Visual Modes Of Communication Research Articles

Determination of Prominent Representations of Domestic Products Advertisements in Kass TV on to Kipsigis Consumer in Belgut Sub-County, Kericho, Kenya

Commercial advertising is part and parcel of our day to day lives which bears vast meanings, thus drawing a great discussion. This study, therefore, intended to study television (TV) advertisements. Television advertisements come in both visual and verbal modes of communication. Meaning is achieved by sounds and images which in turn influence the viewers’ choice. This study sought to investigate how adverts in Kass TV use music, textual and visual images to create meaning and its influence on Kipsigis consumers. The objective of this study was to: determine the prominent representations of domestic products by Kass TV to Kipsigis consumer in Belgut sub-county, Kericho, Kenya. To establish if the prominent representations of domestic products in Kass TV influence consumer choice within Belgut sub-county and to evaluate the extent to which the prominent representations of domestic products reflect the socio-cultural context of Kenya as far as Belgut Sub-County is considered. The study used Kress and van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse Analysis theory, the theory of semiotics and information processing theory. ‘Multimodality’ typically refers to the use of both verbal and non-verbal modes of communication. This study, therefore, analysed the verbal and visual modes of communication in TV advertisements in order to determine their influence on Kipsigis consumers. A descriptive survey research design was adopted. The target population was Kass TV viewers in Belgut sub-county because it is among the Kass TV coverage areas and also due to the fact that a wide population in the sub-county is Kipsigis speakers. Simple random sampling was used to identify the respondents. A structured questionnaire which was self-administered to the Kass TV viewers and buyers of the advertised domestic products was used. 186 respondents were sampled. Data was analysed using content analysis with the use of Frith’s table for analysis of layers of meanings (surface meaning, advertiser’s intended meaning and cultural meaning) by employing descriptive statistics. The study was aimed at contributing to the studies of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) since it sought to analyse how information is presented in Kass TV advertisement of domestic products. It also aimed at shedding more light on letting consumers be aware of the multiple modes that TV producers of television advertisement use to influence their buying behaviour. Television adverts were found to blend visual and verbal modes of communication.

Digital Storytelling: Engaging Young People to Communicate for Digital Media Literacy

Digital stories are powerful forces in the lives of young people as they shape opinions, assumptions, and biases about the knowledge of everyday lives. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory project that saw secondary school students participating in a digital storytelling project. Underpinning this project was an interest in cultivating digital media literacy among young people. Data analysed included a self-assessment questionnaire, focus group discussions with young people and the production of short 1-3 minute digital stories on various issues related to online cultures. The first part of the article looks at the digital competences of young people. The findings of a self-assessment revealed that the respondents felt generally capable when working with information, and moderately capable of communication and safety but had difficulty with content creation and problem-solving skills.The findings of the second part of the study revealed that young people get much enjoyment and feel smart and knowledgeable as they scroll quickly through an online search on information, images, news, and stories. They are content consumers and content creators who enjoy dramatic engagements and can produce stories as communication texts. However, it was also found that the students confronted difficulties in evaluating the relevance and usefulness of information as well as in expressing their ideas through different modes of visual communication. By way of conclusion, this paper calls for the creation of a state-based advisory committee composed of educators, researchers and media practitioners who will work towards building digital media literacy. Keywords: Digital storytelling, young people, schools, digital media literacy, competences.

Framework for Color and Texture Feature Fusion in Content Based Image Retrieval using Block Truncation Coding with Color Spaces

