Week 1: Jan. 13

Introduction to visual communication, syllabus, key course concepts

Semiotics of architecture: a campus tour (outline)

What is culture? Visual culture? Visual rhetoric?
The visual rhetoric of comics

For funsies: Best of 2009 in Design

For Friday: Read the syllabus; quiz on the syllabus on Friday. Contemplate the questions, "What is culture?" "What is visual culture?" and "What is visual rhetoric?" Quiz on the syllabus.

For next Wednesday: Read the comics. Ask yourself: What is the grammar of the medium? The vocabulary? What is the rhetoric of comics? AND visual culture safari -- most unusual surface, context

Week 2: Jan. 18

Chapter 1: Seeing, sensing, selecting & perceiving.

For funsies: Personification | Visual rhetoric of tattoos

No class Monday: MLK Day

For Friday: Read Ch. 1 of the textbook. Possible reading quiz on the chapter.

Special guest Friday: G. David Cooper of Church of the Northside, comic book author/artist, on the rhetoric of comics

Week 3: Jan. 25

Light as metaphor | How we see | Chs. 2-4

For funsies: Afghan eyes | Logo competition | Visual rhetoric of TV news | Visual symbolism of 'State of the Union' addresses

For Friday: Read chapters 2-4.

Safari: bring in two examples of light used as metaphor OR a still image of a broken dream (all must be original photography).

Week 4: Feb. 1

• Gestalt
• Semiotics
• Memory
• Cognitive theory

The Semiotics of The Daily Show: svetnoooowww!

For Wednesday: Read Chapter 5

For funsies:
Mindthecurb.com (from Lauren Wright)
The Medium blog at The New York Times
Best of Multimedia Design from the SND

French Film Festival opens this week!

Week 5: Feb. 8

Berger's Metonymic, analogical, displaced codes -- outline for note-taking

>>Washington Post on Snicker's ad

Denoting/Connoting | The role of memory | semiotics

Due Monday: one-third select (or take) a photo or advertisement and identify its iconic "signs", one-third indexical "signs," and one-third symbolic "signs."

Week 6: Feb. 15

No class Friday: Firsthand Friday for Evans

Get your steaming hot (indexing!) midterms here. Due before class on Wednesday, Feb. 24, typed up, printed out, submitted (no email).

Due Wednesday: Code safari -- find a print ad that uses a metonymic, analogical, condensed or displaced symbolic code to persuade. Type up your explanation, print out and submit.

Week 7: Feb. 22

Popeye's and stereotyping | Persuasion, advertising and product placement

The Race Draft | CatholicVote | Superbowl Advertising | tobacco advertising | A new sign | AfroPicks! | French anti-smoking ads | Dumb blonde | Chimp shooting followup

By midnight Tuesday: Respond to WanderingRocks post on the 'Other.'

For Wednesday read Ch. 7 (stereotype); for Friday read Ch. 6 (advertising)

>>AEJMC convention logo contest (p. 8 of .pdf download)

Week 8: March 1

Stereotyping in advertising

Advertising/persuasion | The Six Perspectives Method

For funsies: Logorama | Full-length version

A model midterm (thanks, Nicole!)

Due Monday: advertising safari "catches" (1 stereotype/1 non-stereotype ads in print; full instructions on WanderingRocks)

No later than Monday (March 8), view Dodgeball (or alternate, pre-approved selection). Chart (record) all of the product placement you see and a judgment on whether they are effective or not and why.

Week 9: March 8

No class Friday: BC in New York City

March 13-21: Spring Break!

Due Monday, March 22: Type safari

Berry Style Guide (.pdf download)

Week 10: March 22

Typography | Helvetica, the documentary

The visual rhetoric of Glenn Beck, courtesty of Jon Stewart | Good, minimalist logos (from Carina) | Nieman Reports: Visual Journalism | Gestalt (from Kyler)

No class Friday: BC in Chapel Hill

Week 11: March 29

Begin Graphic Design | Tropicana fiasco, Pepsi bulls--- & Peter Arnell | Coke's David Butler | New, square Coke bottles

History of movie posters| Negative space logos

Title Sequences | Screen grabs of title sequences | Great logo examples | for funsies: Thinkmap's visual thesaurus

Information Graphic: Times map | Really bad logos | Visualization software (the eyes have it)

No class on Good Friday

midterm #2

Week 12: April 5

Photo Safari: Capturing the ugly, the mundane, the meaningful | The Rhetoric of Photography | Camera Obscura

Migrant Woman Revisited | Yann Arthus-Bertrand photography | Vermeer | Dublin's Custom House | Malton's Custom House | New York Times photo blog | Augmented reality?

For funsies: Soldiersface.com | ArtBabble.org | Essay on Photography (.pdf download) | Shared memory: Hannity's video fakery | Hannity admits fakery | W&M new mascot

Due Wednesday: one photo you took yourself: some will bring the mundane, others the ugly, others the poignant (bring printouts, if you can)

Due Friday: reply post to Wandering Rocks, "Photography is like . ."

