viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Save the Words

H/T to Elaine and Very Short List

To kick off my return to Viz. this semester, I’m excited to share two artifacts at the intersection of verbal and visual cultures. After the jump: a design savvy website that functions as a Linguistic Extinction List of sorts. Also, a short film that invites viewers to consider the neuroscience of language.

Oxford UP's web site Save the Words uses graphic design to re-invest obsolete or antiquated words with modern charm, even (perhaps) a certain glamour and intrigue. Employing colorful typography worthy of a Cosmo cover, the site gives words like jobler and squiriferous a graphic make-over, while the experience of navigating a virtual Wall of Words engages the roving eye of a 21st-century internet user. Once smitten by a particular graphic representation, visitors may pledge to use their adopted word daily.

Image Credit: Everynone

H/T to Elaine

Produced in conjunction with WNYC’s Radiolab, a weekly science podcast/radioshow, the short film “Words” is a curious celebration of words via their absence. After the opening frame, the textual presence is minimal. Instead, the viewer encounters a sequence of images and sonic information, and is asked to supply the words that make sense of these relationships. In addition to being just plain lovely, the video works as an interactive experiment: once you become clued into the logic of the film, you watch a second (or third or fifth) time to observe your brain’s language use--its ability to make verbal associations--in action. On another level, while the video assumes a kind of universal narrative that speakers of American English recreate to decode its "visual wordplay," I'm curious about the stories that individuals construct to make sense of these images: clearly, a clip of an amateur theater production or a coach outlining a football strategy signifies more than just the noun play.

I initially envisioned "Words" as a possible introductory activity for my Literature and Biology class, but ultimately decided to begin with some evolution rap instead. Do Viz. readers have any thoughts about the kinds of conversations that either of these artifacts might prompt in a rhetoric or literature classroom? I have a hunch that, given its explicit invitation to explore the intersection of word and image, "Words" might pair nicely with some of the questions raised by Paul Messaris in "What's Visual about 'Visual Rhetoric'?," which Tim Turner profiled for Viz. last year. This review essay asks whether there is something unique about the status of the visual in argument. For instance, the effectiveness of "Words" hinges on the narrative impulse that's particular to viewers of image sequences; according to Messaris, "Because of perceptual habits cultivated by the dominant role of movies and other visual narratives in our visual culture, all viewers are primed to see sequences of images as bits of stories, even when those images are also connected in more symbolic or conceptual ways."