With tremendous growth in social media and digital technologies, generation, storing and transfer of huge amount of information over the internet is on the rise. Images or visual mode of communication have been prevailing and widely accepted as a mode of communication since ages. And with the growth of internet, the rate at which images are generated is growing exponentially. But the methods used to retrieve images are still very slow and inefficient, compared to the rate of increase in image databases. To cope up with this explosive increase in images, this information age has seen huge research advancement in Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). CBIR systems provide a way of utilizing the 3 major ways in which content is portrayed in images, those are shape, texture and color. In CBIR system, features are extracted from query image and similarity is found with features stored in database for retrieval. This provides an objective way of image retrieval, which is more efficient compared to subjective human annotation. Application specific CBIR systems have been developed and perform really well, but Generic CBIR systems are still under developed. Block Truncation Coding (BTC) has been chosen as a feature extractor. BTC applied directly on input image provides color content-based features of image and BTC applied after applying LBP on the image provide texture content-based features of image. Previous work consists of either color, shape or texture, but usage of more than one descriptor is still in research and might give better performance. The paper presents framework for color and texture feature fusion in content-based image retrieval using block truncation coding with color spaces. Experimentation is carried out on Wang Dataset of 1000 images consisting of 10 classes. Each class has 100 images in it. Obtained results have shown performance improvement using fusion of BTC extracted color features and texture features extracted with BTC applied on Local Binary Patterns (LBP). Conversion of color space from RGB to LUV is done using Kekre's LUV.

What Is a Hieroglyph ?

We consider two unrelated traditions of hieroglyphic writing, Maya and Egyptian, to discuss distinctive features of such mixed, logo-phonetic writing systems. Hieroglyphic scripts are characterized by their sustained pictoriality and by sign forms that are not reducible to stroke, line patterns or fonts. Moreover, the systems are tightly integrated with a broader aesthetic culture, and represent an encyclopedically dense mode of visual communication. Independent of instrumentalist ideologies of communication often associated with alphabetic writing, hieroglyphic writing goes far beyond that function of supposed, reductive transparency. Implicit meta-discourses point to the fundamentally distinct ideologies of hieroglyphic writing. Hieroglyphic signs do not just stand for linguistic values : they are inviolable things in their own right, suggesting a particular ontology and a capacity for performance. Excess, on both the visual and the semantic levels, distinguishes hieroglyphic writing, and can be variously accentuated in diverse contexts. At once inviting and exclusionary, the two systems thrived for millennia in diverse and changing societies, in inextricable collaboration with their aesthetic cultures and worldviews.

Jonathan Kahana (1966–2019)

Jonathan Kahana (1966–2019) Dan Streible (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jonathan Kahana and the wall of wine. Photograph by Jennifer Horne, Bologna, 2019. Media scholar, documentary film historian, and cultural theorist Jonathan Kahana was in his prime when a rare form of lung cancer took his life at age fifty-three. He had already made an impact on documentary studies and practice with two major books and had another (on reenactment) in process when he passed away on the last day of 2019. His essays, interviews, and reviews appeared in publications ranging from Critical Inquiry and Jump Cut to Millennium Film Journal and the Brooklyn Rail. As our colleague Dana Polan put it, he had nothing less than "a world-wide reputation as one of the very best historians and interpreters of nonfiction modes of visual communication."1 Yet Kahana's influence on the field went well beyond his incisive writing. He had ongoing dialogue and interaction with media artists, such as Jill Godmilow, John Greyson, and Zoe Beloff. With filmmaker Lynne Sachs, he launched an annual Experimental Lecture series that brought legends of the avant-garde to the Tisch School of the Arts, starting with Barbara Hammer in 2007, followed by Craig Baldwin, Ken Jacobs, and Peggy Ahwesh. Born in Canada, he earned BA and BFA degrees from York University. While at the University of Minnesota for a master's degree (1992) in English, Jonathan met classmate Jennifer Horne. They became life partners and fellow film scholars. Completing a PhD at Rutgers University in 2001, he served as director of film studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he taught for five years. From 2005 to 2012, Kahana was associate professor of cinema studies at New York University (NYU), where he made a large impact. Ultimately, the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz recognized his work and hired him to lead a new Center for Documentary Arts and Research in its innovative Film and Digital Media Department. At NYU, Jonathan was active on several [End Page 305] fronts, which I was fortunate to experience when joining the department's faculty in 2006. Documentary remained his forte and passion, but he used the word capaciously, researching a broad array of nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental forms of media. His 2008 book Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary examines a funky variety of films and texts, bringing reexamination of landmark works into dialogue with neglected ones, such as Teach Our Children (1972), a Third World Newsreel short anonymously directed by teenagers Christine Choy and Susan Robeson. Serendipitously, 2008 also saw the preservation of that film and its screening at the first Orphan Film Symposium in New York, allowing Kahana to do what he did best: facilitate a discussion among scholars, archivists (Pamela Jean Smith of Pacific Film Archives, which preserved Teach Our Children), and filmmakers (Eric Breitbart, member of the Newsreel collective). I benefited from his intellectual curiosity and devotion to archival exploration when we co-taught a new course called Nonfiction Film History. Traditional documentary was part of the course, but home movies, educational films, sponsored films, and newsreels got equal time alongside cinema verité, social documentary, and compilation films. It was exciting. A milestone of his impact on the field and the department came in 2011, when Jonathan organized the international Visible Evidence conference in New York City. He saw to it that many partners and hundreds of speakers participated. He made "Archiving, Preservation, and the Material of Actuality and Documentary" a thread of the event. His wit and love of eclectic forms of media culture were visibly evident throughout. His program notes celebrated the historical diversity of New York's contributions to documentary "from Robert Frank to Grandmaster Flash; from the Workers Film and Photo League to Third World Newsreel; from Arthur Mayer and Iris Barry to Bill Sloan and the Donnell Film Library; from Anthology Film Archives to Women Make Movies; from Emile de Antonio to Jonas Mekas." He cheekily posited that a pair of cine-poems could shape the conference's experience of the Gotham location: Manhatta (1921), "a film whose metro-normative [!] view of modern life was soon enough shaded...

