via A Fair Game? (TEI ‘24)
What it says
Two adjacent moves, often confused:
- Physicalization — data given a physical form you can hold, walk around, or be blocked by.
- Sensification — data given a sensory form you perceive rather than read: heard, felt, resisted.
Narrative sensification is what you get when you add a story and a protagonist on top.
Does it hold for my work
Not currently. Both presuppose a dataset, and my direction has none. What I would be representing is not information about the world; it is the audience’s own action coming back at them.
Why the page exists anyway
Because it keeps me honest about a citation. If I use narrative sensification, someone will reasonably ask what data I am sensifying, and the answer has to be that I took the concept out of its family. Better to have written that down before being asked.