Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television

Anne Ganzert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030352714
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030352721
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book provides an in-depth study of pinboards in contemporary television series and develops the interdisciplinary and innovative concept of Serial Pinboarding. Pinboards are character attributes; they visualize thought processes; are used for conspiracy theories, as murder walls, or for complex cases in any genre. They significantly condition, and are conditioned by, seriality. This book discusses how the pinboards in Castle, Homeland, Flash Forward, and Heroes connect evidence, knowledge, and seriality and how through transmediality and fan practices an "age of pinboarding" has formed. Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television will appeal to TV enthusiasts, professionals and researchers, and students of TV and production studies, fan studies, media studies, and art theory.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. GanzertSerial Pinboarding in Contemporary Televisionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35272-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anne Ganzert¹

(1)

University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

Anne Ganzert

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

IntroductionSerial pinboardingCastleAge of pinboardingGamesAppsBig dataData fictionVisualization

End Abstract

Big and small screen characters have long used pegboards, blackboards, and whiteboards to gather information. Movie audiences have seen heists being planned from Ronin (Frankenheimer 1998) to Ocean’s Eleven (Soderbergh 2001) to The Wedding Ringer (Garelick 2015). They have put together the pinboard clues at the end of The Usual Suspects (Singer 1996) and learned to read the temporal clues on the Polaroid-filled wall in Memento (Nolan 2000). And (by now) they know that some walls with newspaper clippings, scribbled notes, and crisscrossing thread hint toward the genius of A Beautiful Mind (Howard 2001) or Temple Grandin (Jackson 2010), while others externalize a Conspiracy Theory (Donner 1997) or the obsessions of One Hour Photo clerk Seymour “Sy” Parrish (Romanek 2002).

With the upswing in police procedural¹ television viewers have seen countless investigative teams employ pinboards as means of communication and deduction. Various versions can be found in shows from many other genres, too, from The X-Files (Carter 1997–2003) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon 1997–2003) to Pretty Little Liars (King 2010–2017). However, in some shows, the pinboards’ applications go beyond just a prop or storytelling device when they co-facilitate serial structures. They can establish an aesthetic or semiotic system,² function as a guide through temporal confusion, and are a central element of a show’s diegesis. All of these unique functions and features inspired this book, which has the goal to investigate the co-constitutive relation of pinboards and televisual seriality.

In this understanding, pinboards are not mere visualizations or narrative devices but can determine what may become part of a series’ storyline, how it has to be filmed in order to make its way onto the board, and in which order it has to be presented. Pinboards constitute the characters’ actions and form a space that is deeply ingrained in, and simultaneously meta-reflexive of, seriality. The intertwined dynamics that are observable because of the pinboards will be the focal point of the following chapters in order to approach the central research question: how do pinboards, if pinboards and series in fact create and condition each other reciprocally, become dispositives of televisual seriality? I use the term and concept of ‘dispositive’ to grasp the structure or framework, made up by various elements, within which the serial narrative, the series’ images, the characters’ actions, and dialogues, and the audience’s reception take place.

To gain a command of the coincident relation between pinboards and seriality I suggest the concept of ‘serial pinboarding’, which encompasses the practices involved in the board’s creation, such as the handling of the objects on or in front of a board by the characters of TV shows, and the staging and framing of these objects, actions, and discourses. Analyzing serial pinboarding, therefore, includes the material creation as well as the filmic fabrication of a pinboard. Serial pinboarding also covers the visualization of the fictional characters’ cognitive processes, which are often also connected to specific sounds or music,³ and the triggering of visual associations or conclusions from the viewer’s standpoint. Consequently, in order to convey or trigger anything, pinboarding also refers to the camera shots and framing, the set-making and lighting, the special effects and computer animations.

