Scientific Visualizations: Bridge-Building between ... - Mario Petrucci

SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATIONS
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In Figure 5, chaos physics (often associated with weather systems) provides
another engaging analogy for textual reception. Does a poem, say, arrive in
the reader like a weather front of meaning, intricately modulated by all
manner of inputs and accidents, with the complex environment corresponding
to the reader’s personality and socio-cultural context, her experiences of
other poems and related texts, indeed all her involvements with intertext and
context? To coin a phrase: ‘Is poetry like the weather?’ As with forecasts and
outlooks, we can never quite predict the local detail of a particular text’s
reception within an individual reader; and yet, broad patterns may well
emerge among readers in general, at least in the short term (it was fairly
apparent, for instance, that the final instalment of Harry Potter would raise a
storm of attention). The chaos analogy poses similar questions to other, more
technical, models for communication; but every student has experience of
weather and its forecasting — they may not be so nearly aware of possessing
a code.
Advanced/hybrid analogies
None of the above analogies is presented as, in itself, a source of groundbreaking
insight. If any of them seem a little obvious or simplistic, please
bear in mind they are designed to be largely self-explanatory — which is,
after all, a substantial part of their point. That said, they can be developed in
far more depth, quickly becoming quite sophisticated. The continuum analogy,
for example, may be expanded into a range of spectra, each representing
a different aspect of the text’s reception, thus generating a Fan of Reception
(Figure 6). Here, the first fold of the Fan is just Figure 2 itself, perhaps
simplified, or focusing on key features of the Explicit → Intra progression.
figure 5
Chaos theory analogy for textual reception.
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 36 No. 4, December, 2011