Workshop: How We Make and Understand Drawings

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of doing a workshop with Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA) about the understanding of drawings and visual narratives at the University of Connecticut. The workshop was hosted by Harry van der Hulst from the Linguistics Department, and we explored the connections between graphic systems and the structure of language. UConn has now been nice enough to put our talks online for everyone, and I’ve posted them below.

On Day 1, Gabriel first talked about his theory of pictorial semantics. Then, I presented my theory about the structure of the “visual lexicon(s)” of drawing systems, and then about how children learn to draw. This covered what it means for people to say “I can’t draw,” as was the topic of my papers on the structure of drawing.

On Day 2, we covered the understanding of sequential images. Here our views diverged, with Gabriel taking more of a “discourse approach”, while I presented my theory of Visual Narrative Grammar and several of the studies supporting it. I finished by presenting my “grand theory of everything” about a multimodal model of language and communication. Unfortunately, the mic ran out of batteries on the second day and we didn’t know it, so the sound is very soft. But, if you crank up the volume and listen carefully, you should be able to hear it (hopefully).

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