PhD visualisations
An Expanded Visualisation Practice
These visualisations developed as part of my PhD research. My thesis explores the potential of visualisation as a means of inquiry, offering new possibilities for analytical tools to parse visual communication design artefacts and collections in order to identify, describe and elucidate their graphic language features. Specifically, these visualisations provide new ways of seeing the Emigre collection; identifying and elucidating graphic language features enables more informed, nuanced statements to be made about the complex character of the material.
These visualisations have been produced using an approach to data practice I have defined as an expanded visualisation practice (EVP). As a means of visual inquiry, an EVP offers an alternative or more expansive domain of practice than conventional visualisation. Conventional visualisations—reductive, quantitative studies of phenomena, such as graphs and charts—are limited in their capacity to respond to the graphic complexity and nuances of visual communication design artefacts and collections. Visualisations generated through an EVP are proposed as a means of facilitating multidimensional understandings of this material, enabling researchers to parse graphic artefacts and collections, while maintaining the richness of the visual material, its context and complexity.
