viz. - visual literacy

The Theory and Pedagogy of viz.: Reflections on the 2010-2011 Academic Year

ladysquires — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:39:28 +0000

As the year closes, we're reflecting on the ways our posts have connected visual rhetoric, digital literacy, and pedagogy. We've presented lesson plans that use programs like Animoto, iMovie, Sound Slides Plus, Xtranormal, etc. There are longer posts that detail how these programs were used available on the blog, but in the first part of this post, Elizabeth will focus on those that present ideas for using iMovie in the classroom. In the second part of the post, Ashley will explore one of the broad themes our posts this year have addressed and talk about the ways in which we are theorizing the connections between embodiment and pedagogy.

Elizabeth: In Megan Eatman's RHE 309k: The Rhetoric of Tragedy students used, among other media, iMovie to make visual arguments in the form of narrated slideshows. In one of two posts detailing how she used iMovie in the classroom, Megan wrote The use of images often plays a large part in determining whether something registers as "tragic" in public discourse, so constructing visual arguments allowed students to build on their participation in extant conversations through engaging with the visual rhetoric already surrounding their event." Students were given time to experiment with iMovie during class and were not required to use images related to their topics while learning the program. This created a low-stakes atmosphere in which they could learn the program comfortably. Megan also constructed her own video as a model that could be shown to students. Students then had the option of using iMovie as well as other programs such as Photoshop to create multimodal arguments.

Here is the model Megan created and a link to her lesson plan:

I also began to think about how iMovie could be used in the classroom. I noticed that I was writing a lot of posts about how images and digital media were being used to enhance online experiences of poetry and bring poetry to new audiences. In particular, I was taken with this piece by poet and scholar and UT alum Susan Somers-Willett in which she worked with a photographer to create a series of docu-poems. (Sidenote: there will be an interview with Susan available on our “Views” page.)

In Verse: Women of Troy from InVerse on Vimeo.

I wanted to create an exercise that would allow students to think about documenting their own engagement with poems of their choosing. Creating iMovie files that include their reading of poems they interpret critically allows for a visual record of that interpretation and a public performance that goes beyond rote memorization.

Ashley: This marks the first year of aggressively using Google Analytics to track activity on the blog, and the data that we have gathered shows not only a growing audience for viz. but offers us a better sense of what readers are responding to. Posts that dealt with various representations of the body tended to be the most popular for all of the reasons you can imagine, but as we marked that trend, we talked about using those responses to shape a socially responsible and relevent set of posts on the theme of embodiment. These posts point to the ways in which bodies and representations of bodies function as a powerful form of visual rhetoric in our culture, and that importance has significant pedagogical implications. Our students operate in an image saturated world in which bodies are constantly circulating, so understanding how image producers and image subjects engage with their intended audience is an important part of building visual literacy.

Megan's post on American Apparel advertisements and Mike's post on the use of pornographic images in PETA ads focused on sexualization and exploitation. Both posts point to the ways in which the use of stereotypical, oversexed images may actually work against the rhetorical purposes of their creators. As Mike says of a PETA campaign that visually links nude women to animals and/or cuts of meat, "The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent."

As a counterpoint to those posts, I explored the work of two photographers who use nudes or partial nudes in very different ways. The first was Howard Schwartz and Beverly Ornstein's The Athelete, which uses images of male and female Olympic athletes to make a point about the variety of bodies that excel at particular kinds of physical activity, broadening our idea of what a fit, healthy, or athletic body looks like. Later in the semester, I had the opportunity to interview award-winning New York-based photographer Substantia Jones, who photographs nude or partially nude men and women who self identify as "fat" as part of her Adipositivity Project. Jones's project is explicitly political. She aims to challenge our notions of what constitutes a normal or even healthy body by depicting subjects whose bodies are typically either inivisible or vilified in the media and celebrating thier physicality.

The interview provided powerful insights into the ways in which a photographer can engage with her subjects in a way that celebrates rather than exploits their bodies. All of Jones's models are amateurs, many of whom approach her about participating in the project. Jones talked about how she establishes a rapport with a photographic subject who is obviously placing him or herself in a very vulnerable position: "By the time someone contacts me and asks to be an Adiposer, I presume they've already done all the "Can I really drop trou for a stranger's camera?" work. Many lose their nerve during the scheduling phase (far preferable to losing their nerve during the me-ringing-their-doorbell phase, which has happened). But I think when (and if) they open the door, they see a smiling fellow fatty--a comrade--who wants the experience to be good for all involved. What we're doing is indeed ridiculous, so we usually laugh at lot. That helps. As does a cocktail."

