent validity of the other labels as well; if you know that blob is a forklift, well, certainly it's obvious what those bigger blobs are. Last, one of the students asked, "Isn't it always the joke that when you lie you should lie really specifically so that people will assume you're telling the truth?" Sadly, yes.

It was the perfect way to end the semester: a combination of visual and textual analysis, and the students just ran with it.

Comments

[Michelle]

What a cool discussion.

[forklift]

forklifting, just like the forklift, something has to be lift and placed.

-nico