Using JAWS digest: Playing the game of academic writing in an educational setting: A report

Abstract

This article reports on the work developed on the first semester of the 2020–21 academic year in a curricular unit called art and visual culture belonging to the curriculum of the master’s course in design and visual culture at IADE, Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication of Universidade Europeia, Lisbon, Portugal. For the students’ work – to write an academic article – we used JAWS as a template for a hypothetical submission. Each student developed one article as if to submit for publication in this journal. The work was divided into two phases: research and writing. In the first phase, art and humanities methods were explored, concerning reading and organizing textual and visual materials. Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne method were explored. Students chose one exhibition held in Lisbon at the time to be the subject of the article. A ‘Warburg panel’ was created, bringing depth in analysis linking contemporary art or visual culture with Romanticism and or Modernism. In the second phase, writing was structured organizing a visual rhetoric deriving from the images already collected. Textual strategies like paraphrasing, quoting and commenting were also explored to finalize an article using a defined article already published by JAWS about an exhibition held in Portugal. The article concludes on the virtue of using academic journals as a learning tool.