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This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children's earliest literature.
Offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of "multimodal". Discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children's earliest literature.
Sequential images are as natural at conveying narratives as verbal language, and have appeared throughout human history, from cave paintings and tapestries right through to modern comics. Contemporary research on this visual language of sequential images has been scattered across several fields: linguistics, psychology, anthropology, art education, comics studies, and others. Only recently has this disparate research begun to be incorporated into a coherent understanding. In The Visual Narrative Reader, Neil Cohn collects chapters that cross these disciplinary divides from many of the foremost international researchers who explore fundamental questions about visual narratives. How does the style of images impact their understanding? How are metaphors and complex meanings conveyed by images? How is meaning understood across sequential images? How do children produce and comprehend sequential images? Are visual narratives beneficial for education and literacy? Do visual narrative systems differ across cultures and historical time periods? This book provides a foundation of research for readers to engage in these fundamental questions and explore the most vital thinking about visual narrative. It collects important papers and introduces review chapters summarizing the literature on specific approaches to understanding visual narratives. The result is a comprehensive “reader” that can be used as a coursebook, a researcher resource and a broad overview of fascinating topics suitable for anyone interested in the growing field of the visual language of comics and visual narratives.
There is an art to capturing a photo that tells a story. You need to know what belongs in the frame and what to leave out, what to emphasize in the photo that adds to the story, and how to use light, shape, and color all to express meaning while lending aesthetic value to the image itself. Vincent Laforet – Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and voted one of the "100 Most Influential People in Photography" by American Photo – gives a rare look into the art of photography through his lens as a master editorial and commercial photographer. This beautiful book contains full-color spreads, with scene details and technical information to help tell the visual stories of larger-than-life life events such as Hurricane Katrina, the Olympic Games, and the war zone of Pakistan. With over 100 photos included, you will gain important insights into how you can achieve similar looks—blending what the camera does with the stories you want to tell. Learn how the principles of photojournalism can be applied to telling stories with a single image. Use light, shape, and color to create rich photos that tell the story as well as add sensitivity to beauty and emotion. Learn how the relationship between foreground and background can be used to creatively produce images with strong impact, and choose lenses based on this discovery. Understand the value of an image and convey a more in-depth story of the subject in any genre of photography, including landscapes, close-ups, portraits, action shots, aerials, and more. Receive an up-close and personal view of the author and his work by watching over 60 videos on the accompanying DVD. All of Peachpit's eBooks contain the same content as the print edition. You will find a link in the last few pages of your eBook that directs you to the media files. Helpful tips: If you are able to search the book, search for "Where are the lesson files?" Go to the very last page of the book and scroll backwards. You will need a web-enabled device or computer in order to access the media files that accompany this ebook. Entering the URL supplied into a computer with web access will allow you to get to the files. Depending on your device, it is possible that your display settings will cut off part of the URL. To make sure this is not the case, try reducing your font size and turning your device to a landscape view. This should cause the full URL to appear.
A highly visual exploration of diagrams and data that helps you understand how "maps" are part of everyday thinking, how they tell stories, and how they can reframe your point of view, from Stanford University's world-renowned d.school. “This book is the ultimate legend to mapping all kinds of data.”—Jessica Hagy, Webby Award-winning blogger of Indexed and author of How to Be Interesting (In Ten Simple Steps) Maps aren’t just geographic, they are also infographic and include all types of frameworks and diagrams. Any figure that sorts data visually and presents it spatially is a map. Maps are ways of organizing information and figuring out what’s important. Even stories can be mapped! The Secret Language of Maps provides a simple framework to deconstruct existing maps and then shows you how to create your own. An embedded mystery story about a woman who investigates the disappearance of an old high school friend illustrates how to use different maps to make sense of all types of information. Colorful illustrations bring the story to life and demonstrate how the fictional character’s collection of data, properly organized and “mapped,” leads her to solve the mystery of her friend’s disappearance. You’ll learn how to gather data, organize it, and present it to an audience. You’ll also learn how to view the many maps that swirl around our daily lives with a critical eye, aware of the forces that are in play for every creator.
**Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work** Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, this book argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics?
Illustrations: Numerous B/w Illustrations Description: Story-telling is an ever popular activity that occurs across space and time. Which child has not sat enthralled by the magic of story-tellers, and which adult has not succumbed to the seduction of reenactments of great legends? India's ancient Buddhists capitalized on the lure of stories, portraying them visually in stone reliefs and painted murals, to introduce viewers to the Buddhist faith and to confirm them in their belief. Commencing in the first century BC, Buddhist monasteries across the Indian subcontinent were extensively decorated with visual narratives of varying sizes, from a mere twelve inch panel to an extensive fifty foot wall. This book is a pioneering exploration of the manner in which stories are told. It identifies seven modes of visual story-telling used by the artist in early India, considers the reason for one mode being chosen over another, and explores how the effect of a story on the viewer varied according to the manner chosen to portray it. The book is a contribution to the expanding sphere of art, historical investigation and also to the field of Buddhist studies. Contents Preface Photographic Sources Discourse and Story 1. On Modes of Visual Narration 2. The Multivalent Sign in Early Buddhist Art 3. Text and Image II. Sites Of Narrative 4. Towards Narrative : Sanchi Stupa 5. Emergence of Visual Narrative : Bharhut Stupa 6. Narrative Achieves Assurance : Sanchi Stupa 7. Variations in Narrativity : Lesser Monasteries 8. Maturity of Narrative : Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda 9. Narrative Cycles at Gandhara 10. Ajanta's Painted Murals 11. The Narrative Tradition Recedes 12. Concluding Remarks
Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as far as cave paintings, and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite this fundamental part of human identity, little work has explored the comprehension and cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives-until now. This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology, it argues that comics are written in a visual language of sequential images that combines with text. Like spoken and signed languages, visual narratives use a lexicon of systematic patterns stored in memory, strategies for combining these patterns into meaningful units, and a hierarchic grammar governing the combination of sequential images into coherent expressions. Filled with examples and illustrations, this book details each of these levels of structure, explains how cross-cultural differences arise in diverse visual languages of the world, and describes what the newest neuroscience research reveals about the brain's comprehension of visual narratives. From this emerges the foundation for a new line of research within the linguistic and cognitive sciences, raising intriguing questions about the connections between language and the diversity of humans' expressive behaviours in the mind and brain.
Children’s picturebooks are the very first books we encounter, and they form an important, constantly evolving, and dynamic sector of the publishing world. But what does it take to create a successful picturebook for children? In seven chapters, this book covers the key stages of conceiving a narrative, creating a visual language and developing storyboards and design of a picturebook. The book includes interviews with leading children’s picturebook illustrators, as well as case studies of their work. The picturebooks and artists featured hail from Australia, Belgium, Cuba, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the UK and the USA. In this publication, Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles introduce us to the world of children’s picturebooks, providing a solid background to the industry while exploring the key concepts and practices that have gone into the creation of successful picturebooks.
