Taking a Step Outside the Photo and Frame: How Should Drawings Be Analysed in the Context of Geography Education?

Abstract

The combination of geography and semiotics seems to be rather rare. Nonetheless, geography as a discipline has always been visually oriented because of the usage of maps. However, geographers tend to be interested in the final meanings of visual representations rather than the processes during which the meanings are being pro duced. To approach these processes, we printed a photo taken in New York City (2008) on an A3-sheet and asked in total 64 Finnish high school students to draw around the photo. Next step of our study is deciding in which ways we are to analyze the drawings in question; during our presentation, we hope to gain new ideas from the audience to approach our data-set. In the 1970s, Roland Barthes stated that connotations are likely to be important in semiology. He continued that connotative phenomena have not yet been systematically studied. In addition, a Finnish researcher, Virpi Blom, has said that the analysis of connotation is in the heart of interpretation. When it comes to the drawings we have collected, we can, for example, focus on what sorts of connotations the students have drawn. In her book, Decoding Advertisements, Judith Williamson approaches advertisements both as signifieds and signifiers. The same division can be used for drawings as follows: when the photograph itself is the signifier, the drawing is dominated by the photo; instead, when the drawing is the signifier, the drawer abandons the ready-made signi fied (the photo), and a semiotic act will take place. The former example is to do with synecdochal signs, the latter with metonymic signs. When it comes to visual literacy and semiotics, iconicity, indexicality, and meto nymic signs are said to be the most important aspects we should concentrate on. It was Barthes who said that there is an abundant literature

Geographical Reading of the “Global Warming Ready” Advertisement

“…In this article, the concept of geo-media and geo-media skills, which are introduced as a new set of skills in the reformed Finnish national core curricula for basic and upper secondary school education, are understood as geographical media literacy skills, or rather, competences. In geography education, there are lots of batteries of questions (Hilander, 2016b) to help the teachers' work; the teacher can, for instance, choose suitable questions for interpreting textbook images with children and young people. In the dataset used in this article, there is one question that all the participants-the experts on geography education, geography teachers, and high school studentsshare; that is, all of them agree that the question where is important.…”

“…Indeed, it is crucial to ask these questions when interpreting photos from a geographical point of view (Hilander, 2016b). Even if the skyscrapers are not depicted in their right locations in the Diesel advertisement, the Empire State Building on the right side of the image works as a geographical hint (Hilander 2016a), a landmark, regarding the location where the photo has been taken, that is, Manhattan, New York City.…”