Robert E. Horn speaks (long)

[M Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

Robert E. Horn, founder of Information Mapping, gave a talk at a dinner 
meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the STC a couple nights ago, and I 
attended. I thought some of my fellow writers might be interested in what 
happened.

By the way, I don't know Horn, don't work for his company or have any 
financial ties to him or his works or Information Mapping(R), etc., 
although I did do an Info Mapping seminar several years ago and found it 
useful.

Horn founded Information Mapping and was its CEO for 20 years. He sold it 
in about 1986 and went on to do other things. I don't know what else he's 
been doing, but he was promoting this book he's written called "Visual 
Language" (published 1998). I bought it but haven't read it yet. From his 
presentation, the gist of it seems to be this: an international visual 
language has developed over the last number of years, and he's trying to 
delineate it and figure out how to better apply it. The core of the idea is 
to integrate text and visual elements to communicate complex things more 
effectively.

It's not just stuff like international road signs he's talking about. It's 
heavily integrating text and visual elements, to a greater extent than is 
usually done right now. His has done his book in this same way, and it 
looks like an educational cartoon book created with clip art (yes, the clip 
art makes it look a bit crappy; he has reasons for using clip art, given in 
the preface). Very few pages are just columns of text.

He contends that the world is much more visually-oriented today than it was 
in, say, the 1950s or 40s (and earlier). I thought he made a good case for 
this. He also made the standard case for information overload in our 
society, how there's just so very much that needs to be known. He thinks 
this visual language is helping people to get along better in the 
information explosion.

He spent about 4 years on a project with several graduate students where 
they applied this visual language idea to a fairly complex historical 
argument. The subject was "Can computers think?" as posed by Alan Turing in 
1950. They visually displayed the original statement by Turing, and also 
displayed all the disputes over this statement by others, with quotes, 
pictures, charts and so on. They traced the whole argument and all of its 
sides and branched disputes up to present time, all done graphically. It 
ended up as 7 large graphical charts, each about 3 by 4 feet. He had 
several of these charts up on the wall. Quite a project. He sells a package 
that includes all 7 charts and a book or two for $99. He said its intended 
audience was probably philosophy students and others of similar geek 
nature. I thought of buying it.

He also wants to apply this method to socio-political-type things. For 
example, he's working with some British magazine to present in visual 
language all viewpoints in the current argument over genetically-modified food.

In person, Horn is quite personable and very well-spoken. I didn't see him 
spill any food on himself.

I don't know that this subject has much immediate impact on what we are now 
doing in tech writing, but at a minimum, it's a concerted effort to look 
into the future. I found it extremely interesting.

Language!

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