Visual Communication

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EDITOR: David  Machin
TITLE: Visual Communication
SERIES TITLE: Handbooks of Communication Science [HoCS]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Andrea E Lypka, University of South Florida

SUMMARY

Visual Communication, a collection of studies edited by David Machin enriches
the growing body of visual communication studies through an interdisciplinary
approach. The handbook’s 34 chapters, theoretical and analytical essays and
research studies, examine semiotic modes, such as talk, text, moving and still
images, music, and other forms of communication. Contributions are made by
international scholars and practitioners in the fields of semiotics,
psychology, anthropology, linguistics, typography, theatre, mass
communication, photography, tourism studies, advertisement, education,
political communication, and history. In the overview of the communication
discipline, Peter J. Schulz and Paul Cobley, editors of the series Handbooks
of Communication Science, articulate the interdisciplinary nature of
communication studies and acknowledge that communication spans hard and social
sciences, semiotic and linguistic approaches. This collection conceptualizes
quantitative and qualitative orientations to the study of human visual
communication and offers a broad survey of different theoretical,
methodological, and analytical perspectives.

The 756-pages long book is divided in three sections. In part one, Machin
introduces major academic journals and handbooks, such as Visual Communication
and Visual Studies, Rose’s (2012) Visual Methodologies, and Spencer’s (2010)
Visual Research Methods in Social Sciences. He then examines the evolving
nature of the field, cautioning against over-specialization, the tendency to
privilege theory-building as opposed to conducting research, and the
over-reliance on popular theories, models, and concepts. Machin argues that
such trends limit the approach to the exploration of certain concepts and
ultimately have epistemic limits to knowledge creation.

Machin fuses the perspectives of communication and semiotics to define visual
communication as the act of creating and communicating meaning through visual
resources and understanding the creator-meaning relationship in wider
contexts. In this perspective, visual communication is connected to identity
and positioning self within cultural discourses. Building on Kress and
Leeuwen’s (2001) discussion of the fluid visual-language-genre connection,
Machin visual communication as a social phenomena.

Parts two and three are a collection of 17 chapters that investigate visual
communication extensively from an interdisciplinary perspective, followed by
the authors’ biographical sketch. Studies in part two of the volume focus on
different methodological and theoretical approaches to visual communication,
including textual analysis, relevance theory, multimodality, critical theory,
psychoanalysis, content analysis, film narrative analysis, eye tracking,
biographical analysis, and visual analysis in various fields, such as
semiotics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive science, design
studies, anthropology, media studies, arts, education, and cultural studies.
Studies in part three investigate visual communication in different media or
forms of art.

The First Chapter by Göran Sonesson differentiates semiotics from the fields
of art history and psychology, positing that semiotics studies conventions of
visual artefacts. Informed by cognitive semiotics and James Gibson’s work, the
textual analysis of Mark Rothko’s set of abstract pictures, “Untitled” reveals
the complexity of rules, models (such as iconicity and plastic language) and
concepts (such as prototypes, oppositions, identities and indexicalities) that
might influence understanding of the artwork.

In the Second Chapter, Charles Forceville applies Sperber and Willson’s
Relevance Theory (RT) (1995) as a framework in his analysis of visual images.
Through the analyses of a Tintin panel cartoon and a political cartoon on
Barack Obama and the Dutch queen, Beatrix, Forceville illustrates the
difference between mass communication and prototypical verbal communication,
suggesting that RT allows for a rigorous analysis of different modes and
media.

In the Third Chapter, through the concept of resemiotization (Iedema, 2001),
Ian Roderick investigates the semiotics of military artifacts in two
television series, Future Weapons and Ultimate Weapons, by combining the
simondonian theory of socio-technical relations and Actor-Network Theory.
Findings suggest that the series present weapons as technical objects and
resemiotize the relationship between artifact and audience to publicize
military policy and recruit military personnel.

The aim of the Fourth Chapter by Christina Konstantinidou and Martha
Michailidou is to demonstrate how generic photojournalistic photographs and
archival images in a corpus of Greek newspapers reproduce institutional
discourses on immigration. Findings reveal that the press problematizes
immigration either as a national threat or humanitarian crisis within
discourses on European identity and securitization; both visual and textual
discourses normalize immigration, perpetuate visual stereotypes, and portray
immigrants as the “Other.”

Linguistic fetishisation or the use of languages for symbolic value as opposed
to instrumental value in advertising is the focus of the study by Helen
Kelly-Holmes. Using linguistic landscape analysis, she examines foreign words
in an online advertisement and on commercial websites to emphasize that
linguistic fetish is grounded in power relations.

