Unframing the Visual

Unframing the Visual:

Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces

About the Book

In higher education, visual literacy is often thought of as a concern limited to the fields of art, architecture, and design. However, visual information is multidisciplinary in nature; each discipline has its own visual culture, with conventions for interpreting visuals, communicating with visuals, and using visuals as evidence. Students should have intentional opportunities to explore and interrogate these processes and structures as new researchers, scholars, and practitioners in a given field.

Students create, remix, and share visuals inside and outside of the classroom. This means that, regardless of discipline, learners need a grounding in the role visuals can play in upholding or perpetuating oppression, in order to ask critical questions, reflect on their own practices, and seek social justice through visual practice. Furthermore, in online environments, learners are already grappling with how to navigate accessibility, intellectual property, data privacy, algorithmic bias, disinformation, and other emerging issues. As such, there has never been a more important time for critical and creative visual literacy instruction in higher education.

The current ACRL Visual Literacy Task Force has created a Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education, a companion document to the 2016 Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. This document introduces four themes for visual literacy learning under which a collection of iterative knowledge practices and dispositions around finding, interpreting, evaluating, crediting, creating, and sharing visuals are grouped. Building on this new companion Framework, Unframing the Visual will be an edited anthology of chapters on practical and theoretical approaches to visual literacy in academic libraries and information spaces (such as archives, digital scholarship and visualization labs, makerspaces, visual resource centers and image collections, galleries, and museums). Our Call for Chapters below details our approach to seeking contributions to this work.

Book Sections and Potential Chapter Topics

A photograph of a group of people seen from behind, in silhouette, in front of many small, bright, out-of-focus pink, purple, and blue lights. One of the people has a smartphone raised, and on its screen, a camera app is open, showing the field of lights in miniature.

Participating in a changing visual information landscape

The proliferation of visuals in every day life
Digital remix culture and intellectual property on social media
Visual data privacy/surveillance capitalism
Creation of visuals by computers/artificial intelligence
Snapchat filters, reaction GIFs, fine art NFTs, and other new media
Tracking protest-related images on social media
Engaging in image-based citizen science work
Understanding the role of algorithms in what we see
Teaching with virtual and augmented reality

A pile of photographs, in different sizes and formats, showing a range of subject matter, including a landscape photograph of railroad tracks and a black and white photograph of a white man in a dark top and light pants standing in front of the entrance to a brick underpass.

Perceiving visuals as communicating information

Visual rhetoric in and of the classroom
Visual creation as an iterative process
Images as evidence in a given field
Visuals as data in different disciplines
Creative data visualization practices
Images in digital branding/sponsored content/online advertising
Understanding and engaging in disciplinary practices for visual communication
Defining the aesthetics of memes and viral media
Investigating semiotics (signs, glyphs, emojis) in every day life
Identifying as a creator outside of art and design fields

A photograph of an art installation consisting of a maze of mirrors in front of marshy waters. The mirrors break up the landscape and reflect pieces of it at different angles, creating a sense of disorientation.

Practicing visual discernment and criticality

Critically viewing or 'reading' images and other visuals;
Engaging in slow/deep looking and other visual analysis/thinking strategies
Developing a critical orientation toward visuals (images are not neutral, do not depict 'truth')
Problematizing binary thinking around visuals (text/visual, proxy/original)
Investigating creation processes behind different formats of visual media
Strategies and considerations for evaluating visual information within different discipline-specific, academic contexts
Strategies and considerations for evaluating different types of visual information online (such as infographics, deep fakes, or political memes)

A photograph of a wall of graffiti and wheatpasted signs. The most prominent image on the wall is a stenciled painting of a young black woman holding a megaphone to her mouth. The words "Know Your Rights" appears to the top left of her head.

Pursuing social justice through visual practice

Critical race theories, intersectional restorative justice applied to visual literacy
Decolonization, reconciliation, sovereignty, Indigenization, Indigeneity for visual media and cultural objects
Disability justice and accessibility frameworks applied to visual media
Representation/cultural appropriation/exploitation/other power dynamics in visual creation and dissemination
Critical pedagogy with visuals (in-person, hybrid, virtual instruction)
Critical cataloging for visual media and cultural objects
Critical making/makerspaces
Other critical programming and collection initiatives in GLAM spaces

Editors & Contact Info

Editors

Maggie Murphy (lead editor)

Visual Art & Humanities Librarian/Assistant Professor, UNC Greensboro

Stephanie Beene (section editor)

Fine Arts Librarian for Art, Architecture, and Planning/Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico

Katie Greer (section editor)

Fine and Performing Arts Librarian/Associate Professor, Oakland University

Sara Schumacher (section editor)

Architecture Image Librarian/Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University

Dana Statton Thompson (section editor)

Research and Instruction Librarian/Associate Professor, Murray State University

Contact info

Email the editors at unframingtheviz [at] gmail [dot] com

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