Visual literacy offers readers the opportunity to literally see themselves reflected in the visual texts that they encounter. This can be enormously empowering, showing that reading is inclusive and embraces a wide range of life experiences and backgrounds, affirming many different identities. For professionals working with books, whether in schools, libraries or bookshops, this means attention should be paid to ensure that representation in their book stock is not outmoded or problematic. Just as society shifts and progresses over time, so too does our understanding of what it means to be inclusive and how best to achieve this. Despite the immediacy that visual representation allows, as part of an overall collection, the inclusivity and authenticity of what is being represented can be easy to overlook.

Encountering a wide range of characters with varying backgrounds and lifestyles can be an effective means for helping to normalise situations and increase exposure to a broad range of experiences from an early age. Illustrations within the books we read are able to convey subtle messages that can enrich and at times challenge societal conventions, taking an active role without this needing to be part of the main narrative of the story and thereby feeling didactic. An example of this might include two characters of the same sex holding hands whilst taking a child to school; the inclusion of children wearing glasses, hearing aids or other support equipment in classroom scenes; or a range of different cultures being represented.

This chapter explores different facets of diversity and lived experience and how these can be represented visually in books in ways that are respectful, contemporary and authentic, helping to ensure that books are inclusive and reflect the society they are part of.

Cultural diversity

Signifiers of different cultures can be embedded into visual narratives in a variety of ways. Broadly, this may include skin-tone, hair-colour and hair type but can also be referenced through subtle details, such as the foods that characters are depicted as eating, the textiles and clothing that they wear, or the environment they are located within.

In appraising visual representation in books, it is important to look out for caricatures, where physical attributes are exaggerated in ways that perpetuate stereotypes and to consider when the book was published as books from a certain age are likely to depict a view of people which is influenced by the politics of the day.

Only the other day I came across the expression ‘physical literacy’. Apparently it means being able to run and jump and catch and so on, and the phrase has been in use for five years at least. I remember when the word ‘oracy’ came in – it must have been in the 80s – and we all had to learn what it meant and make sure it was attended to. No doubt there are more –acies on their way, and we shall have to deal with them when they turn up. I suppose the suffix means ‘the capacity, opportunity, or vocabulary to talk about something we all used to do without thinking about it’.

Some of these terms will be more useful than others. But visual literacy is an idea that both makes sense and is interesting to talk about. How do we read a picture? How do we read the graphic symbols that we see in every advertisement, on every screen, in every comic? Unlike words and sentences, these things don't have to be taught and learned (or tested – yet): they don't seem to need any pedagogy at all.

Take a little visual convention like the difference between the speech balloon and the thought bubble. Did we have to be taught what they meant? As far as I can remember, I worked it out for myself, and thought at once how clever I was. Somewhat later I thought how clever the person who invented it was. One of the ancestors of the speech balloon was the long scroll emerging from the mouth of Thomas Cranmer being burned at the stake in the illustrations to Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563), but no doubt there were others. It works because it's so easy to understand.

Or take a short wavy line. What does that mean? It's not like a word, whose meaning we can look up in a dictionary. But in the context of one frame of a comic it could depict a single hair on a bald head, in another the sound of a bird singing, in yet another the powerful aroma of a gorgonzola cheese, in one yet further the disturbance of the air caused by someone running very fast.

An understanding of the development of reading and readers is useful context for librarians, educational practitioners and parents alike. This chapter outlines current theories around how reading skills are developed and the common stages associated with this.

Reading is the process via which meaning is inferred and constructed from written text (Vellutino et al., 2004). There are three aspects required for fluent reading (Commodari, 2017): comprehension – how words themselves are understood; accuracy – the ability to read with precision; and speed – the time taken to decode words. The development of reading skills is predicated upon a number of factors meaning it is difficult to determine standard milestones. Access to learning and ultimately attainment is dependent upon core reading skills.

