While reading Climate Change, I had noticed that Santa Claus appeared many times throughout the book. I even wondered to myself why Santa was appearing randomly in a book about climatic issue such as global warming. Why would Squarzoni include pictures of Santa in such a serious book? Even though I asked myself these questions while reading the book, I did not look deeply into it. I did not actually try to understand the meaning of these reoccurrences and sort of skipped over it until now. This assignment was the perfect way for me to go back and answer these earlier questions I had while reading the book.
After going back and looking at each page closely, I was able to figure out the importance of Santa in this book and why the author included a child’s fantasy in a serious book such as Climate Change. I decided to make my table about Climate Change into an info graph because I wanted to include explanations for each page that Santa showed up. A timeline would not be the most ideal approach for me because it would limit me from including organized and detailed explanations of each page and why the author decided to reuse it. An info graph was the best way for me to lay out all of my information. The type of info graph that I chose to use enabled me to notice that Santa mostly appeared in the last half of the book. The text size and bold font that I used unknowingly helped show me this pattern. Before I had felt like Santa had showed up a few times throughout the book. This map was also a good way for me to include precise details about why the author chose to include Santa on the specific pages I listed on my map. This map allows someone to understand the importance of Santa on each page and understand why the author uses it just by reading the info graph. If someone like me had not noticed the importance before or had questioned themselves the same questions as I had, this info graph is a great way to see the complexity of Santa’s role in this book.
This map allowed me to realize that Santa is used as a representation or a symbol. Santa represents bad in this book. Santa is the fantasy that the world is living in. Santa represents the material desires that everyone has. He represents productivism and consumerism. I would not have noticed these important ideas about the book if it were not for this map. Making this map allowed me to realize how deeply the author has thought about his ideas and how he wants to portray them in this book. This Santa representation was very shocking and interesting to me. Who would of thought that Santa could represent bad? However, Squarzoni was able to take Santa and present his ideas strongly in a different way.
My map does lack a few things as well. The map I chose fails to show images which may have been helpful to someone reading this map. However, I was able to include context for each Santa image in hopes that the importance would make sense after reading the context even if there was not an image shown. I also intended to make my font size larger, but it was hard to fit all of the important information into a tiny space for each page. Overall, this map revealed many important factors and ideas about the book that I had missed before which shows just how important it is to analyze a text from afar.
yagni's_visual_writing 