Toward an understanding of visual literacy: Examination of conference papers of the International Visual Literacy Association, 1991--2000.

摘要

The field of visual literacy (VL) is thirty-four years old. It is an interdisciplinary convergence of interests arising from the more traditional disciplines of art, education, psychology, and others. The central aim is to further the education of the creators and the viewers of visual messages, so that the language of visual media can be used as accurately and effectively as verbal and spoken language. The main organization that brings proponents of visual literacy research and practice together is the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA). This research was undertaken to gain a greater understanding of visual literacy by analyzing influences on the IVLA conference papers and relating those findings to the conference papers themselves. Four questions were posed: (1) Who are the most cited authors in IVLA conference papers, 1991–2000; (2) What are the most cited works of these authors in that literature; (3) What are the cocitation patterns of those authors; and (4) What does the content of the literature, expressed in a vocabulary of descriptive terms (derived from conference paper titles) reveal about the key concepts of visual literacy? Bibliometric and vocabulary analysis methods were applied to arrive at the answers. The forty most-cited authors and eighteen most-cited works were identified. Cocitation analysis using SPSS was performed on the cocitation data of the forty authors. All conference paper titles were analyzed. The results of the research revealed a predominance, in both the cited influences and conference paper titles, of the disciplines of education, psychology, and communications, combined with the use of visual arts and current technologies, to create and interpret visual messages. Visual literacy is a modern metadiscipline that has emerged from the intersection, in both research and practice, of these factors.