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The digital world of today can be understood as a product of late-Victorian construction of the machinery of information organization combined with Modernist visual forms.

The works of Lev Manovich and Dr. Simon Cook use a revisionist approach to examine the past century and a half of visual forms. In his “Late Victorian Reasoning and a Modern History of Vision,” Dr. Cook attempts to prove a link between the late-Victorian visual forms and the “new vision” (including Modernist art) that Manovich observed in the early half of the twentieth century. In his work, Lev Manovich traces the relationship from “new vision” to the computer and new media, claiming a direct connection between the two. Although it is …show more content…

However, the science of psychology had a very slow start and growth. In the nineteenth century, psychology went through a fledging stage in which it attempted to ground itself in different sciences, such as biology, physics, and philosophy (2). It was this initial experimentation with psychology that led to the works produced in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century observed by Cook and Manovich. However, it was the growth of psychology departments in universities and colleges that led to the visual forms used in the new media. Upon further examination of psychology and the three visual forms, the importance of psychology in these fields will become evident.

The late-Victorian construction of the machinery of information organization included the works of men like Lewis Carroll and John Venn, who attempted to create visual representations of arguments, usually on the topic of logic. The link between these two men and psychology can be easily observed upon examination of Mind, a quarterly publication that was established in 1876. In the first issue of Mind, George Robertson, the editor of the periodical and a Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic in University College, London, states the purpose of the journal “will be an organ for the publication of original researches, and a critical record of the progress made, in

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