Information Visualization & Distant Reading

The main idea that I got from all of these readings is that each of these concepts is made to make data itself easier to look at and digest. The part I understood the most was the information visualizations. I've used this many times throughout school in things like research papers or responses for labs, so this topic was familiar to me. For me, this is one of the easiest ways to look at and understand data before they are broken down more specifically. I liked reading this section because it was interesting to see the break down of how visualizations like this work. The other topics like data mining, distant reading and API I found a little more confusing. 

For distant reading in particular, I understand the concept of it but I don't really understand the point in it. For example, when using it for something like literature I don't really see how it would be helpful, as literature is typically supposed to be looked at in detail. When you write a literary analysis or a response to literature it typically involves really close analysis with extremely specific quotes and details. I think this is why I didn't really understand the point. However, I have done things like character charts for literature classes, where you make some sort of map of how characters are related to one another in a story with a lot of characters. I can see how something like this may be helpful to break it down and look at just the characters without the distraction of all the other details in the book. Overall, I think even if you were to use distant reading, it would be important to also read closely so that you can fully appreciate the story. 

I was a little confused by both the "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon" and the "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" exactly examples. I found them both to be a little messy and unorganized. I feel like a clearer easier to read chart, graph or list of some sort may have been an easier way to look at the same data.

I'm not totally sure how to relate these to my project because the website for The Met is extremely clear and just a list of each exhibit, however things like Voyant which was mentioned in the reading I have seen in class. Most of what was shown in these readings looked vaguely familiar to me so I'm sure I have come across a lot of it at some point I'm just not exactly sure what.