tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23541364613571234582024-02-08T13:21:21.349+00:00Jocelyn's Cartoons: Visual LinguisticsJocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-16522211881502184682016-01-14T16:03:00.000+00:002016-01-23T12:17:23.913+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings XV, The Difference a Jacket Makes<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xiv.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XIV, Grylloi and Visual Linguistics</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xvi.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XVI, Cummerbund, not Cumberland</a> ] </p>
<figure>
<blockquote>
<p>Man is the animal who is not satisfied with merely living his
life, but who is capable of —
and insists upon — watching himself doing it. He not only is,
acts, feels, and knows; but unlike any other animal. he is insatiably
curious to observe his body, his actions, his feelings, and his
thoughts.
<p>
When he does this, however, he is seldom
wholly satisfied with what he finds. Nature, he discovers,
has been both niggardly and clumsy in the appearance it bestowed upon him,
and likewise in the talents, virtues, and powers with which it
equipped him. Therefore, no sooner does he get a good look
at himself than he takes steps to effect, as best he can, changes
for the better.
</blockquote>
<figcaption>—<i>"The Art of Personal Beauty" by Curt J. Ducasse, in <cite>The
Philosophy of the Visual Arts</cite>, ed. Philip Alperson (1991)</i></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
In
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge">Vernor Vinge</a>'s short story
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor_Vinge#Apartness">"Apartness"</a>,
the Northern Hemisphere has been rendered uninhabitable by a terrible war, nuclear, chemical
and biological. Two hundred years later, a
scientific exploration fleet from South America sails to Antarctica and
finds an isolated tribe who call their land New Transvaal. Much less adapted to the cold,
both biologically and technologically, than our Inuit, they turn out to be the
descendants of the last white men on Earth: South Africans who escaped from their country after
a genocide against all white Africans. When the scientists land, the leader of the tribe
greets them. They are surprised by his clothing. Most of the tribe are wearing
crude sealskin parkas, but his is particularly impractical, and in fact resembles
a double-breasted jacket more than anything designed to keep its wearer warm.
<p>
But although jackets are not a terribly practical form of clothing, leaving so much
space for heat to escape, people still wear them. Why? Vinge's tribal president
wore his as a symbol, but we don't all hold such positions of power.
In my last post, I wrote about Mark Changizi's call for a discipline that studies
the visual "utterances" people make — writing, visual signs, fashion,
architecture, and the other visual aspects of culture — and relates them
to the visual system and its evolution. While drawing a cartoon, I was looking up the kinds of suit bankers
wear, and I came across
Antonio Centeno's <cite>Real Men Real Style</cite> and his article
<a href="http://www.realmenrealstyle.com/the-difference-a-jacket-makes/">"The Difference a Jacket Makes"</a>.
He starts by writing:
<blockquote>
Imagine a product that will adds inches to your perceived height,
shaves 20 lbs of your midsection, and makes you appear more muscular.
And the magic item can do all this instantly!
</blockquote>
<p>
Centeno says that jackets improve their wearer's appearance in three ways: by bulking out the shoulders; by slimming the waist; and by drawing attention to the face and making the wearer seem taller.
<p>
The first of these benefits, the bulking effect, is obvious.
The second, the apparent slimming, happens because jackets taper a bit above the waist, and widen above the taper, an effect accentuated by their outward-spreading lapels. And they flare out over the stomach and hips, hiding weight you may be carrying under the flare. So the middle of the jacket is narrowed, which "makes you look like our image of a healthy man: tucked at the waist, widening above it". As Centeno continues: "Think of it as a tummy tuck without the horrible, invasive surgery."
<p>
And the third benefit is also because jackets widen towards the top. This makes us naturally look from the waist up rather than the face down, making us think we're looking up at something even when we're taller than the wearer. This keeps people looking at your face rather than your middle. Centeno suggests asking people to guess your height with and without a jacket: the "with" guesses will always be greater.
<figure>
<img src='http://www.realmenrealstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Jacket-Benefits-wm.jpg' width=348px>
<figcaption>Benefits of wearing a jacket, from <a href="http://www.realmenrealstyle.com/the-difference-a-jacket-makes/">Antonio Centeno's article</a>.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
These effects work with the clothing of other cultures too. For example, the cross-shaped design on
<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=moroccan+shirts&client=browser-ubuntu&hs=DBk&channel=fe&hl=en-gb&biw=1196&bih=452&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_jIn2jKfKAhUB6SYKHXkHATMQ_AUICCgC">Moroccan shirts</a> and dresses. Here are two examples that have got copied to many sites on the Web. They show how the "V" formed by the top of the design draws attention to the face:
<figure>
<img src='http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/moroccan_shirt.jpg' width=348px>
<figcaption>Moroccan shirt. Owner of photo not known.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src='http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/moroccan_dress.jpg' width=348px>
<figcaption>Moroccan dress or kaftan. Photo marked as by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/studiolorenzosalemi/">Studio Lorenzo Salemi</a>.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
So, going back to visual linguistics, one question about these visual "utterances" is: why are they so popular, and what has this to do with the way they enhance the wearer's perceived fitness?
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-39623659192167602932016-01-13T13:48:00.000+00:002016-01-13T16:13:17.081+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings XIV, Grylloi and Visual Linguistics<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xiii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XIII, Why is Reading so Easy?</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xv.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XV, The Difference a Jacket Makes</a> ] </p>
<p>
In my last post, I referred to Mark Changizi's book <cite>The Vision Revolution</cite> and his online article <a href="http://www.science20.com/mark_changizi/topography_language">"The Topography Of Language"</a>. In the latter, he says:
<blockquote>
Amongst both non-linguistic and linguistic signs, some visual signs are representations of the world e.g., cave paintings and pictograms, respectively and it is, of course, not surprising that these visual signs look like nature. It would be surprising, however, to find that non-pictorial visual signs look, despite first appearances, like nature. Although writing began with pictograms, there have been so many mutations to writing over the millenia that if writing still looks like nature, it must be because this property has been selectively maintained.
</blockquote>
<p>
<i>Why</i> has this property been maintained? Because the visual system could use its object-recognition software for reading writing that was shaped like nature. Writing that wasn't thus shaped would be harder to read, so fall out of use. This kind of answer, Changizi says, beongs to a new discipline, "visual linguistics":
<blockquote>
Because culture is capable of designing for the eye, the visual signs of our culture are a fingerprint of what our visual systems like. Akin to the linguistic study of the auditory productions humans make, the “visual linguistic” study of the visual productions people make is a currently under-utilized tool for vision research.
</blockquote>
<p>
In other words, visual linguistics studies our visual "utterances". The subject has hardly begun, which is why in this table from the chapter on reading in <cite>The Vision Revolution</cite>, the appropriate cell in the table below is marked with a question mark (and with a shaky font which I can't reproduce here):
<table>
<tr><th></th><th>Laboratory experiments</th><th>Human "utterances"</th></tr>
<tr><th>Cognition</th><td>Cognitive psychology,<br>cognitive neuroscience</td><td>Linguistics</td></tr>
<tr><th>Vision</th><td>Visual psychophysics</td><td>?<br>Visual Linguistics</td></tr>
</table>
<p>
So here's another question for visual linguistics. Why are grylloi so popular? They're easy to draw, but maybe that's not the only reason. I suspect that to our visual system, they look much more like people than they "ought" to. The semantic distance between human and gryllos, one might say, is much less than the geometric distance.
<p>
<figure>
<img src='http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/scotch_egg_no_legend.jpg' width=150px>
<figcaption>"Scotch Egg" by me</figcaption>
</figure>Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-21480013653919291512016-01-12T16:32:00.000+00:002016-01-13T13:52:57.670+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings XIII, Why is Reading so Easy?<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XII, Grylloi</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xiv.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XIV, Grylloi and Visual Linguistics</a> ]</p>
<p>
I'll return to grylloi, but I want to ask a question.
Why is reading so easy? In a few seconds last night while updating this blog, I was able to read wikiHow's recipe for linking Blogger to Twitter. And therefore, as <a href="http://www.changizi.com/">Mark Changizi</a> puts it in his book <cite>The Vision Revolution</cite>, install new software in me. Amazon, he says, listed at least 720,000 "how-to" books when he was writing in 2009. Each is a piece of software just waiting to be implemented by a human brain. Recipes for gefilte fish; techniques for training your labrador to fetch; how to clean the dirt off the bottom of a swimming pool. All encoded as a sequence of little marks that impress themselves on our brain, automatically and without effort.
<p>
But what is it about letters and words that fits our visual system so well? Changizi's answer is that the geometrical properties of written words are similar to those of objects. Our brains have had to evolve to be very very good at recognising objects; if the brain can use the same part of the visual system for recognising words, it's bound to help it read them.
<p>
By "geometrical properties", Changizi means how often different kinds of junction occur in words. This, obviously, is a consequence of the kinds of junction in the symbols that make up the words. These symbols might be letters such as A or ҕ, syllabic characters such as those in ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ (the Plains Cree word for Plains Cree), logograms such as the Chinese 中文, and so on. A comprehensive list of writing systems can be found at Omniglot's <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/langalph.htm">"Index of languages by writing system"</a>. Look at these, and you'll see that, for example, Y junctions are common but ✱ junctions are rare. Somehow, all these symbols feel as though they come from the same family of shapes.
