Abstract
Looking Back
Since the launch of Visual Communication in 2002, much has changed in the lived experience of contemporary communication practices, as well as in the academic study of it. The founding editors of the journal – Carey Jewitt, Theo van Leeuwen, Ron Scollon and Teal Triggs – set themselves the ambitious task of creating a forum for introducing the visual as a (somewhat) new focus for research and critique. As they said at the time: Our key interests … can be summed up as developing methods of visual analysis, reflecting on the historically changing and culturally varying roles of visual communication, the use of principled and explicit forms of visual analysis for the critical investigation of important aspects of social and cultural life (including education), and the interface between theory, analysis and practice. Throughout we will adopt a broad view of the visual, including still and moving images, graphic designs, visual phenomena such as fashion, professional vision, posture and interaction, the built and landscaped environment, and last but not least, multimodality; that is, the interaction between visual communication and other modes of communication such as language, music, sound and action. (Jewitt et al., 2002: 7–8)
Their vision presaged actual social and technological developments in communication, as well as in academia. Research into the semiotic landscape has evolved along a fault line, bifurcating on the one hand in terms of the brave new world of the digital, with all of its influence on the manner, means and roles of communication, not least with the push into artificial and virtual realities. On the other hand, there is a turn to the sensory, the embodied: an emphasis on the deeply human and on the fundamentals of human interaction, including how these intersect with the digital, artificial, virtual and material. Paradoxically, this bifurcation in research is in fact experienced as a merger, fusing the real with the artificial, the human with the technological, the material with the virtual.
Materially, textually, descriptively and theoretically, changes in technology have made more manifest and tangible the inherent multimodality of all communication, and required theoreticians to rethink once comfortable border lines between interactants’ roles. Early studies already drew our attention to the inherent multimodality of all communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1990, 2006[1996]) and pointed out, for example, that a mode such as writing, often conceptualized and analysed as if monomodal, in fact has a visual and material presence, and that the meaning of ‘writing’ cannot be separated from such factors. Linguists and discourse analysts realized this ‘as soon as they had begun to study texts and communicative events rather than isolated sentences’ (Van Leeuwen, 2011: 668). Many other disciplines have also orientated themselves towards the idea of multiple resources or senses working together, dating back at least to the 1920s, when the then emerging field of the psychology of perception focused on the effects that various sensory perceptions created on and with each other (p. 549). Such ideas are now well established within the humanities (and beyond) and have permeated all disciplines (see, for example, Boxenbaum et al., 2018). Revealing the significance and complexity of numerous semiotic resources has been one of the particular contributions of multimodal studies: not just the visual, but also auditory, haptic, spatial and material. Individually, each resource has its own affordances and requires its own detailed descriptions. At the same time, digital technologies enable the combination of modes, by professionals and everyday users alike, as never before and the intersection of modes in the production of texts, artefacts and communicative events also requires detailed description, analysis and theorization. In what sense, then, can a journal focused on the ‘visual’ encompass such redefined and emergent demands?
As the new editorial team for the journal, we argue that Visual Communication has already laid the ground to do exactly that, by framing the visual as a fundamental aspect of communication and doing so in order to understand the place of the visual in a broader social and cultural context, which necessarily includes its interaction with other modes and resources, be they part of the brave new world or of the old. The fundamental drivers of the journal have not changed: addressing the role of the visual in relation to communication, to questions of meaning and to the social. The issue is not what the visual can do in and of itself but how it is used to make meaning and to shape the world, for and by people.
The View Now
However, in the more than 15 years since the journal’s launch, some of the theoretical frameworks and analytical methods developed to address these questions have become almost an orthodoxy and visual modes have been much studied, not least in these pages. At the same time, while the world’s technologies have changed (and will continue to do so), so too have its human societies, becoming increasingly complex. This further problematizes understandings of the interrelations between how humans communicate, interact and make meaning, and how this shapes and reflects forms of social organization (along with its inequalities and reshaped distributions of power). The ‘visual turn’ in the semiotic landscape (Jay, 2002) is now even more complex; it is deeply implicated in that bifurcated trajectory mentioned earlier – towards the profoundly technological, artificial and virtual, on the one hand, and the deeply human, on the other.
