GENRE TRACING AND MAPPING

Genre tracing is an essential research practice for learning and visualizing how a runaway object such as Obama Hope makes an impact on a global scale. Rhetoric and composition scholars such as Clay Spinuzzi (2003) have traced genres in workplace environments to learn what kinds of genres are in collective use and how they function and transform to support those environments. Genre tracing also ought to be practiced to learn both about how visual rhetoric contributes to specific cultural moments and emerges through genre adaptation and novel production. Art Silverplatt (2015), for instance, has emphasized how taking historical approaches to genre tracing can help deepen our understanding of specific historical events and cultural change (p. 83). We can also take a more new materialist rhetorical approach and account for the ways that genres emerge and evolve to actually impact events and communities in nuanced ways⁴. Tracing images across genres can especially help account for how specific genres not only shape local and national events but also proliferate on a transnational scale and take on global significance.

When we trace images across genres, we can especially learn about how new rhetorical practices emerge and gain popularity. Silverplatt (2015) usefully suggested for taking an inter-genre approach to illuminate how certain issues, characters, and themes appear over time across genres (p. 82). Such activities, he noted, are especially useful for learning about cultural attitudes, behaviors, and preoccupations (p. 82). Tracing images across genres can certainly contribute to such research, but it can also, as I have argued elsewhere (Gries, 2015), help account for how affect circulates and becomes contagious, giving rise to significant collective activities. Furthermore, by tracing images across genres, we can learn more about an image's genre diffusion and rhetorical transformation—how an image can spread across a wide range of distributed genres and become rhetorical in diverse, and often unexpected, ways.

VISUALIZATIONSReturn to top

The following maps attempt to do show these rhetorical outcomes. Figure 3 identifies different genres in which Obama Hope has emerged across the globe. This data helps identify a wide spectrum of genres in which Obama Hope appeared, a spectrum that is displayed in the Pie Chart in Figure 4. Typically, in rhetorical study, we have been interested in what constitutes a specific genre in terms of rules of play, formal features, pragmatic actions, and social actions (Freadman, 1994; Miller & Shepherd, 2004). With an interest in how genres perform, contribute to knowledge formation, and reproduce social structures, scholars have also been concerned with specific uses of genre within certain organizations, institutions, communities, and activity systems (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993; Bazerman, 1994; Schryer, 1999; Devitt, Bawarshi, & Reiff, 2003; Spinuzzi, 2003). Genre diffusion, however, also ought to command our attention when studying visual rhetoric since so many images in the digital age can propagate across a wide range of genres and media in a rapid span of time. By genre diffusion, to be clear, I am specifically referring to the spread of an image or text across a range of genres distributed across time and space. When we study genre diffusion, then, we are paying attention to the various kinds and numbers of genres in which an image surfaces, the rates at which such diffusion occurs, and the rising and/or decreasing appearances within such genres in a given geographical area, culture, or time period. Data visualizations that map genre diffusion in terms of space and kind, as evident in Figures 3 and 4, can help make visible this ongoing process and help account for a single image's distributed genre activity.

Temporal maps can also enhance our knowledge of genre diffusion. In relation to Obama Hope, for instance, I was interested in how Obama Hope's genre diffusion fluctuated with time and space. I wanted to learn, in other words, if Obama Hope's popularity in certain genres increased or decreased over time. Such information would help me determine both its past roles and its lingering rhetorical contributions in various communities. Figure 5 thus offers a chronological account of Obama Hope's emergence in various genres. In this visualization, genres are coded by color while the amount of times Obama Hope surfaces within that genre in a given year are illustrated by bar size. Running the cursor over each colored bar in the various timelines will bring up the number of times Obama Hope appears in a genre in a given year.

In addition to helping visualize and understand the phenomenon of genre diffusion, genre mapping can also deepen our understanding of genre absorption. While genre diffusion refers to the general spread of images across genres, by genre absorption, I refer to the process in which images are infused into various genres as various collectives take up those genres for specific purposes. Obama Hope, perhaps more than any other image produced in recent years, has absorbed into a wide range of genres, from political posters to advertisements to protest signs to educational videos. Interactive visualizations such as Figure 3 can help us identify the various genres in which an image is absorbed. Yet when we take time to pull up the metadata in such visualizations and compare different genre absorptions of a single image, we can also begin to learn about the infusion process. We can begin to learn, in other words, how images tend to appear and function within specific genres.

This information, in turn, can enhance our understanding of rhetorical transformation—the process in which images become rhetorical in divergent, unpredictable ways as they circulate, enter into various relations, and catalyze change. An image's shifting rhetorical functions have everything to do with the genres into which it is absorbed. (Click here to see the variety of rhetorical functions Obama Hope has taken on since 2008.) Therefore, by investigating genre diffusion and absorption, we can increase our understanding of how images become rhetorical with time and space.

