Digital Portrait of Nelson Minar

I had a hard time thinking about how to do a digital portrait. To me, portraiture is best with the ineffable artistic quality of fine photography or fine painting. I don't have those skills, so I can't reproduce them. Worse, the unique quality of each portrait makes it very hard to think how to do a portrait generated from automatic data.

So, instead of a fine portrait, I decided to make a baseball card.

The idea here is that my "portrait" is a little card, a little image that I might put on my web page or print out and put on the back of my business card. I'm trying to pack in a bit of historical information about who I am.

The simplest feature is the box on the right - the picture of me and the basic vital stats. These describe who I am. The picture gives someone a quick subjective impression of me. (It wasn't intentional that I used an old picture. I just don't have a new one around!) The four fields are a basic concept of who Nelson Minar is. I admit I chose these fields somewhat arbitrarily, maybe there's a better set.

The larger part of the card is taken up by the chart. The idea here is to convey the kinds of things that I do, what I write. Time flows from left to right. Each row represents a category of thing. Each box represents one text - a piece of writing, a package of software, a participation in an activist group. The width of the box conveys the duration of my involvement in producing that particular text. The brightness of the colour conveys how much impact I had: whether other people have heard of that program, or read that text, or were influence by my actions.

This portrait is a strange mix between objective and subjective. The layout is incredibly objective - little boxes, a timeline, etc. But the actual contents, the choice of what is a "text" and what impact I had with it, are largely subjective. I can imagine this form being used either for self-portraiture or, perhaps more interestingly, someone else making a portrait of me.

For this self-portrait, I did my best to pick out things that I thought were relevant. For instance, some of the larger things in there are my HTML editor, Swarm, my Reed undergraduate thesis, my MIT master's thesis, and my political involvement with activist groups in Portland. Some of these things (HTML mode, activism) had a lot of impact, while others (Swarm, my theses) have not had as much exposure.

One last thing: it'd be nice to make this card interactive. The main thing would be to make it possible to active the info display in the middle. Maybe clicking on the squares would bring up more details of the text, or maybe a zooming interface would allow the viewer to discover more level of detail.