Don’t judge a book by its cover.
This platitude resurfaces more and more with covers such as the one above. The title of the “experimental browser” evokes a notion of what if: “the real face of white australia.” That is, what if the history of an established (super)nation were to be exposed and recreated with data mining and excavation from the past that tells a different story of its people?
I will return to the humanistic interpretation in a few, but first, I would like to discuss the visual displayed. The visualization of peoples’ faces we see are a production employing a face detection script. According to Tim Sherratt, the collection was compiled from a harvest of 7,000 photographs ready for the application to get to work. Current applications such as, iPhoto and Google, perform, and simplify, photograph face detection scripts. For Sherratt, the experiment of manually connecting the dots and displaying faces fascinated him for reasons other than just providing data in a quantitative manifestation: “you look at their faces and you simply want to know more. Who are they? What were their lives like?”
So what does the visual do for us at first glance? It triggers a question: who are they? And, what does Australia have to do with it?
Well, as we know, nations were once before inhabited by natives who do not necessarily look like the majority of natives now. By showcasing the different face from what we are accustomed to seeing, we generate inquires about the nation’s past. Judging from the website’s cover, we could see the ethnic diversity ranging from Indonesians, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Asia proper, and other neighboring ethnicities. These faces do not exemplify exclusive ties to one nation. The faces are portraits of hybridity. Which takes me to this next cover:
The cover above came to mind as faces seemed to be dominate the space. Chandra Prasad’s anthology showcases an array of fictional writers whom depict themes, characters, and notions of hybridity identification. Works from one of my favorite authors, Ruth Ozeki, beautifully tells the story of a character who identifies as a being from two races: white and oriental. Now, narratives aside, the covers of both images I put forth mirror one another, however, one is used as an instrumental tool incorporating data/capta, while the other employs the cover solely to highlight and trigger interpretation. Like I mentioned before, the former cover still evokes inquires that relate to interpretation solely based on the surface of its cover. Whether or not one cover is better than the other is not the basis of debate or inquiry. Rather, the point is to further illuminate how both fields are working together, humanities and sciences, to further display visuals for different purposes, yet still produce similar ways of interpretations.