To learn more about Obama Hope's genre diffusion, genre absorption, and rhetorical transformation, isolate specific genres by clicking and unclicking specific boxes next to Figure 3. Clicking on the marker icons will bring up the information window so viewers can see (when image urls are available) how an image is absorbed into a genre. From there, viewers can follow the url links to see how that genre was put to use in various collectives. (To learn about the image's divergent rhetorical functions, you can also click here.)

In a related sense, I was also interested in how Obama Hope's genre uptake (and rhetorical functions) fluctuated with time and space. I wanted to learn, in other words, if Obama Hope's popularity in certain genres and rhetorical functions increased or decreased over time. Such information would help me determine both its past roles and its lingering rhetorical contributions in various communities. Figure 5 thus offers a chronological account of Obama Hope's emergence in various genres. (To see a chronological account of its shifting rhetorical functions, click here.)

ANALYSISReturn to top

Obama Hope, perhaps more than any other presidential image to date, has traversed a wide array of genres in its brief but busy lifetime. Obama Hope is most famous, of course, for its role in Obama's 2008 presidential campaign during which it was not only adopted by Obama's official campaign but also became the face of the Obama Art grassroots movement here in the U.S. In this latter capacity, Obama Hope surfaced in or on a variety of artifacts—sweaters, bottle caps, Post-It notes, cupcake icing, Lego portraits, paintings, shoes, totes, etc.—all generated to help move Obama into the Oval Office. (Click here for media maps of Obama Hope). Since then, many people across the world have also reproduced or remixed Obama Hope to show their support for Obama when he is visiting their country. Obama Hope has shown up in totes in Ghana, for instance, and it has surfaced on posters in Germany and on t-shirts and woodcarvings in China. In light of such instantiations, one might assume that the most popular genre in which Obama has surfaced has been Arts and Crafts for Obama.

Data visualizations have the ability to visualize and quantify unexpected genre diffusion of runaway objects. These visualizations make clear, for instance, that of the 1000 coded pictures, only 14.4 percent of them captured Obama Hope taking a prominent role in generating support for Obama via arts and crafts. While fan art (9.4%), commercial art (8.5%), and political cartoons (8.2%) constitute their fair share of Obama Hope's genre activity, political art actually accounts for more than 30.9%. And whether criticizing Obama for his protection of NSA surveillance operations or lack of crackdown on BP after the Gulf Coast oil spill, more often than not, the political art targeting Obama is highly critical. As evident in the case with the infamous Rope Obamicon, whose circulation picked up speed in 2015 after Obama made his first personal tweet, sometimes Obama Hope's genre uptake even moved beyond critique to downright racism. What clearly began as a design to help then-Senator Barack Obama enter into the oval office, then, has transformed into a highly popular design deployed for ulterior purposes.

Isolating the political art tab in Figure 3 indicates that this phenomenon is not exclusive to Obama nor to the United States. In Israel, for instance, political art in the style of Obama Hope, depicting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with nuclear explosions and the words "Yes I can," have surfaced. In Tokyo, Japan, on the other hand, wheat pastes depicting Taro Aso have been seen with the words "Gone" printed beneath. In fact, Obama Hope bleeds into political art in more than 30 countries, making political art, of all the genres, the most evenly distributed across the world. In addition, if we consider the frequency of all the genres in which Obama Hope has surfaced, political art is the most popular in every year accept 2008 (see Figure 5). Such quantification of Obama Hope's genre diffusion provides further evidence that despite Obama Hope's original purpose to garner votes for Obama, Obama Hope's most visible and enduring rhetorical function has been to make political commentary across a wide range of genres.

Besides helping to account for an image's genre diffusion, digital visualization techniques have potential, as argued earlier, to deepen our understanding of genre absorption. A detailed account of Obama Hope's absorption across many genres is beyond the scope of this project, but to demonstrate genre mapping's potential to learn about genre absorption, isolate the public campaign art in Figure 3 by making sure that only the box labeled "public campaign art" is clicked. For the purposes of this project, if you recall, public campaign art is defined as art that integrates reproductions or remixes of Obama Hope in a local, national, or transnational campaign that is not affiliated with a political election. Clicking on the brown marker icons on the map will bring up Obama Hope's involvement in various public campaigns, from participating in a Reporters without Borders campaign aiming to denounce the Iranian government's contempt for freedom of information to a transnational Greenpeace campaign aiming to fight for climate change legislation.

