A couple of weeks ago I wrote on the need for design, specifically in the form of visual language, to be included in our framework for rhetoric. If we take this as true, then we can apply traditionally (verbal) rhetorical principles to visual media in new ways. Let’s take an example that has been floating around the web recently,  Jonathan Jarvis’ brilliantly lucid articulation of the credit crisis. (The video is about 11 minutes long, so you better have some time.)

Any homelitcs professor worth his salt won’t let you pass his course without learning this little mantra about public speaking:

1. Say what you are going to say.
2. Say it.
3. Say what you said.

The idea, of course, is that the mind requires repetition to learn and remember. This applies to visual as much as it does auditory presentations and Jarvis is a clear example of this:

First, the characters in the story are drawn consistently. I can tell the difference between investors and home owners, investment buildings from houses. This visual consistency (consistency being a form of repetition) helps smooth out the categories so I can begin to focus on their relationship to each other.

Second, the characters location is always fixed: the investment banker is in the middle, the morgage broker is to the left, and the home owners are alway left of the broker. The actual layout is a simple map of the players, and Jarvis simple zooms in and out to highlight the relationships. The staticness of their place allows the mind to focus on the fluidity of the relationships, so that in each return to an interaction between the characters we become more comfortable with how they are related (visually “saying what you said”) which, in the case of the credit crisis, is the meat and potatoes of the idea.

Now, these methods are probably nothing new to those who work with the visual medium professionally (read: “not me”), but I wonder how much systematic thought could be done to parsing the whole range of rhetorical devices (e.g., synecdoche, metonymy, or parallelism) for visual language.

beyond_words-drawing, originally uploaded by adelej.

One of the threads of the discussion group Marks and Meaning has been about ‘The Tree of Talking’ and the process of packing a concept into a short word or phrase. Sign language is another visual language which does this.

Last year I worked on a body of artwork for an exhibition I called ‘Beyond Words’ which explored language and the ways we interpret symbols and unspoken language.

The drawing here developed from a series of poems by US poet Cole Swensen in her book ‘The Book of a Hundred Hands’ describing the movement and anatomy of hands and specifically of hands making sign language.

To develop this 2 meter long graphite and acrylic paint drawing I asked a deaf model to sign the phrase ‘words emerge like birds’, filmed her and used that as inspiration to describe in visual language her words and her movement. You can both read the signs literally and sense the action.

In written terms this is eckphrasia – using one mode of communication to describe another – usually it refers to writing that describes or is inspired by an art work. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to a Greecian Urn’ was a classic example of this.

I wanted to see what would happen if one instance of the idea was translated a number of times through a series of different modes of communication – to distill and to evolve it. I think this could be eckphrastic art!

The "UN" iverse, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

A member of the Marks and Meaning discussion group asked if I would make a diagram to help group members see how they can interact. Since the book I’m working on is on visual thinking and I’m committed to develop a visual book, it’s been difficult to work with tools and technologies that assume authors communicate primarily using text.

Also, we’ve been trying various online community services, some of which have been more successful than others. The visual above maps the relationships between the services that have been most successful to date: A conversation hub which is primarily textual (Google discussion group) and another which is primarily visual (Flickr photo-sharing community).

It also shows a recent addition, a public-facing community blog, that automatically sends new blog posts to the email group for private discussion.

If it looks complicated, that’s because it IS complicated. I wish it weren’t but it’s the best I have been able to come up with without being a web developer. I’m definitely interested in hearing ideas or suggestions from other communities.

Matthias Melcher asks what evidence there is to support visual thinking in learning and presenting. Here are a few resources:

Some excellent research can be found in Multimedia Learning by Richard Mayer, who conducted the research described in the book.

There’s also a paper here and some great research-based presentation principles by Andrew Abela here.

If you are hungry for more I’ve compiled a deeper reading list on visual thinking and related topics here.

The tree of talking, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

In his book, The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders describes the “tree of talking.” When you turn a thought into language, you must “pack” the concept into a short word or phrase. For example, the simple word “horse” contains a rich set of meanings that are specifically tied to your personal experiences. If you had wonderful childhood experience with horses and the person you are talking to had negative experiences, you will assign different meanings to the word.

Every conversation is a complex interaction where many experiences are continuously packed into tightly condensed phrases and unpacked into experiences.