Working with Words and Images New Steps in an Old Dance

Subjects:

• Communications » Communications (General)
• Communications » Books & Publishing
• Literature » Literature (General)

Reviews:

• Allen offers an overview of the history of interrelationships between words and images, including the challenge of developing meaning from words and images in photographs, film, and computers. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
  —Choice March 2003

• Endorsement From Johndan Johnson-Eilola
  Clarkson University: 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.
• Endorsement From M. Jimmie Killingsworth
  Professor of English, Texas A&M 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.
• Endorsement From James E. Porter
  Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, Michigan State University: Writing teachers need to understand writing as more than merely words. The crucial starting point for developing a multimedia notion of writing is a better conceptual grasp of the relationship between words and images--and Nancy Allen's book provides just such a focus. The essays in this volume explore a wide range of ways that words and images 'collaborate'. Rather than simply rounding up the usual suspects in one field or another, Allen reaches out to scholars, writers, and designers in a variety of professions and academic fields. The result is an interdisciplinary set of voices from areas such as photography, creative writing, linguistics, theater, digital production, media studies, literary criticism, and rhetoric writing. Allen's collection does an excellent job of calling attention to this rich and important area of study.

Table of Contents:

• 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