This interview brought over 1500 unique visitors to our site in the first 24 hours, and the posts mentioned above have been among the most popular blog entries of the entire semester. Naturally, that raises questions about how we ought to use NSFW (Not Safe for Work) or pornographic content on the blog and in the classroom. Obviously, we would be irresponsible to present such images merely for the sake of titillation or provocation, but the widespread circulation of these images speaks to a greater need for dialogue both with the public and with students about the effectiveness and responsibility of using bodies to make arguments.

New Theory Page: Visual Literacy and Solidarity

fc — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:38:58 +0000

Image Credit: AmericanTeenMovie.com

I recently posted a new page on "Visual Literacy and Solidarity" to the "Theory" section of VIZ. It passes back over some of the material from my posts this semester on food, food culture and food policy, but I also couldn't resist encroaching on Rachel's pop-culture territory with a few references to The Breakfast Club and Kanye West (to be fair, though, the movie is named after the most important meal of the day).

My main goal was to illustrate that no one is "literate" in general, that visual literacy (or cultural literacy, etc.) does not exist in a vacuum. Literacy implies a set of skills and a range of knowledge, and, since the criteria for assessing literacy are set by particular groups of people in particular times and places, demonstrating literacy is often a substantial claim of solidarity, a performative presentation of evidence that we belong to the group because we "know our stuff." Such a performance can, in turn, be a powerful rhetorical tool: instant ethos, just add water.

So, if you know why the picture at the top of this post is funny, then you're one of the cool kids. If not, you could click over and read the theory post, or (if you're one of the smart kids) you can probably figure it out with the picture below.

Image Credit: IMDB.com

And remember to eat a good breakfast, for your mother's sake (Mother's Day is Sunday, May 9).

Image Credit: Flickr.com

Steve in Action

timturner — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:15:10 +0000

High Yellow by Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

This year, the Visual Rhetoric Workgroup has collaborated with the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin on the Steve in Action project. Steve in Action is a collaboration of individuals and institutions collectively exploring the value of social tagging to improve access to cultural heritage collections and engage audiences in new ways. (For more about the Steve in Action Project, see their web site.)

Through this collaboration, the DWRL and the Blanton are conducting a study that explores how undergraduate students use software (like those provided by social media sites such as Flickr or Facebook) to tag digital images of abstract works of art. We are particularly interested in exploring what type of language undergraduate students use to respond to abstract art, and how tagging art alters students' experience and understanding of the artwork. This study will have implications for understanding social tagging as it is used in art and writing instruction. In addition, the project should serve as a way to understand the greater implications of social tagging as it investigates students' abilities to produce forms of knowledge in other areas based on skills learned in the literature, composition, or art classroom.

Although the Steve in Action team believes that its research into the value of social tagging to enhance finding will prove a significant contribution to our community’s understanding of social tagging and access to abstract art, the constraints of deploying the Steve in Action tagging tools in an artificial environment structured specifically to answer research questions have made it difficult for the Steve in Action team to develop authentic and engaging tagging activities and interfaces and thus to begin to examine another series of questions about social tagging. We are keenly interested in questions of motivation and in understanding how social tagging engages and rewards the visitor; in gauging the uses and benefits of social tagging for institutions and their visitors; and in measuring what kinds of support and resources are required by institutions hoping to institute social tagging practices.

As part of a major research university, we extend the research on tagging initiated by the Steve in Action team to look at a primary audience we serve, undergraduate students, and to learn about what language they use to describe and categorize works of art that use abstraction. We hope to use the data we collect from this research to inform museum education practices at the Blanton and to share with faculty who use this content to teach undergraduates.

Currently, the study is its first phase, which asks students to look at a collection of digital images and read contextual information about them if they choose. They then answer a series of questions about the experience. The survey collects information about how students responded to the art and asks them to describe the experience of looking at it, and also to engage in a small writing exercise by defining abstract art and retitling three of the images. You can explore the interface here.

We record the language these undergraduate subjects use to describe abstract art in order to help museum professionals and educators assess what university students find interesting, understand, or misunderstand about such art. We hope that the data we collect will provide information about how social tagging technology mediates students' experience of images and helps them translate visual meaning into verbal descriptions.

