On Representing Information: A Characterization of the Analog/Digital Distinction

Abstract

The common account of the analog vs digital distinction is based on features of physical systems, being related to the usage of continuous vs discrete supports respectively. It is proposed here to alternatively characterize the concepts of analog and digital as related to coding systems, of which a formal definition is given, by suggesting that the distinction refers to the strategy adopted to define the coding function: extensional in digital systems, isomorphic intensional in analog systems. This thesis is supported by examples, in particular of analog systems exploiting discrete supports, and is discussed so to explain why digital coding is currently so widespread in the technological and social practice.

Analogue Computation and Representation

“…In short, digital devices read and write tokens that are completely determinate, with read/write procedures that are perfectly reliable. Analog devices, on the other 16 There are still other types, such as (Frigerio et al [2014]), that do not fit well into either camp; but these accounts are not relevant to the concerns noted here. 17 Goodman speaks of representational schemes, rather than individual representations.…”

Visual Information Literacy: Definition, Construct Modeling and Assessment

“…Nonetheless we are well aware of the main current studies on Visual Information Literacy assessment and we refer in the following to these specific sources: the main definitions of what we have termed "Visual Information" are taken from Education and Literacy Studies [1,10] and Data Visualization and Visual Information fields [7,11,12]; the mainstream researches about what we have termed "Visual Information Literacy" assessment are taken from the above sources. In particular, we considered the literature related to the current edition of the most important conference in the Visualization field (IEEE Vis 6 ), together with some foundational studies (e.g., in the Journal of Visual Literacy [13]) and most recent advances (e.g., in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics [7,12]) about assessing Visual Information Literacy 7 We also referred to the Educational and Literacy Studies field 8 . We excluded from our literature overview domain-based visual literacy (e.g., in Biochemistry or Medicine [15]) and too broad studies (e.g., those encompassing multimodal or visual art media and languages).…”

“…The reason is that the supportive power of visual language allows a faster comprehension and selection of relevant patterns in information. This capability may be enabled by its analogical nature, when compared to the digital nature of words [6]. The basic intuition of this distinction regards the fact that information is encoded in visual representation by means of analogies (e.g., in a bar chart, the height of bars represents not only the quantitative intensities of values of a property but enables their immediate comparison -a higher bar immediately recalls a greater quantity).…”

Nelson Goodman’s Aesthetics—A Critique

“…Goodman's explication of the analog-digital distinction was questioned by David Lewis (1971) and John Haugeland (1981), among others, and more recently by Corey J. Maley (2011), Aldo Frigerio, Alessandro Giordani and Luca Mari (Frigerio et al 2013) and Matthew Katz (2016), while the notion of density itself is undermined by Guczalski (2022). Hence, his project for distinguishing between dense and differentiated symbol systems stands at the point of departure, that is, on the level of intuitions resulting from the examples given above.…”