By John Jones
With the emergence of photography in the late nineteenth century, there has been an increasing interest in the way in which visual information participates in the creation of knowledge, particularly how visuals communicate and make arguments. Whether painting or photographs, scientific imaging or typography, a tremendous amount of the information that we absorb each day is processed visually. The following topics are designed to give a brief overview of some of the various theoretical approaches to studying the way visuals make meaning, including terminology and suggestions for further reading. These short introductions are not intended to be exhaustive, but merely to indicate various places—within disciplines and scholarly conversations—where discussions about visual rhetoric can begin.
