Vector Futures : New Paradigms for Imag(in)ing the Humanities

Vector Futures:
New Paradigms for Imag(in)ing the Humanities

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
University of Maryland
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/




This image, an artifact of our age, is named SAMPLE.JPG and comes loaded with all
Windows-based operating systems. If you use a Windows machine you already have your
own copy. Why this particular image? Clearly it has certain aesthetic qualities, for
example the chalked lines of the starter’s box extending the strong limbs of the runner.
The color palette is also conspicuous: red, white, and blue contrasted with the rich flesh-
tones of human body. And the image is thematically appropriate to the Microsoft ethos—
Start! Go! There are good technical reasons for this choice of composition too, for it
serves to test a system’s capacity to simultaneously render both the subtle tonal
gradations in the runner’s arms and the clean, crisp color separation demanded by the
white grid on the blue background. But I want to introduce my topic by proposing a
broader significance for this, one of the most widely disseminated digital objects in the
world today. Although it is a photographic image, its photorealism is tempered by the
way the runner’s body is cropped so as to be all but disembodied against the chalked
asphalt. I am going to read this image as emblematic of two competing paradigms in
digital imaging, both of which have been present since the origin of applied computer
graphics in the 1960s, and both of which are now vying for authority on the Web. The
outcome of this contest—if I may be so agonistic—could well determine the visible
landscape of the Web for some time to come. The first of these two paradigms is
photorealism, images typically delivered in raster or bitmap formats and represented here
by the body of the athlete; the second and slightly older of the two paradigms are
mathematically constructed images, delivered in vector formats and represented here by
the same stark grid lines that have been the wire-frame support for some of our most
influential imaginings of cyberspace. The history of these two competing image
paradigms and their implications for the digital humanities today is the subject of my
paper.

---

2
Let me begin with some context. Computers compute, of course, but the first use of CRT
displays as output devices in the early 1960s also irretrievably situated computers within
a cultural genealogy of screens, a genealogy which includes television, video, cinema,
photography, and indeed, as Lev Manovich and others have argued, the full lineage of
visual aesthetics in the West since the advent of perspective. This is important because it
allows computer graphics and digital images to take their place alongside the other
representational forms that have inhabited our many varieties of screens, frames, and
windows. While there is no single origin story for computer graphics I want to briefly
review two of the most important. The first belongs to Ivan Sutherland, whose work on a
Ph.D. thesis at MIT in 1963 introduced Sketchpad, a system that allowed users to draw
lines on a screen in real-time with what we would today recognize as a light pen.
Sketchpad was a vector system, meaning that the lines and curves drawn by the user were
stored as mathematical statements (vectors) that could be expressed visually on screen.
Nicholas Negroponte has commented:

The achievement was of such magnitude and breadth that it took some of us a
decade to understand and appreciate all of its contributions. Sketchpad introduced
many new concepts: dynamic graphics, visual simulation, constraint reduction,
pen tracking, and a virtually infinite coordinate system, just to name a few.
Sketchpad was the big bang of computer graphics. (103)

Our other origin story belongs to Stanford’s Douglas Engelbart, who five years later, in
1968, demonstrated the first functioning graphical user interface to a standing-room-only
audience in San Francisco. Engelbart’s demo, which is the stuff of legend in computer
science circles, included the first public display of the mouse, windows, hyperlinks, and,
most importantly for my narrative, bitmapped raster graphics (subsequently perfected at
Xerox PARC). A “bitmap,” as many will know, is a grid or matrix of pixels (“picture
elements”), which, not unlike a Seurat painting or a photographic halftone, yield a
coherent visual image through the optical interpretation of the aggregate composition.
This was to prove an enormously successful technique, and until recently bitmapped
formats accounted for nearly all of the digital images one encountered on the Web. 1 If
vector images were the graphical inheritance of the computer’s mathematical roots,
bitmapped images, I would argue, were the visual realization of Turing’s ideal of the
universal machine: bitmaps enabled the computer screen to function as a representational
surface capable of emulating other representational surfaces. Through bitmapping, the
computer screen was transformed into a second-order or “meta” representational venue.
This transformation quickly gave rise to intensive research into photorealistic rendering
techniques in computer graphics as well as the advent of hardware devices like scanners
and digital cameras—which enable the computer screen to function in the service of
photographic media. (JPEG compression algorithms, it is worth noting, were introduced
precisely to provide an image format that lent itself to reproducing photographic images.)
William M. Ivins, in Prints and Visual Communication, his landmark survey of print-
making technologies in the West, argues eloquently for the importance of what he terms
“exactly repeatable visual statements” in enabling the dissemination of scientific
knowledge. Bitmapping, I would argue, endows the computer screen with much those
same qualities and capabilities, and although Manovich is right to point to the origins of

