CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: A.10 Epistemologies of the Visual Since I work with traditionally marginalized students, I am always interested in hearing about alternative epistemologies. One of the “hot” fields right now seems to be Visual Studies and I’ve noticed that there have been a growing number of panels on different aspects of Visual Studies at the Cs in the last few years. Although Visual Studies is not one of my areas of study, I was very interested to know how the visual impacts the composition classroom and what I as a composition instructor would need to know about a visual epistemology. The panel started with “Visual Rhetoric in the Culture of Fear” (the title had been changed from the published program, but I’m not sure if the title was “Visual Rhetoric in the Culture of Fear” or Visual Rhetoric and the Culture of Fear”) in which Steve Westbrook argued that the current copyright laws as they can and may be applied to visual images risk devaluing student experiments in multimedia—such as the resampling, or remixing, ala Lessig. As an example, Westbrook juxtaposed an image of a roll of duct tape, on half a page, and a blank space on the other half, asking the audience to imagine on the blank half a student-produced website which included a parody of a Maybeline ad. Now while the assignment itself, of asking students to manipulate or parody existing images in pop culture or consumer culture, isn’t a revolutionary idea, what I took to be Westbrook’s main point is that copyright laws, as they are written and applied now, are not suited for the use of visual images. That is, the law does not distinguish between reproducing an image and creating a new image from an existing image. At what point does a work become the student’s creation? For me, this question of ownership becomes very interesting when we compare what we tell our students about written texts—about making the writing their own—to what we have to say about visual images belonging to someone else. Thus, in the case of the Maybeline parody, the student gave Westbrook permission to reproduce her remixed image, but Maybeline did not give permission to use the original image from which it created. During the question and answer period, a few pointed out that it was rare that anyone would be sued for using a resampled image on their website (as opposed to printing the image). However, the point was well made that such lawsuits have come about, and individual students are powerless to fight against corporations for ownership rights to works created from copyrighted images. Ray Watkins presented “The Emerging Digital Divide: Pedagogy and Epistemic Design in Freshmen Writing” and asked why don’t we talk more about aesthetics in writing and whose aesthetics do we teach? In classes that include webpage design, such as Watkins teaches, discussions of aesthetics invariably comes into play in the classroom. Watkins claims that while there has been much talk about ideology and politics in FYC courses, there has been little talk about teaching aesthetics or imposing one’s taste on students. Therefore, just as many of us have chosen to expose our ideologies rather than pretend they don’t exist, Watkins suggests that we likewise openly teach aesthetics—and middle class cultural values about aesthetics—to our students as a way to continue to empower students in FYC. By explicitly teaching students about these cultural aesthetic values, instructors allow students to engage in another aspect of critical thinking and to make rhetorical choices including resistance or appropriateness for the audience they choose to write to. Watkins discussed examples of epistemologies of the visual in having students engage in the aesthetics of science (field specific) and the aesthetics of stewardship (urban vs. rural aesthetics of nature). By having assignments such as these, Watkins promotes students’ awareness of their own cultural biases of aesthetics and the realm of other possibilities as a form of empowerment and critical thinking. Lei Lani Michel presented “The Visual Gap or Finding Brad Pitt: The Strange Practice of Searching for Images” and examined search engine help pages. Michel argues that as composition becomes more visual (and our students include more visuals in their writing)—or in my case where students are required to include visuals in their tech writing—we as writing instructors need to become more familiar with the epistemology involved in searching for (or categorizing) images. That is, searching for images on Google, Yahoo, A9 or any other search engine may feel “natural” but is still a critical act, a habituating practice. The search engines’ help pages, however, do not expose any of their proprietary information on how the search engines work. At best (and that is a relative term!), the help pages vaguely instruct us to use “words that best describe” what image(s) we want, and at worst, advise us to double check our spelling. Through this mystified process, these search engines do not allow access to certain websites for the non-initiated. That is, some webpages are made “invisible” via the search process—how and what keywords are used. While searching may not seem difficult or counter-intuitive to some, Michel suggests trying to search for images of abstract concepts like fear or love. What do those images look like, how are they coded or categorized, and who decides on the code? Michel reminds us that while there are search engines specifically created for images, they still are using text (keywords) to search for text (captions, descriptions, etc.) and not the images themselves. An interesting study is being conducted now at Carnegie Mellon to see how people describe images. You can participate in the study by going to espgame.org where you will be paired up with a random online partner. You and your partner are asked to come up with as many of the same terms to describe a common image within a given time limit. Studies such as these may help us understand how visual images and words intersect as well as naming or categorizing of images as a critical act. |
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