Sonifying the quantified self: Rhythmanalysis and performance research in and against the reduction of life-time to labour-time

Today there is a proliferation of wearable and app-based technologies for self-quantification and self-tracking. This article explores the potential of an Open Marxist reading of Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms – specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of work and organisations. It takes as a case study a piece of performance research investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified-self technologies to tell us about the world of work and how it sits within life as a whole. The prototype performance research method developed in the case study reconnects the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data were selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a 40-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The article theorises the project as a ‘negative dialectical’ intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools to recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data. Specifically, we explore how the rhythmanalytical method works in and against the reduction of life-time to labour-time by situating labour within the embodied time of life as a whole. We close by considering the capacity of wearable technologies to be repurposed by workers in constructing new forms of measurement around which to organise and bargain.

Pragmatic Inference and Visual Abstraction Enable Contextual Flexibility During Visual Communication

Visual modes of communication are ubiquitous in modern life --- from maps to data plots to political cartoons. Here we investigate drawing, the most basic form of visual communication. Participants were paired in an online environment to play a drawing-based reference game. On each trial, both participants were shown the same four objects, but in different locations. The sketcher's goal was to draw one of these objects so that the viewer could select it from the array. On `close' trials, objects belonged to the same basic-level category, whereas on `far' trials objects belonged to different categories. We found that people exploited shared information to efficiently communicate about the target object: on far trials, sketchers achieved high recognition accuracy while applying fewer strokes, using less ink, and spending less time on their drawings than on close trials. We hypothesized that humans succeed in this task by recruiting two core faculties: visual abstraction, the ability to perceive the correspondence between an object and a drawing of it; and pragmatic inference, the ability to judge what information would help a viewer distinguish the target from distractors. To evaluate this hypothesis, we developed a computational model of the sketcher that embodied both faculties, instantiated as a deep convolutional neural network nested within a probabilistic program. We found that this model fit human data well and outperformed lesioned variants. Together, this work provides the first algorithmically explicit theory of how visual perception and social cognition jointly support contextual flexibility in visual communication.

Fairness in Proprietary Image Tagging Algorithms: A Cross-Platform Audit on People Images

There are increasing expectations that algorithms should behave in a manner that is socially just. We consider the case of image tagging APIs and their interpretations of people images. Image taggers have become indispensable in our information ecosystem, facilitating new modes of visual communication and sharing. Recently, they have become widely available as Cognitive Services. But while tagging APIs offer developers an inexpensive and convenient means to add functionality to their creations, most are opaque and proprietary. Through a cross-platform comparison of six taggers, we show that behaviors differ significantly. While some offer more interpretation on images, they may exhibit less fairness toward the depicted persons, by misuse of gender-related tags and/or making judgments on a person’s physical appearance. We also discuss the difficulties of studying fairness in situations where algorithmic systems cannot be benchmarked against a ground truth.

