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The Visual Turn and Geography (Response to Rose 2003 Intervention)
Author(s) -
Thornes John E
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2004.00452.x
Subject(s) - citation , rose (mathematics) , intervention (counseling) , library science , sociology , media studies , psychology , computer science , mathematics , geometry , psychiatry
The Visual Turn in Geography To date, the role of the visual in geography has been discussed almost exclusively with regard to human geography (Rose 2003). This paper argues that visual literacy has become an important part of physical geography as well and that there has been a visual turn in geography as a whole, which has accelerated since the beginning of the twentyfirst century in parallel with the use of computers in teaching and research. Visual geography is as concerned with creating images (picturing theory) as it is with interpreting them (theories of pictures)— a point not sufficiently emphasised by Rose (2003). This visual turn has taken place across most disciplines (Mitchell 1992) and is no way exclusive to geography. However, geography has an opportunity to take a leading role in harnessing the power of the visual to enhance its teaching and research. The visual turn has accelerated in the last few years due to the explosion in the use of the Internet using fast cheap connections. Affordable software and hardware tools such as GIS and GPS have allowed the newly expanding branch of geography—geomatics—to flourish. Simple-to-use software tools, such as PowerPoint and Excel, have allowed us to produce sophisticated visual representations of our work and easily display the results to others. PowerPoint in particular has revolutionised both teaching and research presentation, making the carefully chosen juxtaposition of text and image more powerful and portable than ever before. The prospect of virtual reality and 3-D mapping will also ensure an exciting future that geography must grasp. Finally, full blown colour images are now cheap to produce and store with digital cameras, which are also built into mobile phones and laptops. The speed of image production has become virtually instant and billions of images reside on the World Wide Web (WWW). But in order to construct the most powerful images we first have to learn how to deconstruct existing images.