The second phase of the project will ask student to tag the digital images using the social-tagging interface designed by the Steve Project. It will likely be implemented in the fall of 2010.

Victory Gardens and Retro Propaganda

fc — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:16:02 +0000

Image Credit: Joe Wirtheim

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I have always had a soft spot for "victory gardens" and mid-century propaganda. It may be a result of the countless times I watched Bugs Bunny steal carrots from the Saturday-morning victory gardens of my childhood (how many of us were introduced to serious political concepts like shortage, rationing and military conscription through the Flatbush intonation of Mel Blanc?). It may have been the vintage singns and posters ("Loose Lips Might Sink Ships") hanging on the wallls of the local burger joint that was a favorite haunt of my grandfather. Whatever the reason, my eye is always drawn to the bold fonts, severe angles and jingoistic slogans of WWII era posters, particularly those aimed at action on the home front. This week, while trolling for vintage design and espirit d'corps, I came across "The Victory Garden of Tommorrow," Joe Wirtheim's modern day art/propaganda campaign that repurposes and reinvents the genre. More on Wirtheim's project, refurbished propaganda and mobilizing the population after the break.

Wirtheim describes his work as "an art project posing as a propaganda campaign for new, American homefront values. The message style draws from American mid-century homefront propaganda, and the messages essentially draws from 21st century needs as found in the current environmental sustainability movement. The campaign is designed to access America’s history of ingenuity to overcome adversity, and apply those values to fighting modern problems." Wirtheim does much more than repackage or redeploy turn of the century images. He borrows from the iconography of the era, and simultaneously participates in the urgency of the earlier propaganda and gives us a wink through their campiness. Compare Wortheim's "Break New Ground" with this New Zealand contribution to Great Britain's "Dig for Victory" Campaign.

Image Credit: Joe Wirtheim

Image Credit: Imperial War Museum

While the pitchfork and foot in "Break New Ground" are certainly an homage to the British series, Wirtheim has translated the poster's wartime austerity into a new aesthetic register. The posters share essentially the same goal-- they both want you to start growing your own food-- but they rely on substantially different rhetorical appeals. The paucity of the British campaign is well suited for an audience facing the shortages, rationing and hardships of a protracted war. There are no unneccesary embelishments, just the bare earth, the blank sky and the task at hand. It resonates with both the English stiff upper lip and the mid-century penchant for martial drama.

Wirtheim's poster presents another argumenta altogether. His cityscape teems with life as plants sprout not only from the ground but (prophetically) from every roof on the skyline. As urgent as America's food crisis may be, Wirtheim isn't speaking primarily to people who are confronted daily with scarcity and want, so he presents growing your own food as an inviting pleasure rather than a stern duty. (The Chuck Taylors give us a pretty good hint about the range of his intended audience). The friendly-looking worm (who appears to have stopped by to watch the digging and chat with us) and the plump little fly add a playfulness and whimsicallity that would be entirely inappropriate in the British campaign, but they are pitched perfectly for an urban gardening movement that idealizes compost and earthworms. The brown-and-green palette reinforces the "dirt and plants" focus of the poster and fit within a recognizable iconography of organic farming and environmental awarness. The patch on the trouser leg makes a subtle argument about living a non-consumer, environment friendly lifestyle that borrows from the WWII era concern with scrap, necessary trips and "making do" in general (a sentiment that was sadly not shared by the Bush administration that encouraged Americans to buy on credit while it began borrowing heavily to finance two foreign wars).

Image Credit: NH.gov

Wirtheim also borrows from post-war iconography to craft his new American propaganda. His project is, after all, not just any victory garden: he presents the Victory Garden of Tomorrow, and several of the posters draw heavily on the campy futurism of the 1950s and 60s. As he does with the war posters, Wirtheim updates and revises the images while holding onto a tongue-in-cheek version of the original sentiment (in this case, unbridled Jetson-esque optimism).

Image Credit: Joe Wirtheim

This last poster works in yet another iconic image and emphasizes Wirtheim's conscious connection to the environmental movement. Over the shoulder of the Meyer-lemon growing lego-spaceman, Wirtheim includes a version of Earthrise, a photograph taken by William Anders on the Apollo 8 mission and often viewed as one of the single most galvanizing images of the environmental movement.

