Words and images can harmonize to clarify meaning in a variety of texts. This interdisciplinary work presents practitioners, researchers, creative artists, and teachers discussing how we process and develop meaning from words and images. This study is especially important for writers and designers working in electronic communication environments, where the marriage of words and images challenges traditional training. Ranging from theory to practice, chapters examine both cognitive issues and aesthetic concerns. This book explores topics such as: BLHuman processing of images and textBLThe roles of written language in project development in the artsBLUses of images and visual thinking by writersBLHow the ways in which words and images convey meaning can be both different and complementary Professionals, teachers, and students will be understand more effective uses of text and visual displays, and today's writer or designer will learn to clarify complex ideas by controlling the intersections of words and images.

Teachers, researchers, and practitioners in composition, visual arts, and psychology offer various perspectives on the relationship between words and images in the computer age. Among their topics are the indexical hypothesis, some ways that graphics communicate, text and image in the theater, an etiology of two images from a lost graphics novel, the digital design revolution, and exploring links among corporate and academic web sites.
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"An important step in our efforts to theorize, teach, and understand communication as both a verbal and visual activity. Nancy Allen assembles a richly varied, challenging, and useful cast of contributors, working from multiple perspectives to help map out, in both active and reflective ways, this crucial terrain. A useful resource for teachers and students in technical communication, computers and composition, or any field interested in both theoretical and applied views of communication." - Johndan Johnson-Eilola Clarkson University

"This book fills a huge gap in the literature on professional communication. We have many books on images and many books on writing, but few that deal with the historical, theoretical, and practical issues connected with the relationship of words and images. Professor Allen and the other contributors to this volume--all of them either established leaders or bright new prospects in the interdisciplinary study of integrated text design--handle the topic with grace, thoroughness, insight, and lucidity. The book offers an excellent starting point for teachers and practitioners of professional communication, especially those who struggle with the problem of how to harness the power of electronic text and image processing in creating finely integrated print documents as well as web pages and other hypertexts." - M. Jimmie Killingsworth Professor of English, Texas AandM University

Words and images can harmonize to clarify meaning in a variety of texts. This interdisciplinary work discusses how we process and develop meaning from words and images.

The processing and development of meaning from words and images are discussed in this interdisciplinary work.

NANCY ALLEN is Associate Professor of Written Communication in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University. She teaches courses in professional communication, rhetoric, research methods, and computers and writing. She has published in such journals as Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, IEEE, Journal of Computer Documentation, and Journal of Business and Technical Communication and in books on technical communication. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Computers and Composition.

Introduction: Relationships between Words and Images: A Brief Overview by Nancy Allen

From Media to Meaning: Perception, Interpretation, and Learning

The Indexical Hypothesis: Meaning from Language, World, and Image by Arthur M. Glenberg

The Ransom Note Fallacy and Acquisition of Typographic Emphasis by James Kalmbach

Some Ways That Graphics Communicate by Barbara Tversky

Being Visual, Visual Beings by Richard Johnson-Sheehan

Image, Word, and Future Text: Visual and Verbal Thinking in Writing Instruction by Ronald Fortune

Mixing Media in the Arts and Professions: Design and Performance

Telling Our Stories in Pictures: Case History of a Photo Essay by Nancy Allen

Astronomical Rhetoric: 19th-Century Photographs as Models of Meaning by Gregory Wickliff

Two-Dimensional Features in Text: How Print Technology Has Preserved Linearity by Barry Pegg

The Concrete Word: Text and Image in the Theater by Lisa Brock

The Way of the Sorcerer: Etiology of Two Images from a Lost Graphic Novel by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Mike Dringenberg

Visual and Verbal Features in Electronic Spaces: New Visions for Transformed Contexts

The Digital Design Revolution by Jonathan Allen and Greg Simmons

Articulating (Re)Visions of the Web: Exploring Links among Corporate and Academic Web Sites by Amy Kimme Hea

Reading PowerPoint by Rich Gold

Mixing Oil and Water: Writing, Design, and the New Technology by Neil Kleinman

Afterword: Experiments with Image and Word

Exercises and Experiments for the Workbench by Neil Kleinman