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

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 Culture
Call Number: LB1068 .H69 2019

This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world.
Visual Literacy
Call Number: N7476 .T83 2002

How to write about art from a variety of scholarly and rhetorical perspectives.
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 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

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.

As of May 13, 2025 publisher transitioned to providing full PDF and EPUB downloads only for monographs in response to feedback indicating that downloading segmented chapters necessitated users to navigate between chapters and repeatedly download content, often resulting in the need to download the complete book for additional context.
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