Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance (New Directions in Computers and Composition Studies)

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:^L^DBLHuman processing of images and text^DBLThe roles of written language in project development in the arts^DBLUses of images and visual thinking by writers^DBLHow the ways in which words and images convey meaning can be both different and complementary^LProfessionals, 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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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