Visual Rhetoric: A Multi-Disciplinary Review of Recent Literature

This literature review traces recent scholarship on a particular form of communication that uses images for persuasive purposes: visual rhetoric. Disciplines within the purview of this literature review include writing studies, speech, communication, education, and marketing as well as, to a limited degree, anthropology, information science, art history, architecture, and design. The chapter will discuss three main theoretical constructs which ground scholarship in this field: rhetoric, iconology, and semiotics.

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Visual Literacy, Rhetoric, and Design at the Graduate Level

While much has been written about visual literacy and multimodal teaching, almost nothing has been published on preparing instructors and graduate teaching assistants to provide students with the mechanics of visual design, rhetoric, and cultural criticism to help them build complex, multimodal projects that go beyond visual inclusion and critique. This chapter focuses on a graduate course on visual literacy, rhetoric, and design that was taught by one of the authors and taken by the other four.

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The Importance of Visual Literacy: An Analysis of Potential Obstacles for Romanian Students in the Completion of IELTS Academic Writing Task 1

Although Romanian school curricula introduce pupils from all grades to various forms of graphic representation, Romanian students do not get enough training in graph analysis as required by an IELTS exam because this specific competence is not particularly envisaged by the national curriculum for English as a foreign language.

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The Art of Evidence: A Method for Instructing Students in Art History Research

Within various disciplines, contextual sources such as history, theory, and criticism are used to support knowledge claims. However, the discipline of art history assigns the undergraduate a particular challenge with regard to secondary source use.

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Seeing the Bigger Picture: Archival Description of Visual Information

Description is an essential library service of which reads may be unaware. The catalouge reveals where the desired item is; the item is retrieved. That seems easy. But the description of materials in special collections is often more complex, and sometimes even the fundamental nomenclature indicating what an item is can be difficult to identify.

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Developing Visual Literacy Skills Through Library Instructions

Visual literacy skills have become an inevitable part of life in today’s world. Technological innovations leading to new literacy skills have changed traditional ways of communication and made it necessary to learn and understand symbols, pictures, photos, illustrations, diagrams, infographics, pictograms, simulations, graphical interfaces, digitized images, and other visual tools. Therefore, it is very significant to teach individuals about visual literacy skills: the ability to understand, interpret, evaluate, organize, and construct visual information. Infographics are essential tools for learners. One of the most prominent institution to teach visual literacy skills is libraries. Visual tools, strategies, and methods should be applied in library instructions for users to realize these skills. The aim of the chapter is to show the importance of visualization, visual literacy, and infographics and present suggestions regarding how to develop the visual literacy skills of learners by libraries.

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Cultural Differences and Information Literacy Competencies

Design students can pose multiple challenges for librarians. Their information-seeking behaviours are often less linear than those of their university colleagues. Developing library initiations and instruction becomes even more challenging when working with international students who bring different cultural backgrounds and language competencies to their college programme. They also have varying degrees of experience with and knowledge about libraries.

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Moving Pictures and Words: Multimodal Projects in College Composition

Avarice and good intentions: these roads led Laura Ng and Karen Redding to multimodal composition pedagogy. As instructors, the authors are greedy when it comes to incorporating successful techniques into their course. Like more teachers, they constantly seek – through borrowing, adaptation, and invention – new strategies to help their students learn. This constant search means that they keep an eye on the latest developments in composition and pedagogy, and the phase “multimodal composition” immediately piqued their interest, particularly with its implications of process-oriented writing and creative interpretation.

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Perception of the Visual: We See with Our Brains

The visual dominates our visual culture and has become an essential tool for universal communication. The information landscape is embedded in contemporary culture through the internet and social media; wi-fi and remote access to library resources enable immediate access to information. The visual has become an essential resource and source to share. Image cross boundaries and non-verbally illustrate information – a global language that unifies all cultures. Therefore, when communicating human rights issues, images narrate the past and present. How do our brains process these visual resources, and what influence does this neurological process have on interpreting visual images of culture or human rights?

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New Visual Literacies and Competencies for Education and the Workplace

This chapter examines how new visual literacies allow students to create meaning and develop competencies needed for the 21st century. Today’s generation is continually exposed to visual and digital media. Through empirical work, this chapter highlights how emerging visual technologies such as big data, infographics, digital badges, electronic portfolios (ePortfolios), visual social media, and augmented reality are facilitating the development of technology-related skills required for students in academics and in the workforce. Each visual technology platform will be examined for their usefulness in promoting engagement, subject-matter knowledge, and collaborative learning outside the traditional classroom approach.

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Metaliteracy in Art and Design Education: Implications for Library Instruction

The term ‘metaliteracy’ is still a relatively new concept since being introduced into the library and information science literature as a ‘framework that integrates emerging technologies and unifies multiple literacy types’ (Jacobsen and Mackey, 2011, 62). It is therefore still a fairly recent addition to the parlance surrounding library instruction and teaching and learning practice, which this chapter will attempt to expand on.

