Visual Grammar
Last week, students in my undergrad class at USC analyzed visual essays, a growing and dynamic genre that combines writing, graphic design and motion to tell a story or make an argument. The class? It's called "Methods in Scholarly Multimedia," which sounds just awful, but it's actually quite fun. (Or at least I think so.) The idea is to look at the potential of various media forms - images, video, audio and interactivity - to enhance what we do as scholars, whether we're writing papers, giving presentations or doing research. In addition to learning to read and write with critical sophistication, my students learn how to take and manipulate pictures; how to shoot, edit and distribute video; and how to create an interactive experience that demonstrates an argument. And they learn how to analyze examples of media. So the topic during our last class was the visual essay, and one of the videos we scrutinized was Iran: A Nation of Bloggers by Aaron Chiesa, Toru Kageyama, Hendy Sukarya and Lisa Temes, studenst at the Vancouver Film School... In this video, a voice-over chronicles the growth in the number of blogs in Iran, arguing that "Iranian blogs are the true voice of the next generation," and that they are "nothing less than a revolution within the revolution." In the video, music lends atmosphere and helps convey a sense of empathy for the plight of citizens whose only outlet is through blogging. However, what's most interesting about the essay is its visual grammar: the rapid zooms in and out, the sliding screen that seems to careen across a much bigger plane, and the 3-D spins around an image. The filmmakers also frequently add animated graphic analysis to images, offering statistics or highlighting key quotes. The result is a sense that information is ubiquitous, and that making an argument is a process of sifting, of shifting focus and zooming here and there. Argument is continuous movement. Argument is the ability to shift frames of reference quickly and easily. And argument is the knowledge that every image is just that - an image framed by someone else.
We also looked at another terrific example of the video essay, The Crisis of Credit Visualized by media designer and Art Centerstudent Jonathan Jarvis. This 11-minute video explains the current credit crisis in graphic detail, detailing the key terms and how the credit disaster happened. Once again, the visuals are anchored by a voice-over that clearly explains the situation. The images in this case are flat animated graphics and text that illustrate the story. When the narrator explains the concept of leverage, for example, bits of text highlight the key words in the definition, and animated figures demonstrate the sales, profits, credit and interest payments that contribute to leverage.In this video, then, the visual grammar is all about cause and effect, and how one thing leads to another. As a result, the graphics are in a sense moving diagrams. On his Web site, Jarvis describes how the project came about, and notes that he was very interested in creating system diagrams that "make crazy ideas understandable." Using this idea, along with plenty of research and the audio narrative assembled through that research, Jarvis began to think about how the diagrams could use motion to create a rich narrative. He writes, "What really intereseted me was when I gave form to an idea in the diagrams, I was able to draw connections on an entirely new level - and communicate more effectively."
One of the common complaints among my colleagues at USC who see what we're doing as "decoration" or simple "illustration" when we use media in an academic context is that new media tools do not really create new knowledge. I disagree - and I think Jarvis's comment underscores the power of these videos when he notes that he was able to find new connections when he worked visually and in motion. These examples both complicate the notion of how arguments create meaning, but they also engender new ways to understand and to present ideas.
