Dave's Whiteboard

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

The bartender looks up and says,
“What is this, some kind of joke?”

No matter how you reacted to that, it’s a lot like how I react to infographics.

Most of them are more about the graphic than the info, I think. In fact, I’d been planning to write a post contrasting infographics with job aids, because I think many people confuse the former with the latter.

Instead, thanks to Mark Oehlert, I came across Desmond Wong’s post, Infographics to Teach You How to Create Infographics. Wong talks about them as a marketing tool, then goes into the details of constructing them using PointPoint, and of harnessing layout and graphics to achieve your goal.

What’s that got to do with those folks walking into a bar?

Infographics are like jokes.
(This is a different statement from “infographics are a joke.”)

Infographics are situational.

People enjoy jokes, but enjoyment (usually) hinges on context. What’s funny at work isn’t always what’s funny at the game; what sparks conversation at the coffee shop can put off someone reading online.

If you’re uninterested in the context, reading an infographic can sometimes like work–the kind of work you’re glad you don’t have to do.

If the graphic elements are well-done, though–when they engage us, the way a good joke-teller does–we’ll at least take time to find out what happens next. We might not stay long, but we didn’t pass by. 

Infographics rely on patterns.

I haven’t read enough Jung to be sure, but I’d bet he thought about “walking into a bar” as one of his archetypes. It’s really the framework for a pattern: “I’m going to arrange some ideas here and play with them.”

Not every pattern shows up in every good joke, any more than the same cards show up in a good poker hand. Like music, though, jokes and infographics are subject to their version of Duke Ellington’s test: “If it sounds good, it is good.”

X-walks-into-a-bar is a stage for a virtual performance. For infographics, that stage is set, as Wong points out, with strong visual elements: blocks of color, distinctive shapes, headlines, callouts, hand- (or cherry-) picked data.

Even the overall shape is a pattern. While I’ve seen exceptions like Randall Munroe’s graphics on money and radiation, most infographics embrace a long-but-not-wide format. My hunch is they’re following the online convention: people scroll down, but not sideways.

Infographics are an invitation. 

People tell jokes for all kinds of reasons, but they don’t tell them to themselves. Telling is only the start of the process. A joke is an invitation to share.

Maybe you’re sharing silliness or mockery. Maybe you’re sharing stereotypes to ridicule them–or to signal that you’re on the same side. Two-way sharing can be a kind of camaraderie: “Okay, how many accordionists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

Through wordplay and juxtaposition, jokes invite you to take up a different viewpoint. The unexpectedly funny jokes engage us with their contrast and make us feel good because we got them.

A good infographic invites you to look at its content in new ways. Whether polemical or political or even poetic, the infographic is saying, “Did you ever think…?” 

I do have some misgivings. Some people seem to think that any collection of text, shapes, and colors doing time together is an infographic. I suspect they’re the same sort of people who think “outtake” is a synonym for “hilariously funny.”

Still, if somebody wants to follow Desmond Wong’s tutorials and come up with his own infographic, I think that’s great. He’s got some design fundamentals and a set of templates as a fast start. The real learning begins where the infographic leaves off.

In a previous post, I talked about playing music as a form of tacit skill. I’ve also been thinking about accomplishment and assessment: what gets done, so to speak, and what value it has.

Tom Gilbert made a useful distinction between measurement and evaluation. Measurement is a description in terms of a more-or-less objective standard. A person’s height can be expressed in inches or centimeters, measures of length that people can agree on and verify. If you also measure the person’s weight, you can calculate yet another measurement, his BMI (body-mass index).

Evaluation comes when you compare the measurement with some set of criteria–e.g., a BMI number between 25 and 30 puts someone in the “overweight” range, while a number over 30 puts him in the “obese” range.

I chose BMI as an example because there’s disagreement about how useful an assessment it is. In other words, in that area where health, medicine, and personal fitness overlap, it’s not always an easy task to choose the best assessment.

I’d go further to say that there might not be a best assessment. The term “best” implies its own assessment: best on whose terms? Best under what conditions?

Which is why I found so intriguing two essays that accompany volume 4  of Traditional Fiddle Music of Cape Breton from Rounder.

The first, “‘Correctness’ in Cape Breton Fiddle Music,” is by musicologist Kate Dunlay. She takes up the value that fiddlers down home place on “correctness” in playing a tune. What does that mean? How do they know it when they see (or hear) it?

At one time, Dunlay thought that in traditional or folk music, there would be “a great deal of variation, improvisation, and melodic freedom.” She also thought that folk musicians wouldn’t be “musically literate” because traditional music couldn’t be learned from books.

Only later did I realize that although traditional music indeed cannot be learned from books, traditional tunes (including those composed by real known individuals!) can be learned from any source by musicians who know how to interpret them in a traditional style.

She found that Cape Breton fiddlers would tell her which books had the best settings–and that “best” usually meant “closest to what was played in Cape Breton.”

Dunlay quotes folklorist Richard Bauman:

There is also ample evidence to show that rote memorization and insistence on word for word fidelity to a fixed traditional text do play a part in the performance system of certain communities…. the point is that completely novel and completely fixed texts represent the poles of an ideal continuum, and that between the poles lies the range of emergent text structures to be found in empirical performance.

Think about that in terms of non-musical fields. We’re prone, I think, to use absolutes–they’re simpler, they’re cleaner. This is the wellspring of prescriptive grammar (“Double negatives are wrong!” “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition!”) and sometimes the potting soil for ritualistic belief and behavior. Just today I was reading about the “protocol” that requires orchestral soloists to perform without a musical score.

Why? Well, it’s…um… better?  It’s… the way it’s been done?