Developing picture communication for interactional situations at the beginning of the asylum process

The paper reports the initial findings of the first phase of the research and development project PICCORE – Picture Communication in Reception Centres. The goal was to map the use of pictures and other visual modes of communication at reception centres in Finland using an ethnographic, multimodal research approach. The ethnographic data was collected at four reception centres in Finland. A multimodal viewpoint draws attention to how action and meanings are mediated through pictures. The initial findings mark established practices for enabling and coordinating mutual attention, supporting the use of visual and embodied resources in interactions and – as a consequence – supporting mutual understanding.

Probing the limits of languaging: material ecology and thing agency in Yu Jian’s poetry

This paper introduces the concept of material ecology and explains the pedagogical approach that is embedded in the notion of environmental awareness by applying these methods to examples from contemporary art production and Yu Jian‘s thing poetry. Material ecology is a method of cultural analysis that opens up new perspectives on the relationship between human and nonhuman agents, ecosystems in particular, and on a planetary level. This new outlook is meant to engender a consensual set of environmental values that can transcend national borders. As a concept, environmental awareness applies to efforts by official or unofficial agents to change behavioral patterns that can harm the environment. This is done by demonstrating the consequences of said actions. The two approaches are at the core of the quest for a global polity that can support and integrate different communities in their various endeavors to implement rules and incentives for sustainable ways of living based on environmental justice. These must be widely agreed upon in order to commit all social levels, be it individuals, local communities, or transnational stakeholders. Since cultural representations fulfill a seminal role in changing world-views, I will discuss a selection of Chinese literary and art-works which serve as examples of this new perspective on things in material ecology. Highlighting the transformation of landscapes through globalized, unsustainable patterns of urbanization, agri-industrial production, electric power generation, resource extraction and waste disposal, the paper will first explore how nonhuman agency needs to be reimagined, perceived, researched and taught as well as aesthetically represented and narrated in the wake of this transition. In a second step, it will introduce Kunming poet Yu Jian’s thing poetry. I will argue that the poet aims at the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility that can overcome the modern world’s obsession with facades, masks, and surfaces in general—be they composed of words or images. Subverting the regimes of data and information acquisition by means of a kind of haptic epistemology, Yu Jian’s creative bricolage of Anglo-American nature writing, European modernist realism, Chinese Taoist animism, and traditional shanshui, or landscape art does not only promote environmental awareness, but moreover transcends linguistic and visual modes of communication. Hence, his poetry brings to the fore humanity’s material embeddedness and protests against the materialist annihilation of nonhuman worlds and things.

Sonifying the Quantified Self: Rhythmanalysis and Performance Research In and Against the Reduction of Life-Time to Labour-Time

Today there is a proliferation of wearable and app-based technologies for self-quantification and self-tracking. This paper explores the potential of an Open Marxist reading of Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms - specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of work and organisations. It takes as a case study a piece of performance research investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified-self technologies to tell us about the world of work and how it sits within life as a whole. The prototype performance research method developed in the case study reconnects the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data was selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a forty-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The paper theorises the project as a ‘negative dialectical’ intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools to recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data. Specifically, we explore how the rhythmanalytical method works in and against the reduction of life-time to labour-time by situating labour within the embodied time of life as a whole. We close by considering the capacity of wearable technologies to be repurposed by workers in constructing new forms of measurement around which to organise and bargain.

Promoting Science Communication with Children's Literature as a High-Impact Practice (HIP) Assessment.

To emphasize the importance of public outreach and science communication within STEM, and to foster in students a greater appreciative understanding of the scientific content within their courses, the Science Library Project has students creating children’s books about key course content. At the end of this project, the student writer-publishers are able to display their critical and creative work as they collaborate with local teachers in a networked conversation about science and multimodal communication. This innovative pedagogical approach to assessment is important both inside and outside of the Sciences because it participates in High Impact Practice (HIP) pedagogy to have students invest a significant amount of time and effort over an extended period of time as they participate in frequent, timely, and constructive feedback and, most importantly, have the opportunity to discover the relevance of their learning through real-world applications in the public demonstration of their book projects. This practical paper shares our approach to creating and implementing the Science Library Project that activates written and visual communication modes to motivate Science learners to engage with course concepts in deeper and creative ways.

