Blog Post #2

Warwick's discussion centers on the language of the visual and the means by which reliance on the written word has deprived many of us of the ability to read and interpret visual images.  She briefly recounts her visit to Thessaloniki, Greece where she had difficulty understanding the mosaics and marble carvings because she was unfamiliar with the meaning embedded in the images.  She then discusses how technology impacts the notion of the written (and published) word.

Warwick then turns her attention to the various factors involved in reading.  She argues, "reading even the simplest text is a highly complex cognitive task, involving what Crowder and Wagner (1992:4) describe as 'three stupendous achievements':  the development of spoken language, written language, and literacy."  She discusses text-based factors, reader-based factors, and situational factors as elements that influence one's ability to both read and interpret a text, factors that are different for each of us given our life experiences, our racial or socio-cultural background, etc.  This complexity and individuality, she argues, accounts for the intrinsic pleasure or satisfaction derived from reading, which she believes, is "difficult to replicate when computational analysis is used."  She then turns her attention to reading the visual.

Reading the Visual is what attracted me to this particular document.  I have focused much of my scholarly attention on reading the visual to discern the messages embedded in visual texts, messages that are often subtle but highly influential, if not always intentional because many are so normalized, messages that rely for their understanding on discrete textual clues that sometimes only particular members of an audience recognize.  It is precisely beause of this personal experience that I agree with Warwick's claim, "Reading a printed text is clearly a subtle and complex analysis technique.  It is therefore not surprising that scholars have made the assumption that digital resources and computational techniques that simply replicate the activity of reading are a pale imitation of an already successful technique.  To be of use to the humanities scholar, it seems that digital resources must therefore provide a different dimension that may change the way that we view our raw materials."

While technology cannot necessarily assist humanities scholars with the actual interpretation of visual texts, it nevertheless provides access to texts that were previously inaccessible to us.  The Internet has provided access to museums and archives and videos and advertisements and magazines in ways previously unimaginable.  My own scholarship has benefited from this access.  In one award-winning essay, I accepted the challenge presented by John Berger in the influential Ways of Seeing (1972) that asked scholars to continue to compare contemporary advertising images with classical images of the nude to determine whether men are still assumed to be the ideal spectator/consumer and women the object of the gaze.  In order for me to effectively compare contemporary ads with classical images, I needed access to the images,w hcih I found not only through museum websites, but through the Artchive, an art resource that includes most forms of visual art from the classical era to contemporary modern art.  It is a resource that is useful for scholars and provides scholarly analyses of many of the images and artists included in its database.  Without this technology, I would have had to attempt to visit many of the world's museums and requested permission to photograph the paintings (a daunting and pricey endeavor).  The curator of the Artchive, Mark Harden, has done all this for me.  In this way, my own scholarship is the very type Warwick insists benefits form technology.  We both agree, however, that technology cannot do the very personal work of interpretation.  While it can prompt "a fresh approach for consideration," the humanist must still exercise her/his own interpretive faculties to "[determine] the significance of the findings."

So what does this mean for my students and me?  Most of my students are both familiar with and excited about the possibilities of technology, however few possess the critical thinking skills necessary to ask the important questions or engage in the very personal task of interpretation.  I am excited about the possibilities inherent in using technology to assist students with asking the questions of interpreting the visual texts we will examine.  The tools might open up ways of seeing that hitherto seemed too advanced or complicated for many students who fear they may not interpret a text "correctly."  (I should mention that my students typically have difficulty understanding that there is no single "right" way to interpret any text, even if there is an agreed-upon general theme in it.)  As I mentioned in a previous post, I am excited about the possibilities inherent in creating word clouds or, if I can figure out a way to compile something like this, image clouds (repetitive images from, say, a music video, such as fragmented body parts, certain camera angles, etc.).  The possibilities are endless and I think this, in and of itself, will excite even the most apathetic students.