A Virtual Exhibit Devoted to the Critical Analysis and Production of Visual Materials

Produced by Students in Bob Bednar's Visual Communication class in the Department of Communication Studies at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas

ABOUT THE COURSE: COM 75-783: Visual Communication

This course explores communication studies and visual culture studies approaches to the production, analysis, and consumption of visual materials. The primary focus of the class is on learning the fundamental critical methodologies used in the analysis of texts produced by major mass media industries--especially advertisements, films, and fiction/nonfiction television programs--as well as visual materials in popular forms of literature, documentary journalism, multimedia, technical illustrations, desktop publications, museum exhibits, and educational materials.

The course works through Gillian Rose's Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, Second Edition (Sage, 2007), and a Course Packet of additional critical articles. Together, they provide students with an invaluable "tool-kit" for both critically analyzing and producing visual materials.

To put that into practice, we apply and extend what we learn from studying critical visual methodologies to the production of intermediate and final student website projects to be located at the sunetWorks homepage. In the spirit of D-I-Y media production, we use technologies at hand. All of our web work is done from scratch in a lab of Apple G5s. We use Text Wrangler to write and edit the code, and Adobe Photoshop to edit the images.

More information about the class is available at the Bob Bednar @ Department of Communication Studies@ Southwestern University page.