<p>
Why? Our visual system is organised in a hierarchy. At the top is recognition of complete objects. At the bottom is recognition of primitive features such as single edges or strokes. And in between are levels that recognise simple combinations of these primitives, such as the L, T, and Y junctions I've marked in my cartoon below:<br>
<figure>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/a4_with_junctions_300.png">
<figcaption>"A4Billion" by me</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
In fact, most of the junctions in my drawing are L, T, and Y junctions. There are good geometrical reasons for this, to do with how objects meet and overlap, and how the places where they do look when projected down to two dimensions. This is explained in <a href="http://www.changizi.com/junction.pdf">The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human
History Are Selected to Match Those Found
in Objects in Natural Scenes</a> by Mark Changizi, Qiong Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo. (Search for "Other strong ecological relationships can be derived with the help of some defensible empirical assumptions
concerning the relative probability of L, T, and X junctions").
<p>
So images of objects have a certain frequency distribution of junction types. It seems that written words might have a similar distribution. And indeed, Changizi and colleagues say they've shown that they do. For the frequency graphs, see Changizi's short write-up <a href="http://www.science20.com/mark_changizi/topography_language">"The Topography Of Language"</a>. And that's why we're such excellent readers. Writing looks like natural scenes, which our visual systems are superbly evolved to recognise.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-7926567104172605472016-01-11T16:02:00.000+00:002016-01-13T13:37:53.916+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings XII, Grylloi<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xi.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XI, Anthropomorphism</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xiii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XIII, Why is Reading so Easy?</a>] </p>
<p>
I once read the following in <a href="https://www.lambiek.net/artists/a/adkins-richardson_john.htm">John Adkins Richardson</a>'s <cite>The Complete Book of Cartooning</cite>:
<blockquote>
The aggressor with the knife is nothing but a bodiless head with legs and arms sprouting directly from the chin and cheeks. Such figures are of very ancient origin and even have a name. They are grylli (gryllos for singular) and while there are more complicated and monstrous varieties passing under the same rubric, this version is the most typical. During the 1960s underground cartoonist Rich Griffin invented a particularly disquieting version of the gryllos, a disembodied eyeball on legs ..."
</blockquote>
<p>
I don't have the book to hand, and I've pasted together the quote above from Google Books searches which won't let me look at the illustration Richardson was talking about. I remember it to be of a head on legs with, as he says, arms sprouting from its chin or cheeks. However, the name sounded Greek, so I was fairly sure that the plural should be "grylloi" and not "grylli". A search in <a href="http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-s-new-pauly"><cite>Brill’s New Pauly</cite></a>
confirmed this:
<blockquote>
According to Pliny (HN 35,114), the name for caricature depictions in painting since Antiphilus [4] of Alexandria represented a certain Gryllus in that way. Originally these were dancers with grotesque physical proportions and contortions. As gryllographeîn and grylloeídēs later generally referred to ridiculously proportioned bodies, small-format free-standing sculpture representations can also be described as grylloi. Today the genre is no longer attributed to Alexandrian art only. To cover all animal caricatures and monstrous figures as well as the parodies of gods depicted in the wall painting of Pompeii with the term grylloi is dubious as well. On the other hand, the historical identification of ancient grylloi is increasingly replaced by cultural sociological interpretations of all kinds of representations of misshapen and absurd people ( Caricatures; realism as a means of expression).</blockquote>
<p>
Although "gryllos" may have denoted other kinds of distortion, I think that in cartooning, the head-with-arms-and-legs is so common that we do need a word for it. Which might as well be "gryllos". Grylloi are easy to draw, so there are huge numbers of examples. Basically, anything ball-shaped that the artist needs to make into a living being.
<p>
My first thought on looking for examples was haggis. And sure enough, an image search yielded <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=haggis&biw=1066&bih=510&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii2tnSmKDKAhXBPxQKHXVlAvkQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=haggis+cartoon">lots</a>.
Those on all fours probably shouldn't count as grylloi, but as animals. However, this kilted figure, with its arms at a higher level than its mouth, definitely is a gryllos:<br>
<figure>
<img src='http://northings.com/files/2010/06/tartan-haggis.jpeg' width=150px>
<figcaption>From a <a href="http://www.jukeownersgroup.com/new-urban-wheels-on-a-new-tekna_topic1736_post64256.html#64256">post by "M-J"</a> on the Nissan Juke Owners Group</figcaption>
</figure>Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-59915877545459799132016-01-10T16:27:00.000+00:002016-01-13T14:53:53.010+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings XI, Anthropomorphism<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-x.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings X, Recruitive versus Non-Recruitive Prosopification</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XII, Grylloi</a>] </p>
<p>
My posting about <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-viii.html">"The Two Giants of the Time"</a> demonstrates, of course, anthropomorphism. That is, adding arms and legs and other bits to an object in order to make it act as though it's human. Here's an anthropomorphic washstand:<br>
<figure>
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Mojdodyrej2.jpg/549px-Mojdodyrej2.jpg" width=250px>
<figcaption>Postage stamp, Moidodyr. From a strip of 5 postage stamps, "Tales". Russia. 1993. From Wikimedia Commons.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
This is from a Russian story called <cite>Мойдодыр</cite> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korney_Chukovsky">Korney Chukovsky</a>. It's about <a href="http://www.bolshoi.ru/en/performances/585/libretto/">a naughty boy who gets so dirty</a> that his clothes and other belongings flee from him. Moidodyr the washstand, "leader of washstands and commander of sponges" chases after the boy, backed up by soap and brushes; the chase continues all over Saint Petersburg as the boy is pursued by a furious sponge; and eventually, a sponge-eating crocodile intervenes and the boy goes home and gets cleaned up. There are many Moidodyrs: click on this <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=moidodyr&biw=1066&bih=510&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwja1sankqDKAhWHBBoKHawtASUQ_AUICCgD">image search</a> to see more.
<p>
In advertising, an excellent compilation of anthropomorphic characters is <a href="http://warrendotz.com/books/meet-mr-product/"><cite>Meet Mr. Product</cite></a> by Warren Dotz and Masud Husain. To meet them, click <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=meet+mr+product&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5l5_Ck6DKAhUFWhQKHWZODGAQ_AUIBygB&biw=1066&bih=510">here</a>.Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-2239179387114099462016-01-07T16:37:00.000+00:002016-01-13T11:48:17.813+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings X, Recruitive versus Non-Recruitive Prosopofication<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-ix.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings IX, Prosopification</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-xi.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings XI, Anthropomorphism</a>] </p>
<p>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Peet">Bill Peet</a>, <a href="http://www.billpeet.net/">Disney's greatest story man for 27 years</a>, is a master of what I call recruitive prosopofication. When adding faces to objects, he often uses lines already there. Here's a lovely example:<br>
<img src="http://web.archive.org/web/20160106062546/http://www.billpeet.net/PAGES/IMAGES/firstkaty300.jpg">
<p>
Of it, Peet says: "A drawing of an unhappy caboose rattling along under a cloud of train smoke was stuck on my studio wall for fifteen years before she became 'Katy' in the story 'The Caboose that got Loose'". Do a Google image search for <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+caboose+who+got+loose&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjqgq-Ux5TKAhWHThQKHXlrAUgQ_AUICCgC&biw=1050&bih=510">the caboose who got loose</a>, and you'll see many other drawings of the caboose in various attitudes. The line of its "mouth" is either shadow under the back door, or the top of the little platform. Peet often shades mouths very dark, as in some of <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bill+peet+monsters&client=ubuntu&hs=Mkg&channel=fs&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjx8KHh26bKAhWD7B4KHbaLC5AQ_AUIBygB&biw=1107&bih=485">these monsters</a>. With the caboose, he's doing the same on the lines that have been recruited to represent a mouth. There are lots of nice examples in his book <a href="http://www.billpeet.net/PAGES/autobiography.htm"><cite>Bill Peet: An Autobigraphy</cite></a>.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-16368703986878071712016-01-06T16:12:00.000+00:002016-01-07T20:15:58.933+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings IX, Prosopofication<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-vii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings VIII, "The Two Giants of Our Time"</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-x.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings X, Recruitive versus Non-Recruitive Prosopofication</a>] </p>
<p>
Returning to transformations, we often see what I call "prosopofication", from the Modern Greek word for "face", </i>το πρόσωπό</i>. This transformation adds a face to an object that normally would not have one. It is extremely common in advertising and children's stories.
<p>
Here's a charming example. It's from a Russian book called
<cite>Колобок</cite>, which tells
the <a href="http://russian-bedtime-stories.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/kolobok-doughnut-fellow.html">story of
a little round bun which runs away</a> from the house where it was baked, escapes a
hare, a wolf and a bear, but is eaten by a fox. This is a fairy-tale, well-known in Russia and Ukraine
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13206871">(who seem to have been disputing each other's rights to it)</a>,
and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolobok">apparently in other East Slavic countries</a>:
<table>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok0.jpg"><img src="//images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok0_100.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok1.jpg"><img src="//images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok1_200.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok2.jpg"><img src="//images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok2_200.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok3.jpg"><img src="//images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok3_200.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok4.jpg"><img src="//images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok4_200.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok5.jpg"><img src="//images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok5_200.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok6.jpg"><img src="//images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/kolobok6_100.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*"></a></td></tr>
</table>
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-80506753062141316312016-01-05T10:29:00.000+00:002016-01-07T19:57:23.745+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings VIII, "The Two Giants of the Time"<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-vii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings VII, Why Study Morphisms?</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-ix.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings IX, Prosopification</a> ] </p>
<p>
Here's a poem from <cite>Punch</cite> Volume XXXIII, 1857. I'm going to use it as an example of something, but I found it striking and definitely worth a blog entry of its own.
It's on the left of page 132, which I've shown below in its entirety, followed by a bigger copy of the picture at the top of the poem and the transcribed text. I bought the <cite>Punch</cite> in an Oxford market: checking online, I see that the Internet Archive <a href="https://archive.org/details/punch32a33lemouoft">has a copy</a>.
