ASSESSMENT

Assessment B: How Do Visual Images Combine With Words To Communicate Meaning In Your Chosen Texts? + PDP Statement

Assessment B: How Do Visual Images Combine With Words To Communicate Meaning In Your Chosen Texts? + PDP Statement

Introduction

Visual images play a vitally important role in science communication. The way in which scientific information is visually presented helps us to summarize vast amounts of complex data and facilitates understanding and informed opinion. With figures, drawings, and other visual imagery, ideas, facts, and processes are communicated to the general public or a professional audience. Visual images can bring complex scientific processes and the sometimes invisible world of scientific phenomena to light. Esoteric scientific ideas can be brought to life with photographs, illustrations, and animations while stimulating interest and providing new understanding. However, such imagery can also be deceptive, misleading, and incorrectly used (Squire 2003, pp. 3).

In today's newspapers, magazines, comic books, Web sites, movies, and television, visual imagery of science can be enlightening or deceptive. One area of contemporary controversy is global warming.

A variety of forms of visual representation exist that are best suited to illustrate just about any type of quantitative data. The type of graphic that is most appropriate depends on the data available and what the creator of the graphic wants that data to show. There are several strategies to consider when picking a graphic format:

Showing parts of the whole

Looking for relationships between data points

Comparing one set of values with another

Tracking up or down trends over time

Analyzing text for themes or associations

Applying data patterns over a spatial area, such as a county or state boundary

Displaying natural phenomenon in the physical environment

Showing a chronology of events

Showing a process or cause and effect relationship

Visual communication uses visual cues in order to exchange with others. These signs can be written and / or images, whether signed gestures, colors, variations of colors, shades, shapes. It allows us to develop a working environment, a familiar, object for some time, sooner or later, depending on the purpose. This enhancement allows the recognition by the majority (Rose 2001, pp. 1).

Discussion

Visual forms of science communication include tables, charts, photographs, motion pictures, museum displays, computer-generated pictures, holographic imagery, models, and even sculpture. Images of science are communicated in an assortment of venues, from academic journals and textbooks to the popular media of television, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. And most, if not all, of the sciences have their characteristic visual imagery; from mathematics (geometric shapes, fractals, and the golden section) and physics (light, structures, and materials) to astronomy (speckle imaging, low-energy imaging techniques, and spectroscopy), chemistry (optical and nuclear magnetic resonance images), the earth sciences (sonar imaging and seismic profiles), and the human sciences (X-rays, magnetic resonance imagery, and positron emission tomography), to name a few. In the emerging science of nanotechnology, things take place on a scale invisible to the human eye and can be visualized only through “artificial” representations using sophisticated simulation tools.

Imaging and Modelling

Sometimes called digital imaging, computer imaging is a broad ...