Weeknote for 10/6/2019

Work

🙂

I’m out from under my piles of work for real, so now I have my evenings back. Will this translate to more progress on my stuff? Time will tell.

Conceptual modeling

🙂

This week starts the spoooky project month of October, and for this project I’m continuing my study of Visualization Analysis and Design by Tamara Munzner, which is appropriate because I still have a scary amount of it left to read. I also need to avoid getting lost in the details and focus on my main question for this study: In a modeling project, how can I match the object under study to a visual scheme, based on the conceptual frameworks implied in these schemes? On the side I’m looking into the more pictorial kinds of information graphics Munzner’s book doesn’t seem to cover, and the main search terms I’ve come across so far are graphic facilitation, technical illustration, and educational comics.

Experimental literature

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I made a schedule for listening to the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (RCEL), and I should be able to finish it this week. After skimming through a lot of the essays earlier in the year, it’s interesting to see what they’re like when I hear the whole content. Some of them are more confusing than I’d hoped, such as the one on Tel Quel–and when I add summaries of the essays to my experimental literature list, I might start with those–but others are more thought provoking and relevant to me than I expected, like the one on postcolonial literature.

RCEL and the alchemy art book I also bought have put me in the mood for various surreal and philosophical topics, such as existentialism and esotericism, so now I have my reading list for the next couple of months, which you can see in that Goodreads link. Some of my choices are also fitting for Halloween, and if I’m diligent about listening, I can fit all the spooky ones into October.