Visual Codification

Explicit knowledge is understood in terms of grammatical language. The commensurable form for codification is simply text or other symbols like in propositional logic. When someone else reads the “code,” they’ll be reading how the creator understood the explicit knowledge. The reader will be able to process the information, and hopefully put it together as the creator did.

For the tacit parts of knowledge to be codified, they must go through a parallel process. Tacit knowledge is understood in terms of percepts and sensation. Therefore, its commensurable form for codification would be perceptually similar to those percepts and sensations, without text or symbols. Many people are already familiar with perceptual expression – paintings, music, photographs, sculptures, architecture, etc. If tacit knowledge is to be codified, it must use perceptual expression.

Given that people are largely developed towards sight, visual forms would be especially useful, and most suitable to the human mind. Once in a suitable form, the viewer will be perceiving how the creator understood their tacit knowledge. Just like with codifying explicit knowledge, the viewer would be able to process the information and put it together as knowledge. This type of codification I call “visual codification.”

Information designers like Edward Tufte of Yale University have written extensively on ways to represent information in visual forms. The book "Envisioning Information" by Tufte is one well-known work with numerous examples of techniques to visually represent information. Anything ranging from proofs of the Pythagorean theorem to train schedules to weather maps are shown in almost entirely visual form.

When writing about a particular chart of courtroom proceedings shown in the book, Tufte says that

“visual displays of information encourage a diversity of individual viewer styles and rates of editing, personalizing, reasoning, and understanding. Courtroom graphics can overcome the linear nonreversible one-dimensional sequencing of talk talk talk, allowing members of maturity to reason about an array of data at their own pace and in their own manner.” (pg. 31)

Tufte presents many examples of expressing tacit knowledge. Regarding a visual representation of dance technique, he says that “systems of dance notation translate human movements into signs transcribed onto Flatland, permanently preserving the visual instant” (pg. 114). Flatland, the two-dimensional space of many documents, is being used to codify visuals. Preserving a visual instant of a human movement with all of its essential and rich information is exactly what the goal of visual codification should be. Notation may be partly symbolic, but the essence of expression in the representation is the tacit knowledge of dance technique. It does not say in sentences where to place my feet, nor does it precisely order a series of steps. Rather, with its visual form, the dance notation expresses many aspects of tacit dance technique knowledge. As a whole, Tufte presents many examples of visual codification in action.