Drawing to Tell Versus Drawing to Intrigue?

The article “Drawing It Out” by Haidy Geismar (2014) in Visual Anthropology Review (Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 97–113) focused on the use of images in early anthropology. The drawings by Arthur Bernard Deacon (1903–1927), which he made during his field studies in Vanuatu, New Hebrides from 1926 until his sudden death caused by blackwater fever in 1927, are the starting point of Geismar’s inquiry. The author discusses Deacon’s drawings and infers the potential of drawing as a methodology for anthropology. Deacon was a young PhD candidate who was sent to Vanuatu from the University of Cambridge. It was his intention to continue the studies of the indigenous culture of the New Hebrides at the time, which had been started by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. In contrast to his expectations, Deacon found a culture in the process of decay. The subject of his study, the indigenous culture, had been threatened by diseases and cultural influences that settlers, missionaries, and traders imported with them since they landed in the middle of the nineteenth century. Deacon described the impossibility of protecting the indigenous culture and critically reflected on his role as an anthropologist (Geismar 2014, p. 102).

Introduction: The makers and the made

Academic disciplines are a help and a hindrance. While they advance knowledge by focusing disciplinarians on a coherent set of related issues, those same boundaries that define and focus, also delimit and inhibit expansion of universal knowledge for the broad benefit of humanity. Such are Communication Design and Visual Anthropology.

A commentary on: Reappropriation of Gendered Irish Sign Language in One Family

Barbara LeMaster’s article “Reappropriation of Gendered Irish Sign Language in One Family” in Visual Anthropology Review piqued my interest with its initial sentence: The native vocabularies of one segment of the Dublin deaf community (i.e., primarily women over 70 and men over 55) contain different signs for the majority of common lexical items examined (LeMaster 1990). From this I learned that there existed different female and male signs in Irish Sign Language. This intrigued me and led me to explore further, despite recognizing that I was probably out of my comfort zone. I would be addressing a topic of social history, through my lens of theoretical and empirical aspects of communication design. Curiously, I rejected a more comfortable choice of an article that uses an approach far more familiar to me: research analyzing the covers of introductory texts on cultural anthropology (Hammond et al., 2009). I am therefore acutely aware that the questions I ask about Irish Sign Language not only stem from another discipline, but also introduce different research methods. I also suspect that some of the issues I raise are covered elsewhere, either by LeMaster or by other researchers. This I regard as a positive sign of considerable overlap between our disciplines. In the following commentary on LeMaster’s article, I start with a brief account of what I consider to be main themes within the article. This is not a comprehensive summary, but sets the scene for discussion points. I then propose some general differences in approach and emphasis between the disciplines of visual anthropology, as represented in this article, and communication design. Although I have situated myself within a particular sector of communication design (in the introduction), I have nonetheless tried to cover a wider field encompassing design practitioners and historians. From more general topics, I narrow down to specific areas that might inform, or be informed by, graphic communication research: the process of language standardization and dictionary design. The final section on signs moves us some distance from LeMaster’s study. However, personally, one of the most exciting aspects of research is forging links between apparently disparate areas of research, which might require a leap in the dark.

Exploring the Boundaries Between Visual Anthropology and Visual Communication Design Research

Researchers and/or designers in visual anthropology and visual communication share the visual aspect or visual study as a common interest. However, their views are different. Visual anthropologists consider the social impact and/or meaning of the visual communication within a culture. They are also interested in ways to present anthropological data by means of visual techniques. Visual communication design researchers create visual communication, and are interested in how participants respond to visual matter in order to enhance the human experience. In a way, they are (partly) producing the visual culture visual anthropologists are reflecting upon. In order to find out how and whether such disciplinary exploration might be fruitful, we were assigned three articles from Visual Anthropology Review within the category “Deaf Visual Culture.” As typographic legibility researchers within READSEARCH this felt familiar, since we have conducted several design studies (published and in preparation)—more specifically, practical legibility research—for the deaf and hard of hearing community. As design researchers in legibility studies, we do see possibilities to build bridges among the disciplines of visual anthropology and visual communication. A remarkable resemblance between the different fields of study within a deaf culture, in our eyes, is the approach of trying to capture legibility/illegibility within language (spoken, signed, and/or written) by means of visual properties. Therefore, we would like to highlight differences and similarities between anthropology versus visual communication, drawing conclusions about why both disciplines should keep a close eye on each other. Implementing insights into their research practices and/or visual communication design artifacts may open horizons within innovative or even collaborative research projects. Both fields, visual anthropology and visual communication, are trying to contribute to a specific common concern in deaf education—namely, the educational context of language practice.