It is important to remember that at the journal’s inception, the world-wide web was still an ‘information superhighway’, the impact of social media and 3D printing were yet to be felt and the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and data processing software was only just beginning to handle increasing amounts of information. Manuscript submissions to the journal were on paper, printed on one side only, in quadruplicate, double-spaced and posted along with an accompanying disk version. At that time, there was still a relatively clear divide between the producer and the user, between the professional and the amateur, between the authority of institutions and an individual’s everyday experience. All that has changed. Developments in the production, distribution, design and discourses (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) of communication in the late 20th and early 21st centuries do not necessarily raise entirely new questions, but definitely bring with them research aspects and foci that demand adaptations and revisions of, as well as challenges to, current and emerging methods and theoretical frames. As the social and semiotic world evolves, we need to do more than simply continue to apply what have become some well-established theories.
The research needed now for the journal must particularly address the nature of contemporary (and future) semiotic landscapes, whether through theory, empirical analysis, practice, or critique, and this includes using such developments to cast fresh insights on past phenomena. How, for example, do we further develop appropriate approaches, such as corpus analysis, data visualization and explicitly digital methods, to manage the challenges posed by big data? How are creative practices changing, given the affordances of digital technologies, or perhaps in opposition to such forces? How do we more fully account for the role and contribution of users, who now more than ever are simultaneously producers, distributors and consumers? How do we continue to articulate the role of the visual in our social world, particularly in relation to increasingly urgent questions of access, education and ethics, when displacement and disadvantage are the norm for far too many? And how do we need to develop our means of academic enquiry and dissemination so that they are apt to present and argue about ever more complex visual and multimodal phenomena? These questions are only the beginning, and we hope the journal will host articles that widen the range of questions asked, as well as the theories and methodologies that can answer them.
Refocusing
This issue of Visual Communication includes examples of all the established formats of the journal: research article, practitioner’s essay, visual essay and book review. While these formats are ‘established’, it is relevant to point out that, in the context of academic publishing, the practitioner’s and visual essays remain distinctive, enabling the journal to address the practice of visual communication as much as its analysis and theorization. In the practitioner essay, Trevor Vermont Morgan is not the first artist to address issues of ecological degradation in Nigeria, but his art is able to make use of the affordances of digital design, including the reshaping of images and the application of filters, to produce artworks that speak directly to the local context. Being digitally created, these artworks then have the advantage of being able to be reproduced and distributed in multiple forms. And at a time when many contemporary cities around the world are experiencing massive developmental change, the visual essay, by Alexandra Crosby and Kirsten Seale, reveals how something as seemingly inconsequential as vernacular street numbers can be read, or re-read, as a counterpoint of resistance to potentially overwhelming practices of urban homogenization, and as a way of understanding the role of the creative in the life of urban environments.
The research articles in this issue demonstrate some of the breadth that the journal encompasses. Dušan Stamenković, Miloš Tasić and Charles Forceville challenge orthodoxy in the study of comic books, particularly emotions portrayed in facial expressions, as a way of evaluating McCloud’s proposals regarding how reliably these can be ‘read’. While respecting McCloud’s foundational study, their detailed, empirical analysis demonstrates that not all of McCloud’s proposals can be taken at face-value (… pun intended?). This article also invites researchers to tackle the ‘difficult issues’ arising from this study.
Almudena Fernández-Fontecha, Kay O’Halloran, Sabine Tan and Peter Wignell explore the emergent trend of scientific sketchnotes as a way of interpreting information presented in physics articles. It may be a long-established practice to doodle, but prior to digital distribution methods, it had predominantly been an individual affair. Now, however, social media enables the wide circulation of these sketchnotes, and this article investigates what does – and doesn’t – change, as the one practice resemiotizes the other.
Gordon Myskow’s article shows exactly the importance of continuing to interrogate the role of the visual, in order to see ‘old’ phenomena anew. He extends established methods for analysing evaluation in language to provide a nuanced analysis of visuals in the representation of World War I in social studies textbooks in Canada. He shows that the construal of evaluation in the images and layout resonates with that in the language at both the macro level of the core narrative and also at the micro level in the construction of critical enquiry tasks. This multi-semiotic positioning gives students a ‘very limited choice of perspectives to be taken up on the issue’.
Alongside these formats, this issue of Visual Communication showcases the first example of a different type of contribution, articles for the ‘Toolbox’, as we have named the section that will be hosting this type of paper. Kaleidographic, by Helen Caple, Monika Bednarek and Laurence Anthony introduces an open-source and freeware dynamic data visualization tool that has the potential to reveal interactions between different semiotic modes that might otherwise be missed with more static representations. We invite future contributions to the Toolbox, presenting or reviewing relevant resources, on the condition that the resource is freely available.
