Visual Representations of Literacy in the Press A One year Research Project Funded by the Leverhulme Trust

Project Director: Mary Hamilton
Research Associate: Iain Shaw

Background to the Project

For some time members of the Literacy Research Group* at Lancaster University have been collecting visual images of literacy from a range of cultures as part of our ethnographic studies of literacy practices. Our work is part of an interdisciplinary field that has become known as "the new literacy studies". We start from an understanding of literacy as part of socio-cultural practice and focus on the uses, meanings and values of reading and writing in everyday situations. It is closely related to the approaches developed by Shirley Brice Heath, Brian Street and James Gee (see references below) . In the course of this work we have become aware of the important role played by the media and government agencies in forming the popular understandings about literacy which have emerged from our ethnographic data. We are concerned to make links between the theoretical insights offered by our work and the public discourses of literacy which inform educational policy and practice. The current study begins to make this link by examining the ways in which literacy practices are portrayed visually in a range of British newspapers.

Objectives

This project is intended to be the first of a series of studies analysing public and policy discourses of literacy. Pilot work carried out with support from the Nuffield Foundation suggests that there is a disjuncture between text-based stories and visual representations of literacy practices in the press: whilst text-based stories present a view of literacy as a neutral, technical, cognitive skill or deficit mainly of concern within educational settings, the visual representations show it to be embedded in social practice in a wide range of contexts and to carry powerful ritual and symbolic as well as functional meanings. Photographs capture moments in which people interact with written texts. They reveal some of the diverse roles that literacy plays in society and show how it develops as part of a broader cultural process of learning and media use.

Significance of the Project

This research will contribute to the new literacy studies by deepening our theoretical understanding of literacy as socio-cultural practice and by drawing attention to the ways in which literacy is presented and used in the media. In these respects it will be of use to educational policy makers, and ultimately can inform school and college literacy curricula and approaches to teaching and learning.
Visual images are an increasingly important part of everyday life, for communicating information through the media and in educational settings. However, to date there is has been little research into their use, nature and impact. This project will extend our understanding of the ways in which visual images are constructed and used in the media, juxtaposing media professionals perspectives with those of the social semiotic analyst. It will develop computer-based methodologies for dealing with visual data which are of relevance to social research more generally. The research will develop useable frameworks for future research in the areas of ethnography and cultural/media studies. Such analysis frameworks are at present under-developed, despite the expanding use of multi-media data in social research.

Method
The main methodology of the study is the analysis of a sample of press photographs. This will be complemented by interviews with media professionals responsible for producing such images (editors and journalists, including photo journalists and editors). Photographs will be systematically sampled from four newspapers over a period of three months. We will make use of a range of theoretical tools. Social semiotic theory will be used to explore the construction of visual messages, drawing on the framework developed by Gunter Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen. Concepts from cultural and media theory and practice will be used to analyse the ways in which literacy practices are recontextualised within a discourse of news (as in the work of Stuart Hall, John Thompson, Harold Evans). The visual images, interviews and other contextual data will be indexed and analysed using ATLAS-TI, a dedicated package which can handle both graphical and textual documents.

Click here to see the Summary Final Report of the Project