To help you:
>>Selling to Muslims, video from the NYTimes
>>Examples of David Butler-level work

Week 13: April 12

View La Jetée in the Science Auditorium Monday | The rhetoric of cinema | The rhetoric of television

No class Friday -- BC at Covenant College

Pictures at an (safari) exhibition

Midterms Monday April 12

Week 14: April 19

Cinema, Television, Product Placement >> The Truman Show

The rhetoric of sit-coms (My Life as a Sit-com)
The rhetoric of breaking cable news

Crescents, Islam and inanity (Ikea?)

View Rear Window (on reserve)
View Truman Show (on reserve)

View: Prelinger Archives

Week 15: April 26

Not even once (anti-meth campaign)

For funsies: Better labeling for photojournalism? | Digging Photos | The App Store | Title screens (Dakota) | Volcano shot too good to be true

Graduation: May 8

Take-home final exam due: 10:30 a.m., Monday, May 3

Due Wednesday: Critique of local news broadcast as entertainment and a critique of The Daily Show as news

keep your eyes on the prize!

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

“It is a paradox of the twentieth century that while visual images have increasingly come to dominate our culture, our colleges and universities traditionally have devoted relatively little attention to visual media.” Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking (2001)

• Visual Communication, Paul Martin Lester (Thomson)
• Access to a digital camera (model, sophistication not factors, and don't buy one just for class; you can borrow one)

• Ways of Seeing, John Berger (Penguin)
• The Image, Dan Boorstin (Vintage)
• Ourspace, Christine Harold (University of Minnesota)
• Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis (Wiley)
• Visual Methodologies, Gillian Rose (Sage)
• Graphic Communications Today, Ryan and Conover (Thomson)
• On Photography, Susan Sontag (Picador)
• Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (Oxford)

Professor: Dr. Brian Carroll
Office: Laughlin Hall 100
Office phone: 368.6944 (anytime)
E-mail: bc@berry.edu
Home page: www.cubanxgiants.com
Blog: Wandering Rocks

Policies

• Attendance: Attendance is a part of your grade. Be here every day on time, just as you would for a job, surgery or even a haircut. Everyone gets one unexcused absence >> no questions asked. Stuff happens. After that, unexcused absences will result in deductions from the "professionalism and participation" portion of your grade -- one point for each unexcused absence and/or lateness to class. What is excused is at the instructor's discretion, so you are best served by discussing situations and extraordinary circumstances prior to class whenever possible.

• Distractions: This instructor is easily distracted. Ringing cell phones, therefore, will be lobbed out of the classroom window and/or run over with a truck. Chatter during lecture will result in "professionalism and participation" point deductions, as will Facebooking, texting or any other Internet use during lecture or topic presentations, particularly after a warning has been issued. Do homework for other classes somewhere else. If you have to arrive late or leave early, clear it with the instructor beforehand whenever possible.

• Preparation: Complete the assignments and be ready to tackle the activities of the day. Be ready to discuss and debate ideas, approaches and opinions.

• Deadlines: When an in-class/in-lab assignment is due, it is due. This reflects the reality of many mass communication professions and work environments. Late in-class assignments will not be accepted unless permission for extension had been granted prior to deadline. Turn in whatever has been done by deadline. If we have out-of-class assignments, they will be accepted for up to one week after deadline, but late assignments will be penalized. Remember, penalized work is not necessarily the same as 0 (zero) points. Complete out-of-class assignments and learn from them, even if they are turned in late. After an assignment is more than a week late, however, that work is not eligible for points.

Please note: If a student misses a class when an assignment is due and that student has a legitimate excuse, the professor will accept the late assignment without penalty at his discretion. The professor defines what constitutes a legitimate excuse and reserves the right not to grant full credit for assignments turned in under these circumstances.

How you will be graded:

For daily projects and blog posts, grades of check plus, check, check minus, and zero will be awarded. Roughly translated, check plusses = As; checks = Bs; and check minuses = Cs. The wide variability of subjectivity of these daily assignments, such as “bring in three examples of metonymic symbolism,” preclude a more precise grading scheme. The check system also facilitates a faster turnaround time.

To compute your final grade, add up your point totals, apply the appropriate percentages, then refer to the grading system summarized here:

Berry Viking code
Academic dishonesty in any form is unacceptable because any breach in academic integrity, however small, strikes destructively at the college’s life and work. The code is not just policy, it is foundational to the academic environment we enjoy and in which scholarship thrives. It is in force in this classroom.

For the complete Viking Code, please consult the student handbook. In short, each student is “expected to recognize constituted authority, to abide by the ordinary rules of good conduct, to be truthful, to respect the rights of others.” The College’s mission, in part, commits to a community of integrity and justice. During an era when ethics are sometimes suspect, there seems no higher goal toward which students ought to strive than that of personal honor.

Students with special needs
If you have special needs of any kind, including learning disabilities, please let me know. Come discuss it with me. I want to make sure on the front end that we prevent any problems associated with the course. Martha Van Cise, director of the Academic Support Center, suggests: “Students with disabilities who believe that they may need accommodation in this course are encouraged to contact the Academic Support Center in Krannert Room 301 as soon as possible to ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion.”

Finally, I believe we are here for a good time, not a long time, so let’s have some fun!

bc home | berry home | email the prof
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