Fox Harrell: Phantasmal Media

In Chapter 4 of Fox Harrell’s text, “Phantasmal Media”, I found the section on “Brawn at the Bazaar” to be a really interesting example of the role of semiotic spaces and their use and interpretation. It made me realize how there are many unconscious biases that come into play in our day-to-day decision making, which don’t necessarily translate to computational models, such as the eBay Simple Seller Representation that does not capture Brawn’s criteria. It is intriguing how semiotic morphisms from reality to computation can lead to a loss of meaning, but in some cases, like in the contrast between Brawn’s Seller Representation and the eBay Simple Seller Representation, that has a potentially positive impact of reducing unconscious bias and discrimination. This section of the text helped me better understand the more technical descriptions of semiotics that Harrell presented in subsequent sections.

Gestalt Psychology

I really appreciated the examples provided for these laws, as they were very clear in explaining the concepts. I really like the ones that create a sort of optical illusion, such as the Law of Closure (which creates the appearance of a triangle due to the incompleteness of the other shapes) and the Law of Figure/Ground (in which the forms appear to change depending on whether you are looking at the positive or negative space).