Public Lecture in Toronto, May 14th

For those of you in the Toronto area, I will be giving the first talk in the Visual Thinking lecture series at the University of Toronto on Thursday, May 14th at 5pm. The talk is open to the public and more information can be found here. Here’s the topic of my talk:

What is “Visual Language”?: What Comics can Tell Us About the Mind

Many theories describing “visual language” have been emerging from diverse fields including computer science, communications, and design. However, often these approaches rely on metaphoric or folk notions of “language” without delving deeper into what Language actually consists of, especially on a cognitive level. This talk will present Visual Language Theory from the view of the linguistic and cognitive sciences to discuss what “language” entails, and thereby exploring just what it means to have a literal theory of a graphic modality of language. The result will be a view of graphic communication and the capacity for drawing that is embedded alongside other mental capacities and divorced from socio-cultural labels that stymie its recognition.

For those of you not in Toronto, I’ve been told that this presentation will be recorded and available on iTunes following the event. I’ll post more on this as I get more info.

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