ENG 553

Below is an excerpt of a research article that I wrote which really inspired me forward on this project to provide a visual narrative to classic text.

 “Background

In studying multimodality, we discussed how different mediums can express different texts. Much like a painter can use other types of paints, such as acrylic, oil, watercolor, etc., and various mediums, such as cloth, canvas, wood, metal, paper, etc., a writer can use different mediums to convey their messages.

Visual Storytelling For The Classroom

This article deals with how marketing and advertising companies can use great visual storytelling to persuade consumers to buy their products or services. However, I am interested in how great visual storytelling can help students understand narratives better, improve their critical thinking skills, and deepen their understanding of life skills and concepts.

By learning and adapting the methods described in this article, I can apply those to the high school English classroom. The exact format and methodology for making great storytelling via visuals can apply not only to sell a product or service but also to sell ideas to students. It is essential to study the techniques and strategies used by marketers and apply those strategies to selling ideas that benefit the community of students by inspiring and facilitating creative thinking amongst young adults (high school students).

Ultimately, I would like to use this to create a website that highlights how to use visuals to narrate a story and makes it easily accessible online for educators.

Article Summary

This article recognizes that “advertising research has firmly established the power of narrative content, primarily textual” (Nikulina et al. 3). It even recognizes that audio, such as podcasts, “have also received scholarly attention” (Nikulina et al. 3). It recognizes that there is a limited amount of research regarding visual narratives. It then advocates for more research and a better understanding of visual storytelling.

It argues that visual processing is “cognitively and affectively different from language processing” (Nikulina et al. 3). It suggests that it is not only different but better in certain aspects of telling a narrative than text or audio. It notes that “visuals are processed more rapidly than semantic stimuli like texts” (Nikulina et al. 3). It also notes that visuals are “encoded more elaborately in memory due to its vividness, making it readily accessible later for forming judgments” (Nikulina et al. 3). Finally, the “ease of processing images… imply visual information’s superiority in narrative processing as viewers rapidly decode and emotionally react to a visual story” (Nikulina et al. 3). In short, it provides three solid reasons as to why visual storytelling may be more advantageous to conveying or persuading a narrative to a group of people.

With all of this evidence, the article goes on to try to understand the current research status of visual narrative transportation (VNT) by reviewing 64 articles. It concluded that for an image to help successfully facilitate a narrative, it must contain three specific elements. Those three elements are “narrate, act, and resonate, collectively called NAR” (Nikulina et al. 8).

Nikulina et al. describe this in greater detail, suggesting that an image with a successful narrative should “frame its narrative, introduce an actor, and resonate with a viewer (8). The article uses an image of a blank background over the horizon as the setting to frame the narrative. The next image it uses is placing a female character standing in the background, which acts as the actor’s introduction. The final or resonate of NAR, is the female showing some type of body movement. The article concludes that a “transporting image should narrate, act, and resonate, presenting the setting where a visual story takes place, a focal actor, and elements for viewer resonance” (Nikulina et al. 15).

The authors cite and discuss the viewer’s response as affective, cognitive, or behavioral, all of which have the common denominator of inspiring the audience to connect with and act upon that connection that the images facilitate.

Use In Final Project

Ultimately, understanding how to develop and structure stories using visual narratives is important and necessary to help convey a message, persuade, or understand a concept or idea more easily and permanently. Ultimately, it would be beneficial to create a piece of multimodal writing that helps clarify how to use NAR to more easily achieve these goals.

In my final project, I want to explore the concept of NAR by creating a website for educators to understand how to use visual storytelling in the classroom to supplement textual and auditory methods.

I want to incorporate visual, textual, and audio elements into that website to demonstrate the effectiveness of using them all together. Using this article and others would be beneficial to understanding how to convey images effectively to students and gain the most significant appeal and appreciation.”

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So what was the end product?

The final product is a live website that has the potential to grow and improve. I used AI to create and develop visual narratives. It took me a significant amount of time to develop the website and create the images from AI. Like in previous modules, I struggled to get the right text to have AI create the appropriate images. But I hope this inspires a teacher or student to harness the power of using visual images to tell a story.

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Below is a list of works that I heavily relied upon while creating this website.

“AI Image Generator.” DeepAI, deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text2img. Accessed 7 Aug. 2024.

CHATGPT: Get Instant Answers, Find Inspiration, Learn Something New, chatgpt.com/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2024.

Green, John. Turtles All the Way Down. Penguin Books, 2017.

Nikulina, Olesia, et al. “Narrate, act, and resonate to tell a visual story: A systematic review of how images transport viewers.” Journal of Advertising, 20 Feb. 2024, pp. 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2024.2309921.

King, Stephen, and John Glover. The Stephen King Collection Library ed., Books on Tape, 2005.