Reading Medium with Pictorial Content: An Approach towards Communication Analysis
4Reading Medium with Pictorial Content: An Approach towards Communication Analysis
This study is dedicated to the possibilities offered by reading mediums without textual information, letterless books and picture books. The purpose of the present study is to expand the subject of the science of reading to include alternative reading modalities, i.e. reading beyond the lettered text. The author believes that this is a constructive approach to a broader and more contemporary definition of reading, which corresponds to the present multimodal and transmedia environment. The method of collecting primary data has been applied to 11 empirical objects. The historical examination identified four paradigmatic examples of reading media without textual content: “Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel” (“The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel”), “Mutus Liber”, “Wordless Book” and “Codex Seraphinianus”. In the present study, “mute”, or “silent”, books, eccentric books “for watching”, visual, or picture, books have all been brought together under the umbrella term “silent books”. The cinematographic and storyboard approaches in the “optical” book-making are examples of vindicating the visual communication modality in the art of book publishing. A parallel process takes place in media sciences in which iconicity is emancipated as the object of reading. Just like narratives of lettered text, pictorial narratives too require reading literacy. This is a new, holistic type of literacy, or transliteracy, for communication using texts in multiple modality, with prevalent imagery and iconicity. The review performed has proved that the process of defining a new kind of transliteracy for coping in a polyglotic and transmedia environment must obligatorily extend in the direction of non-letter perception and competence in visual reading. A definition of reading as a receptive process of obtaining information in an indirect (medium-based) way which does not depend on letter symbols or the reader’s visual analyzer has been proposed.
#reading #images #visual #communication #resource #picture #books #perceptual #psychology