Visual Methodologies

From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative

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[edit] About the Author

Gillian Rose[1] is from the United Kingdom. Officially, she is a geographer, but her research interest range within all aspects of visual culture[2]. She is a professor and Associate Dean at the Open University in the United Kingdom and is best known for Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge published in 1993. Rose is credited with taking a radical feminist and Marxist approach in much of her work and has published extensively on the intersections of feminism and visual cultures. The second edition of Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials was published in 2007 and has added chapters to address contemporary issues visual culture not defined or quite developed in the first edition.

[edit] Overview

Visual Methodologies works as an introduction methodological text for students new to the field of visual rhetoric or students searching for ways to evaluate visual rhetoric. This text is broken down into sections to help readers find specific areas of focus/interest.

This text serves as a resource to understanding visuals as both material objects and tools of meaning making. The introduction isolates which viewpoints the author will take up and provides an explanation of organization. As this is an introductory text, Rose uses bolding to signify new vocabulary terms and explains that this technique is used in order to isolate points of conversation and to highlight where new terms will be used, so a new comer to the field of visual studies will know where to further their research. The first chapter primarily focuses on setting up the ground work by roughly defining Visual Methodology and providing historical context to visual culture. This chapter is situated to discuss the field of visual culture and front loads much of the theoretical framework that will be used in the following chapters. Rose situates visual culture as its own field, which is practice is very similar to visual rhetoric.

This text is a great beginning text for students new to evaluating visuals. The methods outlined by Rose provide a context for researching visuals and understanding the works of scholars such as: Selfe, Wysocki, Devoss, Arola, and Halbritter. Rose does this by providing an understanding of what should be evaluated, how others have evaluated in the past and present, and by explaining the process of evaluation. As students develop greater understandings of visual rhetoric and they want to know how and why scholars evaluate visuals, Rose's text will provide possible methods and conversations for understanding why visuals are important in the 21st century and beyond.

[edit] Chapter 2

Chapter 2 focuses on how to use this text; meaning, that Rose provides suggestions for the intended use of this text as a methodological guide. In chapter two Rose briefly goes over each of the chapters and what these chapters add towards an understanding of visual culture. Since I am reviewing the second edition, Rose also speaks directly to the changes from the first to the second addition and provides a rationale as to why two new chapters appear in this edition. This is helpful because it demonstrates an ongoing investigation of understanding visual culture and attempts to stay current.

[edit] Chapter 3

Chapter 3 focuses primarily on developing a vocabulary to discuss images. Rose states “This chapter explores one approach which offers a detailed vocabulary for expressing the appearance of an image.” (35) This move away from visuals in general, towards images is made to clarify the difference between pictures and other visuals. This chapter uses fine art as examples and outlines the words necessary to describe the meaning that these visuals are attempting to convey. Roses uses a disciplinary example of a journalist reviewing an exhibition of fine art from the seventeenth century. There is a conversation that details basic painting principles such as alignment, focus, and geometric perspective.

[edit] Chapter 4

Chapter 4 provides a method of counting what an observer “sees” when analyzing visuals. (59) Titled content analysis, chapter 4 also represents the Humanities’ compromise for empirical analysis by shaping a framework where characteristics of an image can be counted, quite literally in a numeric form. This chapter also relates specific advice in regards to how to choose an image(s) for analysis by suggesting that images should be both “representative and significant”.(63) Chapter four is the last chapter that looks at the proposed principals of visual theory, where the rest of the text either involves case studies or cultural intersections.

[edit] Chapters 5&6

Chapters 5&6 focus on understanding the context through which visuals are typically interpreted by considering cultural positionality and an observer’s bias. Chapter 5 takes up the “prejudices” that exist within visuals by using a method named “semiology” which deals with how images make meaning. (74-76) Rose provides an example where an Black man is used in one advertisement distributed in a particular neighborhood and a White man is used for distribution in a different neighborhood. This chapter is particularly important because it the first place where ideology is discussed in a cultural context and attempts to lay bare what roles culture play in our understandings of meaning making in relation to images. Chapter 6 focuses on psychoanalysis and the roles that art/images play with the internal abstract functions of the human mind. There are many brief sections that deal with sexuality, fantasy, and pleasure.

[edit] Chapters 7,8,9 and 10

Chapters 7,8,9,&10 are primarily concerned with how visuals are discussed within academia and what the implications of these discussions lead to. We also see the first steps outside of 2D images and begin to discuss film/television in earnest. Chapters 7&8 deal with how visuals are discussed through the use of texts and institutional values (governments, schools, dominate culture, etc.). What is an acceptable way to view a visual? Does the text an author provides override/enhance the way an observer makes meaning of an image? These types of questions are discussed and theorized in these chapters. Chapters 9&10 are concerned with conversations involving viewers of visuals by involving the ways that television is watched and providing an anthropological approach to the social life of visual objects. By considering the social life of visual objects and the function these objects serve within a given time period in a given culture, Rose claims that this type of “anthropological” approach provides a larger narrative arc to understand visual objects. These two chapters are directly related because, chapter 9 attempts to understand the observer and chapter 10 provides a method to analyze observers from the focal point created by chapter 9. Chapter 10 is not only focused on the observer, as it relates the life span of images often force shifting of meanings.

[edit] Chapter 11&12

Chapters 11&12 provide suggestions on how to include images in research projects and an overview that synthesizes the previous ten chapters. Chapter 11 is mechanical and provides very detailed instructions regarding how visuals should be obtained and documented. Rose provides rationale for using images to support medical research as well as other field, which has specific implications in the field of Visual Rhetoric in that the moves Rose suggests are deliberate rhetorical choices that provide a holistic standard shifting view on the role images play. In Chapter 12, Rose reflects and reviews the previous chapters through the lens of application developed in Chapter 11. The reader sees the synthesis from Chapter 1, where we are introduced to visual methods, to Chapter 11, where we are provided a frame work in using visuals in our research.