We've been working, thus far, on becoming sophisticated readers of prose-based text. Today, we're going to turn our attention to applying those same skills and some different skills to reading visual images. Visual images occur in disciplines in a myriad of ways, and it's really important to be able to become sophisticated, careful readers of visual images. Images can make arguments, they do make arguments, and they are constructed and created with attention to detail and intention in the same way that articles are, that are written with words. And also, we're going to be thinking about how words and images are integrated throughout the course of this second major project. When you read visual images, the most important thing is just to look carefully. Spend a lot of time looking because the more you look and the more you notice, you will actually be able to find out more about what you're looking at. So, I think that the most important thing is to spend time and to keep looking in the same way that you do with reading, right? If you read something once, you're not going to get as much out of it as if you keep reading it multiple times. So, look carefully. Another thing to think about is the frame. That's the frame within which the image is placed and where there's presumably other stuff outside of the frame that you're not seeing. It's important to think about what you're not seeing, as well as what's within the image itself. Are there any people in the image? If there are, you might want to think about who they are, where they're looking, what their expressions are like, where they're situated, in relationship to other objects in the text. And what are the objects in the image? So you want to think about the various items that you see, or the landscapes, or the features, and what you're noticing. And then finally, you want to pay attention to the context. What can you find out about the context in which the image emerged, either when it was created or what it is depicting, right? Sometimes those can be different, but anything that you can learn about the context. I'm going to show you an example of how to read an image. And the first thing we're going to do, though, is spend time together thinking about this image, just looking carefully and writing about it. So, I'd like you to set your timer for, maybe, two minutes, and just look at the image. And I'm actually not asking you to write anything at this point. I just want you to spend two minutes looking at this image, that's 120 seconds, and it's going to feel like a long time. So, spend two minutes looking at this image. Okay. So, hopefully you've had a good two minutes, and now it's time to start writing about what you're noticing. You can still look at the image as you're writing, but I'd like you to set a timer for five minutes, and I'd like you to write about anything that you notice in the image. And remember, you can notice those other points that we went over in the last frame: people, objects, the frame, the context. So, spend five minutes, please, writing about what you're noticing in the image, and then I'll share with you what I have noticed. Welcome back. I hope your five minutes was productive, and you noticed and wrote about all kinds of aspects of this image. I purposefully didn't tell you anything about the image before we started because I wanted you to approach it as you would a new image, kind of out of context, and to think about how you could contextualize it. Often, in academic arguments, images are not decontextualized. They appear within an argument, and you see what's happening around a particular image, but we're looking at how to read images. So, we're doing that from as blank a slate as possible. What I noticed, when I looked at this image: This is an image of a writer at work, and I thought writing expertise would be a good thing to think about. So, this is an expert writer. His name is Cory Doctorow, and he's a Canadian writer. What I first notice is the large amount of books around him, right? So, this makes me think about how much writers need to read other people’s work in order to model, and not model, what they want to do, but also just to engage with the work of others, that writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. So he might be alone in this image, but he's not alone in terms of ideas. I'm also wondering what's around this frame and what we're not seeing. Maybe he's not alone. Maybe there is another desk here, off to the side, where someone else sits. Or, where's the door to the room, and how separated is he from the rest of his environment? Is he in a self-contained property, or is this one room in in a larger office or house? I am noticing images of his family members or people he cares about and knick-knacks that he has collected from various experiences in his life. That makes me think that writers need to have experiences, and they want to remember their experiences, and they want their writing spaces to be comfortable and remind them of things that they presumably want to remember for one reason or another. I'm noticing that it's a little bit cluttered here with electronics of some kind, and I don't know what that has to do with what he's working on because maybe it's central to his work, I don't know. And he looks happy, I think. He looks pretty happy and like he's concentrating deeply to me. And this makes me wonder if he ever has those moments that I have, right, where I'm actually not happy, or where I'm looking around, and I'm distracted, and I'm not paying attention, but he looks pretty happy, and he's very, very intently focused on what's on his screen. And I don't know if he's actually writing, or if he's reading. It looks to me, because his shoulders are slightly like this, that he's writing. If I were going to spend more time with this image, talking you through it and sharing what I found, I would probably point out details about what specific texts I'm seeing or words that I'm seeing that pop out. And, I would also spend time looking at every single image and thinking about what those images, inside this image, had in them. So, here is an example of how a visual image can be carefully read and how it can construct a definition of what it means to be an expert writer, right? And I'm interested in thinking about if this definition of writing expertise applies to everybody or not, or a particular kind, right, of writer.
