Reading Images provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. By looking at the formal elements and structures of design the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning.

Extending the discussion of critical content analysis to the visual realm of picturebooks and graphic novels, this book provides a clear research methodology for understanding and analyzing visual imagery. Offering strategies for "reading" illustrations in global and multicultural literature, chapter authors explore and bring together critical theory and social semiotics while demonstrating how visual analysis can be used to uncover and analyze power, ideologies, inequity, and resistance in picturebooks and graphic novels. This volume covers a diverse range of texts and types of books and offers tools and procedures for interpreting visual images to enhance the understandings of researchers, teachers, and students as they engage with the visual culture that fills our world. These methods are significant not only to becoming a critical reader of literature but to also becoming a critical reader of visual images in everyday life.

Adapting the methods of the much admired and extremely successful composition anthology Ways of Reading, this brief reader offers eight substantial essays about visual culture (illustrated with evocative photographs) along with demanding and innovative apparatus that engages students in conversations about the power of images.

This third edition of the landmark textbook Reading Images builds on its reputation as the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. Drawing on an enormous range of examples from children's drawings to textbook illustrations, photo-journalism to fine art, as well as three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and toys, the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning. Features of this fully updated third edition include: new material on diagrams and data visualization a new approach to the theory of 'modality' a discussion of how images and their uses have changed since the first edition examples from a wide range of digital media including websites, social media, I-phone interfaces and computer games ideas on the future of visual communication. Reading Images presents a detailed outline of the 'grammar' of visual design and provides the reader with an invaluable 'tool-kit' for reading images in their contemporary multimodal settings. A must for students and scholars of communication, linguistics, design studies, media studies and the arts.

In this book the authors describe their strategies for critically reading global and multicultural literature and the range of procedures they use for critical analyses. They also reflect on how these research strategies can inform classrooms and children as readers. Critical content analysis offers researchers a methodology for examining representations of power and position in global and multicultural children’s and adolescent literature. This methodology highlights the critical as locating power in social practices by understanding, uncovering, and transforming conditions of inequity. Importantly, it also provides insights into specific global and multicultural books significant within classrooms as well as strategies that teachers can use to engage students in critical literacy.

This second edition of the landmark textbook Reading Images builds on its reputation as the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. Drawing on an enormous range of examples from children's drawings to textbook illustrations, photo-journalism to fine art, as well as three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and toys, the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning. Features of this fully updated second edition include: new material on moving images and on colour a discussion of how images and their uses have changed through time websites and web-based images ideas on the future of visual communication. Reading Images focuses on the structures or 'grammar' of visual design – colour, perspective, framing and composition – provides the reader with an invaluable 'tool-kit' for reading images and makes it a must for anyone interested in communication, the media and the arts.

The simultaneously tautological and oxymoronic nature of word / image relations has become a subject of massive debate in the post-modern period. This is not only because of the increasing predominance of word / image messages within our modern media-saturated culture, but also because intellectual disciplines are becoming increasingly sensitized to the essentially hybrid nature of the way we construct meaning in the world. The essays in this volume offer an exemplary insight into both aspects of this phenomenon. Focussing on both traditional and modern media (theatre, fiction, poetry, graphic art, cinema), the essays of Reading Images and Seeing Words are deeply concerned to show how it is according to signifying codes (rhetoric, poetics, metaphor), that meaning and knowledge are produced. Not the least value of this collection is the insight it gives into the multiple models of word / image interaction and the rich ambiguity of the tautological and oxymoronic relations they embody.