Social Visualization October 28, 1999

Portraits

Judith Donath

1) Context and expectations

a) The Caricature Generator

i) Facesànormal face

ii) Makes caricature based on deviation from norm

b) Jerry Brown, Mayor of Oakland

i) Salon article vs. Factual description

ii) Traditional portrait vs. Cubist portrait

2) Where are you from?

a) Categorization: identity

b) How to act towards them

c) Gender, nationality

d) How can you distract people from these questions in a virtual environment?

e) New Yorker cartoons about identity online

f) Relevance of these categorizations to the situations/interactions/conversations we are in.

g) Interpretation of same sentences based on whether they are male or female.

h) What are the expectations people have based on gender.

i) Age vs. how you speak to someone

3) Self portraits vs. portraits controlled by others

4) Portrait of a “type” vs. individual

a) Personal identity (fingerprints, id scans, etc.)

b) Type of person (stereotype)

c) Environment as telling of type, but also intimately tied to the character of the person himself

d) Who makes a portrait, who controls it.

5) Lifelines

a) No context

b) Difficult to take series of facts and cast into canonical form

c) Good for basic view of person, helps digest wealth of information

d) Doesn’t give real “picture” of a person, always missing something—subjective interpretation

6) Evaluation of Portrait

a) Good portrait is very subjective and interpretatively qualitative

b) Meaningful

c) Difficulty for interfaces: can’t foist creation of portrait onto machine because objective

7) Tools for portrayal

a) Clothing as self expression: mass produced, but wide range of portrayal ability

8) Contexts

a) Crowds: very compact representation—snapshot, packed full of information, recognizable

b) Homepage: non-compact representation of self

c) Avatar: represented on a live basis, communicating with someone else

d) Move smoothly between one another: separate environments

e) Capturing interactive behavior

i) Emotional representation based on interaction with an abstract visual object on screen

9) Homepages

a) Geocities

i) Rapid changes to home pages

ii) Tools: mostly computer illiterate

iii) Social context, genres of images, styles

iv) Ugly, but expressive

b) Academic home pages

i) Dry, research oriented

10) Avatars

a) Humanoid forms

b) The Palace vs. Chat Circles

c) Avatar as puppet

d) What you can control, meaning of actions

e) Alternative ways of controlling them, something in between Palace and CC

Papers:

Gender Differences in online communication

On Reading Race Online

The Caricature Generator