ABSTRACT
News delivery in this country is increasingly comprised
of carefully crafted displays of visual information. As
consumers of information, however, most of us have never
been taught to critically read or decode images and other
graphic displays of information in the same ways that
we have been taught to analyze verbal communication. We
are taught reading comprehension and writing skills throughout
most of our educational experience, but not visual language
comprehension. Yet, if we wish to remain critical viewers
of the news media in the midst of this image-driven, converging
media landscape, we must develop equally sophisticated
visual literacy skills. I believe that bringing together
the work of multiple disciplines including communications,
media studies and communication design is key to addressing
this problem. At the intersection of those fields, there
is a rich body of work that seeks to understand and analyze
the power, the practices, and the techniques employed
by the news media in presenting visual information. By
taking advantage of work done in these related discourses,
new methods of promoting visual literacy can be derived.
This thesis builds on elements from each of those disciplines
in order to create a prototype for the critical analysis
of visual news content utilizing the tools of interactive
visual design.
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