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Visual Language, Visual Literacy: Education a la Modes

I [the author] am writing about visual literacy and visual texts, and in doing so, I will share with you examples of children’s ‘picturebooks’ where alphabetic print is no longer the primary carrier of meaning and where images and print often are symbiotic.

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Pin This: Working with Faculty to Enrich the Classroom Environment via Pinterest

Focusing on academic libraries and librarians who are extending the boundaries of e-learning, this collection of essays presents new ways of using information and communication technologies to create learning experiences for a variety of user communities. Essays feature e-learning projects involving MOOCs (massive open online courses), augmented reality, chatbots and other innovative applications. Contributors describe the process of project development, from determination of need, to exploration of tools, project design and user assessment.

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MOOC Global/Local Shakespeare: New Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare in Taiwan and Beyond

Chen adopts an intercultural perspective in her Shakespeare classes and online courses. She emphasizes collaborative activities and student participation, while drawing extensively from manga and Taiwanese Shakespearean productions housed in the Taiwan Shakespeare Database.

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Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy: How Two Academic Librarians Combined Information Science and Design in Their Careers

The two authors of this chapter both worked in graphic design departments before obtaining their Master of Library & Information Science degrees, and subsequent professional positions in academic libraries. Framed within a context of visual literacy, this chapter describes each author’s experiences with graphic design and how the skills gained from those experiences lend themselves well to academic library outreach, instruction, web design, and archival work.

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Using Strategies from Graphic Design to Improve Teaching and Learning

This chapter calls attention to the value of graphic design education in K–12 settings by explaining the history and practice of graphic design, identifying the uses and value of graphic design in education, and sharing a case study of how it can be applied in the classroom. The chapter focuses particularly on the value of constructing meaning with pictures and text, both for teacher use in the classroom and in student picture–text integrated projects. It argues that the visual draft process, which uses pictures and words together, can operate just as powerfully as the writing process to facilitate and demonstrate student learning. This graphic design process gives learners control of their content and liberates them to see different relationships between elements and ideas. At the same time, it frames picture and word relationships as malleable and builds flexible, critical thinking in multiple dimensions.

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The “Eyes” Have It: A Digital Media Lab in an Academic Library

Multimedia design center, digital media lab, makerspace, scholars’ lab—there are many names for the ways that academic libraries are embracing a wider definition of the “library as space” concept, “where new and emerging information technologies can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user focused, service-rich environment that supports today’s social and educational patterns of learning, teaching, and research” (Freeman 2005, 3). While actively renovating and reinventing spaces for information/knowledge commons areas, the rationale for this movement is to provide an environment where students have access to equipment and space to experiment. The underpinning of this movement encompasses two key missions of academic libraries: to develop skills in information literacy and to encourage critical thinking among college students.

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Teaching Visual and Media Literacy Skills Through Media Production Technology

Information professionals such as archivists and librarians are faced with the challenge of preserving, describing, and providing access to information encoded on a variety of media, both text based and visual. While the visual and media literacy discourse recognizes the role of information professionals in visual, media, and information literacy education, the literature contains few pedagogical approaches those charged with training informational professionals at the graduate level. This chapter discusses one approach to visual and media literacy instruction in the Moving Image Archives course offered at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, and suggests one method for visual and media literacy instruction at the graduate level. This technology-based approach addresses the “designing and creating” competencies from the Association of College and Research Libraries Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, creating an environment that simulates production by introducing students to the tools and technologies of media production. This approach could also be used in other academic disciplines, such as film and media studies, where students learn to analyze and interpret specific media products, but do not engage directly with the technologies used to create these images.

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Presenting My Selfie to the Digital World: Visual Composition for Better Representation

The intention that motivates an online image’s creation might be ignored by overwhelmed media consumers as images wash over them as they scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat. Consumers of commercially and personally produced images tend to focus on how those images make them feel as opposed to the narrative or reportorial information embedded in images. Since both “experts” and “novices” create online images, discerning an imagemaker’s level of expertise is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp due to lack of attribution, the availability of sophisticated online photo editing tools, and a steep learning curve among many novice creators. To discourage merely skimming images and to develop greater visual literacy, five principles of visual composition can be applied to access and analyze the intended and unintended denotative and connotative messages embedded in personal or commercial images posted on various social media platforms.

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Multimodal Composition in Teacher Education: From Consumers to Producers

In the twenty-first century, visual texts are vital to learning in English language arts (ELA). As English educators, we know the importance of telling and sharing stories in various formats in order to build community as well as facilitate deep understanding of the concepts we teach. In our methods courses for undergraduates, two of our course projects help students think creatively and reflectively about themselves as ELA teachers, particularly in this time of changing demands, standards, and high-stakes testing. Further, these projects also help to expand students’ understanding of visual and digital ELA content and promote their development as sophisticated consumers of these texts. However, the projects also encourage students to be producers of digital content and to better understand the affordances of multimodal composition. We ask students to use digital tools such as iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, and VoiceThread to achieve our goals. In this chapter, we share the multimodal assignments we use and student project examples. While we teach in a university setting, we discuss adaptations to these projects that make them applicable to learners in other contexts.

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