Research Guides: Visual Literacy: Home

What is Visual Literacy?

Visual Literacy
is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively
find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media.

ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

Visual Literacy Research Books

Visual Methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials
Call Number: P93.5 .R67 2012
How to deal with the visual from diverse approaches such as content analysis, semiotics, psychoanalysis and discourse analysis, all explained carefully, using examples, in terms of the stages of a research project.
Visual Literacy
Call Number: N7476 .T83 2002
How to write about art from a variety of scholarly and rhetorical perspectives.
Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture
Call Number: HM500 .S78 2001
An overview of a range of theories about how we understand visual media and how we use images to express ourselves, to communicate, to experience pleasure, and to learn.

Visual Literacy Image Analysis

How Do You Look?
Learn what questions to ask when analyzing different types of artwork with the interactive tool created by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
Reading the Pictures
Reading the Pictures is a web-based, non-profit educational and publishing organization dedicated to visual culture, visual literacy and media literacy through the analysis of news, documentary and social media images.

Visual Literacy Research Databases

Use databases to search for articles and essays on visual literacy.

Research tip: Browse for information using keywords like visual literacy, visual culture & visual communication

Art Full Text (now Art & Architecture Source)
Citations, abstracts, and selected full text for articles from international periodicals, peer-reviewed journals, and art dissertations. Also indexes art reproductions from indexed periodicals across styles and art movements.
Now Art & Architecture Source with access to more journals.
Communication and Mass Media Complete
Communication studies database with full-text, indexing, and abstracts for many top communication journals covering all related disciplines, including media studies, linguistics, rhetoric, and discourse.
Design and Applied Arts Index (DAAI)
International index to articles in hundreds of design and craft journals. Also contains data on designers, craftspeople, studios, schools, workshops, and firms.
Project Muse
Database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books in the humanities and social sciences from university presses and scholarly societies around the world.
JSTOR
Searchable backfiles of core journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. (Backfiles end typically 3 - 6 years prior to the current date).

Visual Literacy

Related Guides

Subject Guide

What is Visual Literacy?

Visual Literacy Research Books

Visual Literacy Image Analysis

Visual Literacy Research Databases