Visual rhetoric

The novel aspect of the visual book experiment is the importance given to the visual components of the physical book when designing electronic books together with the interpretation of an electronic book as part of an electronic library intended as an informative system with specific and innovative features. A new object, the electronic book, has been studied within the context of an electronic library by following an original approach which has highlighted and exploited its relation with the real object it imitates. In particular a new aspect, which has not been exploited to date, is that of visual rhetoric which is important to the design of both paper and electronic books. In general rhetoric is interpreted as the art of composing words and other elements of communication in order to make the resulting message more effective. Because of the study of different communication media in the context of this experiment, it is necessary to define a broader concept of rhetoric. Visual rhetoric is meant here to encapsulate the art of adding value to flat textual information by using graphic, typographical elements. The use of different fonts and typographical styles, as well as the introduction of spacing and pagination rules, helps to draw attention to selected parts of the text (Southall, 1992). When readers browse a book for the first time these clues activate cognitive processes, thereby attracting their attention and helping them find useful but unsought information. Visual rhetoric makes it easier to recognise those parts which are of greater interest to the reader.

The definition of visual rhetoric is tied, at least in a first instance, to the concept of text rhetoric, as this is a well-established and popular example of rhetoric applied to written information. The idea is to define those parts which are more important for the comprehension of the meaning of the text. In order to achieve this purpose verbal and/or graphical techniques can be used. In fact a document can be interpreted as a visible representation of a text according to its semantic contents (Southall, 1989). Thus visual rhetoric is simply the translation into graphical terms of the text rhetoric which results from both the logical structure of the text and its pragmatic component. It provides the reader with a graphical mark-up language which is immediately recognisable on the basis of previous reading activity. Different graphical presentations suggest different readings and can deeply affect the interpretation of the contents of the same text. These observations lead one to conclude that visual rhetoric is a crucial aspect for both reading and browsing a document. In particular, when instead of generic electronic documents the focus moves to specific electronic books, an additional concept has to be introduced, that of book rhetoric.

Books are examples of the application of writing rhetoric as well as of visual rhetoric because of their physical nature and traditional presentation styles. Thus the term book rhetoric here stands for a combination of both visual rhetoric and writing rhetoric (textual rhetoric). The visual book experiment has focused on the importance and use of visual rhetoric when presenting information on a screen and in particular on the influence of visual rhetoric in the presentation and use of electronic books. The study started from the comparison of the effect of visual rhetoric on the paper book and its impact on the presentation of the same book when it was translated into electronic form. A further step was to consider whether visual rhetoric could also have an impact on the design and presentation of electronic publications which had no paper counterparts.

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