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Monday, September 12th, 2005.
Show/Tell: Relationships between Text, Narrative and Image was one of a series of scholarly events hosted by the tVAD Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire. Convened by tVAD Research Group Co-ordinator Dr Grace Lees-Maffei and tVAD Research Fellow, Dr Sarah Johnson this event attracted a wealth of proposals from across the globe enabling a thoroughly international treatment of the themes and questions raised.
The proverbial picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, images are rarely devoid of textual or verbal accompaniment. We use words to describe images, just as we use images to convey stories. Images and text appear in conjunction, and in succession, and these juxtapositions may be read as narratives. In sum, text, image and narrative are nothing less than mutually constitutive. In learning about objects and images, and in preparing resultant outcomes, cultural historians and commentators employ a range of methods and sources, from observation, interview and oral history, to object analysis and documentary interpretation. What is at stake in the translation of sources, both visual/pictorial and written/verbal, in the production of these analyses? Posters, paintings, guidebooks, films, computer games and other digital environments are just some of the cultural artefacts in which text, narrative and image intersect in particular ways.
Art historians, design historians, material culturalists, practitioners of cultural studies and others came together at Show/Tell to reflect on their sources, the issues mobilised by articulating images and objects with language and the ways in which their talking and writing conditions understanding of cultural artefacts in relation to a number of broad questions, including, but not limited to, the following:
- How do cultural narratives shape understanding of the artefacts they represent?
- How do archival and curatorial practices shape cultural understanding?
- How does oral history inform understanding of texts, narratives, objects and images?
- How is taste shaped through text, narrative and image?
- How do text, narrative and image appear in the works of individual practitioners?
- How might the borders of text, narrative and image be transcended?
programme
abstracts
panel of referees
Co-ordinator, tVAD Research Group
Senior Lecturer in the History & Theory of Design & Applied Arts
Editorial Board Member, The Journal of Design History
University of Hertfordshire
Faculty of Art and Design
College Lane, Hatfield, AL10 9AB, UK
Tel: 00 44 (0)1707 285369
Fax: 00 44 (0)1707 285350
Email: g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk
Web: click here
Our keynote speaker, Dr Roger Sabin of the University of the Arts, London delivered his paper 'Comic Timing: Chronologies of Text, Narrative and Image, 1884-1923' with the support of the Design History Society, for which the conference organisers are very grateful.
tVAD is grateful to the referees for their help in ensuring high quality scholarship at Show/Tell (see link at left). An open call for papers was issued and proposals submitted for Show/Tell were subject to a formal process of double-blind peer review, according to the following criteria: relevance to the conference theme, originality and clarity of the theme, research context, and method. Following the process of blind review, the panel of referees was published.
Following the conference, speakers submitted full papers for double-blind peer review and a selection of these papers, edited by Grace Lees-Maffei, is published as issue 2 of Working Papers on Design, an on-line peer-reviewed journal at http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpdesign/index.html
In addition, the strand ‘Telling Stories: Oral History and Material Culture’ formed the basis for a special issue, ‘Oral Histories and Design’ of The Journal of Design History (vol. 19. no. 4), guest edited by Linda Sandino, which includes an article Matthew Partington developed from his Show/Tell paper. More information and the resultant papers are available at http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol19/issue4/index.dtl
Other published outcomes include an expanded version of Deborah Schultz’s paper for a special issue of the journal Word and Image, co-authored with Edward Timms (Winter 2008), as part of a research project on Politics and Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Arnold Daghani, Felix Nussbaum and Charlotte Salomon, University of Sussex, 2001-4, funded by The Leverhulme Trust. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/02666286.html
The conference organisers gratefully acknowledge the financial support of
The conference uses open source software from the Public Knowledge Project
