Visual Methodologies

From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative

About the Author

Gillian Rose is from the United Kingdom. Officially, she is a geographer, but her research interest range within all aspects of visual culture. 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.

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.