Digital Visual Literacy

Like other literacies (textual literacy, numeracy), digital visual literacy (DVL) is the ability both to create and to understand certain types of information, in this case visual materials created with a computer. DVL is now essential in many daily life and workplace tasks, from looking critically at newspaper images or TV evening news to using a digital camera, making a Web site, creating presentations, and modeling and visualizing data in virtually all of the sciences. DVL is, of course, also now essential in all visually oriented disciplines. Defining the underlying principles of DVL and integrating it into established curricula presents many challenges. This article describes some of these and the authors' responses, using experiences from an innovative course at Brown University and a larger-scale community-college-based project, Digital Visual Literacy.