The review section of this issue includes the well-established tradition of book reviews, with Mingui Chen reviewing Camiciottoli and Fortanet-Gómez’s exploration of multimodality in academic settings, and we continue to welcome these important responses to new academic contributions.
We also include a review by Zhiyong Mo of Lampo Leong’s multimodal installation and performance, Chanted Poetry, an event which highlights the intersection of music, image and body to explore poetic themes. We particularly welcome further such reviews of exceptional exhibitions, performances and textual artefacts, which problematize and extend the boundaries of the visual in contemporary communication contexts.
The contributions to the current issue exemplify some of the variety of approaches that underpin the journal’s remit. As well as continuing to draw upon the founding fields of the journal – language and communication, design theory and practice, visual anthropology and sociology – we particularly welcome contributions from other related fields, including human and urban geography, material semiotics, sensory ethnography, digital and visual humanities, embodied interaction, and more. It is in the intersection of multiple approaches that fresh insights are more likely to be reached. Just as the visual does not operate in isolation from other modes or from social and cultural practices, nor does the study of it.
Looking Ahead
To introduce ourselves, we are:
As the new editorial team, we have all been strongly influenced by semiotic approaches to communication, albeit from different backgrounds, including linguistics, text and discourse analysis, design theory, architecture, pedagogy, film and media theory. We are all deeply engaged in the theory, analysis, practice and teaching of visual and multimodal communication across a variety of areas. As a group, we hope that our combined knowledge and perspectives will continue to guide the journal effectively, supported by our Associate Editors and by the breadth and depth of expertise represented in our Honorary and Advisory Boards. Our sincere gratitude goes to the new, ongoing and previous board members, whose presence and advice are critical to the journal’s identity and to the highly-valued reviewers, in whom much of the journal’s standard is invested.
To ensure the journal remains current with academic publishing practices, we have initiated an online-first publishing model that facilitates speedy distribution of content prior to print publication. The online-first publication of Fernández-Fontecha et al’s article on sketchnotes (https://journals-sagepub-com.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/full/10.1177/1470357218759808) invited a swift response on Twitter in terms of another sketchnote (https://twitter.com/Rob_Dimeo/status/976806139676459013), which the author himself warned might lead to ‘head implosion’! This is only one example of many with which Visual Communication is widening its general scope and visibility, and we are looking forward to connecting with readers and authors on social media (@Sage_VCJ).
© Rob Dimeo. Reproduced with permission.
Ambitiously, we wish to explore the capacity to extend the journal’s well-established practice of visual essays in terms of innovative presentations of both creative works, academic arguments and practitioner perspectives, supported by other modalities and making use of the affordances of the web; hence, we strongly encourage proposals which address these objectives. This will require imagination and a combined effort from ourselves as editors, you as authors, and from our publishers, but we very much hope this is something we can achieve.
The journal has been redesigned to signal this new phase: a different colour for each of our four annual issues, reflecting the basic print colours of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and key [black]). However, black is already a constant through the journal as the colour for printed text, still a fundamental ‘key’ for us, so the third issue each year – typically a special, guest-edited issue – is allocated its own image. Each cover also carries our new logo. As visual specialists, we hesitate to describe this but we believe it encapsulates some of what we are trying to do: peeling back the layers to enable new insights – a form that evokes the initials of our title and that sits, in the words of our designers, Nigel Truswell and Niall Sweeney of Pony (UK), ‘between the real and the perceived, the physical and the virtual, between analogue and digital. It directly relates to Visual Communication’s discourse and how it explores the construction, meaning and delivery of “the visual” today.’ We are grateful to our designers for their patience with the demands of five semioticians!
From the start, the strength of the journal has been underpinned by the commitment of Sage as an independent publisher and by its proud history of developing and fostering challenging forms of academic publishing. Within that, we see Visual Communication as an exemplary model of best academic practice: collegiate, bold, rigorous. The editorship is an unparalleled opportunity to participate in, sustain and enhance an academic enterprise that has been pivotal to the professional development of whole communities of research and practice, as well as of ourselves. We are deeply indebted to the inaugural editors for their vision and commitment. We appreciate the enormity of this undertaking and hope that we can carry the journal forward in a pro-active way, ensuring its continuity and viability for the current generation of scholars, and for the next.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to the members of the Advisory Board who shared their insights with us, to Jana Pflaeging who designed the graphics, and to the colleagues who gave us feedback on draft versions of the logo.