ABSTRACTVISUAL COMPOSITION IN EVERYDAY LIFEByLes Loncharich In Visual Composition in Everyday Life I report on a study of everyday practices as forms of non-alphabetic writing - as visual composition. I want to understand how meaning is made and shared visually, in mundane circumstances. To come to this understanding, I explore everyday practices in the study as visual genre, which is recurrent social action in the visual mode. The artifacts produced by these practices, garage workbenches and workplace cubicles, I examine as sites for building and sharing knowledge. I consider these artifacts as tools, in activity systems, which mediate between the composer-producer, and social outcomes, such as identity building. Central to this work is the theory that activities in the material world affect human learning, and personality. Visual composition is often treated as a relatively empty term for the arrangement of information on a page or screen. By incorporating genre theory and activity theory with the study of visual elements as rhetorical actors, visual composition can be seen as transformative activity that usefully contributes to everyday social interaction. Currently, in rhetoric/composition scholarship, treatment of the visual is often bifurcated as either semiotic representation, or as document design. From this study I hope to develop awareness of everyday visual, writing activities and a richer, less polarized scholarly engagement with the visual. The study is rich with implications for future research. For writing studies, the project connects composition, in a broad, interdisciplinary meaning of the term, with writing lives outside of the classroom. This project adds to genre scholarship, by discussing the possibility of genre in the visual mode. Connecting activity systems, social cognition, and composition expands the terrain of everyday studies. The everyday artifacts in the study are analyzed through images obtained from Flickr, the digital, social medium for archiving and sharing images. Because Flickr images are freely shared, Flickr enables research on remote and otherwise inaccessible subjects. As a research tool, Flickr opens possibilities for further research into digital, social media, visual genre and visual rhetoric, pictorial autoethnography, and visual composition.
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