Reading Images

Is seeing a matter of nature? Does perspective show things as they really are? Can we read an image in the same way as a text? This book draws together essays that attempt to answer these questions but in a variety of ways and from the different theoretical positions offered by psychoanalysis, semiotics, poststructuralism and postmodernism. The anthology opens up a dialogue between seeing and the seen, text and image, theory and practice. By discussing a range of visual material, from advertising and architecture to painting and photography, it crosses generic and disciplinary boundaries and suggests ways in which vision and visuality are related to questions of textuality, subjectivity, race, and gender.

Reading Images provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. By looking at the formal elements and structures of design the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning.

"Focussing on both traditional and modern media (theatre, fiction, poetry, graphic art, cinema), the essays of Reading Images and Seeing Words show how it is according to signifying codes (rhetoric, poetics, metaphor), that meaning and knowledge are produced. Not the least value of this collection is the insight it gives into the multiple models of word / image interaction and the rich ambiguity of the tautological and oxymoronic relations they embody."--BOOK JACKET.

This third edition of the landmark textbook Reading Images builds on its reputation as the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. Drawing on an enormous range of examples from children's drawings to textbook illustrations, photo-journalism to fine art, as well as three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and toys, the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning. Features of this fully updated third edition include: new material on diagrams and data visualization a new approach to the theory of 'modality' a discussion of how images and their uses have changed since the first edition examples from a wide range of digital media including websites, social media, I-phone interfaces and computer games ideas on the future of visual communication. Reading Images presents a detailed outline of the 'grammar' of visual design and provides the reader with an invaluable 'tool-kit' for reading images in their contemporary multimodal settings. A must for students and scholars of communication, linguistics, design studies, media studies and the arts.

This innovative volume provides a new analytic framework for understanding how meaning-making resources are deployed in images designed for knowledge building in school science. The framework enables analyses of science images from the perspectives of both their complexity and recognizability. Complexity deals with the technical and abstract knowledge of school science (technicality), evaluative dispositions in relation to that knowledge (iconization) and the condensation of the technical and dispositional meanings as ‘synoptic eyefuls’ in discipline-specific infographics (aggregation). Recognizability concerns the relationship between the appearance of phenomena in reality and the reconfiguration of this reality in images (congruence), the perceptibility or discernibility of the features and contexts of phenomena in images (explicitness), and how images engage their viewers (affiliation). The framework is illustrated by more than 100 images in colour in the e-book and black and white in the paper version and will inform research into multimodal literacy pedagogy that incorporates an understanding of the role of images in the teaching and learning of school science. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in multimodality, semiotics, literacy education and science education.

Description based on content as of March 15, 2006.

This 8-hour free course explored the analysis and interpretation of photographs as social data and how photographs can support ideas about society.

Students need purposeful practice on previewing text to improve reading comprehension. These first grade texts capture student interest with focused, standards-based activities that provide targeted practice opportunities.