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Visual Rhetoric

Visual Rhetoric Variations Created by AIs
AIs can use this page to upload exercises/assignments/approaches they have created or modified for their course.

The Viz. blog
This site is maintained by the CWRL and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. Posts by instructors often bring up videos and images that may be helpful for classroom activities and discussion starters.

1.  Resource by Media Type

1.1  Photographs & Images

library resources

• Finding Images in Library Databases - how to find images in the library's multi-disciplinary databases. Includes:
  • Academic Search Complete
  • Academic One File
  • Gale Virtual Reference Library
  • Opposing Viewpoints
  • ProQuest Newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times)

web resources

• Unordered list
• Flickr - Free image sharing site on the web, organized by tags and subject.
• American Memory - historical photographs, advertisements, films, and more from the Library of Congress.
• Smithsonian Images - Search by keyword or click on "more categories" under the left-hand browser.

1.2  Video

library resources

• Search the Library Catalog for DVDs - This searches for DVDs in the UT Libraries.

web resources

• American Rhetoric - This website is maintained by a UT-Tyler professor of Communcation and collects speeches (audio, video and text) found in current and past twentieth century popular culture.
• YouTube
• Blip.tv
• Google Video
• IMDB.com - Search for movies or television shows based on title, actor, or keyword. To search keyword, change the drop-down box on the homepage from "all" to "keywords".

2.  Explanation to be used in all classrooms

Students generally know how to find images on the web, but when they are searching for a specific type of image, you may want to discuss what they think about when they are searching for images.

Students should still evaluate the visual resources they find, just as they would evaluate a website. For instance, a Google image search for "school lunch program" retrieves everything from pictures of tater tots, to government graphs, to clip art of fruits and vegetables. Students may need to read the site on which the image appeared to get more context about what it depicts, where it came from originally (if it's not the author's) and if it's relevant to what they're looking for.

You can also reinforce using the previous search strategies for web and database searching as a way to get background information to answer any questions students might have about what they actually read into the visual image.

3.  Next Steps: No Technology in the Classroom

Have a discussion with your students about where they can find images using library resources. Print out some of the How-To's from the Finding Images section.

4.  Next Steps: Instructor Station Only

Pick one of the databases available from the library and demo it for your students. Point out the different ways they can modify and refine their search. Show them how they can email it themselves; in some databases this will also include the articles.

Alternately, you could also play Guess-the-Google, a website mash-up that "uses Google's image search to generate a large gridded montage of images based on keywords (search terms) entered by the user. Guess-the-google reverses this process by picking the keywords for you, the player must then guess what keyword made up the image." You could use this to demonstrate the different ways each of us interpret images and visual information, as well as how the specific keywords and search terms affects the type of information you retrieve with a search. Close by relating it all back to brainstorming keywords for database searching.

5.  Next Steps: Hands-On Classroom

Demo one of the databases or two of the databases. Then ask the students to perform a search in one of the library databases or on the web that pertains to their paper topic. Have them email or download the image they find. In addition, you could also ask them to fill out the Photography Analysis Worksheet from the National Archives.

6.  Suggested Resources/Databases

• See the Images/Visual Resources section and the Political Cartoons section
• Use or modify the Document Analysis Worksheets from the National Archives and the Library of Congress Photography Analysis document - HTML