1 Perspective Of Visual Literacy

An alternative to the common approach to defining concepts is introduced, where the primary goal is to point to what is large and essential in a concept, that is, to its perspective. Based on this new approach, visual literacy is defined as the ability to decode and design implicit information. It is argued that such literacy is no less needed than the common literacy, which is the ability to read and write explicit information. Introduction The Visual Literacy movement started three decades ago, motivated by the insight that there is something hidden and essential in visual information. An essential part of information being hidden, decoding visual messages requires special training without which one is in a certain sense illiterate. The Visual Literacy movement developed as an effort to produce the required research and education. But, as we have seen during the panel on the yr. 2000 IVLA Conference, an agreed-upon definition of visual literacy, which would direct the movement, has not yet emerged. In this article a definition of visual literacy is proposed based on a non-traditional approach to information called polyscopic modeling (Karabeg, 2002). There is an interesting paradox associated with the definition of visual literacy. If pictures can indeed express something that words alone cannot, and if that 'something' is what visual literacy is all about, then it may be difficult to define visual literacy in the usual, verbal way. Perhaps to define visual literacy one needs to draw a picture! That is in essence the approach taken in this article.