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The study of visual communication is a multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional effort. People who write on this topic come from mass communication (including photography, advertising, and news editorial areas), film and cinema studies, education, art and aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, architecture and even archaeology. This rich melange of viewpoints is an asset because of the insights that come from cross-fertilization, however it causes some problems academically for those of us who teach visual communication because of a lack of any sense of common theory. This is not to suggest that there is or should be a central of core theory that organizes the field, however, it would be easier to order a curriculum, as well as a graduate program of study, if there were some notion of at least the important theories and scholars from the various disciplines that need to be covered. This project looks at the body of literature and the categories that emerge from the writings to develop a taxonomy of topics and some sense of the location of the most important, or at least the most frequently written about, areas of study. The objective is to collect the scholarly writing on the most central visual communication topics (mental imagery, visual thinking, the language metaphor, psychology), as well as peripheral topics that interweave with visual communication, such as sociology, anthropology, archaeology and architecture.
Moriarty, Sandra and Keith Kenney. International Visual Literacy Association. Resources>Bibliographies>Information Design>Visual Rhetoric