viz.

Tim Turner has posted a new pedagogical article, “Visual Rhetoric and Propaganda,” in viz.’s assignments section. The article explains why rhetoric instructors should teach their students about the methods of propagandists, and outlines a course unit based on the topic. In the article, he argues that conversations about the use of visuals in propaganda

are useful because they illuminate for students a range of rhetorical possibilities, including the fact that “bad” arguments can be quite influential and that modes of persuasion cannot (and should not) be divorced from ethical considerations. From this perspective, discussions of propaganda may also be useful in that they help illuminate discussions of the fallacies of argument (in which case, “bad” is taken to mean specious, illogical, or poorly reasoned). But discussions of propaganda may also lead to discussions of the ethical dimensions of persuasion (in which case “bad” is taken to mean ethically or morally suspect).

Many of you may have seen the story in the New York Times yesterday about a comic that has been introduced in Germany to teach students about the Holocaust. (A brief portion from an English translation appears below.) This week, 25 Feb. through 2 Mar., is actually Holocaust Awareness Week, so some attention is being paid to issues surrounding the teaching of the Holocaust in this and other countries. More examples, after the jump.

This summer I taught a rhetoric course that focused on the idea of a University. The course used Cardinal Newman's nineteenth-century treatise as a jumping off point but also looking at other ways a university might define itself as an institution. One of the more interesting discussions in class was one in which we investigated the relationship between art and the university...

The University of Texas, our home institution and object of study, has an archive (describing itself as a "world-renowned cultural institution") that not only houses important pieces of visual, textual, and performing art but also has its own galleries to put these objects on display. The building itself was recently renovated, and the atriums converted into "galleries" themselves that display the Center's significant collections on etched glass windows:

Students in my Rhetoric of Spying Class recently read sections of the 9/11 Commission Report, along with the graphic novel version of the report (for a thorough discussion of the graphic novel version and its critics, including some great links, click here).

Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman pieced together a rather precise visual argument by sequencing a series of images from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While we could spend many a blog entry on the imagery of terror and war or on the function of visual images in argument, the Hariman sequence seems to provide an excellent in-class opportunity to dwell on the different persuasive registers present in visual communication and political speeches that invoke the same imagery.

PikiWiki is a free wiki service that adds drag and drop functionality to collaboratively-edited pages. If you are planning on using a wiki in your visual rhetoric class, PikiWiki might be a good option.

If you are teaching advertising in the visual rhetoric section of your course, you will probably be interested in Donald Gunn’s 12 Categories of Advertisements. Slate’s Seth Stevenson has recently posted a slideshow demonstrating them all.

One of my favorite things about this post is they way Stevenson questions the categorizations and where they overlap—is there really 12 types, or fewer basic types that are combined in different ways?—and suggests that the list works not only as a way for advertisers to get ideas, but also as a means of education for consumers. Here’s the last paragraph of the slideshow:

The good folks over at Information Aesthetics recently posted a link to Wiki Mind Map. The site provides a mind-map-style outline of topics in Wikipedia.

Right now the site appears to be able to search the German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and Indonesian versions of the encyclopedia. It can also search www.self-qs.de, which appears to be some sort of German dictionary (perhaps a German-speaker can help out here).

Since fall of '06 I have been giving a PowerPoint visual rhetoric presentation in UT's RHE 306 and RHE 309K classes. The presentations have been pretty successful and seem well received by students and instructors alike. I have had some requests to distribute the presentation but have been holding off for a couple of reasons: 1) the presentation is composed almost entirely of coprighted material and unlimited distribution would almost certainly violate the fair use terms under which I am currently using the materials; 2) the images I included are often controversial, for a variety of reasons, and I am hesitant to distribute the presentation to instructors without backgrounds in visual rhetoric or who might not be attuned to some of the delicate classroom issues some of the images present.

Notes for the Instructor: This is a unit-long assignment, which asks the students to write first a short paper (300–500 words), in which they compare two images/objects/spaces and their respective messages, and then produce a long essay (4–5 pages), in which they incorporate the text they have already produced in the short paper, but make an argument about the rhetorical effectiveness of the two images/objects. In other words, in the short paper they discuss message alone; in the long paper they discuss both the message and its reception. The assignment involves doing extensive research into the respective culture/ideology, which produced the images/objects. Both the short and the long essay should contain a rhetorically crafted, comparative description of the images/objects, which should serve to set up the main argument, i.e., to make the reader more receptive to it.