<p>
<a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/the_two_giants_all_1500.jpg"><img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/the_two_giants_all_500.jpg"></a>.
<p>
<h2>THE TWO GIANTS OF THE TIME.</h2>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/the_two_giants_image_400.jpg"><br>
“WHAT can we two great Forces do?”<br>
Said Steam to Electricity,<br>
“To better the case of the human race,<br>
And promote mankind’s felicity?”<br>
<br>
Electricity said, “From far lands sped,<br>
Through a wire, with a thought’s velocity,<br>
What tidings I bear! — of deeds that were<br>
ever passed yet for atrocity.”<br>
<br>
“Both land and sea,” said Steam, “by me,<br>
At the rate of a bird men fly over;<br>
But the quicker they speed to kill and bleed,<br>
A thought to lament and sigh over.”<br>
<br>
“The world, you see.” Electricity<br>
Remarked, “thus far is our debtor,<br>
That it faster goes; but, goodness knows,<br>
It doesn’t get on much better.”<br>
<br>
“Well, well,” said Steam, with whistle and scream,<br>
“Herein we help morality;<br>
That means we make to overtake<br>
Rebellion and rascality.”<br>
<br>
“Sure enough, that’s true, and so we do,”<br>
Electricity responded.<br>
“Through us have been caught, and to justice brought,<br>
Many scoundrels who had absconded.”<br>
<br>
Said Steam, “I hope we shall get the rope<br>
round the necks of the Sepoy savages,<br>
In double quick time, to avenge their crime,<br>
And arrest their murders and ravages.”<br>
<br>
“We’ve been overpraised,” said both; “we raised<br>
Too sanguine expectations:<br>
But with all our might, we haven’t yet quite<br>
Regenerated the nations.<br>
<br>
“We’re afraid we shan't — we suspect we can’t<br>
Cause people to change their courses;<br>
Locomotive powers alone are ours:<br>
But the world wants motive forces.”
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-75857199515139476352016-01-04T13:48:00.000+00:002016-01-04T20:40:00.716+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings VII, Why Study Morphisms?<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-vi.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings VI, Inflating Significant Zones</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-viii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings VIII, "The Two Giants of the Time"</a> ] </p>
<p>
When talking about transformations, mathematicians often use the word "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphism">morphism</a>". The word has a precise meaning in the branch of mathematics known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory">category theory</a>, and a somewhat vaguer meaning elsewhere. In general, though, it's associated with the idea that when you study how one thing can be transformed into another thing, you should be particularly interested in transformations that preserve "structure".
<p>
A simple example is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_arithmetic">modular arithmetic</a>. Take the addition table for the non-negative integers, and make from it another table where the addition "wraps round" whenever the answer is greater than a specific integer N. When N is 12, we have the familiar clockface arithmetic, where 11+1=0, and 11+2=1, and 5+7=0, and 5+8=1, and so on. The resulting addition table is wildly different from normal addition: for a start, it's finite. But it does have properties in common. For example, 0 is still special in that it does nothing when added. If we make a clockface-multiplication table, in which 2*6=0, and 3*4=0, and 3*5=3, and so on, then 0 is special there too, because multiplying by it still always gives 0. And so is 1 special: multiplying a number by it still gives that number. So making the clockface-arithmetic tables preserves the special rôles of 0 and 1. These are a vital part of the structure of the integers.
<p>
Outside mathematics, lots of examples occur in jokes. For example:<blockquote>An American and a Russian were discussing politics. The American said "In <i>our</i> country, we have freedom of speech. You can stand in front of the White House and yell, 'Down with Reagan!', and you will never be punished." The Russian said "So what? I can stand in Red Square and yell, 'Down with Reagan!', and <i>I</i> will not be punished."</blockquote>In that joke, the White House and Red Square are like the 0 and the 1. They're a special part of the structure of the countries: distinguished elements which map onto one another. Reagan is another such element: the joke is that the corresponding element of Russia should be Gorbachev, so the transformation from America to Russia has violated the structure. In <a href="https://archive.org/details/MetamagicalThemas"><cite>Metamagical Themas</cite></a>, Hofstadter has lots of examples (humorous and non-humorous) in the essays "Metafont, Metamathematics and Metaphysics", "Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking", and "Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity". In the last, Hofstadter's "counterfactuals" are the transformations, and he's discussing whether they violate structure by "slipping" elements too far.
<p>
On rereading this, I notice that I seem to be implying that "structure" is about the distinguished parts that an entity has, and how those parts are preserved when it's transformed to another entity. But I don't think that's the entire story. For example, topologists study "structure-preserving" transformations between spaces, but many of those spaces don't have distinguished parts. Anyway, I hope the above gives an intuitive idea of what "structure" is. But as
<a href="http://math.stackexchange.com/users/21674/michael-greinecker">Michael Greinecker</a> notes in his Stack Exchange <a href="http://math.stackexchange.com/q/120168">answer to the question "Why do we look at morphisms?"</a>, it is hard to say what mathematicians do mean when they talk about structure. Neverthelsss, he has nicely answered the question I posed in my title, so that's where I'll stop today.Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-76057947961715557022016-01-03T11:37:00.000+00:002016-01-03T11:39:34.220+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings VI, Inflating Significant Zones<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-v.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings V, Helveticality Descending into the Darkness</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-vii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings VII, Why Study Morphisms?</a> ] </p>
<p>
When I started this series, I said that I wanted to find out what kinds of transformation can be applied to line drawings, and what their properties are. I've mentioned one, the texture-deleting one that I call "appointing a representative". Another, the topic of this posting, enhances crucial regions relative to the rest of the drawing. By "crucial regions", I mean those regions that are most important for recognising what the drawing depicts. Every cartoonist who has had to draw the same character at wildly different sizes will, I think, be familiar with this. But for an excellent example and explanation, please read my <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-v.html">previous post</a> and Hofstadter's explanation therein of how he renders Helvetica on smaller and smaller grids. The key point there is:<blockquote>The second and third columns are the work of an algorithm that has information about zones likely to be characteristic and critical for recognizability. It mathematically transforms the original outline so that the critical zones are disproportionately enlarged (the way your nose is enlarged when you look at yourself in a spoon). It then applies the naive algorithm to this new outline (pixels light up if and only if they fall inside). This amounts to an interesting trade-off: sensitivity in the critical zones is enhanced al the sacrifice of sensitivity in less critical zones.</blockquote>
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-9915591669527292602016-01-02T16:29:00.000+00:002016-01-07T20:16:41.187+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings V, Helveticality Dissipating into the Darkness<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-iv.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings IV, Douglas Hofstadter's Metaphor for Translation</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-vi.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings VI, Inflating Significant Zones</a> ] </p>
<p>
In my last posting, I showed an image of stepping stones in a stream, Douglas Hofstadter's metaphor for translation. One specific case of this is: what if you're translating from a language into the same language, but with a coarser resolution? For example, if you're trying to précis a novel, or squeeze the gist of a newspaper article into its lead paragraph, or display an image at very low resolution. This is one of the themes in the essay that I referred to last time, Douglas Hofstadter's "Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking". It's a special case of his <a href="http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/mcgrawg/lspirit.html">Letter Spirit</a> project, which explores the mechanisms that high-level cognition might use to design stylistically consistent fonts on fairly simple grids. For examples, search for the section heading "Some sample gridfonts" in the linked page.
<p>
Investigating creativity and style in font design is like investigating Newton's laws using inclined planes and balls: it provides an easy-to-control microdomain from which irrelevant influences are easily excluded. Hofstadter's image and commentary below — from page 597 of the <a href="https://ia601007.us.archive.org/22/items/MetamagicalThemas/Metamagical%20Themas,%20Hofstadter.pdf">PDF</a> — are set within the same microdomain, and make a nice example of something I want to refer to in my next post:
<blockquote>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/helveticality.png">
<p>
FIGURE 24-12. Helveticality emerging from the gloom. Proceeding from bottom to top, we
have a series of increasingly fine-grained dot matrices within which to maneuver. Clearly,
both the 'a'-ness and the Helveticality get easier and easier to recognize as you ascend — especially
if you look at the page from a few feet away. Proceeding from left to right, we have
a series of increasingly letter-savvy programs doing the choosing of the pixels to light up. (As
a matter of fact, the rightmost column is a very light touch-up job of the third column, done by
a human.)
<p>
The leftmost column is done by a totally letter-naive program. It takes the curvilinear
outline of the target shape and turns on all pixels whose centers fall within that outline.
<p>
The second and third columns are the work of an algorithm that has information
about zones likely to be characteristic and critical for recognizability. It mathematically
transforms the original outline so that the critical zones are disproportionately enlarged (the
way your nose is enlarged when you look at yourself in a spoon). It then applies the naive
algorithm to this new outline (pixels light up if and only if they fall inside). This amounts to an
interesting trade-off: sensitivity in the critical zones is enhanced al the sacrifice of sensitivity
in less critical zones. Consequently, some pixels are turned on that do not fall inside the
letter's true outline, while some that do fall inside that outline remain off It's a gamble that
usually pays off but not always, as you can see by comparing the first and second letters in,
say, the third row.
<p>
The difference between the second and third columns is that in the second column, the
critical zones are crude averages fed to the program and don't even depend on the letter
involved. In the third column, however, the program inspects the curvilinear shape and
determines the zones itself according to its knowledge of standard letter features such as
crossbars, bowls, posts, and so on. Then it uses these carefully worked-out zones just the way
the second algorithm uses its cruder zones: by distorting the true outline to emphasize those
zones, and then applying the naive algorithm to the new outline.
