By Thomas Barker | Fellow
This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to thomas.barker@ttu.edu or visit the column forum at http://theacademicconversation.ning.com.
What does it mean to be literate in the digital age? For many of us brought up in the world of print, it means finding ways images can convey information and argument. As academics, it means we need to develop the eye for seeing shapes in data, helping students learn and use images ethically and effectively, and understanding the demands on our counterparts in industry to be communicators skilled in words and images.
Academic technical communicators, working with students and practitioners, balance the focus between the meanings inherent in the data and the way visualizing information affects its use. We ask questions like, “What power message does this image convey?” or “What visual fits this rhetorical situation?” The answers are complex and interesting because they hinge on principles of visual rhetoric.
What is visual rhetoric? Visual rhetoric, according to researchers at Stanford University, is a form of communication that uses images to create meaning or construct an argument (see Alfano). This means that images, photos, drawings, and text itself signify on more than one level. It's not what you show, but how it looks that conveys the message. Questions in research start from the premise that visuals can change, reinforce, and motivate, as well as inform.
Visual Information in Research
Research in visualizing information relies on the work of foundational researchers such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen to underlie studies of the affects of images on users. Amy Propen (Technical Communication Quarterly, 2007) explored how social and visual theorists help us explain the power of images—maps—as “powerful knowledge-making devices.” When I was researching risk communication in Alberta, Canada, a colleague at East Carolina University, Catherine Smith, suggested, “Get a geographer on your research team!” Why a geographer? Because a geographer (mapmaker) can see information visually as well as textually. The location of knowledge tells volumes about how that knowledge might function in disaster and pandemic planning.
University researchers also ask questions about the functions of visuals in workplace decision-making. In Technical Communication in 2008, Tiffany Portewig studied how writers, designers, managers, and engineers invent and reuse images in manuals, guides, data sheets, and other documents based not just on accuracy, but on conventional and socially motivated principles. Using the right image can alter the dynamic between an engineer and a writer, and between writers and readers.
Images can also mediate social relationships among healthcare providers, doctors, patients, and health policy administrators. Research by Mark Haselkorn at the University of Washington explores relationships among these information users.
One of Haselkorn's studies at the University of Washington's Pacific Rim Visualization and Analytics Center pursues the conventional direction of visualization information studies, by mapping “the value chains of high value products in Nepal's economic corridors.” According to the study, “By creating a visual representation of the value chain, we hope people involved in each sector can identify gaps in the existing market and areas with high potential for investment.” Readers can Google the “Nepal Economic Corridor Map Project” (in Firefox). How often do students in English get to work in Kathmandu and help expand global economic opportunities?
Work done in Haselkorn's laboratory at The University of Washington also helps those who wish to improve national electronic medical record systems. The field related to this study is called health care informatics, or the study of how visuals can enhance the storage, use, and retrieval of health information. This kind of research attempts to look at large quantities of data at once, and provides results in webs, snarls, scatter graphs, and other visualized data sets that help viewers make sense of sheer numbers.
Visual Information in Teaching
The commitment to viewers carries over into teaching: how can we teach visual rhetoric? One approach is through “visual composing,” defined by Kathryn Riley and Jo Mackiewicz in Visual Composing as the use of principles of clarity, unity, usability, tone, and aesthetics to integrate words and pictures. This approach goes beyond using software tools and “folk wisdom” such as “use vivid colors” and other anecdotal advice. These authors apply researched principles that help students explore how images, typography, font selection, and other choices can enhance a professional design.
Another approach to teaching visual rhetoric is to use visual-spatial thinking. In his book Web Development: A Visual-Spatial Approach, Craig Baehr offers a great definition: “Visual-spatial thinking is based on an understanding of how humans perceive and respond to visual elements and their placement, or spatial characteristics, in a visual-textual landscape” (21). In my conversation on this topic with Dr. Baehr, I asked, “What challenges do students face in learning how to use the visual-spatial approach?” His reply focused on the student's need to experiment. “Normally, to think visually and spatially, students need to learn using the same mode, i.e., visual examples, spatial environments. Since a lot of learning is trial-and-error and perception based, interactive practice is always a good teacher. When they experience it, they learn it.”
Another colleague, Mike Salvo at Purdue University, uses a questioning technique in the classroom. His syllabus asks, “Is there potential to create critical verbo-visual literacy?” and “What does it mean to be visually literate? What does it mean to compose visually?” These questions help students understand the fundamental ideas of visual rhetoric: the rhetorical nature of images and using images effectively in practice.
Visual Information in Practice
Users of technology often have to function in image-rich environments, and few spaces reflect this situation more than airplanes: arrows, pictures, warnings, demonstrations, and icons surround the traveler. Why? Because in airplanes we need to see and understand quickly. The same goes for underground trains, city maps, and tour guides. My favorite discussion of these images comes from Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety. In a nutshell, information anxiety is what we all experience when we should have read the manual or should understand stock trends better, but don't. In Wurman's view, information anxiety “is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand. It is the black hole between data and knowledge, and what happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know.” Understandably, visuals play a key role in helping users digest vast quantities of information at a glance, with a sense of relief.
Other academics have spent their careers studying visuals and helping writers and editors use them more effectively. Edward Tufte (www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index) stands out for his work in visualizing information. His books on visual design and information have guided the practice of technical communication for years. For example, we can perhaps travel more confidently knowing that Tufte has taken on the challenge of runway incursions (near misses, runway blockages, and the like) at busy airports like Boston's Logan. Let's hope that in his new role as a member on President Barack Obama's Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, Tufte can increase the transparency of how our American Recovery and Reinvestment dollars are being spent.
Another pioneer in this area is Ben Fry, who wrote Visualizing Data for the purpose of helping people build data visualizations: images that show important relationships among large sets of data. Take a simple question: “What baseball teams are spending their money well, and how does it change over the course of the season?” Dr. Fry's approach, which may be found at http://benfry.com/salaryper/, allows us to interact with data showing efficiencies early or late in the season. You can even relate the information to team standings. The user learns not just to see data as static, but also as something that can be manipulated and, we hope, understood and controlled.
Probably the most fundamental book on visualizing information is Rudolf Arnheim's Visual Thinking (1969), which remains a classic academic approach to practical applications of visual rhetoric. Arnheim taught us all to look to the context of an image and how it relates to other images, text, and other elements of its setting. Whether you're a researcher studying how context affects interpretation, a student learning to see images as content and as elements of design, or a practitioner putting together an informative map of a subway system, Arnheim's work, now in its 35th printing, still speaks. The academic eye—researcher, student, and practitioner—adjusts its gaze to see connections, relationships, and meanings in both visuals and text. Through visual rhetoric, it helps users connect with technology more effectively.
References
Alfano, Christine. www.stanford.edu/~steener/courses.htm.
Baehr, Craig. 2007. Web Development: A Visual-Spatial Approach. Pearson/Prentice-Hall.
Nepal Economic Corridor Map Project, www.mercycorps.org/lab/nepalmapping/index.html.
Pacific Rim Visualization and Analytics Center, University of Washington, http://parvac.washington.edu/.
Riley, Katherine, and Jo Mackiewicz. 2011. Visual Composing: Document Design for Print and Digital Media. Pearson/Prentice-Hall.
Wurmann, Richard Saul. Information Anxiety (1 and 2), www.wurman.com.
