Infovis and Composing in Web 2.0

Sorapure, Madeleine. “Information Visualization, Web 2.0, and the Teaching of Writing.” Computers and Composition 27 (2010): 59-70. Print.

This article introduced me to a Web 2.0 technology I knew little about: information visualization, or infovis. This technology allows users to upload information (parts of a text, personal information, statistics, etc.) and create various visualizations with that data. Madeleine Sorapure argues that this technology can provide students with critical perspectives of Web 2.0 texts and software by offering instructors opportunities for improving assignments, students’ abilities to analyze software biases, and student competencies in conceiving and creating texts. In short, she claims infovis makes students better producers and more critical consumers of Web 2.0texts.

She begins her work with some basic explanation of Web 2.0, mostly emphasizing that our students are often already creators of Web 2.0 texts but are not critical of these texts, which she also calls for in her use of infovis. She then turns to three common writing assignments—textual analysis, personal reflection, and the persuasive essay—but re-envisions them with infovis. She asks students to upload text, create a word cloud (a type of infovis) from this text, and reflect on their choice of text and methods of manipulating the text. Some students noted greater insight into their texts; others found software failing to account for personality or subtly in language. Her second example of an infovis assignment relied on student use of personal information (credit card purchases, music listening habits, or even photos taken, for example) to create a new way for students to think of themselves. Finally, she used infovis to address broader social concerns, asking her students to search for statistical information on a meaningful social issue and put that information into a visualization that would be meaningful for their audience.

Because this article gives examples of typical writing assignments, the application of infovis seems quite achievable. And although this Web 2.0 technology intrigues me, I feel that Sorapure’s goal of being critical of this new technology slips away from her. She does note that students were aware of the limits of this technology; however, she misses (or takes for granted) some key issues. First, she does not say if her students were freshmen/sophomores, juniors/seniors, or graduate students. The class was “Writing in New Media,” which seems to suggest a course designed for undergraduate students at the junior or senior level or graduate students (at least students with writing and research experience). So the types of research and software manipulation she suggest here may be somewhat taxing for lower-level undergraduate students without extensive instructor intervention, limiting the scope of infovis application. Next, and related to this, she fails to mention the learning curves associated with the software discussed here. Harried teachers who may want to incorporate innovative practices may find the programs too onerous to learn effectively. Finally, she does not mention how much visual rhetoric instruction students needed (or had had previously) to become the critical producers and analyzers of Web 2.0 texts she described at the beginning.