The ‘beautiful’ in information: thoughts about visual literacy and aesthetics

Abstract

Many agencies have promulgated standards for visual literacy. These groups include libraries, museums, computer science and graphic designers. The implementation of these standards tends to be skill-based courses for production. Other, larger questions about visual literacy are eclipsed and the growing number of research areas investigating visual literacy has made a complicated, contradictory literature. The dominant stream of discourse in the humanities emphasizes cultural, historical and social-constructionist perspectives. An alternative perspective, which was dominant until the 1970s, still seems to lead the sciences, a pseudo-objectivist perspective. The theme of this essay is that considering visual literacy from a yet-earlier analysis, that of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of judgment about ‘beauty,’ may lead to a shareable discourse to advance our study about the interpretation of visuals and create a foundation to allow for individual and community-based interpretations, a middle-way between an entirely strict empiricist view and a hyper-relative socially constructed one. This approach may be controversial, but all the more useful to sparking discussion of deeper issues about interpretation and professionals’ advancement in visual literacy.