The first assignment my ENGL 1001 students will complete next semester is a visual analysis assignment, in which students must identify a pattern within an example of visual media and use that pattern to explain how the image effectively (or, in some cases, ineffectively) persuades viewers to, say, support a certain political candidate or purchase a particular item. Students are required to lean heavily on their understanding of rhetorical appeals (pathos, ethos, logos) in order to formulate theses for the written portion of the assignment.
This is my favorite Comp. I assignment for many reasons: students find visual media accessible and readily contribute to classroom discussions; many students were asked to deconstruct images in high school and thus feel more comfortable asking questions about the task; and students often begin to grasp textual metaphor in new ways after our discussions about visual metaphor. During introductory exercises, I like to push students to evaluate not just popular media but famous paintings, as well. The resulting conversations prove that the visual analysis required to complete this paper helps some students understand that “high” art (and, later in the semester, poetry) is not something to be appreciated by humanities majors alone—we repeatedly discover that everything, from a gum wrapper to The Birth of Venus, is a text open to interpretation.
I’ve been thinking about new ways to approach this assignment, and the ThingLink Education Blog has given me a few ideas. ThingLink is an incredibly simple dh tool that allows users to annotate images. In the past, I’ve asked my students to post the images they would like to use for their papers to the class Moodle page, and then I’ve had students break into small groups and discuss their preliminary thoughts about each image. This works fairly well, but using ThingLink to annotate these images might be more beneficial. The simple act of dropping a pin on an image and writing a comment about it forces students to interact with the image by disrupting it, and clusters and patterns of pins could help them (literally) see these disruptions as tensions worthy of further examination. For example, here’s an image that I use to discuss the racial controversies surrounding Tommy Hilfiger advertising campaigns (please click):
I added some thoughts to the image based on previous students’ notes. Conversations about this image tend to focus on the model on the far left, whose posture and clothing students find troubling after a few moments of reflection. ThingLink could visualize their discomfort—that model would quickly be covered in pins if I were to type student comments in ThingLink during class. Because this tool permits groups to work with multiple images, small groups of students could work together to identify specific areas of tension in visual media, and then use the patterns created to formulate working theses for their papers.
As a side note, sharing annotated ThingLink images works similarly to sharing memes on social media, and I doubt any undergraduate would be intimidated by a request to upload a ThingLink image to a class blog or website. I’m also hoping that this tool will make it easier for students to examine each other’s comments; a stream of these images embedded into a blogpost seems more accessible and attractive than a list of JPEG file links on Moodle.
Thank you for bringing this tool to my attention!
I like that you’ve found something that seems like it could be seamlessly integrated into a real classroom setting for an actual assignment! Do you think you might encourage students to use this tool again on their own? Or how might you help them make connections between this one in-class activity and future/ongoing analytical efforts?
P.S. I’d like to observe that class!
Yes–I would definitely encourage students to use this tool for other projects, if only to insert any images/annotations into their papers as figures for reader reference. Being able to do that easily will help them in other courses (and look impressive). Alex V’s presentation in our ENGL 7915 class (using fliers found on campus to talk about connotation and rhetorical appeals) made me think I could use ThingLink to segue from images to text-based advertisements, and from there to richer texts, though ThingLink obviously wouldn’t be the tool of choice for larger textual annotation projects. Students could use ThingLink to pass around photos of book covers, screenshots of news articles and news websites, product packaging, album covers, and text-filled informational posters as we segue from the first assignment to the second, which requires them to analyze scholarly texts (a huge leap, in my opinion). I’m trying to find some online freeware that would make it easy for all of my students to, say, upload an article from Project Muse, scribble all over it, and pass it on to other students for more textual glossing. Google Docs might help with this, but there are some difficulties with sharing docs that contain images–especially tables and graphs created in other software, and anything available only as a pdf is problematic. Basically, I want to teach my students to interact with their source materials in some physical/digital way, because many of them treat text as sacrosanct at the beginning of the semester–if something’s printed professionally, they think it must be credible, and scribbling on things seems to solve that problem.
Yeah, I totally know what you mean! I always have a hard time getting my students to annotate texts, though I usually I’m trying to do it on physical printed texts by hand. Maybe they are more inclined to markup digital versions of texts? If I come stumble upon anything I’ll let you know! Good luck!