Visual Literacy Quiz 10

Form and content

modes of analysis may tend to focus on one more than the other

manifest content

what is shown; objects recognized by most- obvious or literal: denotation

latent content

attached to secondary meanings: connotation

denotational

what is shown

connotational

how it is shown/what it means

quantitative analysis of data

count number of images; not indication of qualitative value; precision and verifiability

iconography

branch of art history which studies content (representation); "descriptive and classificatory"

iconology

"interpretive;" synthetic

Panofsky's 3 levels of content

a) Primary (natural)

-factual (what it is) expressive (how it is rendered)

b) secondary (what story is being shown; stock characters)

c) intrinsic meaning (underlying principles which reveal basic attitude of a nation)

genre

french - "species, kind or sort," in art, grouping or artworks

form

color, shape, value, lighting- what things look like; formalist critics or historians

style can be controversial, variously seen as:

a) set of formal characteristics

b) specific combination of content and form

c) spiritual force

seminotics

study of signs within society; fashionable beginning in 1960s

sign

"something that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity"

Ferdinand de Saussure

"all that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement that one thing will stand for another"

2 constituent parts of a sign:

a) Signifier

b) Signified

a) material dimension of sign

b) conceptual dimension of sign

syntagm

collection of signs in linear sequence (letters

paradigm

a set where each unit has something in common and is different from the other units

analog

paradigm with no easily fixed number of units

digital

paradigm with fixed number of units

object

external reality

representamen

material dimension of sign (signifier)

interpretant

not fixed; user of sign, user's cultural experience of sign

index

record of; a direct, causal connection (footprint)

icon

resembles referent in some way (realist art; photo)

symbol

arbitrary, depends on convention-agreement on how we should respond to a sign (letters/numbers)

motivation

how much the signifier describes the signified: highly motivated-very iconic; least motivated-very symbolic

semiosis

act of signifying; not one-way, similar to apperception

unlimited semiosis

representamen gives interpretant, which becomes a representament and triggers new interpreant; chain of associations (w/o fixed limits)

Roland Barthes

denotation and connotation

myth

connotations for subgroup made to look "universal:" ideology made to look natural

undecidability

stresses indeterminacy rather than closure; attention to framing devices