Image Credit: NASA.gov

Earthrise reminds us in dramatic fashion that our earth is a tiny island home in the cold, dead vastness of space. Wirtheim's image--a mix of space-age camp and environmental realism, reminds us that (since none of the mid-century dreams of space colonization by our century have panned out) the way we grow our food-- and the way we treat the earth in the process-- has lasting effects for us as individuals and for the entire planet.

How to write code for images

noelradley — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:45:29 +0000

This page is meant to provide the basics of how to code images for the web. This link is a starting point for learning to code images.

A Modern Take on Still Life

fc — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:55:50 +0000

Image Credit: David Halliday on samuseum.org

Photographer David Halliday's current exhibition of still lifes at the San Antonio Museum of Art contains some stunningly beautiful and surreal photographs of food. It also lends itself to use in the rhetoric classroom and could be used for teaching lessons about visual literacy, changing contexts and visual rhetoric within communities. More about Halliday, still life and possible classroom uses after the break.

David Halliday is a New Orleans based photographer-turned-chef-turned-photographer. The photograph above is one of a series of still lifes produced in Italy using local ingredients and an old tin box. Halliday describes his "box" series, his own relationships to photography and food, and his current San Antonio exhibition in this interview on Zester Daily. In that interview, Halliday tells Liz Pearson that one direct inspiration for the series came from the Italian painter Caravaggio's still life paintings that were circulating on Italian currency when he was in the country. Halliday's subject matter (fish, vegetables, etc.) fall directly into the great tradition of European still life painting, and his use of lighting and his sepia-toned silver prints do a better job than most photographs of capturing the visual appeal of great Dutch or Italian still lifes. Many of the images make local ingredients appear like alien life-forms, like this de-familiarizing shot of a magnificent Italian cauliflower.

Image Credit: David Halliday on ZesterDaily.com

While these photographs are visually interesting devoid of context, they might provide a great way for rhetoric instructors to bring discussions of context and visual literacy into the classroom. Traditional still life paintings use fruits, vegetables, fish, pheasants and other types of produce as a doubled system of signs. The natural bounty arranged on tables or in baskets stood as signs of wealth and bounty but also as memento mori. Life is good, they tell us and their original burgher viewers, but it doesn't last. The arrangements are attractive and the subjects usually appetizing, but the produce, unlike the painting, has a very short shelf-life. Having been caught, picked or plucked, they will soon be rotting. Some still life painters, including Caravaggio, even include signs of decay (wilting leaves, shriveling grapes, flies, etc.) to drive home the point.

While they obviously look back to those Early Modern paintings, Halliday's photographs show no signs of rotting, but they do evoke the freshness and thereby the transience of their subjects. Rather than evoking a 17th century sense of mortality, Halliday's focus lingers on the food itself, and in an era of refrigerators, chemical preservatives and grocery stores that stock the same products year round, really conceiving of our food as part of a natural, seasonal cycle may be just as shocking as coming to terms with our own mortality. The change in context--the difference between pre- and post-industrial worlds--accounts for the shifting target of the images. Caravaggio's viewers could use seasonal produce as a familiar object with which to contemplate the less familiar concept of their transient lives. For Halliday's viewers, the produce itself is unfamiliar and worthy of contemplation.

This type of contemplation is encouraged by several contemporary movements away from processed preserved packaged foods and towards fresh, seasonal and even local ingredients. The Halliday exhibition was put together in part because the curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art wanted to connect the museum's mission with several changes in the local community including the opening of several new farmer's markets and a San Antonio campus of the Culinary Institute of America. Halliday's photographs dovetail with his personal interest in his own vegetable garden and the curator's interest in local farmer's markets: each moves food out of the system of global distribution and economies of scale and back into the cycle of seasons and cultivation where food is produce and not an industrial product.

Halliday's photographs might not operate in the same registers as his early-modern predecessors, but they do ultimately use images of food to make us reflect on our own lives. Rather than reminding us that life is short and we're going to die, his still life photographs remind us that our lives are part of a larger system and that the food that sustains our lives comes from the same ground to which we will eventually return.

Student Unions

fc — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:08:40 +0000

Image Credit: FairFoodProject.org

This carrot-wielding fist appears on the website housing “Fair Food: Field to Table” a multimedia presentation created by the Fair Food Project in cooperation with the California Institute for Rural Studies. The project draws on a visual iconography of labor and political activism as part of its educational outreach to university students. It also aims at turning students into educators with its three-part multimedia presentation and associated resources. More about the project,including video, after the jump.

