Podcast 11: What qualifies as visual language anyway?
April 25, 2008 – 1:49 pmIn the visual thinking community, we frequently use the term visual language. Some would say that it gets used pretty loosely. So, today we began that discussion with 3 experts in our field in order to begin to understand what visual language really means. Neil Cohn, Yuri Engelhardt, and Dave Gray joined us to discuss topics like:
What is a visual language?
Does a visual language require a grammar?
What components make up a visual grammar?
Are certain forms of visualization a language and others not?
Not surprisingly, we come up with as many questions as we do answers. Our experts find some areas of agreement and plenty of areas ripe for further podcasts and live debates. For your convenience, we’re trying out a new format that divides the podcast into 11 digestible segments. Just click on the clip your interested in to skip around.
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6 Responses to “Podcast 11: What qualifies as visual language anyway?”
I’d like to say thanks again for everyone participating. Tom encouraged us to continue the discussion online, so here goes…
The discussion stuck on my mind quite a while afterwards, and I realized that one of the issues I was striving to express was never articulated cogently and could serve to mediate some of the issues involved. I’ve posted these thoughts to my post of the podcast for all those who might be interested.
By Neil Cohn on Apr 25, 2008
Some points.
When discussing whether a comic sequence has linguistic qualities, such as grammar and therefore morphology and syntax, and semantics, and thus qualifies as language, it was not clear in the discussion whether each frame or scene of the comic sequences were being considered(for purposes of linguistic interpretation) as a word, a phrase, or a sentence. If each scene is considered to be a word, as Neil appears to suggest in the slide ‘Distance Dependencies and Embedding’, it places severe limitations on the type and breadth of visual information that a scene can contain( in order to qualify as a word). In fact, one has to wonder at that point whether it constitutes a scene or just a single statement, more akin to the road sign. If, on the other hand, a scene is considered a phrase or sentence containing several elements of imagery each of which might be considered the equivalent of a word, then the grammatical mapping of the visual ‘language’ changes somewhat and perhaps is not quite such a tidy fit. Since the concentration of information in scenes can vary greatly, it seems that much of the ‘grammar’ of a visual ‘language’ can be expressed there.
If a scene in a comic strip might be considered a phrase or sentence, than why not a single stand-alone image? The single image may qualify as a word, a statement, a phrase, a sentence, or a story depending on it’s qualities. A single icon may qualify as a word, a road sign, being a combination of more than one element, may qualify as a statement, whereas at the other end of the continuum a Chinese scroll painting, the Bayeux tapestry, or Picasso’s Guernica may qualify as stories; the Chinese scroll paining and the Bayeux tapestry as linear narrative, Guenica as non-linear narrative.
Further, although it seems inevitable that in order to approach a definition of a visual language linguistics must be considered, is there not a realm beyond linguistics, which according to the definition concerns itself with the structure of language up to the limits of a sentence but not beyond? Barthes:
‘And yet it is evident that discourse itself (as asset of sentences) is organised and that, through this organisation, it can be seen as the message of another language, one operating at a higher level than the language of the linguists. Discourse has its units, its rules, its ‘grammar,’ beyond the sentence, and though consisting solely of sentences, it must naturally form the object of a second linguistics.’ (Barthes, Image Music Text, 1977, p.83).
Barthes appears to suggest that there is more than one language in operation when one considers discourse or story.
If this is the case, then the application of linguistics, carte blanche, as a means for explaining or organizing imagery or imagery systems is surely insufficient. Beyond the sentence and the realm of linguistics is the narrative, i.e. the story. What type of ’second linguistics’ can be applied to shaping or interpreting visual stories?
By Malcolm Jones on Aug 10, 2008