Visual Literacy

Leslie Brooks on BlogHer asks:

Are you visually literate? Are your kids?

What's going on in this image from the U.S. Library of Congress? What do you see? What is the image's significance? Its context?

[See original post for image]

If you can answer these questions with any skill or accuracy, you possess a variety of literacies, including U.S. cultural literacy, U.S. historical literacy, and visual literacy. But it's visual literacy that gets you started 'reading' the image. If you're visually literate, you know what to look for in this photo, what questions to ask, and can begin to deduce its meaning and significance. Historical and cultural literacy will help you to refine and evaluate these deductions, as well as indulge in what the material culture scholar Jules Prown has called 'cultural daydreams'--brainstorming about the larger meaning of the photo before diving into actual research on it.

Map reading, diagramming, making sense of charts and graphs in the business section of the newspaper--all of these require some degree of visual literacy. Simply put, visual literacy is the ability to 'read' images for information, as well as to create them to transmit information.

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Visual literacy is especially important in the digital age. Software and online tools have made it easy for anyone to create or manipulate images and to disseminate those images widely. As a result, we're introduced to more images now than at any point in history. The ability to interpret these images becomes increasingly crucial as we rely less on text and more on image and video to convey information.

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