Visual literacy: Do you have it?

There are seven visualization types, according to a demo tutorial at the Visual-Literacy.org e-learning course:

Sketches
Diagrams
Images
Maps
Objects
Interactive visualizations
Stories

I found this interesting because I am fond of telling people there are five online media types:

Text
Photos
Graphics
Audio
Video
User interaction

(Yes, I know that’s six, but user interaction might include any or all of the others, while any of the others might exist without any significant interaction. So, um, call it five plus one.)

From my point of view, graphics can be either animated or static. Video and animation are not in the same class, as I see it. Neither do video and still photography overlap — you might disagree, but I find them to be opposites. Video is moving and alive, immersive, fluid; photography is a way of freezing the world, stopping time, making us appreciate a single instant that otherwise we might never see.

As I continued poking around at Visual-Literacy.org, I found a Breeze presentation (how I hate those!) in which a lecturer listed six “static” visualization fields:

Art
Advertising
Graphic design
Visual communication
Information design
Film

He went on later to list “interactive” visualization fields:

Interaction design
Game design
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Medical visualization
Scientific visualization
Computer graphics
Information visualization
Human-computer interaction (HCI)
Virtual reality
Augmented reality
Storytelling
Knowledge visualization

As you might imagine, the presentation degraded after this list. Having two lists is one thing, and not a bad idea. Having 12 things on one list is not going to help people learn very well. (Talk about a need for good information design!)

In an online text called Literacy in the Digital Age, I found this –

Students who are visually literate:

1. Have working knowledge of visuals produced or displayed through electronic media

Understand basic elements of visual design, technique, and media.
Are aware of emotional, psychological, physiological, and cognitive influences in perceptions of visuals.
Comprehend representational, explanatory, abstract, and symbolic images.

2. Apply knowledge of visuals in electronic media

Are informed viewers, critics, and consumers of visual information.
Are knowledgeable designers, composers, and producers of visual information.
Are effective visual communicators.
Are expressive, innovative visual thinkers and successful problem-solvers.

If you’re wondering where all this is leading — so am I. But I can tell you, it’s those last three I’m very concerned about. I think the college students I see every day are pretty savvy visual consumers, but they’re not the producers I’d like them to be. They can stick things on a MySpace page, but they can’t necessarily conceive and execute a visual project. They write, but they don’t sketch.

You may want to tell me this is my job — as a journalism educator, I need to get them up to speed on this visual stuff. I won’t say you’re wrong. But they can’t even sketch.

I have no solutions yet. I’m thinking about it. Any ideas?

Technorati tags: infographics | information graphics | journalism | storytelling

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25, 2007, at 4:27 am and is filed under education, graphics, ideas, storytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

13 responses to “Visual literacy: Do you have it?”

Danny writes:

Perhaps an idea is to require students to submit storyboards of Flash projects and the portfolio. For me, any Flash graphic or HTML/CSS design starts out with a bunch of pencil sketches, so at least getting them into the habit couldn’t hurt.
May 25, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Mindy McAdams writes:

You’re right, I am thinking about storyboards. I also have an idea cooking about the golden ratio.
May 25, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Chuck Fadely writes:

Visual literacy, as the name implies, requires the study of a language - a non-verbal one. Visuals are a language with all the richness, subtleties, grammar, and syntax of the languages we speak. Like learning a verbal language, the language of images needs to be learned through immersion, practice, study, and above all, use. Like a verbal language, much of the language of images depends on context, cues, culture, and familiarity. A still photo certainly does tell a story — often better than words or videos can. You just have to understand the language.
May 26, 2007 at 1:28 am
Ron Sylvester writes:

It’s a late-night of catching up on reading, but this intrigued me, and inspired a couple of assignments (or maybe one assignment in two parts): They watch movies, TV. Have them take their favorite TV show and write a traditional news story about it, distilling the facts and detailsm using names and quotes. Put a limit length on it. Then have them compare their written story to how the director told it visually. Then do the opposite. Take a story out of the morning paper and tell it in comic book form (like story boards but more fun). I would even let them include all the sound effects you’d find in a comic book (getting audio) - thing “zap,” “whiz,” “bang.” It all has to be accurate. Don’t mark down for being a bad artist. At least, they’ll be sketching.
May 27, 2007 at 6:11 am
Ron Sylvester writes:

And mark down for typos, like that last post. Serves me right for trying to type with tired fingers.
May 27, 2007 at 6:14 am
Mindy McAdams writes:

Thanks, Ron. I like those suggestions. I’ve been thinking about picking out a nice sequence and assigning one to all the students — the trick is to make sure I don;t need to spend 10 hours grading their work!
May 27, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Mindy McAdams writes:

