Annulus

Annulus is a product of the Writing Rights project within Humanities + Design at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University. Annulus is a graphic form that mimics the rings of a tree to show the pattern of emergence. Each ring represents one step or one 'action' and color is used to distinguish types of actions. The radian measure could be used to indicate the relative duration of the action. Annulus can be used alone or in multiples to compare discrete stages in a larger event.

For Writing Rights the purpose was both to show how the participation of individuals in the debates shapes the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen article by article. More is reveled when patterns within debates are compared to each other. We created two instances with different rules:

##1. Political Dynamics in Debate Based on Keith Baker's analyis of the debates

1. The first action begins in the center and subsequent actions push out from the center.
2. The overall size of the circle reflects the length of the debate. The number of rings = the number of actions.
3. Four colors are used to convey the tone of the action in a range from Traditional (red) to Conservative (orange) to Liberal (green) and Libertarian (blue).
4. Gradients are used when an action contains more than one tone.
5. Opacity drops as early proposals are ignored and drift out in the circle. This is to offset the effect that larger circles, covering more area, would appear dominant while also conveying how, the longer the debate the further away we are from the initial dicussion.

##2. Procedural Moves in Debate Based on Dan Edelstein's analyis of the debates

1. The first action begins in the center and subsequent actions push out from the center.
2. The overall size of the circle reflects the length of the debate. The number of rings = the number of actions.
3. Three colors, each with a range of value (5 values or 4 values), indicate whether an action was "adopted" "close" or "rejected"

In Example #2 the opacity does not drop because the goal is to track each discrete procedural move in sequence. Change of intensity over the course of the debate is not the question as it is with Example #1.

Figure 1: Political Dynamics comparison by debate

Figure 2: Color scheme for Political Dynamics

Figure 3: Procedural Moves comparison by debate

Figure 4: Color scheme for Political Dynamics