In Chapter Six, Paul Bowman explores gender, sexuality, identity, and
ethnicity as performance, and the male gaze in contemporary popular culture,
to argue that media shape discursive individual and collective identity
formation. By linking Critical Theory and Laura Mulvey’s visual pleasures with
Rey Chow’s coercive mimeticism as analytical frameworks, Bowman demonstrates
how the popular music videos perpetuate patriarchal and sexist discourse on
gender.

In Chapter Seven, Inna Semetsky’s study on visual semiotics in Tarot cards
fuses Jung’s work and Charles Sanders Peirce’s logic as semiotics model that
consists of sign, object, and interpretant. The author suggests that
interpreting the polysemous meanings of Tarot cards in light of current events
enriches the consciousness.

In the Eighth Chapter,“Color language hierarchy,” Dennis Puhalla theorizes
color as language. By analyzing a weather map that might be difficult to
interpret without reference to a color legend and the London underground
transportation map that successfully integrates color, the author argues that
similar to language, color carries meaning and message and its three
characteristics, hue, value, chroma act as organizational and hierarchical
rules, comparable to syntax and semantics in language.

To understand the complex process of reading and the analysis of typefaces,
Mary C. Dyson carries out computer-based experimental research in chapter
nine. Specifically, the author examines differences between typographer and
user perception of these visual forms, particular characteristics of letters
and typefaces, drawing on two models of reading, McClelland and Rumelhart’s
Interactive Activation Model (1981), and Sanocki’s “font tuning” concept
(1991). Even though such methods are less used in typography research, they
can inform pedagogy and typography practice.

Toys as mass cultural artefacts and representations of simplified and often
distorted reality are the center of Gilles Brougère’s study in Chapter 10.
Using a socio-anthropological lens and rhetorical analysis, the author
connects the notion of toy to the action of play and game, to the goal of
entertainment and/or education, arguing that this image of toy is constantly
altered through media.

In Chapter 11, Martin Conboy’s provides a thorough historical overview of the
evolution of the journalism industry in Britain, including the influence of
American journalism and New Journalism, characterized by bold headlines and
simple, short language to attract attention. Conboy expands his analysis to
image, textual display, layout, and format, arguing that the evolving tabloid
journalism genre needs to be contextualized within contemporary journalism,
politics, economy, culture, and technological advances.

In Chapter 12, Gwen Bouvier analyzes how news photographs in the UK framed the
2011 uprising and 2012 NATO involvement/strikes in Libya, employing visual
content analysis and Halliday’s (1978) classification of verb types. Findings
reveal that the photographs represent a simplified, generic, decontextualized,
sanitized, and ethnocentric worldview, utilize government perspective, and
lack details about socio-political context.

Audiovisual artefacts, in particular narrative films, are the focus of the
study by John A. Bateman in Chapter 13, inspired by the Hallidayan systemic
functional theory. Bateman employs functional discourse analysis to interpret
three filmic discourse relations, such as time, contrast, and space, filmic
discourse structure, such as spatiotemporal relations, and filmic cohesion,
including audio elements and settings in an extract of the movie Father and
Daughter.

In Chapter 14, Jana Holsanova calls for more empirical research on
multimodality from the user perspective within an interdisciplinary framework.
Using heatmaps and examples from previous eye tracking studies, Holsanova
discusses informant narratives on their inspection of an image, following the
gaze allocation saliency model.

Within the broader aspects of the role of arts and artist in society, H.
Camilla Smith examines artistic creativity of German artist, Jeanne Mammen
(1890-1976), pointing to the artist’s and arts’ role as social construct in
Chapter 15. The analysis of magazine illustrations is contextualized in a
detailed discussion of Mammen’s letters, objects, and photographs in her
studio to reveal that such multilayered analysis can enrich or challenge
previous evaluations of Mammen’s work.

Carey Jewitt connects the discussion on multiple literacies and multimodality
in education to the Foucauldian notion of power in Chapter 16. Using a case
study of a multimodal hands-on lesson on blood circulation and a learning
space similar to a teenage room in a secondary school, the author demonstrates
how multimodal practices and materials facilitate learning and reconstruct the
student-education relationship,

In Chapter 17, Ross P. Garner adopts social-constructionist theories to expand
Paul Grainge’s (2000) model of nostalgia “moods” and “modes” to his analysis
of nostalgia discourses in the crime drama series, Ashes to Ashes. Garner
dissects changes in discourses of nostalgia, using various narrative
strategies. The author combines textual analysis with socio-semiotic
methodology to reveal the interconnection between nostalgic discourse
constructions and BBC public service discourses in TV series.

