Visual outlining with Flickr

I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one.

It amazes me now that I ever tried to organize my thoughts any other way.

Consider this image:

For most of us, music is the most familiar context for a cassette tape. But you can store any kind of data on a cassette, not just audio. Back in the seventies and early eighties, cassettes were a popular computer data storage medium. Seeing this picture on the same screen as Alan Turing led me to the insight that a cassette with an operating system stored on it is a perfect physical analogy to the concept of a Turing machine. Then I see the Apple cassette on the same screen as Run-DMC, because in the late Jam Master Jay’s hand is a cassette deck.

It brings the connection back home to music, leading me to the idea that music and computer programs might be kind of the same thing. From there it takes me to the idea that music is made of algorithms. From there, I get the idea that maybe memes are algorithms for getting themselves copied, and maybe genes are too. Like I said: useful.

The whole experience has proven to me that I can shuffle images together into a narrative way more easily than hunks of text, no matter how cool Scrivener’s index card view is. I’ll bet there are a whole lot of artsy types out there like me who would be having an easier time in their writing life if they got hip to visual outlining.

I’m finding also that I like developing my ideas in public, throwing images out there and seeing how people react to them. I used to play jazz guitar, and now I laptop DJ. I like improvising in front of an audience. Coming up with ideas is only the front half of creativity. The equally important back half is the pruning, the editing, the rejections, the natural selection. Social writing and image gathering is like social music. When you’re trying to impress other people, you instinctively prune based on what’s going to be the least annoying to everyone, what’s going to raise your social standing. The more time I spend trying out my ideas in public, the more sophisticated and adaptive they become.

You can make folders for your images, known in Flickr as sets. You can also make collections, which are sets of sets. A particular image can belong to as many different sets as you want. And Flickr also supports tags, for another layer of more associative sorting.

All the way around, Flickr is a slick piece of interface design. Anybody trying to create a dashboard for a large, complex database will find a lot of inspiration there.

Like Delicious, Flickr offers a variety of creative alternative display methods. One of its simplest and most delightful toys is the randomizing web site badge. I have mine set to choose three images at random. It chooses a different three every time you refresh the page. Here’s my most serendipitous threesome so far:

Just sitting there and playing random images against each other could keep me supplied with creative nonfiction inspiration for basically ever.

Flickr gives you a lot of nuanced feedback on your viewers. Here are my most popular photos according to Flickr’s interestingness measure, a weighted sum of page views, favorites and comments. For some reason, the image below is the internet’s favorite thing I’ve ever posted, by a large margin. This is probably because I titled it using the word “Matrix,” inadvertantly guaranteeing that it shows up in a lot of google searches.

I myself did not create this image. Some random person on the intertubes did. I found it unattributed on Ffffound. I do a lot of reblogging with Flickr, which is not exactly what the terms of use had in mind, but everything I’m doing could be reasonably characterized as fair use, so I don’t think Flickr minds. I’m not making any money whatsoever from reblogging images. (I wish!) I’m scrupulous about including links to original sites when I can find them. If I include an image from pop culture, like an M.I.A. album cover or something, it’s in the context of an enthusiastic endorsement, the kind of heartfelt word-of-mouth that drives most sales, so I doubt the artists mind either.

In your daily stat report, Flickr lists all the Google and Yahoo image searches that resulted in a view of one of your images. It does something better, actually, it links to those searches. If I post a picture of a cool molecule or interesting knot or colorful bird, a bunch of science students find their way to it immediately. Usually their searches turn up some other cool molecule or knot or bird pictures as well, a rich source of new material for me. And so the cycle continues.