Pinboarding in TV series is a multifaceted phenomenon that requires a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary approach, reaching from the narrative to the production to the reception, and even beyond that, into the realms of fan practices. Before going deeper into the analysis, I want to explore the ‘age of pinboarding’ and introduce a first example of serial pinboarding, which already demonstrates the complexity of the topic and the various modes of pinboarding that we as an audience have become familiarized with.

The Age of Pinboarding

A general trend toward pinboarding as a cultural practice can be made out not just in television series, but in print media (Burda 2009), the design of web 2.0 front ends (see Chap. 6), presentation templates, and even in problem solving and team-building practices in companies, universities, and so on. Vision boards and collages are staple creative techniques from kindergarten to the office. Flowcharts have long been used in businesses to track and plan the movement of goods, and have a fixed dia-grammar of five typical symbols (Dommann 2011, 90). Current trends like the ‘bullet journal’ (invented by Ryder Carroll) play into this, as well as recurrent hashtags like #WhiteboardWednesday on Twitter, under which users tweet charts, drawings, and even music sessions in which song lyrics are illustrated on whiteboards. Many of these instances fall under the larger buzzword of “design thinking” (Plattner et al.2010): a trend in business and education alike, and an approach that connects analysis and creative production that has an output often visually related to pinboarding. More recently, infographics have even become entertaining, such as those found on dailyinfographic​.​com, and visual note-taking has become an anti-trend to typed note-taking in classes or conferences, while essay writing gets support from drawing (Gröppel-Wegener 2016). All of these practices, media, and techniques share traits characteristic of serial pinboarding: by visualizing anything in the mode of pinboarding, spatial, causal, and temporal relations are created, which in turn shape the perception of the items, their connections, and the topics they represent. Using them, reading them, and understanding them hence share similar cognitive processes, which viewers are well versed in, precisely because we do live in an ‘age of pinboarding’.

One of the most striking examples for everyday pinboarding is probably Pinterest (www.​pinterest.​com), which is used for private collections on countless topics, mostly by women (Cf. Ottoni et al. 2013), as well as for professional marketing purposes (Hayden 2012), and of course ‘social curation’ (Hall and Zarro 2012). Yet the majority of the published work on platforms like Pinterest or flickr focuses on collective digital practices, user curation, or social media aspects, while the pinning as a visual, aesthetic, and epistemic practice is discussed less.

In the context of data visualization, a lot of academic and corporate debate occurs, as the so-called big data and its visualization are understood as a contemporary challenge (Beer 2016b; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013). Here too, it proves useful to thoroughly understand pinboarding as a serial practice that allows users to make visual statements, which follow an instinctively understandable visual grammar and which have been practiced on all levels—outfitted with a credibility of data, the power of numbers, or Metric Power (Beer 2016a). Users, employers, managers, marketers, and so on are encouraged to ‘tell stories with data’ (Cf. Knaflic 2015; Ali et al. 2016; Kirk 2016; Segel and Heer 2010) while simultaneously the idea prevails that as long as data remains manageable, things are under control. For example, enterprise applications provide managers with access to ‘executive dashboards’ interfaces, that look like a cross between an airplane’s cockpit and a mind-map (Cf. Beverungen 2019) and make the stock market ‘tameable’ through visualization, while any influencer can access a multitude of analytical apps, that give them personalized graphs, statistics, and recommendations for their social media followers and interactions. Such apps or online applications that allow users to explore pre-visualized data play into our collective ‘will to order things’, and function as a (pop-)cultural reassurance that even in times of accelerated communication and huge amounts of data, human users can still access, sort, and manage data. Pinboards as they appear in this book and TV shows comparatively are relatively small sets of data, they are easy to use, restricted in their content, and we get to watch characters successfully use them, deal with problems, and manage the items and data. They could hence be read as a form of data fiction (Cf. Bieger 2017), and maybe this also explains the significant increase of televised pinboards simultaneous to the developmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Serial Pinboarding
• 3. Pinning Evidence
• 4. Pinning Place and Time
• 5. Pinning Knowledge
• 6. Pinboarding Spin-Offs
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter