Graphic Recording

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

The Honest Truth

While looking for some tips on good writing, I found a page on how to make writing more concise by substituting awkward or redundant phrases, such as "after" for "after the conclusion of" or "near" for "in the vicinity of."

I noticed "honest truth" was on the list. I could see why on its face this appears to be a redundancy. Taken literally, there should be no difference between the "honest truth" and the "truth" given there is only one truth.

I do not believe this is a mere redundancy (unless used by habit in as a cliche) but an expression of mutual knowledge. If you've read Stephen Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, you will understand how important mutual knowledge can be in human affairs. When we say "honest truth" we are acknowledging there is a public truth, a conventional truth everyone must acknowledge, and a private truth we all know is reality. The "honest truth" is a warning to everyone within earshot: I am about to reveal unspoken mutual knowledge.

Pinker also discusses how human language contains a model of time different from the mathematical or physical one known to science. A meeting can have an "end" and a "conclusion" the period leading up to the end. So it does make sense to say "after the conclusion" speaking to the period of winding down toward the actual end of the conference. I suspect many phrases exist to express these shades of meaning, which emerge from phenomena like mutual knowledge or the shaping of time.