Referierender

Ildar Garipzanov (Oslo)

Vortragstitel

Between Text and Image: the Rise of Early Graphicacy

Abstract

Graphicacy as the fourth “R” (received speech) has attracted a growing interest among specialists in educational psychology and visual literacy in past decades, who have commonly studied various forms of graphic visualization as diagrams, maps, and graphs as a phenomenon typical of the modern age with its increasing importance of visual media in social communication. This assumption is in obvious contradiction with the
increasing  role  of  non-figural  graphic  representational  signs  (monograms, graphic
symbols,  monogrammatic  initials  etc.)  and  systems  (T-O maps,  cosmological  and
computistic diagrams, carmina figurata etc.) a wide range of media in late Antiquity
and the early Middle Ages. Their rise was conditioned by socio-cultural changes in this period, and religious transformation in particular.
The surviving graphic data from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages allows a preliminary definition of early graphicacy as a mode of communicating conceptual information through the means of non-figural graphic formations, which may or may not consist of letters and words. The category of graphicacy enables us to avoid a dichotomy between “visualcy“ (Image) and literacy (Text), the stance that is noticeable in modern medieval studies. This dichotomy has meanwhile been questioned in recent studies in
visual  literacy,  which  have  emphasized  that  in  fact  many  visual  media are hybrid
formations combining text and image. In the same vein, if we see “visualcy“ and literacy as two poles with a visual-written continuum in between, graphicacy will be a handy category to describe phenomena located in the middle of that continuum.