---

3
computer graphics in the vector images of Cold War radar displays, the visual authority
of the computer as we know it today probably owes more to the refinement of
bitmapping. Taken together, however, Sutherland and Englelbart, about five years apart,
laid the foundations for contemporary computer graphics and today’s graphical user
interface through their competing paradigms of vector and bitmap imaging; “competing”
not in a strict commercial sense, but rather in that they offer different visions of the
computer as a representational medium and as an information space.2

For those who know something about printmaking and the graphic arts—the tradition
documented by Ivins, Estelle Jussim, and Gascoigne Bamber—the contrast between
vector and raster imaging will likely be a familiar story, prefigured by the history of
techniques such as line engraving and halftone screens. I do not have time to tease those
correspondences out further here. Perhaps the most rigorous way of articulating the
differences between raster and vector representations is by way of Nelson Goodman’s
painstaking distinction between “dense” and “finitely differentiated” symbolic systems.
Goodman’s vocabulary is drawn from the language of analytic philosophy, but the basic
concepts are quite accessible. Dense or replete systems are those in which every
constituent component contributes to the ontological whole; each brushstroke of an oil
painting, for example. Finitely differentiated systems are those in which there are discrete
elements that can be added or subtracted from the ontological whole; examples would be
the text of a novel or a musical score. What’s really at issue here is the way in which a
given symbol system encourages or inhibits formal manipulation of its components. For
purposes of my discussion here, I want to align bitmap images with Goodman’s dense or
replete systems, and vector images with Goodman’s finitely differentiated systems.3
Though both are susceptible to formal manipulation by virtue of their status as
computational objects, vector images, which in fact exist as mathematical statements, are
scalable and modular in ways that bitmaps are not. A vector image is not subject to the
phenomenon of pixellation, for example; as the viewer zooms in on the image, its
coordinates are simply extrapolated to generate the illusion of a closer view. 4

Today the most popular vehicle for vector graphics is the animation tool Flash, which,
characterized by its colorful, dynamic displays, is rapidly colonizing large segments of
the Web; indeed, there are those who believe that at the level of interface design the Web
itself will eventually be made over as an animated Flash-based environment, with static
HTML (or more likely, dynamic and database-driven XML) documents existing as
subsidiary, special-purpose content. Interestingly for our purposes, Flash is also capable
of supporting embedded bitmapped images, suggesting that the representational field I
described earlier has receded by one full order of magnitude and that vector graphics are
now the true heir to Turing’s universalism. (On the other hand, it remains true that all
general purpose screen displays, whether LCD or CRT, are rendered as bitmaps.) To
build a Flash animation, the designer creates a so-called “movie” consisting of a series of
timed, sequenced, or triggered events. For some this may suggest that the Web is
evolving into a medium that owes more to television than the now-familiar (and
comfortably humanistic) conceit of the “page.” I would cast the argument differently.
Unlike bitmap or raster graphics, vector graphics are not well suited to representing
continuous tone (especially photographic) images. Consequently, they may seem of little

---

4
use in the digital humanities, where much of our work chiefly consists in providing high-
quality facsimile renderings of documents, artwork, and other artifacts of cultural
heritage. But vector images bring at least three important instruments to our humanist
toolkit: temporality, modularity, and programmability. I want to briefly consider each of
these in turn.