Anyone who reads much about food culture or food politics has likely come across Barry Estabrook’s article (published last March in Gourmet, the now defunct food magazine at which he was a contributing editor) “Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes” (I ran across the story and Estabrook’s new endeavor on Mark Bittman’s Bitten blog a few months back). Estabrook’s article focuses on enslaved migrant tomato harvesters in Florida and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,a modern day (and East Coast) inheritor of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers mantle, that is working to protect these men and women from abuse. The Fair Food Project includes Immokalee workers along with farm workers from California and other US locations. Part one addresses the plight of enslaved and abused farm workers. Part two profiles several farms around the nation with sustainable labor practices. Here is part three, “The Advocates”:

Along with the website’s suggested reading list—including historical, fictional and photographic accounts of “Okie” migrant workers who made Californian agriculture possible during the nineteen-thirties—the Project’s visual iconography reveals a conscious sense of its own historical position(the Marxist in me wants to say “its historical struggle”). The worker’s raised fist graphically links the Fair Food Project to the long history of international labor movements, and the substitution of a carrot for the more traditional hammer or wrench makes a visual argument about the solidarity of farm workers with labor’s more traditional realm of industry. While some people may be most familiar with the fist icon through its later development in Socialist Realism, it has a long history of use by labor movements in this country, particularly in the political imagery of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies’ political aim and motto—“One Big Union”—is graphically represented in this 1917 poster that prominently features farm workers (note the pitchfork) alongside their industrial counterparts.

Image Credit: "One Big Union" by Ralph "Bingo" Chaplin

The most interesting thing about the Fair Food Project is the way that it embraces and expands on this image of solidarity. While positioning itself squarely within the international and domestic history of labor movements, the Fair Food Project overtly extends this solidarity to consumers. The Project’s website is aimed largely at university students and includes information about a number of organizations students can join to collectively bargain with the people and organizations who make food-purchasing decisions on college campuses (dining halls, fast food companies, etc.). They even provide resources to help students “unionize” at colleges where such organizations don’t already exist. I find this demand-side unionization a remarkably savvy strategy for challenging agri-business corporations and the modern food-production/distribution industry. By attempting to forge solidarity between the farm workers who grow the nation’s food and the consumers who often have little control over what food choices are made available to us, the Fair Food Project and its associated organizations are reconceptualizing the IWW's “One Big Union.”

Literacies: Visual and Auditory

EmilyBloom — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:16:50 +0000

Image Credit: The Guardian

Samuel Beckett's Play (dir. Anthony Minghella, 2000)

This is my last Viz posting for the year, so I thought I’d be introspective, or perhaps, self-referential. Specifically, I want to talk about podcasting pedagogy I’ve been experimenting with this semester and how it’s raised interesting questions in our classroom about the relationship between visual and auditory rhetoric. The final assignment for our class was a podcast in which students delivered an argument on a contemporary controversy. It was very strange for all of us to rely so heavily on voice without a piece of paper to mediate the exchange. Early twentieth-century theories of oral delivery such as those by T. Sturge Moore advocated that speakers of poetry should stand behind a curtain so that listeners could listen more attentively and W.B. Yeats suggested that his Abbey Theatre actors should be placed in barrels to train them against using distracting motions. Not wanting quite so drastic an approach, I at least thought that a focus on the auditory would push my students to consider their words in action and more carefully focus on simplicity, organization and delivery.

Image Credit: Screen Shot of Garageband

While I originally intended to outlaw any visuals, I relented and allowed them to use Garageband’s artwork track. This decision was inspired in part by the interesting results of the collaboration between UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center and Badgerdog, a local Austin creative writing program for K-12 students. I loved the way that participants in this program incorporated imagery into their podcasts without losing focus on the attention to language that makes podcasting such an interesting medium. The results were mixed. Some students seemed really motivated by the challenge of auditory delivery and blended interesting music, noises and audio clips into their presentation to create variety in their performances. Others presented simple, elegant spoken arguments with clear delivery. Then there were less successful uses of the medium: students who read papers that should have remained on paper and others who found oral delivery challenging for a variety of reasons. Those students that chose to incorporate visuals were not uniformly successful. I asked students for feedback on what they think defines a good podcast and very few mentioned visuals. They seemed to appreciate the medium as primarily auditory and one best approached through auditory innovation.

