XplanaZine

Here is Alice, just before she goes down the rabbit-hole, “What is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?” I agree with Alice. Books with pictures and conversation are the best possible books, because they help us to remember that writing is a way for a person to share their presence with us. Voices. Bodies. And the web, at its best, is also a place for conversations and pictures. Today, in fact, I want to talk about pictures and how the web can allow students to interweave their writing with images in a way that was almost impossible for most of the 20th century. (As for conversation, why not submit a comment on this article when you are done reading it…? The “Discuss Button” wants to be clicked, really!)
About pictures: my first “wow” moment with the web was a demonstration of Mosaic in the offices of the University of Chicago Press in 1993. Was that only ten years ago? It was a long day of wrestling with a DOS application written in dBaseIII Plus, staring at screens with black backgrounds and appalling green and violet text, and then - in a moment of pure diversion - someone was showing us a Library of Congress Vatican Museum book exhibit o n l i n e . . . ! ! ! I can still remember feeling a little shiver. To tell the truth, I really didn’t even understand how it was possible. But there they were: pictures, gorgeous pictures, that arrived as if by magic. (You can still take a look at Herodotus’s Histories in this ten-year old online exhibit.)
The web makes it possible to share images around the world - and it also makes it possible to share images around the classroom. Remember how in grade school and high school the best teachers would fill the rooms with images, covering the walls, giving you something to look at and think about? Well, since most college professors are itinerant teachers, moving from room to room, we don’t have the ability to plaster the walls with art reproductions or amazing photographs taken from magazines. Instead, we have to plaster our websites with them. It seems to me that there are at least three very good reasons to invest your time in finding ways to integrate images into your course websites:
Decoration and entertainment. Images are a source of pleasure and there is no reason whatsoever to deny ourselves that pleasure - such pleasures are not essential, but they are quite delightful. There are few texts that cannot be decorated with some kind of image, as the marginalia of medieval manuscripts clearly demonstrate. One of the things I have done with my Medieval Latin Online course is to use images to decorate the annotated Latin texts that the students read each week. The little 100×100 pixel images can liven up the page without distracting the students from the Latin task at hand. Here is a sample page of reading. The text is a treatise on the place of Asia in medieval geography, and the illustrations are snippets of medieval maps showing how Asia is consistently “on top” in drawings of the world.
Education and information. While inserting these decorative images into the text, I also try to make each image a potential learning experience. The 100×100 pixel images are cropped and resized from larger images which each have their own webpage in the site. All the student has to do is to click on the small decorative image, and they can immediately learn more about it. Each time you click on one of the small images you move to a page with a larger version of the image, along with a date, title, and other information - plus a link to the websource where the image was found. Here is an example: a page showing a map from the Liber Floridus of Lambert of St. Omer, dating to the year. Doesn’t it just make you want to learn Latin to be able to read what a map like that says?
Provocation. Best of all, you can use images to provoke discussion among students, and to stimulate their writing. Many students feel alienated from the world of words, but they do not feel intimidated by images - at least, they do not ever seem to be intimidated by them. Perhaps that is simply a happy accident of the utter neglect to which the images have been consigned by our logo-centric university culture. In any case, students respond strongly to images, and they can build a solid piece of writing on the strength of that response. That even includes writing in Latin! I regularly have my students write commentaries on the images that they see using their limited Latin vocabulary - with wonderful results: illustrated Latin compositions! For example, here is what one student wrote about Saint Francis preaching to the birds: Sub arbore multae aves stant. Franciscus avibus audientibus praedicit. Vir Dei de Christo praedicit. Aves Deum laudare hortatur. In reverentia et silentio audiunt. Which means: Under the tree many birds are standing. Francis preaches to the birds as they listen. The man of God preaches about Christ. He urges the birds to praise God. The birds listen silently in reverence.
What Latin teacher could ask for more? Felix sum, lucky me.
Feel free to submit a comment in English. Or Latin.