CUED SPEECH AS A TOOL TO OVERCOME DIFFICULTIES IN ENGLISH PHONETICS ACQUISITION BY THE CHINESE STUDENTS OF PHILOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT

The paper argues the possibility of using a special visual mode of communication to improve English phonemic awareness by Chinese students. The analysis of existing techniques to teach word rhythm considering the differences in Chinese and English pronunciation has been made. Keywords: CUED speech, phonemic awareness, handshape, visual, phoneme.

A Holographic Infotainment System for Connected and Driverless Cars: An Exploratory Study of Gesture Based Interaction

In this paper, an interactive in-car interface called HoloDash is presented. It is intended to provide information and infotainment in both autonomous vehicles and ‘connected cars’, vehicles equipped with Internet access via cellular services. The research focuses on the development of interactive avatars for this system and its gesture-based control system. This is a case study for the development of a possible human-centred means of presenting a connected or autonomous vehicle’s On-Board Diagnostics through a projected ‘holographic’ infotainment system. This system is termed a Holographic Human Vehicle Interface (HHIV), as it utilises a dashboard projection unit and gesture detection. The research also examines the suitability for gestures in an automotive environment, given that it might be used in both driver-controlled and driverless vehicles. Using Human Centred Design methods, questions were posed to test subjects and preferences discovered in terms of the gesture interface and the user experience for passengers within the vehicle. These affirm the benefits of this mode of visual communication for both connected and driverless cars.

Verbal and Visual Communication in the Movie The Hunger Games

Communication can be made by using two kinds of mode; they are verbal and visual communication modes. Nowadays, people tend to focus on the verbal communication and ignore the visual communication itself, even though they have the same important part of communication by using language. This study entitled “Verbal and Visual Communication in the Movie The Hunger Games” is trying to reveal and find out the sentence forms of the characters’ verbal utterances, the visual signs of the scene among the characters and the relationship between those communications. In the study, The Hunger Games movie is used as the data source. It tells about a death game that was held by a capitol city which was inhabited by people of the upper class and the people of the lower class who live in the districts as the tribute of the game. The method used to analyze the movie is Qualitative method. The main theory used is proposed by Dyer (1986) with his Verbal and Visual Communication theory and helped by using a theory from Timothy Shopen (2007) describing the types of sentence in form of verbal utterance. Based on the analysis, all of the sentence types as the verbal communication analysis and almost all of the visual sign elements in the movie were found, except for the national and racial element in appearance category. The verbal and visual communications represented in the movie supports each other to convey the meaning. It shows the differences between two different social classes; they are upper and lower classes. How the characters of the upper class speak, act, and look, tend to be more polite, prestigious, classy, colorful, and more educated than the characters of the lower class. It shows the relationship of visual and verbal communication itself.

How do communication modes of d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing prereaders influence the amount of storybook text teachers report reading during read alouds?

ABSTRACTDeaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) literature, including the reading behaviour of Deaf adults, suggests that Teachers of the deaf (TODs) read different amounts of text during read alouds to DHH prereaders based on the spoken and visual communication modes DHH prereaders use, such as: American Sign Language (ASL), only spoken English (speech), simultaneously spoken and conceptually signed English (ConceptSE), and simultaneously spoken and Signing Exact English (SEE). To date, no studies have surveyed teachers of the d/Deaf serving DHH children using these communication modes to determine whether TODs read different amounts of text during read alouds. To address this gap, we surveyed 69 TODs: 16 TODs serving DHH children using ASL (DHH-ASL), 18 serving DHH children using only spoken language (DHH-speech), 17 serving DHH children using ConceptSE (DHH-ConceptSE), and 18 serving DHH children using SEE (DHH-SEE). A binomial logistic regression indicated that the majority of TODs serving DHH-ASL report relying mainly on the illustrations during read alouds while the majority of TODs serving DHH-SEE report reading almost every word of the text during read alouds, resulting in these two groups being significantly different from each other in read-aloud behaviour. Interestingly, approximately half of the TODs serving DHH-speech and DHH-ConceptSE reported each type of reading behaviour. These results raise several issues about the kinds of input TODs are providing DHH children during read alouds.

