Presenting research into visual knowledges:
integrating text with visual data and multimodal research
objects.
Dr Ella Chmielewska, Cultural Studies LLC
It is an accepted assumption that in the humanities we deal with texts. Indeed, we even
argue that all objects of our research could be treated as texts to be read and interpreted
and we largely follow Wittgenstein’s dictum that if we cannot say it (in text, in a traditionally
rendered written argument) we cannot say it at all.
Norms of academic publishing impose restrictions on visual data guarding the fixed position
of the written word from the contamination by the “graven image”, but since we do privilege
texts, this should not be of our concern.
What if we work
on visual texts, though, and on
the relationship between text and image?
Or visual text and its context?
What if the corpus of our work is in the form of complex visual material
and my theoretical propositions give equal status to visual and written arguments?
How can we present such visual research?
What tools and technical support for working with the visual do we have at my disposal?
What are our avenues of presenting research outside of traditional journals that typically limit
numbers of "illustrations", or brief conference presentations ruled by their ubiquitous PowerPoint
displays?
What are the possibilities of "exhibiting" academic work if research may not necessarily qualify as
“art” to be shown in galleries?
What are the funding possibilities for disseminating visual work in curated shows or web-based
displays?
Considering the state of development of visual technologies, what innovative publishing outputs
could we pursue and what publishing tools could we demand? (assuming that we can make any
technological demands if my work is set within the humanities).
My work is strongly image-based as it mainly concerns urban visual landscapes,
visual knowledges and visual culture. This visual character presents both
challenges and opportunities embedded in the multimodal material that
constitutes simultaneously the corpus, research tool, and the research output.
My visual data includes my own photographic material and design work,
documents from various photographic and media archives including aerial
photography and maps, drawings and popular print material (from magazines and
newspapers), design artifacts and art objects, as well as a variety of documents
that record the processes of change and transformation of the urban visual realm.
I see a paradoxical quantitative condition with regards to the qualitative research
on the visual: In publications (in cultural studies, cultural theory, visual studies,
social semiotics, art history, even in architecture) I am typically given a number of
images with which I am allowed to embellish my textual exposition. The numbers
vary: 4 to 6 is the norm.
It is, of course, possible to publish the visual material in
professional architectural magazines or submit images as visual
essays. These venues do not allow for longer texts, however, and
are not partciularly suitable for publishing theoretical reflections.
Recently, in a chapter on Public Art in Canada (University of
Toronto Press) in my essay on photographing graffiti in Montreal, I
could use only six images but I needed eleven which I was
allowed in the end but only because I successfully argued that six
of them were really one aggregate. Still, I could only use B&W
images which significantly compromised my visual argument.
In a comparative essay on the semiotic landscape, in another
publication, I was given the limit of eight B&W images and a
chance to compete for one in colour. I had proposed a singular
colour image and had completely rewritten my paper (that
originally demanded 24 images) and submitted one composite
image of four pictures.
Similarly, in an earlier work on visual landscape, I was allowed use only six
images, but composed my visual material into triads and thus managed 18.
For a chapter in a recent book on City and Art, I was given a luxury of a
colour insert and managed over 50 images set in triads, but the editor had
no problem with the number which was extraordinary. Still it was an
insert…
It may sound as if it is all about numbers, but other issues are at stake here.
What happens to the argument if I have to build it around a specified number of images?
What happens to the content if I can only show it in a prescribed number of expositions?
Typically what is not considered is a possibility that my textual argument is inherently linked
to the visual material and that changing the number of images would necessitate writing of a
different text. That I simply cannot make some points on visuality without involving visual
material in the presentation of my argument. (Even de Saussure who seemed to have little
use for images, resorted to diagrams for his basic propositions.)
In an article in Space and Culture (a journal published by Sage), I was able to use as
many in-text images as my argument demanded. The article, “Logos or the Resonance
of Branding” was a breakthrough.
Arguing for a close reading of prosaic cultural objects and their immediate surroundings,
the article drew out the linguistic and graphic nature of the minimal urban texts while
indexing the entirety of visual landscape. In examining brand names in specific locales
and within their particular symbolic and linguistic contexts the work considered two
interrelated questions:
What is the logo’s relationship with the specific place of its display?
And what is the impact of its linguistic idiom, its graphic and sound image, on the local
language?
My written argument contains a heavy dose of theory as well as a detailed site
investigation and both lines of inquiry are supported by 51 images.
A similar visual material was accepted by Space and Culture again in
an article on graffiti and place.
By then the editors trusted my method: all my images were carefully
prepared and sized in a modular form that allowed the editor to easily
work with page layout.
This also allowed me to develop a model for a working structure of text
and a beginning of a system for managing my visual data.
I am happy with these articles, but both are compromises. Not only
because of the absence of colour but also because their final shape is
a result of a page setup and working with the editor on a fixed
document rather than a result of a dynamic word and imageprocessing that could be a tool, linking my massive collection of
photos, annotating all visual data and thus allowing me to work with
both text and image without exploding the Word files.
I am interested in the process of contructing arguments that fuse the
discursive and representational elements, that give words and images
the same epistemologivcal status.
While this seems possible in a finished product (a designed page) it is
not yet attainable in the process of writing.
I have envisioned a word/image processing tool that could provide
me with a “footnoting” funtion that could access images from a
database and position them on a page like on a light table.
My new project on the post-socialist city that I have began last
year with Mark Dorrian in Architecture at Edinburgh, proves far
more demanding (Tracking the City Project). It is a project on
critical pedagogies and new methodologies of urban research.
In addition to the material that I would normally work with (own
photographic documentation, photographic archives, maps,
press material, and archival documents) the project involves
massive data sets collected in MArch research projects (urban
plans and aerial photography) and the output from exhibitions
and seminars that have been part of our work in the last year
(variety of media: video recordings, animation, book projects,
design objects, creative writing and photography, book objects
and narrative objects, models of various scales, results from
technical studies, as well as sketchbooks and visual diaries).
For this project we need a sophisticated tool that is not merely an image
managing software but could be a workbench: allowing to integrate text
with visual data and multimodal research into a work environment, a
dynamic platform from which critical and theoretical, as well as
interpretative and curatorial work could be carried out.
I need a tool which could function like my sketchbook, a platform that will
facilitate working with a variety of visual material.
I need a workbench for the humanities.