I found Johnathon Harris’ choice in portraying the timeline of the photos of his work “The Whale Hunt” to be very interesting. The pulse-like structure was certainly very misleading. When I first was on the site, I thought the the spikes in the timeline, similar to the spikes of a heart beating, represented exciting things happening in the series. This was enforced by the large amount of spiking at the end of the timeline, which I assumed coincided with the actual killing of a whale. However, I started to question this notion when I arrived at the large lone spike in the middle of the timeline.
Eventually, I realized that the spikes represented a larger amount of photos taken at the same time. In a way, this still did reflect my original thoughts, as a spike in photos would suggest an event worthy of lots of photos, more than likely more interesting than the events that were given only one photo. In this way, Harris’ timeline is a clever way of portraying the events, as the pulse line does in away suggest which events are more interesting then others, like the whale butchering vs the men standing around at camp.
Seeing this work made me think on what authors take into consideration when choosing a type of visual to represent something. Audience surely has to be the main factor- I thought back to how confusing the Kissinger visualizations were before I had a more thorough explanation. Those were meant for people more experienced in fields trying out different visualizations to gain new insights into something. Harris, as a photographer, was most likely looking at his work as art, and the pulse-like timeline added an extra element of creativity to his work.