<p>
But no matter how smart a program you are, the problem gets harder and harder as
you descend towards typographical hell — matrices too coarse to capture essential distinctions.
En route to hell, more and more sacrifices are made. Helveticality goes overboard first, then
'a'-ness; and from then on, entropy reigns supreme. But just before that point is the ultimate
challenge — and only people can handle it, so far. [Computer graphics by Phill Apley and Rick
Bryan.]
</blockquote>
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-84384107255128935402016-01-01T16:06:00.000+00:002016-01-07T20:17:02.120+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings IV, Douglas Hofstadter's Metaphor for Translation<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/09/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-iii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings III, Appointing a Representative</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-v.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings V, Helveticality Dissipating into the Darkness</a> ] </p>
Here's a lovely metaphor for translation, from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter">Douglas Hofstadter's</a> essay "Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking" in his book <a href="https://archive.org/details/MetamagicalThemas"><cite>Metamagical Themas</cite></a>. In the <a href="https://ia601007.us.archive.org/22/items/MetamagicalThemas/Metamagical%20Themas,%20Hofstadter.pdf">PDF</a>, it's on page 588. I'm posting it here because I'll need it in future posts.
<blockquote>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/stream_500.png">
FIGURE 24-7.
A metaphor for translation. A stream (symbolizing reality) has two
sets of stepping-stones (symbolizing the basic ingredients of a language, such as
words and stock phrases) in it. The black stones (Burmese, say) are arranged in one
way, and the white stones (say, Welsh) in some other way. A pathway linking up a few
black stones (a thought expressed in Burmese) is to be imitated by a "similar"
pathway joining up white stones (translated into Welsh). One possibility is the
speckled pathway, located at nearly the same part of the stream as the original
pathway but not terribly similar in shape to it (a fairly literal translation), while a
rival candidate (a more literary translation, needless to say) is the pathway located a
distance upstream and resembling the original in some more abstract ways, including
patterns in some of the "overstones" of the main stones (the similar archipelagos in
Burmese and Welsh stones running roughly parallel to the far bank).
</blockquote>Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-23915179405341521622015-09-03T20:00:00.000+01:002016-01-07T20:17:24.315+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings III, Appointing a Representative<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/09/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-ii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings II, Information Deformation Theory</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2016/01/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-iv.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings IV, Douglas Hofstadter's Metaphor for Translation</a> ] </p>
<p>
Here's a not very good picture taken from my bedroom window:<br> <img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/real_bricks_h377.jpg"><br> You can see that the walls of the houses are brick, and just about see the individual bricks. Suppose that you wanted to draw this in black and white. Drawing all the lines between the bricks would make the drawing look "busy", as would shading each brick to indicate its tonal value. So if you want to indicate that there are bricks in the wall, what do you do? One possibility is to apply a transformation that I call "appointing a representative".
<p>
You draw just a few patches of bricks, leaving the viewer's brain to fill in the rest. These patches are <i>representatives</i> for the rest of the bricks.
<p>
This transformation can be thought of as a two-step process. In the first step, draw all the bricks. Unfortunately, this overemphasises them relative to the rest of the drawing. So in the second, reduce the "brick level" until they are no more prominent than in the photo.Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-20724844219053374392015-09-03T19:24:00.002+01:002016-01-07T20:17:47.070+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings II, Information Deformation Theory<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/07/the-semantics-of-line-drawings.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings I</a> | <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/09/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-iii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings III, Appointing a Representative</a> ] </p>
<p>
An interesting aspect of the semantics of line drawings is what one might call Information Deformation Theory. Here's an example.
<p>
I was drawing people's hands from across Cornmarket Street, a wide shopping street in the centre of Oxford. From one side of Cornmarket, you can see the general shape of the hands of people on the other side, and the positions of some of the fingers if the light is favourable. My natural tendency is to try to draw all the fingers, with lines indicating the boundary of each. But this looks very wrong. Why?
<p>
It looks wrong, I think, for the same reason that I mentioned in one of the slides for my Thales talk: <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/texture_5.html">"Texture lines are often omitted"</a>. The slide showed a drawing from <a href="http://christopherhartbooks.com/">Christopher Hart</a>'s book <cite>How to Draw Cartoon Baby Animals</cite>. When drawing the face, Hart advises, draw ruffles of fur on the cheeks, but leave a large neutral space under the chin. This allows the eye to "rest" and stops the animal from looking too furry.
<p>
Similarly, cartoonists often draw only a few isolated patches of bricks in walls, as in this clip-art Great Wall of China:<br>
<img src="http://web.archive.org/web/20160106065153/http://comps.canstockphoto.com/can-stock-photo_csp10507430.jpg"><br>
Drawing the spaces between bricks or blocks as black lines overemphasises them relative to the original scene. And in my drawings of hands, drawing all the boundaries between fingers, even with a fineliner pen, would overemphasise them.
<p>
In other words, the medium — such as pen and ink — biases the information represented with it, and the artist must compensate by warping or deforming the drawing in some way. That's what I propose to write about in the next few posts. Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-24421832661618469102015-07-26T19:43:00.004+01:002015-07-26T21:07:58.813+01:00Enhancing the Moment vs. Enhancing the Image Bank<p>
When I used to go to the Caption Comics Festival, before the committee decided
not to hold it in Oxford
any more, one of the artists I enjoyed chatting with was Bib Edwards. Bib has
<a href="http://hoopercomicart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/tribute-to-brian-bib-edwards-by-john.html">passed
away</a>, but I still value his advice. He told me that to
help me draw from imagination, I should sketch whenever I could,
drawing everything I had the chance to. After four years, he said, I would have built up a
reasonably sized image bank. And when I drew from imagination, I would subconsciously find
myself using bits and pieces of the images from it.
<p>
This is a different use of memory from trying to remember a specific person (say)
so that you can sketch them before they move away. I'm writing this partly to make that distinction. But I hope that psychology and neuroscience can help artists both enhance the moment and enhance their image banks.
<p>
While
drawing from imagination is fun, it's more fun when you don't have to keep stopping to look up reference pictures for difficult poses, pieces of machinery, costumes. And, it's more fun when you don't have to stop and spend all day working it out. To see what I mean, consider people's arms. When you're drawing a cartoon, you can get away with drawing arms as tubes standing distinct from the body. I did that below, and the result is perfectly intelligible:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/dobbs/stone_age_new_473.gif">
<p>
But now look at the real-life arms in this Wikipedia photo of a jersey:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/pullover.png"><br>
The arm on the right is very slightly obscured by a fold of fabric from the jersey. Because of the bagging of the jersey, the one on the left has a characteristic double-curved dark line bounding the upper arm. When drawing more realistically, and indeed, even when drawing cartoons, it's good to be able to add such details. They <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/inflect2.html">inform about shape and pose</a>, and they satisfy the brain, preventing the drawing from looking too schematic.
<p>
You can force such details into your brain through practice, practice, and more practice.
And if that's the only way, that's what the artist must do. But it would be silly not to ask whether neuroscience can make the uptake of such information easier. For example, there's the phenomenon of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory">flashbulb memory</a>, whereby everyone remembers where they were when Princess Diana died. Surprise, importance, and emotion, it seems, make memories more vivid and less fragile. So could we hook into the flashbulb-memory mechanism in order to strengthen the memories to be added to the image bank? Perhaps by viewing the images to be recorded through smart glasses, and changing their colour or making them very bright. Perhaps chemically, by stimulating the "downstream" production of whichever neurotransmitters strengthen memory storage, if indeed that's how flashbulb memory works.
<p>
Or perhaps most of us already have such memories, and the problem is not storage but retrieval. That's hinted at by <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2014/12/trans-cranial-magnetic-stimulation-and.html">Allan Snyder's experiments on trans-cranial magnetic stimulation</a>. A related question, though one which may apply to enhancing the moment only: does the brain contain an analogue map of the visual field? If so, is there any way to make it accessible so that one can draw directly from it? This would eliminate a lot of tedious angle- and proportion-judging.
<p>
One subgoal of such research should be to help artists
consciously "see" the components of their image banks, so that they can mentally compose them, in full three-dimensional Technicolor glory.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-3464991168870563392015-07-26T18:27:00.000+01:002015-07-26T18:54:07.232+01:00Training Visualisation via Afterimages<p>
There are several discussions on the Web about improving visual imagination and memory. I wrote about one of them in an earlier posting, <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/01/from-i-cannot-mentally-visualise-to-god.html">"From 'I cannot mentally visualise' to 'god what a taste of fire'"</a>. The second part of that title comes from a comment by user "fritillary" who, explaining how she had <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/143968/I-cannot-mentally-visualize#2166692">revolutionised her own visualisation abilities</a>, remarked:
<blockquote>
It was months before I saw any results, but god what a taste of fire.
</blockquote>
Another discussion that I've just found on lesswrong.com suggests a way to do this — namely, using afterimages. Actually, it's concerned with auditory "afterimages", but would it also work for visual memory?
<p>
The discussion is in a thread called
<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/">"generalizing From One Example"</a>. (In case the site should disappear, I've <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150726100213/http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/">archived this in the Wayback Machine</a>.) The title refers to the "Typical Mind Fallacy", the belief that one's own mind is similar to everyone else's. According to user Yvain who started the thread, <a href="http://galton.org/">Francis Galton</a> carried out a study on mental imagery, presumably the one written up in <a href="http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm">"Statistics of Mental Imagery"</a>,
<i>Mind</i>, <i>5</i> (1880). Galton gave people detailed questionnaires about how well they could visualise. Some subjects couldn't form mental images at all, others had almost perfect imagery. But the ones who did assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't assumed no-one did, to the point of supposing that anybody claiming they could image was lying. Thus Galton experienced the Typical Mind Fallacy. Most of the rest of the thread concerns applications of the Fallacy, including visualisation. The contributions that interest me today are by user "cousin_it", in
<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ah6">this comment</a>
and
<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ah9">this</a>
(archived
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150726140554/http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ah6">here</a>
and
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150324171950/http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ah9">here</a>).