A 19th century UK cartoon figure with an oversized head and pot belly, Ally
Sloper, is the focus of Roger Sabin’s essay in Chapter 18. Following an
overview of comics studies, including the comic Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday,
the author draws on textual analysis and historiography to provide possible
interpretations of the evolution, relevance and meaning of this popular figure
in the Victorian context.

In Chapter 19, Marvin Carlson calls for the reconceptualization of visuality
in theatre. He discusses examples and technological affordances to attest the
dominance of visuality in the theatre, starting from the Greek theatre and
Filippo Brunelleschi’s giant flying machines, theatrical shows of panoramas,
evolving into the melodrama and silent movies, and culminating in live video
installations that blur the lines between public and private.

Vincent Campbell’s article in Chapter 20 provides an overview of Computer
Generated Imagery (CGI) in documentary entertainment, such as extinct animal
shows as well as series on extreme weather, natural disasters, and crime. The
author draws on models of computer animation in documentary films to analyze
the use of CGI scenes in Planet Dinosaur, a series about extinct animals.

From a poststructuralist paradigm, Sarah Edge approaches historical
photographs taken in prisons as visual discursive constructs that can help
historical photographers interpret complex historical events, identity, and
popular culture at a particular point in time. The author’s critical
interpretation of photographs of Fenians is contextualized in the mid -19th
century sociopolitical environment.

Diane Carr’s study in Chapter 22 is an analysis of a section of a survival
horror digital game. The author employs textual, structural, and inter-textual
analysis to reveal differences between game textuality and game structure,
arguing that the combined theoretical and methodological approaches afford a
multiple-level analysis.

Visual thinking and graphic representation play a key role in children’s
sense-making process and communication. In Chapter 23, Susan Wright discusses
a telling-drawing study that investigated how children from two primary
Catholic schools in Australia interacted with multimodal texts, using an
analytical framework inspired by Vygotsky, Bruner, and Peirce. Wright’s
analysis reveals that children combined fantasy, imagery, and personal
experiences to represent and describe complex ideas in their drawings.

Gendered meanings of fashion toys perpetuated in advertisements and connected
to culture are the focus of the study by Danielle Almeida in Chapter 24. The
author adopts a social semiotic lens to compare the performative nature of
gendered discourses on fashion dolls. The analysis reveals that fashion toys
present an idealized and simplified version of reality: they mirror evolving
discourses on gender but are unable to capture the complexity of human lives
beyond the commercial level.

In the exploratory study in Chapter 25, Kay I. O’Halloran, Alvin Chua, and
Alexey Podlasov combine linguistic and visual analysis to investigate visual
communication on social media networks in Singapore. Specifically, the
interconnection between personal and professional life is analyzed in
multimodal user generated content on Twitter and Instagram, using the free
face detection software, OpenCV.

Nathaniel Dafydd Beard’s essay examines the symbiotic relationship between the
contemporary fashion industry, visual communication, and technology in Chapter
26.  The examples in the essay reveal that through  evolving technological
developments, fashion photography blends characteristics of commercial
photography and art photography, materialism, artistic creativity with
multimodal forms to appeal to a global audience.

In Chapter 27, Nurit Peled-Elhanan adopts a social-semiotic approach to
examine meta discourses of power in Israeli textbooks. Her analysis suggests
that the ideological choices employed in the textbooks portray Palestinians as
subhumans or as invisible and legitimize Israeli discourses on authority by
presenting Israel as a democratic state that protects human rights.

Through a semiotic perspective, William Cannon Hunter’s case study
investigates discourses of tourism in advertising materials published by the
government and tourism developers to reveal how the tourism destination image
of Seoul is mediatized. Frequent depictions of tourism landscapes represented
Seoul as a progressive, global city and landscapes portrayed Han River as an
evolving tourist destination for recreation.

In Chapter 29, Randall Teal dissects the relationship between object and
visual representation in architecture from a visual communication lens. The
author borrows the analytique drawing approach developed by Marco Frascari to
argue that through this technique the designer reintroduces the elements of
ambiguity, incompleteness, and specificity in design.