In most of these instances, you will see that Obama Hope has been infused onto either large banners, posters, wheatpastes, stickers, or web icons, with larger banners and smaller posters being the most popular choices. In many of the posters, Obama Hope appears on a letter-size or slightly larger sheet of poster paper. In others, such as the Greenpeace campaign, the reproduction or remix of Obama Hope appears enlarged on an enormous banner hanging from a hot air balloon. More importantly, perhaps, in half of its public campaign uses, Obama's portrait is reproduced in Fairey's original design, most often in the same red, white, and blue colors but not always. Code Pink for instance, printed their sign in pink for branding purposes while Reporters without Borders created their web icons in the color of Iran's flag. In the other half of its public campaign uses, Obama Hope has been remixed so that a different figure is depicted. While Greenpeace replaced Obama with Sarkozy in an environmental campaign implemented in France, for example, the Enough Gaddafi campaign replaced Obama with Muammar Gaddafi. In most instances, text has been laid either over, next to, or below a portrait, anchoring the image's function to help readers identify the campaigns' purpose. In only two instances, in fact, did organizations let a single word communicate their campaign messages.

Such differentiations in medium, size image, text, placement, and color may seem uninteresting, but we learn something very important here about Obama Hope's genre absorption. When it comes to public campaigns, there seems to be as much confidence in Obama Hope's style to raise public awareness as does there the image of Obama Hope itself. One might think that campaign organizers might develop less confidence in their target audience's recognition of Obama Hope's style with time, but campaigns appropriated Obama Hope's style in 2013 and 2014, indicating that even 5-6 years after Obama Hope's first appearance, the style still had potential for resonance. Such findings are further substantiated by the fact that in other genres, the Obama Hope style is being appropriated all the way through 2015. Perhaps, more than the image itself, then, Obama Hope's style will linger long in public campaigns and other genres as an effective graphic design. Such discovery might make us pause to think more deeply about Obama Hope's contributions. Has Obama Hope become such a cultural icon because the image itself made such an important contribution to the 2008 presidential campaign? Or does its widely recognized status have to do more with the contagion of its design, which has been appropriated in public campaigns and across various other genres?

To adequately address this question and to find a more nuanced answer about Obama Hope's genre absorption, more qualitative research, of course, would need to be conducted. We especially would need to interview the human actors who have participated in Obama Hope's genre dispersal and absorption to learn about their precise motives in appropriating Obama Hope as well as their design, production, and distribution practices: research that is beyond the scope of this webtext. But I want to close this section by pointing out how even our simplest digital visualizations can benefit our research process, especially when we consider them alongside other visualizations. For instance, while the genre percentage and frequency visualizations in Figures 4 and 5 are simple in design and offer only singular perspectives into Obama Hope's genre diffusion, taken together with the geographic maps, they also help us find answers to some of our most complex questions. Thus, in an age of "beautiful data" when we might feel pressured to take advantage of the latest digital visualization inventions and trends, our research process can still be deepened by even the simplest and static of visualizations.

Such usefulness ought to make us pause to think more deeply about what "good" visualizations are. David McCandless (2013), creator of the "Information is Beautiful" website and author of Information is Beautiful (2009) and Knowledge is Beautiful (2014), has argued that good visualizations contain four key ingredients: story, information, goal, and visual form. While visualizations ought generate interestingness through story, he explains, the communicated information needs to have integrity, the visual form needs to be harmonious and beautiful, and the function needs to be useful and efficient. The visualizations in Figures 4 and 5 surely do not fit this criteria in that while they are useful and accurate, they lack the visual form and story to engage the eye and fully entice the audience's interest. Yet too often scholars may feel pressure to create "good" visualizations at the cost of useful experimentation and research productivity. I also wonder how much it is worth our time to produce visualizations that are "good" by McCandless' standards if we do not have opportunities to collaborate with talented information designers such as McCandless, especially in light of the time it takes to collect, code, and analyze massive amounts of data. As rhetoricians attempt to make use of digital visualization techniques to further our own research and communicate our findings, just how far ought we go, then, with our digital, graphic designs? This is a question we still need to grapple with both as individual scholars and as a research community.

FeedbackNext Page

FOOTNOTES

• (4) I introduce a new materialist rhetorical approach to visual rhetoric in Part 1 of Still Life with Rhetoric (Gries, 2015). From a new materialist rhetorical perspective, genre artifacts are considered vital entities that in and of themselves have potential to manifest change as they come into various relations with other entities. A new materialist rhetorical approach also recognizes the constant change that undergirds life and thus would seek to explore how genres are constantly evolving with time and space.↩