There is a visually easy way of seeing regeneration "happen" through these images. Processes of exclusion, expulsion, and eviction are visualized through the juxtaposed construction. The way in which infrastructure allows for a restructuring of space is key in this image. The two arches (one in each picture) give me a sense of attempted continuity. The removal of any Chinese architectural legacy from the new station brutally deletes history. The fact that the new building looks like a church reminds me of colonial impositions of creed.
It is harder to see how toxicity becomes part of the analysis and I would be very interested in hearing more about what the author dubs “toxic vulnerabilities.”
That floral freeway headdress: what an image! I read this as a celebration of constriction: the visible demands that this absurd headdress exerts upon the body and mind of the woman modeling it, the knot of freeway overpasses and underpasses, the snarl of traffic. Is the aestheticization of these multiple levels of constriction perhaps an act of cultural self-justification and defense against critique?
We ("we") southern Californians circa 1962, the argument might go, we bear up so gracefully under the pressures of self-presentation and built environment and mobility. Can you really ask much more of us -- socially, economically, environmentally? I mean things are tough enough as it is -- look at what we're dealing with, headdress-wise.
This image shows a bird's eye view of toxicity. However, I wonder how we can better incorporate the human element into these scales. Could we collage it with data on hospital visits, pharmacy records for asthma medications, emergency room visits for difficulty breathing?
As you identify in the last bullet of your design statement, "the simplicification of ontology has led to the enormous complication of epistemology." As with your "Toxic Family Tree" visualization, I wonder how one might demystify the content of this visual so that it's also more legible to non-specialists. As a historian, you might already know the ongoing debates within and objectives of digital humanities. To this end, I ask, how does this image make legible information, knowledge, or insight that is otherwise impossible to articule?
This is a powerful image in several ways. The story it tells is a realistic portrayal of the past which foreshadows the racism that is still prevalent today. The dated look of the visual adds to the overall feeling that the reader experiences while looking at and reading the image. Lynching as an action produces profound feelings for the reader especially since this is no longer a regular occurrence (shootings on the other hand...). The accompanying text adds to the article by bringing in some backstory and showing both sides of the situation. Overall an excellent visualization. I was a little confused with the term technologies, as in "technologies of control". Was lynching the "technology of control?" (I am new to anthro, so this might totally make sense, I am just not there yet).
Contested Beginnings, Disorder. What is the order of events? Are there linear orders at all? This image collage proposes a range of beginnings: the exterior or the interior? the empty street/the militarized street or the home, the covered or exposed body? The straight lines are misleading, for so called "riotous" events collide and intersect in a curvilinear fashion.
The image here, along with your text frame-up a powerful sentiment that I often feel gets lost in the discursive gymnastics over gentrification, or pretty much most facets of Late Industrial Capitalism as we understand them now. Urban renewal is an example of the affordances neoliberal machinists grant educated progressives as they demand to live their lives under certain moral parameters. For instance, here with La PLaza, you have capitalists partnering with the Cesar Chavez Foundation, fostering a particular aesthetics of empathy, care, and even solidarity in order to financially marginalize all but the most affluent. Cultural formations themselves are being consumed for profit in the race towards total economic apartheid and situations like this are proof. In essence, structures that retain sociocultural flexibility, but that continue to accrue wealth, are immoveable.