The article on animal visual communication in Chapter 30 by Karely Kleisner
and Timo Maran proposes the Portmannian- Uexküllian adopts biosemiotic
approach as alternative to traditional theories on evolution. Through a
discussion of the development of semantic organs, the authors demonstrate that
the subject-oriented nature of biosemiotic approach allows the
reinterpretation of the dynamic interactions between certain elements in
complex and organic systems.

Murals as a medium to publicize political messages and propaganda, recruitment
tools for political movements, and representations of political events and
cultural symbols in Northern Ireland are at the center of Chapter 31 by
Maximilian Rapp and Markus Rhomberg. From a historiographical lens, the
authors investigate how murals in Belfast and (London-) Derry depicted a
republican agenda during the 1968 civil war.

From a visual anthropology paradigm and Taussig’s notion of mimesis (1993),
Rupert Cox’s essay raises questions about the relationship between art-agency,
original-copy, and viewer-object by analyzing a collection of reproductions of
Western artwork at a Japanese art museum in Chapter 32. Findings reveal that
this act of copying photographs of authentic artwork blurs the lines between
original and copy and challenges norms of cultural knowledge display,
copyright, and ethics.

Reader emotional engagement in fictional narratives is explored by Maria
Nikolajeva in Chapter 33. The author adapts the theory of mind from cognitive
psychology and the term emotion ekphrasis to reflect on joy, fear, love, and
guilt, in relation to multimodal narratives in children’s picture books.
Nikolajeva suggests that the complexity of iconography on the levels of
visual, verbal narrative, and word-image interaction differs in various
picture books.

In Chapter 34, from a practitioner standpoint, Paul Brighton argues that
effective data visualization and newsgathering can enhance a story’s news
value and the news outlet’s authority. Using autobiographical accounts from
reporters, he dissects how visual representation influences story treatment
and editorial decisions of selection of stories for television news from the
perspective authenticity, transparency, and audience expectations and within
the constraints of journalistic norms, citizen journalism, and economy.

EVALUATION

Visual Communication’s critical, interdisciplinary approach provides a fresh
perspective on the relationship between text and image with specific attention
to the symbiosis of popular media and the culture at large. Each chapter
offers an overview of visual communication in everyday mass-mediated culture
and examines a specific facet of popular culture: music videos, the toy
culture, tabloid newspapers from various fields of study, such as psychology,
media studies, linguistics, communication science, typography, anthropology,
theatre, and tourism studies, and lesser-known fields, such as cartoon
studies, biosemiotics, and game studies. As a result, the epistemologies and
theoretical frameworks underpinning these studies expand current pedagogy and
research.

However, this edited volume is more than a collection of visual communication
studies written by international scholars. The studies are valuable for
students and researchers in diverse fields interested in interdisciplinary
approaches to visual communication. There are many studies that will greatly
benefit novice researchers because of their in-depth description of theory,
methodology, and implications for practice, as well as  the visual
enhancements– photographs, news articles, works of art, diagrams, heat maps,
and statistical tables–that accompany these studies. For example, Garner’s
clear argumentation for the relevance of the social constructionist
perspective to the topic of his study, nostalgia, as well as the combination
of textual analysis with socio-semiotic methodology in Chapter 17 are great
resources for novice researchers. However, some studies do not convey theory
and method in a way that is easily accessible to the novice researcher.

Besides the broader connection to visual communication, sometimes it is
unclear the relationship between the chapters and the three sections of the
book. The editor could have linked their theoretical, methodological
implications and broader concepts to other chapters in the book. For example,
the concept of creativity, explored in Chapter 15 as “artistic creativity”
could have been more thoroughly explored in Chapter 16 that deals with
multimodal forms of expression in education and Chapter 23 on affective
interactions with multimodal texts. Machin cautions against over-reliance on
popular theories, and the book itself does not rely on popular theories.
Instead authors use a fusion of theories from various disciplines and critical
approaches, such as the Foucauldian perspective on power.

REFERENCES

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essays. Austin: University of Texas Press

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Brougère, G. (2014). Toys or the rhetoric of children’s goods. In: D. Machin
(Ed.), Visual Communication (pp. 243-259). Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.

Grainge, P. (2000). Nostalgia and style in retro America: Moods, modes, and
media recycling. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 23(1), 27-34.

Halliday, M. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of
language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.

Hight, C. (2008). Primetime digital documentary animation: The photographic
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Taussig, M. (1993). Mimesis and Alterity. New York and London: Routledge.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrea Lypka is a third year PhD student in the Second Language Acquisition
and Instructional Technology (SLA/IT) program at the University of South
Florida (USF). Her research interests include motivation, identity, digital
storytelling, and photovoice.

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