<p>
In the first comment, cousin_it wrote:
<blockquote>
Regarding differences in mental imagery: only this winter did I really understand that good musicians have vivid aural imagination, while I couldn't hear <i>any</i> sounds in my head, period. Immediately after this realization I started exercising. By now I can hear complete monophonic melodies, and (on good days) imagine two notes sounding at the same time. Classically trained conductors can imagine a complete orchestral sound while reading sheet music. I don't see any reason why visual imagination can't be similarly trained.
</blockquote>
Another user then asked how cousin_it practised this skill. Here's the reply:
<blockquote>
The hardest part for me was the beginning, getting a toehold at <i>any</i> inner sound. Pick a note on the guitar - I started with D on the second string. Play it at a steady rhythm with rests, slowly fading away into nothing. (Might not be possible on the piano or other instruments.) At some moment the brain will start to "complete" the sound, even though by that point you're playing too softly to hear. Catch that feeling, expand on it. When you can "do" several different notes, try playing a simple melody and hearing it afterwards. After you're comfortable with that, try to hear a simple major scale <i>without</i> playing it immediately beforehand. Then work from unfamiliar sheet music without playing it - solfege-sing in your mind - by now I can do this quite easily. And so on.
</blockquote>
<p>
One thing to investigate, I think, should be what happens in the brains of people who have learned to "complete". Does some part of the brain's state when hearing the sound persist once that sound is gone? Is there some kind of feedback that is keeping this going? Does the brain state of completers differ from that of people who have not learned to complete?
<p>
As far as applying the idea to vision goes, we need an analogue to fading notes. The obvious thing to try is fading simple shapes — perhaps lines or circles — on a computer screen. It would be a fairly simple research project to write suitable software and try it out on a range of subjects.
<p>
Not having such software, I looked around for an object I could try "fading". The pen pictured below (*) seemed a good choice:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/brookes_pen.jpg"><br>
It's in a translucent violently-magenta case, vivid enough to grab the attention, especially if direct light is shining through. It's actually quite a lot brighter than in the photo, as if softly glowing. I tried holding it horizontal in the middle of my visual field, then snatching it rapidly away along its own length while concentrating on retaining the image, doing this twenty times. I seemed to be able to maintain an afterimage for a short time, provided that I viewed the pen against a white background with no distractions, namely my ceiling. Is this worth practising? Of course, one has to beware of the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray">N-ray</a> effect.
<p>
By the way, I came across one advocate of afterimages for visualisation. It's Marko Martelli
on his self-help site unchainmybrain.com . In his
<a href="http://unchainmybrain.com/learn-to-visualize/">"How to Develop the Ability to Visualize Mental Imagery – From Scratch"</a> (archived
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150726163158/http://unchainmybrain.com/learn-to-visualize/">here</a>), Marko suggests looking at a candle flame for ten to twenty seconds, then
closing your eyes and trying to keep the afterimage for as long as possible. Describe the flame's colour, shape and other properties to yourself in words as fully as possible. Then open your eyes and repeat the exercise, for no more than five minutes. Practise regularly, Marko says, and you will see progress. Marko says that he developed this method after long practice, frustrated at not being able to visualise.
<p>
(*) Coincidentally, the pen was given to me at a discussion with Brookes University about applying sports science to drawing. But that's another topic.
<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ah9"></a>Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-83620718972458741362015-07-03T18:17:00.002+01:002016-01-07T20:18:13.878+00:00The Semantics of Line Drawings I<p>[ <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/09/the-semantics-of-line-drawings-ii.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings II, Information Deformation Theory</a> ]
</p>
<p>
I've just given a talk in Athens. Only virtually, unfortunately, because I do love the city. I spoke on <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/intro.html">The Semantics of Line Drawings</a>. What are the different uses to which artists put lines? What kinds of information do they convey? And how can we express this information mathematically? We'll need to do that if we are to make computers draw and understand drawings.
<p>
I'd been invited by
<a href="http://www.math.ntua.gr/~sofia/ThalisSite/index.html">Project Thales</a>: a group researching into the
algebraic modelling of topological and computational structures. I've previously worked in this field in a very different
context, that of <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/calco2011/paper.html">making spreadsheets modular</a>.
But, these mathematical methods can be applied to a huge variety of different problems. One of these could be described, very generally, as the problem of how to integrate different points of view. For example, in urban design, how can you reconcile the very different
vocabularies and modelling methods used by, for example, a transport planner, an expert on making streets safe from crime, and a designer who wants to minimise energy loss in houses? This is something that I and a colleague will be writing up later. I mention it here because it is, like the topic of this posting, an "art" problem. Algebraic modelling is very definitely applicable to art.
<p>
So let's get back to semantics: the way that languages convey meaning. For programming languages, and other artificial languages such as those used to describe integrated-circuit designs, this is vital for ensuring that your programs and machines do what they were intended to. Rather important for nuclear reactors and Google's driverless car, but not unimportant even for mobile phones, supermarket U-scans, and banks. (One might argue that the recession of 2008 could have been avoided had we had a decent semantics of bankers.)
<p>
The semantics of natural languages is more complicated, but needed for speech understanding, automatic translation, and searching. My interest in this is that there's a sense in which drawing is a language too. In some drawings, this may seem
obvious. Some of the lines in a line drawing have a clear geometric interpretation — they denote the edges and "rims" of objects, namely the places where the line of sight grazes the object's surface. When projected onto the image, they form a silhouette. We now understand very well how to convert these lines back into a 3-D model: see the references I gave in <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/rims.html">this slide</a>. So the meaning of these lines is clear.
<p>
But lines are used in many other ways. What are they, and can we formalise them?
<p>
Most people understand line drawings easily, and realise, for example, that the cross-hatched lines in the school-story picture below are not to be interpreted as lines, but as shadow:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/greyfriars_h446.gif">
<p>
Similarly, note the horizontal lines on the back of the leftmost animal below, and
the vertical ones on the nose of the rightmost. These don't represent scars or other marks, but tell us about the orientation of their
surfaces:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/lupo_alberto_h300.gif">
<p>
And in this drawing by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Busch">Wilhelm Busch</a>, the lines rising from the bathtub represent steam, even though steam does not have a definite boundary:<br><img src="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/busch_h500.gif">
<p>
Here's another Busch drawing, from the well-known <cite>Max und Moritz</cite> strip in which two naughty boys torment the bourgeois townsfolk and eventually meet their doom in a baker's milling machine. In the picture, they have fallen into his dough:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/busch2_h338.gif">
<p>
I find those lines characterful, conveying a droopy, gloopy, effect. Not drippy: drooping is slower than dripping, with bigger drops. Which brings us on to cross-sensory association, the <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/suggest_1_8.html">bouba/kiki effect</a>,
and asssociations such as those Paul Klee writes about in his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogical_Sketchbook"><cite>Pedagogical Sketchbook</cite></a>. As you can see, I'm moving from the physical attributes that lines denote (object boundaries, light and shade, orientation, texture) to character, emotion, and mood.
<p>
I gave some examples of conveying these through line quality <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/suggest_2_5.html">near the end of my talk</a>, using excerpts from <a href="http://www.hadleighhistory.org.uk/page/leonard_doust_-_a_hadleigh_artist_author_wip_vj">Leonard Doust</a>'s book <cite>A Manual on Caricature and Cartoon Drawing</cite>. The point is that artists do use such effects, so a semantics of line drawing must be able to handle them. One example is the drawing below:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/doust5b_h290.gif"><br>
Of the righthand figure, Doust says,
<blockquote>Please remember that it is not enough just to make a pattern or design. It must be in harmony in line and (or) tone with the character. This is, I think, patently obvious in Fig. 5. Surely a pun is not out of place when I say that here is a blockhead made of blocks. No imaginative sweeps nor complicated whirls as in Fig. 4, just plain solid chunks; and the whole, also a plain stolid design — heavy, with a sphinx-like stillness resulting perchance from extreme emptiness instead of, as in the Sphinx, extreme understanding.
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
A more extreme example is this one:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/doust7_h449.gif">
<p>
In a sense, this is as extreme as you can get, because it contains no recognisable objects whatsoever. The first design, Doust says, represents Speed. The second is Peace, and the third Intelligence. Whether or not you agree with him (I do), such drawings exist, so a formal semantics of drawing must be able to describe their meaning. How? I've hinted at that in my <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/lds/conclusion.html">conclusion</a>, and I'll write it up in a future posting.
<p>
(The first image is from <cite>The Greyfriars Holiday Annual</cite>, 1926. The second is from <cite>Lupo Alberto Collezione N. 7</cite>, 1993. The third and fourth are from Wilhelm Busch's <cite>Die schönsten Bildergeschichten für die Jugend</cite>, a 1960 edition presumably reprinted from Busch's late 19th century original. The fifth and sixth are from L. A. Doust's <cite>A Manual on Caricature and Cartoon Drawing</cite>, 1936.)Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-36813336857778913532015-06-22T18:14:00.000+01:002015-07-26T10:58:05.342+01:00The Artist's Spex<p>
I've been thinking about what could be done with
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-mediated_reality">mediated-reality</a> glasses,
i.e. ones that can edit your view of the world before you see it.
