I read into Yuri Engelhardt’s dis­ser­ta­tion “The Lan­guage of Graph­ics”, and I think it is a fan­tas­tic piece of work. As the title sug­gests, the the­sis sug­gests a lin­guis­ti­cally moti­vated approach to the analy­sis of graph­ics: based from a syn­tac­ti­cal analy­sis of space, objects and their rela­tions, Engel­hardt clas­si­fies and exem­pli­fies dif­fer­ent types of syn­tac­tic struc­tures in which graph­i­cal objects can be arranged in order to con­vey mean­ing. A great achieve­ment is the com­par­i­son and “trans­la­tion” of numer­ous, dis­ci­pline spe­cific approaches in this area, rang­ing from Tufte, Bertin, Card, over MacEachren to even Lakoff. Besides, I espe­cially enjoyed his dis­cus­sion of syn­tac­tic roles: Anal­o­gously to the dif­fer­ent syn­tac­tic roles verbs can have in a sen­tence, the same visual ele­ments can trig­ger dif­fer­ent seman­tics or have dif­fer­ent degrees of free­dom accord­ing to their syntatic role in a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Good exam­ples are map mark­ers, labels, con­tain­ers, sep­a­ra­tors etc. Again, this part is ana­lyt­i­cally really strong and I believe also quite novel in this form. The the­sis closes with a dis­cus­sion of inter­pre­ta­tion and seman­tics, and a result­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion of graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tions. But I haven’t got­ten this far yet.

Again, I find it a great work, and it reminds me a lot of my Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence days :)

Here are some pic­tures from the the­sis to give you an impression:

One Response to 'The Language of Graphics'

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1. LeMel
   February 18th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

   There is a book of the same title…

   “The Lan­guage of Graph­ics” Edward Booth-Clibborn and Daniele Baroni, 1980, Harry N. Abrams Publishing

   It is about graphic design. It is some­what a sum­ma­riza­tion of mate­r­ial from the 7-volume Kodan­sha series on graphic design.

   Nice site you have going here — thanks!

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