- List 3 connections between Kress and Van Leeuwen and 2-3 other readings we’ve covered. (Not every article you choose needs to have a connection to every other article. Look for common threads.)
- Well, it’s a bit of an obvious one, but Barthes is mentioned in many places. The use of the sign and signifier are used, as is the term anchorage early on in chapter one.
- There is a general connection to Porter and Sullivan, too. The use of “design consistency” (Porter and Sullivan, 293) links over to Kress and Van Leeuwen’s very detailed application of Shannon and Weaver’s Communication Model to understanding Participants and Narrative process in chapter two.
- The same with Kelly, as well. The incorporation of Shannon and Weaver’s Communication Model is something shared between both Kelly and Kress and Van Leeuwen. In fact, I’d state Reading Images might take it a bit too far in its application and use of geometric shapes to explain relationships.
- List 3 thought provoking or provocative ideas. What makes them so?
- While, on the one hand, I thought Kress and Van Leeuwen might have taken the use of geometric shapes and flowcharts into a land bordering on obsessive, I did like much of the early analysis as a way to describe relationships. Much of the comparisons between the seemingly unconscious trusting of squares and rectangles was particularly spot on, I thought. The use of the paradoxical instability/stability of triangles as a way to describe the communication triad of participant, vector, and directionality was a great insight.
- Along those same lines, I at first liked and then grew quickly tired of the constant use of hierarchies of various things. There are different versions of Narrative Processes and Conceptual Representations, as two examples, that spiral out to over a half-dozen taxonomies of various descriptions and usefulness. So, while, yes, it can be provocative to give labels to things, maybe not so much? Maybe? Many of the descriptions didn’t seem useful other than to cover some small part left out by the other categories.
- Much of the conceptual relationship descriptions felt very object-oriented to me. The ways of describing if something was part of an attribute or identity seemed to come right out any number of ways of categorizing is-a and has-a relationships between objects. Something that, honestly, I’m a little undecided on as it applies in this context. Between the fierce use of the communication model and never-ending hierarchies, adding proto-OOO is maybe not the best move.
- List 3 questions you jotted down for yourself while reading. What sparked them for you and why?
- A great deal of emphasis on children. I get that Kress and van Leeuwen come from a background of research in this area, but isn’t it a bit too much? Isn’t it?
- The question “is the move from the verbal to the visual a loss or gain?” (31) is definitely an important one to consider? (Indicates question via inflection?)
- Yeah, I think, with the above, a closing question I have concerns the book itself. While much of it seems potentially useful, I couldn’t help but to think about Kress and Van Leeuwen kinda writing themselves into a corner because of the more mathematical (or, at least, technical) usage of the communication models to explain everything. Was that wise?
Hey Dan! Regarding your second question, it’s an interesting one, indeed, as I’ve seen it pop up in some way in other blog posts. I’d argue that it’s a gain. As you point out in your own question, Kress and van Leeuwen’s phrasing suggests that a shift from the textual to the visual could be something dangerous. However, I think that the accommodation of additional possibilities for visual rhetoric does not always or even necessarily correlate with a decrease in possibilities for textual rhetoric. I’m thinking that Kress and van Leeuwen are functioning on a false, give-and-take binary.
Dan,
While I can’t speak to your math comment (shudder), I do have to agree with your assessment about the authors writing themselves into a corner. On the one hand, they emphatically assert that the linguistic mode is outdated and subsequently search for a more visual theoretical framework. Yet, the more “visual” they become, the more, I think, they validate using verbal texts to explain visual communication. It’s a hard thing to do, but I still think Kress and van Leeuwen provide a good foundation for more research on how to make the visual a self-sustaining language.