Chuck, I agree with you in principle, but then I need to look at how the communication to an audience works. If I publish a photo like the one I linked <a HREF=”http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/images/br0130bs.jpg” REL=”nofollow”>here</a>, with no accompanying text, no one in the audience will know what the story is. Who are they? What are they doing? Where are they? Why are those soldiers with those schoolchildren? When did this happen? You might know some of the answers because you are an American. But show that image to a 20-year-old in, say, China, and the story will be a complete mystery.
May 27, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Chuck Fadely writes:

If, in words, you describe troops enforcing Little Rock’s desegregation, the 20-year-old in China will still be mystified. You would have to write an encyclopedia to describe the entire cultural landscape that led to armed troops surrounding small children. Language depends on culture and context. You have to learn more than definitions to speak a language. Even “universal” visual symbols — like the international “no” sign — require learning definitions and grammar rules. You first learn that a circle with a slash means “no”. Then you learn that the circle/slash over a “P” means no parking; over an arrow means you can’t turn that way. Then you learn subtleties and context and learn that the circle/slash over the picture of a cow with horns doesn’t mean you can’t bring your cattle here, but means “no bulls..t”, but in a joking way. This is the same process by which you learn a language. Our education system doesn’t really emphasize fluency in visual languages. Most Americans are stuck at the pidgin level while creating visuals, even though many can understand the language. I applaud attempts to teach visual literacy, but the approach needs to be modeled after learning a language, and not like learning math or science.
May 27, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Mindy McAdams writes:

So the teaching must include drills and practice — I agree. If you don’t produce visual communication, you can’t learn to communicate visually. Most people are immersed daily in a lot of visual messages, so they do seem to muddle through — as receivers of these transmissions. Just because I can read a Spanish newspaper does not mean I can converse fluently in Spanish.
May 28, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Mark E. Johnson writes:

I was talking with a friend about an internship opening at a paper he’d just left. (It was a good leave - he liked the paper but it was time for him to move on.) He had become the lead multimedia guy mostly because his boss would give him a project and tell him to “figure it out.” In my short time in academia, one of the things I keep running into is a fear of failure. Students do not want to experiment, to try something, because they believe the consequences of getting it wrong are absolute when, in fact, the consequences of not experimenting are absolute failure. When it comes to “skills” classes (as opposed to .. well … I don’t know what), we need to find ways of encouraging students to play, to experiment. To make themselves uncomfortable and ensure there’s no punishment for trying something new. Students won’t sketch because they’re taught form an early age that there is only one right answer to every question. We need to teach them to Fail Faster, then let it go and move on.
May 30, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Mindy McAdams writes:

Mark, how much of that do you think is caused by fear of a bad grade? I find that some students won’t do anything unless they are graded for it — but the flip side is, they don’t want to be creative or deviate from the assigned task.
May 30, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Mark E. Johnson writes:

I think (and here comes my personal rant with all of education - take it with a grain of salt) that almost every issue we have to wrestle with as teachers comes from the fear of a bad grade. Our entire educational system is now biased towards “standardized tests” - in their pre-collegiate days, all students seem to do is learn how to take tests. Where’s the learning there? Is that a skill they really need? So, how do we get around that? All of my classes have ridiculous redo policies - any assignment turned in on-time can be redone for a different grade. Redos are due two weeks after the critique goes out. Not happy with the redo? You get another two weeks. My job is to help them learn the material - if some learn it on the first try, great. Some (especially in a skills-based class) may take a couple of tries. If they get it by the end of the (artificially imposed deadline) semester, then that’s still good, right? Why should they get a lower grade if they learned the material? And, yes, I do a lot of grading, but not as much as, ahem, I’d like. The good students do the work, and redo it. The slackers (we all have some), accept the C (and occasional D) and just move on. Which hurts them more as everything in my photojournalism classes builds - if you lose one piece, it gets really hard to get the next piece. I do occasionally wonder if it’s just frustrating for them - they do the work, get a C and I tell them to try again. And again. And again. (The record is seven attempts at one assignment, I think.) In any other class, they’d take the C and grumble about it. But in mine, they sit there staring at it and try to decide if they want to improve or not. The burden to learn is on their shoulders at that time. The other thing we need to do (especially here) is to let our students know what skills they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE TO GET A JOB. I’m amazed at times at how poorly prepared some of our students are as they don the cap and gown. I don’t know if that’s them or us or a combination. Probably another topic entirely.
May 30, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Mindy McAdams writes:

Mark — I bet you’re going to write that post at your own blog (”what skills they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE TO GET A JOB”) … so I can LINK TO IT!
May 30, 2007 at 11:39 pm