As it happens,
there are researchers developing
what sound like some very suitable
glasses very near me: in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, where
<a href="http://www.ndcn.ox.ac.uk/news/stephen-hicks-wins-award-for-inventing-intelligent-glasses-for-blind-people">Dr
Stephen Hicks</a> and his team have set up the
<a href="http://www.va-st.com/smart-specs/">Oxford Smart Specs Research Group</a>.
<p>
Smart Specs use clever
image processing to help people with very bad sight see better, as shown in the group
of four images near the top of the Smart Specs page. The first image shows a lecture room
in natural colour, with a view of some chairs and two men in the foreground,
and a cupboard and door in the background. The following three images have been
processed into monochrome, and show only the chairs and two men. Details
have been thrown away, and contrast enhanced, making chairs and men much easier to see.
<p>
From an artistic point of view, the third image is the most interesting. It
shows a very clear edge-detected image of one of the men, simplified so that
only his hair, glasses, eyes, nostrils, mouth, chin-tip, T-shirt and trousers, and
arms and hands (half in pockets) are visible.
If you had a pair
of Smart Specs and you wanted to cheat at
<a href="http://www.urbansketchers.org/">urban sketching</a>, you could do
so very effectively by using the same algorithm to capture and render your
subject in line.
<p>
But let's assume that you want to do the drawing yourself, rather
than letting the computer do it for you. (Though perhaps, with kit such as this, as well as programs like the
one Michael Haller, Florian Landerl, and Mark Billinghurst
describe in
<a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.61.6181">"A Loose and Sketchy Approach in a Mediated Reality Environment"</a>, sketching will one day be as dead as
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_%28folklore%29">John Henry</a>'s steel-driving.)
How could Smart Specs help you learn to draw better? Here are some possibilities.
<p>
<ul>
<li><p>Highlight regions of negative space. This is the space between objects. As
<a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/01/stripping-away-meaning.html">I've mentioned in this blog already</a>,
paying attention to this space, rather than to the objects themselves, fools the brain
into drawing more accurately. See, for example,
Brad Kasten's
<a href="http://www.learn-how-to-draw-and-paint-great.com/negative-space-drawing.html">"Once you master negative space drawing
it will forever change the way you see the world"</a> page.
But you need to learn to "see" negative space,
and a tool to point out instances in real scenes would be
very helpful.</p></li>
<li><p>Superimpose basic shapes. Here, you break objects down into simple two-dimensional
shapes such as triangles and rectangles, and use these to create a framework
for your drawing. There are some examples here at Bob and Phil's <a href="http://www.how-to-draw-and-paint.com/learntodraw.html">"Learn to
Draw Whatever You Want"</a> page. Once again, a tool that demonstrates instances in real scenes would be
useful.
<p>The image processing would be harder than for negative space,
because the former is an objective notion, whereas decomposition
into basic shapes is subjective. You can argue about how much the body
of a bird, say, must deviate from a triangle before it stops being
useful to see it as one. But by inducing from example decompositions
drawn by artists, it should be possible to define a best-match
criterion.</p></li>
</ul>
</p>
<p>
Both negative space and basic shapes are techniques for seeing
more accurately. So are the suggestions below, but in a
rather different way. I don't think I'd call them "techniques" now:
they're more like tools that could be applied either to the scene
you're currently drawing, or to lots and lots of scenes
that you can learn relationships from.
<ul>
<li><p>Superimpose a rectangular grid, to help you judge angles and lengths.
This can also be useful in composing a drawing, as explained in
Russell Stutler's <a href="http://www.stutler.cc/other/sketchbook/sketchbook_c_11.html">"Page 11. How to Sketch"</a>
page.</p></li>
<li><p>Superimpose a horizontal rectangular grid, receding into the background, onto surfaces
such as pavements and floors. This would provide a baseline for people's feet, and also show
how distances parallel to the picture plane relate to distances perpendicular to it. </p></li>
<li><p>Superimpse ellipses onto clockfaces, wheels, the tops of cups, to show how
to draw circles in perspective.</p></li>
<li><p>Superimpose plausible skull, skeleton, and muscles
onto people and animals, to help understand their anatomy.
<p>
This would require much much much more processing than the suggestions above,
and I don't know whether it's feasible yet.
But there certainly is work going on, as I found from
Michael J. Black's presentation
<a href="http://www.auai.org/uai2003/UAI03mjb.pdf">"Inferring 3D People from 2D Images"</a>.
</p></li>
<li><p>Label different types of crease in clothes. Creases are
important in drawing clothes accurately. But also, even in an abbreviated
way in cartoons, they're useful for giving information about people's poses.
For example, is part of the sleeve round an arm stretched or not, and
what direction do the creases show the arm to be pointing in. There are several
different kinds of crease — see <a href="http://www.mightyartdemos.com/mightyartdemos-bradley.html">'Types of Folds
An Illustrated Tutorial from "Drawing People: How to Portray the Clothed Figure"'
by Barbara Bradley</a> — and it's important to use the right type for the
situation. So it would be useful to have a tool that
classifies creases in real-life scenes.
</ul>
</p>
<p>
Now here's a different type of suggestion again. Not for seeing more
accurately, but for "seeing as".
<ul>
<li><p>Render reality in a particular style, in order
to improve the translation from scene to style. Most lines in a line drawing don't exist in the
scene, but have been introduced by the artist according to some set of conventions. In an analogue to sight-reading music,
can you learn to look at a scene and "see" it in a particular artistic style? Russell Stutler
suggests in <a href="http://www.stutler.cc/other/sketchbook/sketchbook_c_11.html">"Page 11. How to
Sketch"</a> (under "Visualize the sketch on paper") that you can, and I've
suggested a possible method
<a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/artsci.html#priming">here</a>. You could do
this on an ordinary computer, but running the rendering program on Smart Specs
would enable users to immerse themselves in the results, perhaps making them
much more effective.
</p></li>
</ul>
</p>
<p>
And finally, here's one that would help with practising particular objects.
When I'm in the street and I've just drawn a hand in a particular
position, say, I often wish I could try drawing a slight variant.
Not an hour or two later, when I can get back to reference books or
computer, but immediately in order to help consolidate the original.
So it would be great to have a program that can:
<ul>
<li><p>See what I've just drawn,
search Google's image bank for photos of variants, and display them in front of my
eyes for me to practise on.
</p></li>
</ul>
</p>
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-51722056586258667272015-06-01T18:17:00.000+01:002015-06-01T18:17:11.970+01:00The Body as Regions in a Memory PalaceI've been trying a new memory method for fast sketching of people. I mentally divide their image into regions, and superimpose a number on each, trying to note the outline of the region and the most important lines in it. Then I walk through the regions in order, recalling the shape and contents of each.
<p>
Three things inspired this. The first was some passages in Joshua Foer's book <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein"><i>Moonwalking with Einstein</i></a>, in which he looks at the techniques that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore">Ben Pridmore</a> and other memorisation champions use to memorise such remarkable quantities of information. In Chapter Five, "The Memory Palace", Foer notes that
the point of memory techniques is to transform the information we want to remember into a form that our brains were built for. And apparently, one of these is navigation. Foer quotes the Memory Grand Master <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Cooke_%28author%29">Ed Cooke</a>:
<blockquote>
"The thing to understand, Josh, is that humans are very, very good at remembering spaces," Ed remarked from his perch on the boulder. "Just to give an example, if you are left alone for five minutes in someone else's house you've never visited before, and you're feeling energetic and nosy, think about how much of that house could be fixed in your memory in that brief period. You'd be able to learn not just where all the different rooms are and how they connect with each other, but their dimensions and decoration, the arrangement of their contents, and where the windows are. Without really noticing it, you'd remember the whereabouts of hundreds of objects and all sorts of dimensions that you wouldn't even notice yourself noticing. If you actually add up all that information, it's like the equivalent of a short novel. But we don't ever register that as being a memory achievement. Humans just gobble up spatial information."
</blockquote>
<p>
This made me wonder whether I could improve my memory for the things I was drawing by thinking of them not as single and relatively small objects, but as landscapes that I wanted to navigate.
<p>
My second source of inspiration was the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity research on attention and memory that I blogged in <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/01/attention-restores-forgotten-items-to.html">"Attention restores forgotten items to visual short-term memory"</a>. As I mentioned in that posting, the research suggested to me that when sketching someone who I've only seen briefly, then about a second after seeing them, I should deliberately scan my remembered visual field. And I should pay attention to those places in it where I think the most salient details for my drawing are. The division into numbered regions that I'm writing about today prepares for that scan, and the numbers make sure that I scan everything.
<p>
The final inspiration was the idea of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci">memory palace</a>. It's the main memorisation technique that Foer writes about, but was known long before him, dating at least as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans. The idea is to first build a mental image of a palace or other building. Then become so thoroughly familiar with it that you can reliably walk through it, guaranteeing to visit all its rooms or landmarks in a fixed sequence without missing any.
Once you've done this, your memory palace is ready for use. To memorise a list of items, mentally place one item in each room. There are lots of techniques for converting hard-to-visualise items such as abstract concepts into images that are easier to visualise, and for associating them with the room they're in. To recall a list, just walk through the palace and see what's in each room.
<p>
Here's a sketch made using the method described in my first paragraph. I think it worked well, given that I drew it entirely from memory, something I don't think I could have done otherwise.<br><img src="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/landmarks_h293.gif"><br>It's a man who I was watching from inside Combibos, standing near a Saturday market stall being set up in Gloucester Green. I haven't kept a note of how many numbers I superimposed, but it would have been around eight. Two went on his head: one for the quiff, and one for the rest of his hair. One was for his face and neck, including prominent eyebrows and the different length sides of the V below the neck, plus the change in direction of the collar further up. One was for his further arm, and one for the torso and nearer arm: the amount of visible back to the right of his arm was important, and I may have used <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/">negative space</a> to judge this.
