An American Education

Drawing on 150+ official documents, newspaper clippings, and library archives, I deconstructed the official seals of Forbes’ top 100 universities in America and manually reconstructed them according to the motifs they use. I sorted the 211 motifs into 13 categories which inform the colors of each diagram, then tracked each motif's meaning, size, and frequency across its various appearances within the collection. The resulting website analyzes my findings through two distinct views.

The first view charts each motif's frequency of appearance across the collection. The sankey-style legend may be used to toggle the seals by category, motif, or symbology.

This view also offers focused portraits for individual seals:

The second view visualizes each seal according to the area taken up by each of its motifs or domains. They are arranged in order of either founding year or rank. Focus views for each motif or domain may be toggled to determine trends over the last 390 years.

The core experience of this view is the detail mode, which opens each seal into a custom data card portraying its categories (left) and motifs (right). The bars similarly stack in order of area percentage.

The school's Forbes rank (top) and its founding year (bottom) relative to the rest of the 100 seals also appear as ticks on each card.

Users may hover over each element to further grasp the makeup of a seal.

Latin vs English names over time:

What a rush!!! This project started from a desire to position visual emblems as important systems that deserve both reverence and scrutiny.

The ultimate takeaway here is that what we believe to be the purpose of education is heavily impacted by the visual narratives that schools construct. Schools legitimize themselves partially by aligning themselves with certain values, as well as aligning themselves with other schools that might wield more of the authoritative image they want, even if they don't personally have that kind of history themselves. The purpose of a database like this is to record how our academic institutions are presenting themselves at this moment in time and to notice how images have defined our nebulous ideals of merit and power and knowledge.

I also set out hoping to play around with the possibilities of what interactive data viz can look like... I think there is worth and beauty in presenting research in aesthetic forms that exceed just the informative. In the end, this is really just a dive into the common core of educational imagery. I want it to be a joyful place for discovery and new knowledge, just like how the universities in America had intended themselves to be.

That's me presenting "An American Education" at MAKING SPACE, the Parsons Communication Design Thesis Show! (Here's an Easter egg: I also made the website for that!)

Thanks for reading!