How do communication modes of deaf and hard-of-hearing prereaders influence teachers' read-aloud goals?

ABSTRACTDeaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) literature suggests that there are different read-aloud goals for DHH prereaders based on the spoken and visual communication modes DHH prereaders use, such as: American Sign Language (ASL), simultaneously signed and spoken English (SimCom), and predominately spoken English only. To date, no studies have surveyed teachers of the d/Deaf (TODs) serving DHH children using these communication modes to determine whether they have different read-aloud goals. To address this gap, we collected read-aloud goal statements from 84 TODs: 16 serving DHH children using ASL (DHH-ASL), 35 serving DHH children using SimCom (DHH-SimCom), and 33 serving DHH children using spoken English only (DHH-oral). We conducted a content analysis to isolate key concepts from each group’s goal statements. All TODs use read alouds to build background knowledge, basic language skills in either ASL or English, and sight word recognition. TODs differ in read-aloud goals based on the language DHH children use to communicate. Only TODs serving DHH children using English use read alouds to build sequencing skills and verbal reasoning. Although our findings indicate TODs serving DHH-SimCom and DHH-oral target verbal reasoning by asking questions during read alouds, it is unclear the types of questions (literal, inferential) they ask. All TODs in our study failed to mention increasing independent story retells as a read aloud goal, which we believe is a missed opportunity for supporting both cognitive and linguistic development in all DHH children, regardless of the spoken and visual communication modes they use to communicate.

Bill colour pattern in Bewick’s swan: information on sex and body size displayed on face?

Ornamental traits in birds (plumage/bare part colours) have been shown to provide information on diverse aspects of individual quality and behaviour. In bird species with achromatic plumages (uniformly white, grey or black), signals encoded in bare parts are the major mode of visual communication. In this study we analysed the influence of sex, age, body condition and selected biometric traits on the bill colour pattern in Bewick’s swans Cygnus columbianus bewickii. The results indicate that sex and body size (weight and tarsus length) are associated with the bill colour pattern in Bewick’s swans. Individuals with a larger black area on the bill were heavier and had a longer tarsus. Moreover, females had more black on their bills than males did. Age, head length and body condition index were not significantly related to bill colour pattern. The present work indicates that Bewick’s swans may display information on their sex and size by means of their bill colour pattern. These findings also suggest the possibility that swans can remotely quantify one another’s traits from the appearance of their bill colouration. Proper assessment of an opponent or of mate quality during face-to-face signalling may help birds to avoid unnecessary interaction or to maintain bonds between mates and family groups.

The Zoning Map and American City Form

This paper investigates a common mode of visual communication in planning practice, the use of maps to regulate urban development. Holding equal legal status with the text, the zoning map was invented in the early twentieth century as a tool for implementing municipal policy and, although debated, modified, and sometimes repurposed over the past nine decades, it remains standard. Mundane and largely taken for granted, the zoning map itself has aroused little scholarly interest. However, as an image of the city and as a graphic intermediary used in administrative processes, it reveals how planning thought is embedded in planning tools.

The Rise of Graphicacy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Diagrams, maps, and other forms of graphic visualization are nowadays discussed as a specific mode of communication, graphicacy, typical of the modern age with its ever-increasing role of visual media in social life. This essay questions this tendency to see graphicacy as a by-product of modernity by surveying various forms of representational graphic signs and systems that were placed on various media in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and it suggests that this graphic material should be seen as expressions of the very same mode of communication rising at the time of the sociocultural-and more specifically, religious-transformation of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. With reference to this graphic evidence, early graphicacy is defined as a mode of visual communication of conceptual information and abstract ideas by means of non-figural graphic devices, which may comprise inscribed letters, words, and isolated decorative symbols.