Session 8: Seeing it Through
Chair: Jorge Latorre

The Positive Use of Visual Aids in Thai Annual Reports in Time of Crisis: Visual Literacy and the Creation of Positive Meaning
Ora-Ong Chakorn
School of Language & Communication, NIDA, Bangkok, Thailand

An annual report can be regarded as part of every established organisation’s documents.  In Thailand, it is indispensable for each public company listed on the country’s stock market.  Despite some remarks assessing it as fair to poor source of information, the annual report steadily continues to exist and has multiple audiences such as stockholders, local and foreign investors as well as interested individuals.  In any annual report, “Message from the Chairman” always appears at the very beginning.  This type of message is generally written by the chairperson or CEO who provides management’s summary of the company’s overall performance for the year before the presentation of detailed accounting features such as balance sheets.  It is a way of reaching out to stockholders and investors to ensure them of the company’s stability and credibility (and oftentimes profitability).  
This study investigates the use of visual aids (i.e. pictures, tables, charts and graphs) for communication of ‘positive news’ in Thai annual reports written in English during Asia’s economic crisis of 1997.  It focuses on analysing the role of visual literacy in strengthening the “Message from the Chairman” in the creation of positive meaning in time of crisis.  As financial support from stockholders and investors is the backbone of every public company, each business tries not to lose these people’s confidence.  It is interesting to see how companies exploit visual aids in line with language variation to communicate their messages to reflect the true situations of the crisis in the way that will not tarnish their companies’ image and credibility.  This study aims at examining this issue in ten annual reports from various Thai public companies in different fields.  It is an interpretative visual-based discoursal study; therefore, financial issues and business strategies of each company in the corpus are not taken into consideration.  The findings have revealed some culture-specific styles of visual representation worth noting for better understanding of cross-cultural visual literacy.

Movies: A Powerful Resource for Visual Literacy in Journalism Ethics
Lucía Tello
Universidad Complutense, Dept. Periodismo III, Madrid, España

Contemporary Research has proved that Movies can serve to the purpose of literacy, constituting a powerful teaching resource, specifically, in the field of Ethics in Journalism Studies. The importance of an ethical frame into the journalistic profession is supreme, in order to carry out the professional activity conscientiously. Traditionally, teachers have used for instruction tools as project text, bibliography and Codes of Ethics, which gave a correct guide to work diligently. However, in the new Century and with the new journalistic roads, teachers have seen the need to increase the devices that they use, to express the whole ethical development of the journalistic profession.
Analysts have check that movies, as Mass Communication Media, exert enormous influence on people, being an influential tool to reflect the reality and to shape the professional conscience, in order to give young Journalism students the correct ethical education for their future profession.
To see how visual arts, and specifically movies, can be used for teaching Ethics, we are going to carry out a research focused exclusively on films about Journalism. According to the authority of Bernard Rubin, we are going to check that since the beginning of the Motion Picture Industry, there are films which deal with the journalistic ethical decision, as it have been made by José Luis Sánchez and Valerie Alia, each of them have published studies where they develop the extraordinary importance of Ethics into the films which deal with the journalistic subject matter.  
To continue this study, we are going to analyze films taking as starting a technical specification, in order to check how films are a potent –and useful- device to teach Ethics in Journalism Departments.

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Visual Engagement: Fostering Design Students’ Visual Engagement using Personas
Emma Jefferies
University of Northumbria, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available