5. Defining and Visualizing Concepts

Assignment 5: Defining and Visualizing Concepts

1. List two concepts highly relevant to your sociological focus. Briefly state why you would like to learn more about them and especially why you would like to build multimedia around them.

Two concepts that are highly relevant to my sociological focus are humor and comedy in media.  I would like to learn more about these concepts and build multimedia around them because both humor and comedy are part of society and shape our lives.  It triggers people’s emotions and affects their mental ability.  We use it everyday in social life and as the digital world advances further, comedy and humor are even more distributed.  Television, radio, film, images, the internet, all has comedy and humor in them.  These concepts keep society sane and allows for people to not take this life so seriously.  It’s uplifting and beings people together.

2. Provide a brief description relative to how each concept has been defined and measured (i.e., operationalized) in the academic literature (books and/or journal articles). In so doing, consult at least two references per concept (be sure to provide citations for references (follow citation style of American Sociological Review).

For comedy, the book “Laughing Matters: The Paradox of Comedy” by Scott Cutler Shershow, it’s elusive, slippery, and subject to uncertainty principle because measurement transforms or destroys it; it’s always something larger, deeper, and more complicated than it seems (1984:4). In “Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion” by John Morreall, it’s not a time out from the world but it provides another perspective on the world; a perspective no less true than the tragic perspective (1999:3).

For humor, the article “Sociology of Humor and a Critical Dramaturgy” by Paul Paolucci and Margaret Richardson, it is defined as playing with institutionalized meanings; by playing with the meanings that structure our daily lives; humor disturbs our definition of reality causing the emergence of doubt as to the value of daily routines and giving rise to some confusion as to the very foundations of reality (2006:333).  And in the article “Sociology and Humor” by Murray S. Davis, humor is what saves the integration of a subject from the potential disintegration of the object by distancing the former from the latter (1979:4).  Some of the ways that humor has been measured was through observation, surveys, and interviews.

3. For each concept, briefly describe how you might approach it via multimedia representation.

Comedy – multimedia clips from standup shows, television and film. 

Humor – comic strips, images

4. Relative to A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, determine the following for each of your concepts:

a. Would “structure” or “process” visualization work best?

Answer: I believe structure visualization would work best for comedy and humor in media because it’ll take the general concept and break it down to more specific meanings and relatable information on the concepts.

b. Which of the six broad types might be most applicable?

Answer: either concept, metaphor, or compound visualization because I can see these concepts relying on a more qualitative approach with how people react to content that is presented.

c. Within that broad type, which particular visualization device might be most appropriate?

Answer: right away I focused on cartoon in the compound visualization because cartoon is related to comedy and humor. 

d. Run each concept through Wordnik, Visuwords, Lexipedia, and Ngram Viewer. Did you discover anything noteworthy?

*Wordnik:  Many definitions, meanings, examples and related words

            Comedy – “a dramatic work that is light and often humorous or satirical in tone and that usually contains a happy resolution of the thematic conflict.”

            Humor – “the quality that makes something laughable or amusing; funniness.”

*Visuwords: a visual dictionary diagram that connects the word to their meanings and associations with other words and concepts

            Comedy – “light and humorous drama with a happy ending.”

            Humor – used as a verb, noun or adjective; related to mood, wit, chemical reaction, a sense, and in the middle ages was one of the four fluids that determined your emotional and physical state.

*Lexipedia: online visual semantic network with dictionary and thesaurus references.  

            Comedy – “light and humorous drama with a happy ending.” Related to funniness, clowning, prank, show, sarcasm, drama.

            Humor – “the characteristic of being funny and amusing.”

*Snappy Words: an online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps find the meanings of words and draw connections to other words it is associated with.

            Comedy – “light and humorous drama with a happy ending.” Related to melodrama, low comedy, slapstick, sitcom, dark drama, comic, tragedy, amusing.

            Humor – wit, sulk, liquid or bodily fluid, mood, temperament.

*Ngram Viewer: a phrase usage graphing tool that charts yearly counts of publications on the word that is entered.

            Comedy – starting from 1800 to the present, this word had many more publications at the beginning and then leveled out.

            Humor – starting from 1800 to the present, this word had very little publications at the beginning but then leveled out with comedy almost being equal.

What I found is that Visuwords, Lexipedia, and Snappy Word were all very similar in the definitions and also image/web diagram.  Wordnik was much more thorough providing a more wordy depiction of comedy and humor.  Ngram Viewer was a line graph that provided information on the amount of publications that contained the word/topic beginning in the 1800’s until the present.  This site was very different compared to the others in regards to meaning and definitnions, however it did provide information on where to find resources to study those words/topics and was a visual graph like Visuword, Lexipedia and Snappy Word.  Overall, all the sites except for Wordnik provided a visual depiction whereas Wordnik provided a listing of means and definitions.  All provided practically the same information but presented it a little differently.