Empathic Projections: Visual Anthropology Design and Acknowledgement

Averting or embracing our capacity for acknowledgement results from what we are willing to take-in what there is to see. In this sense, the photo essay in general confronts us with the limits of our capacities. This essay attempts to examine how it is that the photo essay and its design contend with imagination and acknowledgment. Considering recent editorial initiatives and a redesign of Visual Anthropology Review, and, in greater depth, Feldman and Pérez’s photo essay “Living at the LUX: Homelessness and improvisational waiting under COVID-19,” this essay asks: How does the photo essay—and relatedly, the photograph—in its looks face the possibility of a resistance to acknowledge the reality it depicts?

Re reading the Borderland Imaginary from 2021

This essay re-reads Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barriga’s “Beyond surveillance and moonscapes: An alternative imaginary of the U.S.–Mexico border wall” (2010) from the position of a design educator engaged with horizontal co-design methods for social and disciplinary change. The essay brings Dorsey and Diaz-Barriga’s ideas into conversation with a selection of relevant visual communication design outcomes and scholarship produced around the same time. It then rereads the value of that transdisciplinary conversation from within the present moment—one complicated, morally charged, and visually saturated by domestic immigration policy.

Echoing the Call for Multimodal Representation

The editor’s introduction to the Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 32, Issue 2, from fall 2016 emphasizes the necessity of anthropology to engage in multimodal methodologies of research and research communication. An expanded view of visual anthropology, and its methodological and analytical contributions to current debates, recognizes and builds on the field’s commitment to a reflexive awareness of the social relationships at stake in the process of making images and an engagement with the politics of representation. It also encompasses an active approach toward learning to see how others see, how technologies of imaging picture the world, and a serious consideration of the technical capacities necessary for communicating ethnographic knowledge through visual composition, editing, and design. (Chio & Cox, 2016, pp. 101–102) The claim that the reflection on images has been neglected compared to the reflection on language, echoing in the introduction of Chio and Cox (216), has been made in the context of the iconic turn in the mid-1990s. In reference to the linguistic turn in philosophy coined by Richard Rorty (1967) in philosophy, art historian Gottfried Boehm (1994, pp. 11–38) described the iconic turn, and Thomas W. Mitchell (1995, pp. 11–34) used the term pictorial turn, observing a significant shift toward communication by images. Both recognized the increasing power of images in society through the digital means of communication, which enables everyone to easily create and disseminate images. Both were aware of the lack of reflection on the meaning of images in Western thought.

Developing Accurate Visual Conventions?

Five articles about pictorial materials that were published in Visual Anthropology Review were read with an aim to compare the research approaches of anthropology and visual communication design. This text focuses on three themes in the five articles that relate to pictorial materials: processes, terminology, and the objectivity of visual evidence. Several questions and uncertainties are very similar in both disciplines. It might be beneficial for investigations into visual communication design practices to consider the level of detail, a critical theory base, and reflexive positions that form the basis for the five anthropology articles. Both disciplines need to look at terminology and investigate the motivations and impact of pictorial materials.

Beyond Judging Books by Their Covers: "Reflections on Interrogating Cultural Anthropology Text Covers"

Why place covers on books? The most obvious reason is to protect the pages. But what do you put on the covers themselves? Answers to the “what” question have evolved over the nearly two millennia since the birth of the codex. To situate the use—and user interpretation—of contemporary covers, particularly for textbooks, let’s start with some history.1

Letterform Legibility and Visual Perception: a speculation

This short paper explores a straightforward insight: that the basic features of visual perception map instructively onto the letterform skeletons of the Latin alphabet. Linking findings from visual perception ith knowledge about typography and reading might advance our knowledge of how letterforms function visually. This knowledge could be used to develop a formal measure of letterform legibility, to rovide means to distinguish between a text and a display typeface, and to provide guidance for typeface design.