Okay this is just cool! I found BAGNewsNotes through Culture Kitchen and added to the Snook blogroll yesterday. It’s expert “photo-psychology” for want of a better descriptor.
The visual interpretation of political images.
You need to see it to believe it of course, so here’s one example of Nancy Pelosi being interviewed — read all the way down for the play-by-play blackboard diagrams and analysis.
My own public communication experience and training is language-based. This is like the same ideas but hung on a whole different scaffolding for social and political thought, one that Thinking Parents may want to explore with their kids schooled or not, considering how graphically advanced (beyond the written, spoken or sung word) their cognition and symbology are, these days.
Here’s who the expert is:
Dr. Michael Shaw is a Clinical Psychologist, a writer, and publisher of the popular weblog, BAGnewsNotes.
“The BAG” offers a daily semiotic analysis of news and political images from a political, cultural or psychological point of view, and is also a platform for original social photography and photojournalism.
Dr. Shaw’s training — which is woven into his commentary — involves the psychology of character and the everyday presentation of self. His research has dealt primarily with symbolic expression, the process of visual narrative, and the psychological function of metaphor.
Besides his private practice, Dr. Shaw . . . has spent thousands of hours collaborating with students and design professionals in their creative process, as well as participating in the analysis and critique of visual images.
Dr. Shaw’s experience with cyberspace began in the early eighties. Working for a publishing technology firm in New York, he was involved in develop some of the first interactive, graphic databases for consumer use. It was out of these trials (know at the time as “videotex”) that the html standard emerged, and new communication companies, such as AOL and Yahoo, first took shape.
The BAGnewsNotes blog began in June 2003. Originally, it was the home for a combined teaching tool/ visual experiment/political cartoon called BAGnews. Beginning in November of 2004, spurred by the peculiarities of the photo coverage of the Bush-Kerry presidential campaign, Dr. Shaw’s attention turned to this new “discipline” — the visual interpretation of political images.
Besides this site, Dr. Shaw blogs irregularly for the Huffington Post, writing a feature called “Reading The Pictures.”
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