Ken and Ranjan thank you for the additional references. Here are a few
that my students found engaging and useful at the intersections of text +
image.
Amare, N., & Manning, A. (2007), The Language of Visuals: Text + Graphics
= Visual Rhetoric Tutorial. IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication,50(1), 57-70.
I love this essay because it breaks down and visualizes C. S. Peirce’s
three-part theory of rhetoric (decoratives, informatives, and indicatives)
and his ten categories of sign from raw images to raw texts. I think
technical communication is an undermined source of theoretical
contribution to design.
Brasseur, L. 2005. Florence Nightingale's Visual Rhetoric in the Rose
Diagrams. Technical Communication Quarterly 14:161-182.
We never think of Florence Nightingale as an information designer, but she
invented the rose diagram and used it to effectively advocate for war
reforms. It compares the ineffectiveness of her textual report with the
effectiveness of the visual rhetoric of the diagram. I students were wowed
by this knowledge and empowered by the progressive use of design.
Kostelnick, C. 2004. "Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics, and the
Emergence of Graphical Conventions: the Statistical Atlases of the United
States, 1874-1925," in Defining Visual Rhetorics. Edited by C. Hill and M.
Helmers, pp. 215-242. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
My students and I love this essay because it traces historical
transformation of design conventions (from Victorian to Modern) and ties
it to the visual representation of national interests through "objective"
statistical data. Kostelnick does an excellent job of showing how the
inclusion or exclusion of data as well as it representation can justify
national policies of Manifest Destiny or slavery, as well as, show the
evolution of these policies.
Dori
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