First, temporality. Flash and other vector formats will, I predict, encourage an explosion
in the use of time-dependant data in digital humanities research. Every major humanistic
discipline, certainly including literary studies, is four-dimensional in the sense that time is
an integral component of the subject. If throughout the 1990s digital humanities research
was dominated by the spatial paradigm of the Archive, this next decade may well be
devoted to studying the way texts and other artifacts of cultural heritage forge and
maintain their networks of dynamic temporal relations. This work will demand new
forms of questions and new forms of representation. The Temporal Modeling project,
under the direction of Johanna Drucker at the University of Virginia, is engaging that
opportunity head-on by designing experimental Flash-based interfaces for the time-based
representation of humanistic data. 5 Likewise, Nelson Hilton, at the University of
Georgia, has been using Flash to animate sequences of illuminated prints by William
Blake. Second, modularity. By modularity I mean the way in which vector
representations can be assembled and disassembled out of discrete data structures in an
object-oriented fashion. The traditional stronghold for vector imaging has been in fields
like CAD and GIS, where images serve as something more akin to models or diagrams
than as mimetic or documentary constructs. I predict that with the resurgence of vector
imaging the humanities will find greater applications for CAD and GIS techniques, which
are well-established in the social sciences. Projects at both Virginia’s Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the University of Maryland’s Institute for
Technology in the Humanities (MITH) have already used Flash-based vector displays to
this end. Virginia’s Salem Witch Trials project, for example, permits users to access a
dynamic map across which they can choose to layer a variety of different data structures
to trace the history of witchcraft accusations in Eastern Massachusetts over four weeks in
1692.6 Finally, programmability. Lev Manovich (2002), writing of the recent outpouring
of activity in the digital arts community around Flash and other vector tools has
characterized their delicate mathematical line structures as a kind of “soft modernism,”
with conspicuous debts to Bauhaus. These algorithmic designs, Manovich suggests, serve
to remind us that the computer is ultimately a programmable machine at precisely the
moment we seemed most in danger of being overwhelmed by its enormous
representational capacity. Today much of the most exciting work in the digital arts and
electronic literature is being done in vector-based animation formats, with software artists
and multimedia authors positioning the arts and letters as genuine contenders to the game
culture that currently dominates the bleeding technocultural edge.7

I want to close by very briefly sketching some of the broader theoretical implications of
vector graphics. It’s fascinating, for example, for those of us interested in word/image
relationships, that vector imaging enfolds graphical representations within textual data
structures; the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard, an XML-based spec which
currently has the status of a Recommendation to the World Wide Web Consortium,

---

5
would enable visual data to be expressed as machine-readable text.8 Likewise, as the
Salem project above demonstrates, the scalable and modular properties of vector formats
lend themselves extremely well to integration with databases and encoded texts. But the
point I most want to emphasize here is that the greatest significance of vector graphics in
the humanities, is that they will, I believe, force us to confront head-on our dependence
upon documentary forms of knowledge, a guilty habit which we have rushed to indulge
in our digital embrace of elaborate archival shrines to the documentary ideal, loaded with
24-bit color high-resolution raster representations.9 Vector images, and the conceptual
freedom they instantiate, will lead to new ways of imaging and imagining the humanities,
presenting us with challenges and opportunities that lie outside our archival walls.10

Works Cited

Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1976.
Ivins, William M., Jr. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge and London:

The MIT Press, 1969. First edition 1953, Harvard University Press.
Manovich, Lev. “Generation Flash.” Online: http://www.manovich.net. Accessed
December 15, 2002.
---. The Language of New Media. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001.
Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era.
Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1992.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1995.

Notes


1 The term “bitmap” as it is used here (interchangeably with “raster”) should not be confused with the
specific BMP or BitMap image format, a popular but proprietary bitmap format introduced by Microsoft.
2 William J. Mitchell, in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, his important
1992 study of computer graphics, gives no extended attention to vector imaging, suggesting that a decade
ago raster techniques had succeeded in supplanting vector except in a handful of specialized communities.
3 I am aware that Mitchell has also deployed Goodman’s terminology in a similar context, arguing that
bitmapped digital images, contrasted with their (dense) analog counterparts, are allographic (in Goodman’s
use of the word) and therefore (by extension) exhibit the characteristics of Goodman’s finitely
differentiated systems. I would in fact agree with this formulation, but I would also argue that vector
images, contrasted with their bitmapped counterparts, serve to demonstrate the relativity of Goodman’s
terms. That is, a symbol system may be dense in one symbolic economy, and finitely differentiated in
another. See Mitchell 50-51.
4 Fonts are another common data type stored in vector formats, which is what allows them to scale up and
down in point sizes. Thus, all of us use vector formats all the time.
5 See http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/time.
6 See http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/salem.
7 See, for example, Rhizome’s Artbase (http://www.rhizome.org) and the Electronic Literature
Organization’s Directory (http://www.eliterature.org).
8 See http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/.
9 See, for example, Computers and the Humanities 36.1 (2002), a special journal issue on image-based
humanities computing, guest edited by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with contributions from practitioners of
several leading archival projects. Examples of electronic scholarship in the documentary archival mode
include the Dante Gabriel Rossetti Hypermedia Archive (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/rossetti), the William
Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org), the Walt Whitman Archive

---

6

(http://www.iath.virginia.edu/whitman), the Dickinson Electronic Archives
(http://www.emilydickinson.org), and the Electronic Beowulf (http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/).
10 What it will mean for the digital humanities to find ways of working “outside the archive” is the subject
of a manuscript in progress by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Kari Kraus.

---

Document Outline

• ??
• ??

---