And probably two regions were for his legs, with special attention paid to position of feet and to the stretch creases along his nearer leg. To make the perspective right, the bottom of the nearer trouser leg should probably have been lower.
<p>
Granted, the drawing looks stiff. This is partly because I was being quite deliberate when I drew the lines, not thinking about how to change their character to reflect what I was drawing. So the man's hair was drawn with the same simple straight line as his sleeves and trouser legs, even though one would have had a fine texture, one would have been gently undulating, and one would (if denim, which statistically speaking, it probably was) have been full of inelegant wrinkles and bulges. My memory didn't extend to that level of detail.
<p>
In drawing this and other sketches, I was thinking almost entirely about numbered regions. Even though the idea was inspired partly by Foer's passage about landmarks and navigation, I wasn't changing mental contexts to think of this as navigation. Would that have helped?
<p>
I haven't objectively tested this memory technique, so although it seems to work, that could be self-delusion. If it does work, it needs practice. Part of that, I've found, is being able to superimpose a constellation of numbers in parallel, because there isn't always time to work through them one by one. I think it also needs some prior experience in drawing, so that you know which features of the subject will be most useful in helping the viewer "read" your sketch, and hence should be paid attention to.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-32741135689744916702015-01-06T10:42:00.002+00:002015-01-06T12:53:13.952+00:00Stripping Away MeaningLast August, I discussed the contents of my post
<a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2014/08/can-psychology-help-us-draw.html">"Can Psychology Help Us Draw?"</a> with <a href="http://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/team/principal-investigators/glyn-humphreys">Glyn Humphreys</a>,
head of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford.
We talked about the way that certain techniques help the artist to concentrate on the shape of an object, ignoring what they "know" it should look like. Glyn called this "stripping away meaning". It's a good phrase, and I suggest that it should be adopted.
<p>
Here are the techniques for stripping away meaning that I mentioned in that post:
<p><b>Negative space</b>.
This refers to the space around and between objects. Many
artists train themselves concentrate
on this space so that they can see the shapes of the objects inside it more
accurately. Here are some short articles about it: <a href="http://www.animationtaco.com/ap/ap_negspace.html">
"Figure/Ground Relationship"</a> by Alice Taylor; <a href=
"http://jayalders.com/philosophy/see-like-an-artist-negative-space.html">"See
Like
an Artist: negative space"</a> by Jay Alders; <a href=
"http://artkatcards-paintings.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/art-stuff-negative-space-and-left-brain.html">
"art stuff - negative space and the left brain"</a> by Kathy Hebert;
and <a href=
"http://annebobroffhajal.com/category/drawing/right-brain-left-brain-in-drawing/page/2/">
"Hand Drawing Demo #6: Reviewing Left Brain/Right Brain"</a> by Anne
Bobroff-Hajal.
<p>
<b>Inversion</b>.
There are drawing exercises in which one copies
inverted images in order to focus attention on shape. Here are two typical articles about
this: <a href=
"http://watercolorjournal.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/upside-down-drawing-and-contour-drawing/">
"Upside down Drawing and Contour Drawing"</a> by "Davy"; and <a
href=
"http://everydayadrawing.com/2013/01/31/drawing-picasso-igor-stravinsky-upside-down/">
"Day #031 - Drawing Picasso’s Igor Stravinsky Upside Down"</a>
by
"Neelima". It occurred to me that psychologists have used inverting
spectacles in <a href=
"http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/linden%20%281999%29%20the%20myth%20of%20upright%20vision.%20a%20psychophysical%20and%20functional%20imaging%20study%20of%20adaptation%20to%20inverting%20spectacles.pdf">experiments on the adaptability of vision</a>. Could
they help us draw? It should be possible to program image inversion into
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass">Google Glass</a>.
<p><b>Blind drawing</b>. This is drawing without looking at the paper. Some artists use
it to improve hand-eye coordination, or
to make themselves aware of what's actually seen rather than some symbolic stereotype for it — i.e.
to strip away meaning once more.
The following articles explain these:
<a href="http://drawsketch.about.com/cs/drawinglessons/a/contourblind.htm">"Blind
Contour Drawing: A Classic Drawing Exercise"</a> by Helen South; and
<a href="http://www.wetcanvas.com/ArtSchool/Drawing/BlindContour/">"Blind
Contour Drawing: Drawing by Touch"</a>
by Carol Rosinski; and <a href="http://www.naturalwaytodraw.com/2011/04/if-you-dont-begin-blind-contour-drawing.html">"If You Don’t Begin Blind Contour Drawing Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later."</a>. By the way, the third article
refers to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimon_Nicola%C3%AFdes">Kimon Nicolaïdes</a>, whose
book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3061.The_Natural_Way_to_Draw"><cite>The
Natural Way to Draw</cite></a> advocated blind drawing.
</p>
<p>
<b>Cold water in the ear</b>. A strange idea, but one
mentioned in the paper <a href=
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11204407">"Spatial- and
verbal-memory
improvement by cold-water caloric stimulation in healthy
subjects"</a>, by
D.Bächtold, T.Baumann, P.S.Sándor, M.Kritos, M.Regard,
and P.Brugger. The authors
say that putting cold water in subjects' left ear sped up their
recall of
object locations, while water in the right ear sped up recognition
of words. They
suggest that the stimulation activates structures in the
opposite
hemisphere, speeding up cognitive processes there. But it seems this is not likely to be useful. Glyn
told me that the
effect is too
short-lived to be any use. It also causes <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nystagmus">nystagmus</a>.
<p>
<b>Transcranial stimulation</b>. I posted about this
in <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2014/12/trans-cranial-magnetic-stimulation-and.html">"Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation and the Curled-Cat and Bristly-Scottie Drawings of Allan Snyder's Subjects</a>". Snyder
applied strong magnetic fields to his subjects' brains, to test
the hypothesis that the extraordinary skills shown by savants could be
induced in normal people by simulating the savants' brain impairments. Drawings done
under TMS are shown on page 4 of <a href="http://www.centreforthemind.com/images/savantskills.pdf">the research paper</a>.
It seems to me that the cats and dogs drawn under TMS by subjects "N.R." and "A.J."
are less naïve, artistically speaking, than those drawn normally, and that the effect is big enough
to be worth investigating further. Glyn also thought it worth following up.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-20586343524752321902015-01-05T20:43:00.001+00:002016-01-02T15:20:33.435+00:00An argument that visual memory can, in principle, be improved<p>
My last two posts were <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/01/from-i-cannot-mentally-visualise-to-god.html">"From 'I cannot mentally visualise' to 'god what a taste of fire'"</a> and <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2015/01/attention-restores-forgotten-items-to.html">"'Attention restores forgotten items to visual short-term memory'"</a>. To me, the second answers a question that the first poses. Namely, is it possible <i>in principle</i> to improve visual memory?
<p>
The research by Stokes and colleagues described in the second article shows that visual memory is affected by attention, and that memory for specific items can be improved thereby. But we can consciously manipulate our attention. Therefore, we can <i>in principle</i> improve visual memory even though we may not be able to consciously change its storage capacity. Of course, the improvement might not be large enough to be useful. I'd welcome comments from experts.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-26355043058111173252015-01-05T11:58:00.000+00:002015-07-24T18:39:56.481+01:00From "I cannot mentally visualise" to "god what a taste of fire"<p>
All artists want a better memory. In <cite>The inside story of Viz</cite>, Chris Donald says of co-cartoonist Graham Drury:
<blockquote>
Graham had an uncanny ability to draw anything at all, entirely from memory. He was a graphic reference library. For example, a cry would go up of, 'Graham, What does an Anglican bishop's hat look like from the back?' and he'd draw one instantly.
</blockquote>
<p>
But not everyone is as lucky as Graham, as the thread <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/143968/I-cannot-mentally-visualize">"I cannot mentally visualize."</a> on Metafilter shows. (In case the site disappears, I've <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150103135317/http://ask.metafilter.com/143968/I-cannot-mentally-visualize">archived it in the Wayback Machine</a>.) Discussion was kicked off by "gibbsjd77" saying that until he was 15, he'd never realised that other people could visualise things. Because he can't: he can't see his mother's face, a lemon, a house. It was only when discussing it with a friend that he realised some people can clearly see things in their minds.
<p>
Other posters suggested methods for improving visualisation. But then <a href="http://dfan.org/blog/">Dan Schmidt</a> writing as "dfan" <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/143968/I-cannot-mentally-visualize#2061160">retorted</a>:
<blockquote>
And let me back up gibbsjd77 here - for all the people trying to help us build up our skill with visualization exercises or something, it doesn't help; our brains just don't work that way. It's like suggesting to someone with no arms that he should lift weights.
</blockquote>
<p>
But is that really so? Right at the end of the thread, user "fritillary" <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/143968/I-cannot-mentally-visualize#2166692">contradicted dfan's experience</a>:
<blockquote>
I adamantly disagree that visualization is a 'got it or not' skill. Two years ago, I was in your place exactly... I couldn't summon colors, lines, even my own face at will. Growing up I never had mental or sensory imagery. Every bit of my thinking was done in words and numbers. [...] Now I see images and feel body-flashes all the time. No lie, it has been exceedingly difficult to get this far. When you seem to lack every possible starting component, it's like asking a seahorse to skateboard. [...] The rewards are astounding though. The closest thing I can think of is learning a second language... but it's so much better than that! It's a whole new way to THINK. I've put myself through the wringer to learn and I am a different, happier, more complex person because of it. It was months before I saw any results, but god what a taste of fire.