Image Credit: Undergraduate Writing Center

In general, my students were much better trained in visual literacy than, pardon the paradox, auditory literacy. However, they seemed to appreciate the particular auditory rhetoric involved in podcasts (which of course borrows heavily from old media such as radio) that to varying degrees they attempted to capture in their presentations. I wanted to end on this note because I think that many of our blogs on Viz are about the audio-visual or performative text rather than the exclusively visual and that we might want to further consider how teaching auditory literacy might help students better understand contemporary audio-visual rhetoric.

Mapping the Eighteenth Century: A Report from CSECS

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:03:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

While I wrote in my last blog here that I would use this week’s blog to discuss my upcoming conference paper for MMLA, I was led astray this weekend by an excellent panel I attended at CSECS that I thought the viz. audience might enjoy. (Sorry, Gossip Girl fans. Tune in next week!)

After deciding to attend the panel entitled “Mapping Culture: Topographies of London,” I was delighted to discover it featured not only a paper on Boswell’s enchanting London Journal, but also an excellent discussion about using mapping strategies to teach and research eighteenth-century texts. What united the various papers on the panel, which discussed such disparate texts as John Gay’s “Trivia,” the Mohock Club, Boswell’s aforementioned Journal, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was that each paper was based on material provided by The Grub Street Project, a website that unites topographical data with literary texts like Pope’s Dunciad.

As explained by Allison Muri, both the panel’s chair and the website's designer, The Grub Street Project’s goal “is to visualize the literary and cultural history of London.” The About the Project page also notes that

High-resolution “zoomable” maps from 18th-century prints associated with a database of bibliographical and topographical data, trades indexes, and literary texts afford new possibilities for not only seeing the relationships between trades, book production, and dissemination of ideas, but also for seeing the topographies of literary imagination.

As the incredibly topical (and topographical) texts of the early eighteenth-century require some previous processing for undergraduate students to understand the references, I was delighted to see how well The Grub Street Project works to help visualize these texts in intriguing ways. (I most enjoyed Kurt Kruger’s paper on “Gentleman and Topography in Boswell’s London Journal: 1762-1763,” and thought that his map of Boswell’s first month in London well represented how Boswell topographically conceives of gentlemanliness.)

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

I also enjoyed how this panel raised interesting questions about the pedagogical purposes of visual material not only in explaining the eighteenth-century, but also in making arguments about the eighteenth-century to students and scholars alike. While I know that our own distinguished Sean McCarthy has led the way in showing how Google Maps can work in the writing classroom, visual data can often be difficult for certain kinds of students to interpret, and its conclusions can sometimes seem “obvious,” for better or worse. As I’ve been thinking this week about Chaim Perelman’s New Rhetoric for a class I’m taking with Trish Roberts-Miller, I wonder if there’s something about visual arguments that may appeal to the universal audience, but that are similarly difficult to understand as constructed, just as rhetors can forget that the universal audience itself is a rhetorical product. Our language encodes the value of visuals in such maxims as “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but how are we supposed to interpret that picture? And what safeguards are there to prevent misinterpretation? As we move into explicitly teaching digital literacies to students, however, these questions will help students to consider more carefully how they evaluate and analyze visuals as rhetorical objects.

At any rate, The Grub Street Project has great functionality and is very intuitive to use. In addition to things like UT’s eComma, I am beginning to visualize a literature classroom that integrates web materials fully.

Tearing Up My Heart (and My Grounds)

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:24:13 +0000

Image Credit: Wikipedia

I’m a bit nervous and distracted right now, as I’m in the middle of preparing to go to Ottawa for the CSECS/NEASECS conference this weekend, and anticipating the following weekend’s jaunt to St. Louis for the MMLA Conference. My plan to manage to stress involves using my blog posts for the next two weeks to examine my paper topics through the lens of visual rhetoric.

For the CSECS/NEASECS conference, I’m going to be presenting a paper on Adam Smith and Edmund Burke entitled “Fragmentary Selves: (Aesthetic) Living with the Man in the Breast in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” While the title may be overlong, it’s in part because I’m trying to balance within the paper a discussion of the Burkean sublime and how Smith uses that aesthetic rhetoric to discuss and picture an ideal self that is so responsive to the feelings of others that such a self is in part fragmented by this openness. The connection that I see between this paper and my work here at viz. is through the trope of ruins.

