WEB SITES
Viz: Visual Rhetoric -Visual Culture – Visual Pedagogy
The award-winning digital publication viz. is committed to the intersections of Rhetoric and visual culture. In keeping with its mission to promote visual literacy, the viz. blog presents a daily community forum for discussing images in the digital age. The website attracts a steady, significant following with an international audience made up of users from 144 countries and territories.
Site is maintained by members of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin
Writing Across the Disciplines
Special Issue: WAC, WID, ECAC, CAC, CXC, LAC — VAC? Incorporating the Visual into Writing / Electronic / Communication / Learning Across the Curriculum
Abstract: Disciplines across the curriculum increasingly respond to the visual culture into which our students graduate—and from which they come. This issue explores the use of visuals to teach, to construct knowledge, and to deconstruct knowledge; specific disciplinary expectations concerning visuals as end products/forms of communication; the production, changes and/or effects visual technologies (from paper to screen) have had on our field; the intersections between/among visual/written/spoken pedagogies and productions across disciplines/interdisciplines; ways in which brain activity dedicated to writing intersects/affects/changes visual production.
Article Titles:
- Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication Across the Curriculum
- Connecting Visuals to Written Text and Written Text to Visuals in Science
- What You See Is (Not) What You Get: Collaborative Composing In Visual Space
- Designing Your Writing/Writing Your Design: Art and Design Students Talk About the Process of Writing and the Process of Design
Interesting analyses of visual messages by professional photographer and scholar of visual studies, Marco Bohr.
BOOKS
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Very popular and influential “215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication.” Also see McCloud’s TED Talk
Carolyn Handa’s Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook
Amazon description: This sourcebook helps composition instructors consider what it means to teach visual rhetoric in the context of the multimedia classroom. Drawn from a range of disciplines, readings address visual argument, rhetoric of the image and design, and how culture shapes visual understanding.
ARTICLES
“A Rhetoric of Sequential Art”
Review of Scott McCloud, Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels (Harper Paperbacks, 2006)
by Ben McCorkle, Ohio State University at Marion
Published in Enculturation 7 (2010)
Opening paragraph: Compositionists have long held an interest in visual culture, as textbooks such as Seeing & Writing, Convergences, and Rhetorical Visions demonstrate, not to mention recent scholarly books such as Carolyn Handa’s Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World or Kristie Fleckenstein’s Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom. Books in this vein expand our critical perspective of what counts as a worthwhile cultural artifact, moving beyond the confines of high art and into the sometimes maligned world of advertisements, graffiti, and even (perish the thought) comics. For the most part, such efforts tend to focus more on the analysis and critique of preexisting visual texts and less on how students themselves might produce such texts. It is within this context that we can read Scott McCloud’s book Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels. We can read McCloud’s text as a rhetoric of comics in that it not only offers readers practical and theoretical advice for producing aesthetically effective and engaging comics of their own, it also demonstrates its own argument in a sophisticated yet visually appealing manner. (Continue reading…)