</blockquote>
<p>
Fritillary went on to suggest things that might help: recalling one's dreams; lucid dreaming; meditating to build concentration; working with one's hands; taking art classes; drawing with one's left hand or one's feet. Paying close attention to how objects look and change, and to size, line, value, surface, light, texture. Asking oneself questions such as "Where is this orange in relation to that one over there? Where do they both lie in my visual field? How is this shade of red different from that one? If I rotated this orange 90 degrees to the left, how would it look?"
<p>
And, making visual imagery one's only mental language:
<blockquote>
Arm yourself with questions in the thought-systems you know (language, music, touch, taste), but don't let yourself answer in anything but sight! If you start thinking in words push them away. Build your memory: look at a orange, look away, try to recall. Repeat. Repeat. Do the same with every visual scene in front of you until you can see afterimages. Try imagining objects in new positions, add features that don't exist. Set up Rube Goldbergs. Compare and contrast. Work your way from hazy generalities to clear microdetail.
</blockquote>
<p>
But has this really worked? A neurologist I discussed it with pointed out that Fritillary's new abilities had not been objectively tested. She might only believe her powers of visualisation have increased. So is it worth spending time on the kind of exercises Fritillary did?
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-38710697984138828522015-01-04T17:38:00.002+00:002015-07-26T13:44:58.844+01:00"Attention restores forgotten items to visual short-term memory"<p>
If you have seen something briefly and you want to sketch it from memory, scan your remembered visual field about a second after seeing it, paying attention to the parts most important to your drawing. This will help fix them in memory. That's what I conclude from <a href="http://the-brain-box.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/research-briefing-attention-restores.html">"Research Briefing: Attention restores forgotten items to visual short-term memory"</a>, a posting by <a href="http://www.ohba.ox.ac.uk/team/core-staff/mark-stokes">Mark Stokes</a> in his <a href="http://the-brain-box.blogspot.co.uk/"><cite>Brain Box</cite></a> blog.
<p>
Mark is head of the <a href="http://www.ohba.ox.ac.uk/groups/AttentionGroup">Attention Group</a> at the <a href="http://www.ohba.ox.ac.uk/">Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity</a>. To quote from the Attention Group's home page:
<blockquote>
Our everyday view of the world is necessarily biased: we focus our attention on information that is most relevant to our current goals, and ignore behaviourally irrelevant information. Without such bias, we would be lost in a world of information-overload, unable to accomplish even the simplest tasks.
</blockquote>
<p>
One of the faculties this applies to is memory. The brain receives too much visual information to remember it all, so has to choose what to remember. Previous research has suggested, according to Mark's post, that paying attention to information in visual short-term memory helps one maintain it, in the same way that repeating a phone number to oneself helps one remember that. But the paper that's the subject of his post goes further. Paying attention to items sometimes restores them to memory even when they seem to have been forgotten. This may be because they were originally stored in a format in which they couldn't be retrieved. Paying attention to them converts them into a retrievable format.
<p>
The experiments that suggest this are described in <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Byf6yMJNMU9jTk16Y1pkTnprQnc/edit">"Attention Restores Discrete Items to Visual Short-Term Memory"</a> by
Alexandra M. Murray, Anna C. Nobre, Ian A. Clark, André M. Cravo and Mark G. Stokes, in
<cite>Psychological Science</cite> published online 22 February 2013. Here's my cartoon summary of them:<br>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/dobbs/memory1.gif" width=300>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/dobbs/memory2.gif" width=300>
<img src="http://www.j-paine.org/dobbs/memory3.gif" width=300><br>
(Apologies for the rough drawing, which I did with a mouse.)
<p>
In the first shot, the subject is shown a screenful of little coloured arrows in various orientations. In the last, the subject is given a "memory probe". This is a coloured arrow in the same position on the screen as it was before, but in a different orientation. The subject is asked to rotate it back to the original orientation, thereby testing their memory.
<p>
Where does the effect of attention come in? In some of the experiments, subjects were shown a "cue" as in the second shot: a small square that pops up somwehere on the screen.
In these experiments, subjects showed more accuracy in the third shot than if the cue had not been given. As Mark says in his posting:
<blockquote>
We combined behavioural and psychophysical approaches to show that attention, directed to memory items about one second after they had been presented, increases the discrete probability of recall, rather than a more perceptual improvement in the precision of recall judgements [...]
</blockquote>
<p>
Full details of the experiments, and of the authors' conclusions, are given in the paper. What the research suggests to me is that if I'm trying to draw someone who I've only seen briefly, perhaps a person who has just walked past, then about a second after seeing them, I should deliberately scan my remembered visual field. And I should pay attention to those regions of it where I think the most salient details for my drawing are.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-59533266111119468222014-12-17T21:32:00.000+00:002015-01-03T13:31:56.028+00:00Helping People Sketch Fast with Computer-Aided Chunking<p>Here's an idea I'd like to try to help myself and other artists who want to sketch more quickly, for
example for sketching people passing by during "<a href="http://www.urbansketchers.org/">urban sketching</a>".
<br /><br>
1) Take lots of photos of people in an environment similar to the one you'll be drawing in.<br />
<br />
2) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_detection">Edge-detect</a> them. The results would look rather like <a href="http://www.j-paine.org/artsci/cornmarket_ed.gif">this</a>.<br />
<br />
3) Edit away parts of the images that aren't relevant to the step below.<br />
<br />
4) Feed the results into a program that searches for line shapes that are common to a lot of the images. For example, the rough "K"-shape made by the backs of the legs of someone standing at ease at a counter, one leg straight and one bent. The straight leg makes the straight part of the K, and the bent leg the "<" part.<br />
<br />
5) Process the resulting list of line shapes so that they grab the attention as much as possible. Perhaps by increasing their contrast, orcolouring them yellow or red.<br />
<br />
6) Train the artist on the results.
<p>
The idea is to equip the artist's brain with a repertoire of shapes that often occur in the scenes being drawn. This could be useful in at least two ways. First, it might help them remember the scene. When trying to memorise what I'm seeing so that I can draw it later, I find that I consciously search for such shapes and then try to vary or "modulate" them so that they match the appropriate part of the scene exactly.
<p>
Second, it might help them draw the scene more quickly, if the artist has practised drawing these shapes as well as memorising them.
<p>
I suspect that most artists do build up a reportoire of such shapes without conscious effort, as they continue to draw. But acquiring them in that way is haphazard: surely we can make doing so more efficient.
<p>
What I'm basing my idea on is the well-known psychological phenomenon of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_%28psychology%29">chunking</a>. After writing the first version of this post, I discovered that there has indeed been research into drawing and chunking. One of the papers I found was <a href="http://www.sequenceserial.com/Users/peterch/papers/ChengObaidellah-CogSci09.pdf">"Graphical Production of Complex Abstract Diagrams: Drawing Out Chunks and Schemas"</a> by Unaizah Obaidellah and Peter Cheng. They asked subjects to draw a variant of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rey-Osterrieth_Complex_Figure">Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure</a>: by tracing, by copying, by drawing immediately from memory, and by drawing from memory after a delay. All their subjects appeared to organise the figure being drawn into chunks for all the drawing tasks, even tracing.Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2354136461357123458.post-50222272696267650562014-12-10T19:22:00.000+00:002015-01-05T15:44:11.193+00:00Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation and the Curled-Cat and Bristly-Scottie Drawings of Allan Snyder's SubjectsI thought I'd say some more about trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and drawing,
which I mentioned <a href="http://blog2.jocelyns-cartoons.co.uk/2014/08/can-psychology-help-us-draw.html">here</a>.
The paper that got me interested is
<a href="http://www.centreforthemind.com/images/savantskills.pdf">"Savant-like
Skills Exposed in Normal People by Suppressing the Left Fronto-Temporal
Lobe"</a>, <cite>Journal of Integrative Neuroscience</cite>, 2, 2, 2003, by Allan Snyder
and colleagues. The cat and dog drawings
shown at the top of page 4 excited me, and I'll explain why next.
<p>
Many art
teachers say that novices draw objects "symbolically", usually showing the
object's main parts, from a point of view that makes them instantly
recognisable. Novices often draw objects "flat" as well, side-on or
face-on. Well-known examples are spectacles drawn as a pair of circles,
and trees drawn as a trunk with branches sticking out flat on either side.
<p>
That's true of the non-TMS cats drawn by Snyder's subject N.R. and the
dogs drawn by A.J. But what excites me is that under TMS, N.R.'s cat
changed from side-on to curled round on itself. That's a complicated
posture that many novices probably wouldn't be able to recall, and
wouldn't dare to draw even if they could. Was the TMS somehow causing N.R.
to access a previously inacessible memory?
<p>
Likewise with A.J.'s dogs. Because of foreshortening, a dog's muzzle is
difficult to draw face-on. But something has prompted A.J. to do so under
TMS, and perhaps even to draw the bristles around the muzzle receding back
into the distance.
<p>
What has this to do with TMS? Snyder hypothesises that savants' remarkable
skills are innate, rather than arising through intensive practice or
greater development of parts of the brain. These skills, he says, work by
accessing low-level information that's in everyone's brains — in the case
of drawing savants such as <a href="http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/gallery.aspx">Stephen Wiltshire</a>,
an analogue
representation of the visual field. Normal people can't access such
information, but savants can because of their brain impairments, so if we
can simulate these impairments via TMS, perhaps we can induce savant
skills in normal people.
<p>
Snyder doesn't go into detail about the neural mechanisms, and some neuroscientists
I've spoken to have criticised him for this. But I think this research
needs to be regarded in the same way as the discovery of drugs such as
opium and digitalis. The mechanisms may not be known, but it's obvious
that <i>something</i> interesting and useful is happening, and that it's worth
working out how to enhance it.
Jocelynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698682321877616962noreply@blogger.com0