as part of the Georgia Tech Salon on vision.

This project examines the data and metadata from 30 x-ray backscatter patents (patent id: G01N-23/20) between 1980 and 2011. Patents, as posited here, are more than descriptive documents, but are objects in their own right that textually, diagrammatically, and materially constitute realities of technology. In turn, the visualizations suggest partial, multiple, messy, and interfering socio-technical networks that are produced by, as opposed to produce, the document-objects we call patents.