Visual Teaching Alliance
Digital Visual Literacy
A modern, literate person is one who is not only able to read and write but is educated in all the basic means necessary to thrive in a digital, networked world.
An important aspect of this general literacy is a digital visual literacy, the ability to critically analyze visual materials, create effective visual communications, and make judgments and decisions using visual representations of thoughts and ideas.
Digital visual literacy is a set of skills that enable students to function in an increasingly digital and visual workplace. These skills are based on concepts from a range of established disciplines but are not simply a collection of modules from courses in, say, computer science and graphic design; they build on basic concepts in such disciplines but are modified with awareness of related skills in other disciplines. The basic DVL skills are informed by original sources in single disciplines and interdisciplinary projects. Ideally, students should learn DVL skills in authentic contexts, such as learning how to make a business presentation, rather than study them solely in the abstract.
One of the challenges of defining a field of DVL and describing its contents is that research on the visual has been carried on in many fields, but without, until recently, much cross-disciplinary influence. Imagine, if you would, that mathematics was taught and conceptualized very differently in different fields: “Engineering math” might have different notations, axioms, methods of proving things and goals than “aesthetic math” and both might seem foreign to, say, a group of number theorists. The groups wouldn’t be able to leverage each others’ knowledge because it would be so hard to translate between them. A student seeking to be mathematically literate would have to undertake studies in several academic departments to get any sense of a larger mathematical picture. There wouldn’t be any “basic math” to teach in an introductory course because the “basics” would be different depending on the field the student was going into.
The field of DVL is like this today. Although one needs access to concepts that originate in several different fields, there are few resources for non-experts that relate a field’s concepts to DVL. Terminology in media theory and the computer science of computer graphics, for example, fall into two circles that scarcely overlap at all. In addition to terms incomprehensible to one group or the other, often the same words mean different things in different fields. The key phrase “computer graphics,” for instance, means something quite different to a computer scientist than to a graphic designer.
Art and design, and often visual literacy courses, tend toward a studio-based approach that includes drawing and compositional skills and an extensive vocabulary to describe images (line, form, color, etc.). Media and culture theory tend toward highly politicized views of image meaning and purpose and often draw on ideas in philosophy, economics, and linguistics. Vision science, an increasingly vital part of the “brain sciences,” has progressed dramatically in the past 50 years, in part through trying to teach computers to “see.” This research is directly applicable to creating and interpreting images, especially those made on the computer, but, once again, the underlying concepts and terminology are completely different from the fields mentioned before. A novice cannot casually read a research paper in vision science.
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI)
Division of Academic and Student Affairs
Maricopa Community Colleges
2411 W 14th St · Tempe, AZ 85281
An important aspect of this general literacy is a digital visual literacy, the ability to critically analyze visual materials, create effective visual communications, and make judgments and decisions using visual representations of thoughts and ideas.
Digital visual literacy is a set of skills that enable students to function in an increasingly digital and visual workplace. These skills are based on concepts from a range of established disciplines but are not simply a collection of modules from courses in, say, computer science and graphic design; they build on basic concepts in such disciplines but are modified with awareness of related skills in other disciplines. The basic DVL skills are informed by original sources in single disciplines and interdisciplinary projects. Ideally, students should learn DVL skills in authentic contexts, such as learning how to make a business presentation, rather than study them solely in the abstract.
One of the challenges of defining a field of DVL and describing its contents is that research on the visual has been carried on in many fields, but without, until recently, much cross-disciplinary influence. Imagine, if you would, that mathematics was taught and conceptualized very differently in different fields: “Engineering math” might have different notations, axioms, methods of proving things and goals than “aesthetic math” and both might seem foreign to, say, a group of number theorists. The groups wouldn’t be able to leverage each others’ knowledge because it would be so hard to translate between them. A student seeking to be mathematically literate would have to undertake studies in several academic departments to get any sense of a larger mathematical picture. There wouldn’t be any “basic math” to teach in an introductory course because the “basics” would be different depending on the field the student was going into.
The field of DVL is like this today. Although one needs access to concepts that originate in several different fields, there are few resources for non-experts that relate a field’s concepts to DVL. Terminology in media theory and the computer science of computer graphics, for example, fall into two circles that scarcely overlap at all. In addition to terms incomprehensible to one group or the other, often the same words mean different things in different fields. The key phrase “computer graphics,” for instance, means something quite different to a computer scientist than to a graphic designer.
Art and design, and often visual literacy courses, tend toward a studio-based approach that includes drawing and compositional skills and an extensive vocabulary to describe images (line, form, color, etc.). Media and culture theory tend toward highly politicized views of image meaning and purpose and often draw on ideas in philosophy, economics, and linguistics. Vision science, an increasingly vital part of the “brain sciences,” has progressed dramatically in the past 50 years, in part through trying to teach computers to “see.” This research is directly applicable to creating and interpreting images, especially those made on the computer, but, once again, the underlying concepts and terminology are completely different from the fields mentioned before. A novice cannot casually read a research paper in vision science.
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI)
Division of Academic and Student Affairs
Maricopa Community Colleges
2411 W 14th St · Tempe, AZ 85281
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Comment
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Comment by Timothy Gangwer on May 6, 2009 at 12:44pm
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“We, finally, are the artists of this immeasurable discourse. We create values. We do
this because we are alive. Information is as big a "mess" as the material world it reflects
and transforms. We embrace the mess, all of it. It's all life. But within the vast chaos of
the alive, certain information and certain material things begin to coalesce into a poetics
or a way-of-knowing or a way-of-acting. We can draw certain pro-tem "conclusions," as
long as we don't plaster them over and set them up on altars.” --Hakim Bey, The
Information War.
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