Back to Dunlay, though. She talks about the differences between Irish and Cape Breton traditional music, noting that in Ireland a musician can vary a tune “more radically” than a Cape Bretoner can. That’s because the traditions treat their sources differently. As long ago as 1802, the Scots  Niel and Nathaniel Gow sought explicitly to make their Complete Repository a standard reference.

The one stream isn’t better than the other; they’re just different. “Personal style is greatly valued in Cape Breton music,” Dunlay writes, “but it is expressed in ways other than by creating variations of tunes.”

In particular, she points out that since recorded music became common, in Cape Breton the accepted version of a tune is most likely the first recorded version, or some classic recording, rather than a particular book version.

“If the tune is judged to be better, the authority of the book has been overruled.” As the highly regarded Winston Fitzgerald said of his version of “Miss Gordon of Park,” “Nobody would play it the way it was in the book anymore… Never.”

In fact, she says, “the term ‘bookish’ is sometimes used to describe music that is dry and uninteresting — too exact.”

If you try, you might come up with other expertise-related situations in which too literal an approach yields less than satisfactory results.

Another shift that Dunay describes, interesting to me: at one time, an authoritative reference for the rhythm of a tune was puirt-a-beul (“mouth music”), a form of Gaelic singing in which the voice imitated the notes and rhythms of a tune (example here). As the use of Gaelic faded in Cape Breteon, recordings became more important.

Mark Wilson, in notes following Dunlay’s, touches on other facets of how “traditional” music evolves. He’s looking, to borrow Jane Bozarth’s term, at how the (very loose) community around Cape Breton fiddling looks at its own tradition and renders its judgments.

In our own research experience, the violin music native to a particular locality sometimes shifts rather dramatically over short intervals of time… many aspects of “folk culture”… have been shaped, to an extent not always recognized, by somebody’s conviction that ‘in the past, things must have been so…’

Wilson says that many Cape Bretoners believe their style closely resembles the way their pioneer forebears would have played, though there’s little evidence for this. In fact, fiddlers around Antigonish (a city on the Nova Scotia mainland less than 40 miles from Cape Breton), despite similar roots in Scotland, have a style “closer to a standard Scottish country dance group of the late 1920s.”

In fact, despite the high regard that many fiddlers have for collections like James Scott Skinner’s Scottish Violinist, Wilson reports very little interest in how those tunes might have been performed. Skinner himself recorded tunes on wax cylinders as early as 1899. When Wilson played these for a Cape Bretoner who knew the collection by heart, the fiddler was “greatly surprised” by how Skinner played (“I found it kind of weird, you know”) but not in the least troubled by the difference.

Wilson points out how Don Messer’s radio and TV broadcasts “homogenized” Canadian fiddle styles, in something of the way that bluegrass and the Grad Old Opry shaped the american country music scene in the 1950s. Cape Breton was an exception to this trend, he writes, partly because of a local audience who appreciated the music and partly because of the “large numbers of reluctant economic emigrés who would usually return to the island for lengthy summer vacations” and who would want to hear what my dad always called “good Scotch music.”

If there’s a “so what” here, it might include these points:

• Calling something an assessment doesn’t make it one.
• Calling something a standard doesn’t make it one, and doesn’t mean it’s standardized.
• Werner Heisenberg could have been talking about accomplishments.

I’ve just seen Jane Bozarth’s terrific column at Learning Solutions, Content Becomes Its Own Context. As she read David Byrne’s How Music Works, she writes, “I found I could pretty much substitute the word “content” for the word ‘music’ in many of his ideas.” I don’t plan to summarize her article here, so you’ll have to read it for yourself.

I may have to read Byrne’s book. I certain enjoyed Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, which I wrote about almost five years ago. And like human languages, a phenomenon I use often to highlight the many possible meanings for “learning,” music is both pervasive and evasive.

One of Jane’s insights in her comparison is that capturing tacit knowledge isn’t easy, in music or in the world of workplace learning. Yet it’s the tacit that raises music (or cognitive ability) above the merely routine. Or as Artur Schabel put it,

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides.

There’s a different sort of problem for exemplars like Schnabel, as he wrote in My Life in Music:

I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much.

Part of what that says to me, in terms of learning, is that as a person’s capabilities increase, she’s often less and less interested in the mundane. Not that she won’t do mundane tasks–every job has some of them (says the guy who installed software and tinkered with file backup yesterday). I’d argue, though, that the person with a greater  depth of job-related capability is less and less interested in being trained in the mundane.

The idea of people dying the death of a thousand cuts in some mandatory training experience is almost too common to draw notice. But you don’t get better as a musician by going through high-school marching band instruction again.

You might, as Pablo Casals did, choose to practice scales every day, but Casals played many other works as well, and I feel reasonably sure those weren’t the cellist equivalent of “Kitty on the Keys.”

A month or so back, I had lunch with a colleague I hadn’t seen in far too long, and learned that his wife had taken up not the violin but the fiddle. So I sent him a couple of links to videos of Natalie MacMaster, a dynamo of Cape Breton fiddling. We all ended up at Natalie’s concert here in Maryland last week.

I mention her because it’s a good excuse to drop a video into a post, like this one where Natalie is performing with her uncle, Buddy MacMaster–and you won’t often get to hear two members of the Order of Canada playing fiddle like this.

Natalie and Buddy are exemplary musicians–but notice what’s going on in the video around the 2:00 mark: a whole stageful of musicians, ranging over at least a span of 60 years of age, takes up bows and dives into the music. No one’s tracking them in an FMS (Fiddle Management System); no one’s worried about the failure to capture and embed Shareable Audio Objects. People put time and effort into becoming better at an activity they find worthwhile.