Thursday, November 11, 2004
Reading visual images
We're huge fans of Gunther Kress' work with social semiotics and multimodal texts and affordances, and he came immediately to mind when looking at the following website that presents a range of cartograms showing voting demographics for the recent US elections that take into account each state's and county's population density etc., in contrast to the more usual state-by-state way of presenting democrat and repullican voter trends (and which assumes all states have the same number of people) etc. The resulting maps are fascinating and show how important it is to be able to read visual images with a knowledgeable and critical eye.
