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Image Credit: "Hospitality II" by Arriving at the Horizon Via Clinamen

For this entry, I want to point out two online texts that model best practices in the use of images.  Both texts also make powerful arguments. The first is Clinamen, an academic blog by James J. Brown, formerly of UT-Austin and the Digital Writing and Research Lab, who now teaches in Detroit at Wayne State.  The image above is from Brown's March 16 post. Indeed, all of Brown's entries are organized by a compelling, and beautiful, image (see screenshot after the break).  

Image Credit:  Screenshot of  Clinamen Blog by James J. Brown

Many of the images Brown uses have a Creative Commons license, published via Flickr by various users. "Hospitality II" is published by a user called Arriving at the Horizon with an Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License.   The caption tells about "desert hospitality" the photographer experienced.  Arriving at the Horizon (on a fellowship to document nomadic cultures) describes how the Malian woman was putting up the nicest tent for her guests.

Arriving at the Horizon documents traditional, person-to-person, place-based hospitality, and this kind of hospitality becomes the foil for Brown's blog entry. Brown wants to think about hospitality and software.  Yes, software is concerned about the other (the visitor, the user), but also, as Brown says, hospitality can be used to talk about the "predicament" of networked environments (the hacker, the unknown, unpredictable visitor, etc). Brown 'borrows' the documentary photograph, not solely to do rhetorical analysis, not to uncover the original context of the photo, but instead to illuminate his own theories of ethics and rhetoric in digital environments. At the same time, Brown does quote and discuss Arriving at the Horizon's text, and he hyperlinks to the Flickr stream.  I think having students use Creative Commons images for their blog writing as a jumping off point, but also referring to the initial context of the photo would be great.  Certainly,Brown's publication of these networked, free-use images on his blog underscores the positions he is working out about networked information and how it gets found, used, remixed, and repurposed by the other in ways that violate the expectations of the original creator.

"Writing Technologies" by Alex Reid at the University of Buffalo

Another really nice use of Creative Commons licensed photos, and the second text I want to highlight, is the video above by Alex Reid at the University of Buffalo.  The video compares different  writing media:  from pens, to typewriters, to software, to video. The thing I liked so much was the way Reid proactively and elegantly cited the images.  The piece is basically a narrated slideshow, created using a software called Voicethread.   Reid uses the caption feature to attribute the photos (This is hard to see on the embed).   Reid also verbally narrates the context of the image with the audio feature.  Reid tells us where he got the image, the time period of the image, and, as well, he describes what we can see in the picture.  I especially like that we are reminded when the media (photo...screenshot) changes.  If part of visual literacy is drawing attention to the very processes of cultural production, then this video is on point.   This would be a great text to model for students with a narrated slideshow assignment.  On a side note, check out how the Voicethread platform allows you to skip through the different images and to post your own comments with audio. 

To conclude, I'd like to invite you to check out some of the resources we have been building on the Viz. page under the main link 'Practice.' We're hoping the upcoming 2010-2011 year will flesh out these pages to provide more samples and information about how to produce with images.  Please feel comment on this post with any other uses of Creative Commons images you find exciting, or "Contact Us," and we will continue building these resources for everyone.