Ruins, as I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, were a huge obsession of the eighteenth century. The Victoria and Albert Museum website describes the place of ruins in eighteenth-century landscape painting as aesthetic objects, in particular examining the work of William Gilpin. Ruins are also important as signs of empire: both the fallen Roman Empire whose writers people like Pope tried to emulate, and the emergent British Empire whose rise would be documented by writers like James Thomson. However, I see Burke and Smith connected with ruins in how all of these objects meditate on the construction of the self (either historically, physically, or emotionally), and the contemplation of its possible fragmentation. A text that I’d like to look more at for my prospectus that I think connects in usefully is C.F. Volney’s The Ruins, or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, translated into English in 1795.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

In this most interesting book, a first-person narrator is traveling through the East, meditating on the fallen empires, when he is accosted by the Genius or spirit of the ruins, who proceeds to give him the history of the ruined grounds upon which the narrator looks. Ruins here not only stand in for history, but also have the ability to speak and to interact with their observers. The sentimental tears of the narrator align him with a particular novelistic tradition of sympathy, like Smith, but this openness ends up shaking the foundations of his beliefs about empire. Here, the sentimental scene of a man looking upon ruins forces him into a violent confrontation with the object he sees, before which he is powerless. Being an eighteenth century self thus in these texts requires the self to always be open to being a ruin. The desire to construct aesthetic follies like Wimpole’s Folly, pictured at the top of the post, also speak to a desire for a constructable authenticity and relationship with the past. We want not just to know the past, but to be able to create it as well.

Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to add more speculations here about the visual rhetoric of eighteenth-century ruins. If you’ve enjoyed these speculations and want to read something further, I’d recommend Lynn Festa’s Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France and David Marshall’s The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot.

Photoshop Disasters

timturner — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:02:19 +0000

Some of you may have seen this story on the Huffington Post about an apology issued by Ralph Lauren for the peculiarly skinny model pictured here:

The image was first noted by Photoshop Disasters, one of my favorite blogs about visual culture (other than Viz., of course). The images collected there are often hilarious and sometimes unintentionally tragic (as this super skinny model indicates). The blog itself is a terrific read, and a hilarious way to pass a few spare minutes. What's great about it, however--in addition to its delightfully relentless snark--is how it invites a deeper engagement with images. In many cases, the tragedy of the poor photoshopping is obvious, in an impossibly thin waist or a terrifyingly elongated neck. In other cases, you have to look harder and closer to locate the details. One of the unintended consequences of living in the age of photoshop may be an increase in visual literacy: spotting the falsifications sometimes requires a keen eye for close-reading.

The necessity of teaching video composition

John Jones — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:58:05 +0000

A few weeks ago I suggested that the seeming ineptness of many amateur videos indicates that most people are more skilled at textual production than at video production. William Saletan’s piece at Slate on video resumes got me thinking about this topic again. While the popularity of non-commercial videos on youtube argues that our culture is in many ways already video-literate, it is likely that the youtube community is self-selecting for video-savvy individuals. However, Heather Havrilesky’s recent review of Donald Trump’s Apprentice implies that there is a lack of awareness of a broader audience in that group, as well. Since we are near a point when video production will be as ubiquitous as text composition, it will soon become necessary for training everyone in video composition. If this is the case, I think it is likely that a huge part of the training in the rhetoric of video communication will be left to composition departments.

Technological innovations like Apple’s iSight camera, which now comes standard with all of its laptops, will soon put this technology in the hands of everyone with a computer. Returning to the Saletan piece, he provides a fairly inclusive list of pros and cons for video resumes, which, for the purposes of this conversation, can be summed as: everyone is going to start providing video resumes, so you need to as well. If videos are going to be a requirement for job-hunters, who will give students a rhetoric for creating these videos, the topoi that they should cover (or clichés they should avoid), and techniques for presenting themselves to their audience other than composition departments?

Eventually someone is going to have to create a video rhetoric for classroom use. Those of you who are more familiar with film studies might be able to suggest works in that field that already do this. I think the first step towards brining this conversation into the classroom would be assigning student videocasts. Blogging Pedagogy has had some interesting discussions on podcasts, and I think that assignments like this one by John Pedro Schwartz could easily be adapted for students with cameras in their laptops. Any thoughts on other videocast assignments?