It can be easy to mistake acquisition of literacy with reading itself. Reading is an activity with several motivations, including learning and self-improvement, challenging ourselves, reinforcing and affirming existing ideas and knowledge, and the all-important reading for pleasure. A part of learning how to read is not just sequential progression, but also includes re-reading and exploring a range of materials and forms that might fall beneath the reader's current ability level, but nonetheless allows the discernment of different styles and techniques. This is often what makes reading a desirable pastime as opposed to simply being a skill that is held.

As children learn, it is important not to solely emphasise progressing through complexity of language and construction. Natural reading habits also include re-reading and exploring a range of materials and forms that may well fall below an individual's ability level but that nonetheless allow the discernment of different styles and techniques.

Visual literacy in particular often relies on a slower, more careful reading style. In order to extract detail and understanding, readers should take time to consider the levels and layers at work, to recognise the different patterns and references, and to appreciate the choice of style, construction and composition that can influence meaning. Caldecott winning illustrator, David Wiesner (2012), describes the way reading pictures forms a vital and multi-levelled approach to reading:

What is knowledge?

We all are aware that we are living in the Information Age, just as there have been ages of hunting and gathering, of agriculture and of industry in the preceding centuries and millennia. Information and knowledge shape our lives and our society in many ways.

This is now increasingly reflected in scholarship: terms such as information architecture, knowledge management and knowledge representation are increasingly common in the titles of conferences, books and educational programs. This book contributes yet another tile to this mosaic, by dealing with the conceptual arrange - ment of knowledge content.

However, before we get down to details we need to get a clear idea of what we are talking about. Obviously, this is a requirement in any domain, but it is even more necessary in the present case, as terms such as those used above, although suggestive, cover a particularly wide and fuzzy semantic space. When people from outside our field ask me about my research domain and I answer ‘knowledge organization’, their faces often express a mix of polite deference and perplexity about what exactly am I referring to.

Let us start with the first half of the term. What do we mean by knowledge?

Knowledge as representation of networks

Intuitively, we are aware that knowledge often refers to someone knowing something – that is, having developed some internal representation of certain external objects. That Maria knows the story of Christopher Columbus means that her mind has some representation of a sequence of events involving the navigator and his actions which led to the rediscovery of the Americas by Europeans.

The representation consists in a model of some set of entities and of links among them. While Columbus, his sailors, his maps and his ships were made of material substances, the notions in Maria's mind are immaterial ideas, recorded in a complex system of neural connections. Still, the material entities and the ideas modeling them are similar in terms of the network of relationships between their parts – they are isomorphic. Knowledge is thus a (usually simplified) reproduction of relationship networks in a different substrate. (This description differs from traditional philosophical definitions of knowledge as ‘true and justified belief ‘, although ‘truth’ corresponds in our description to isomorphism; a model that does not correspond to the represented object is a ‘false’ one.)

Theories are needed

In everyday life we use many kinds of KO systems without reflecting about it. We quickly browse menus in a pizzeria or services on a government website without paying attention to the fact that they are sorted by some principle: pizzas may be listed by increasing price, by ingredients or in alphabetical order; public services may be ordered according to the different life stages (services for children, for occupations, for old people and so on) or by the offices and departments dealing with them.

A famous book on information architecture (Krug, 2014) is titled Don't Make Me Think! It represents a view common among interface designers: users should not waste their time in understanding which KO principles have been adopted, but should use them in intuitive ways to quickly get to the content they need. This is correct from a functional viewpoint. After all, we do not need to know how a watch works before acquiring the only information relevant to us: what time it is.

However, as we are now considering KO we have to delve into its mechanisms. Think of those watches with transparent cases that were once fashionable, allowing one to see their mechanisms while providing time information remained their main function. Why not offer knowledge organized in effective ways, and at the same time allow curious users to peer into the mechanism and understand how and why is it organized in those ways?

The mechanisms of KO are its structuring principles and devices, which we will treat in the next chapter, while the theories that inform them are the topic of this chapter. Like the watch mechanism, theories and devices are often nonexplicit. Still, they exist and are necessary, because any way of organizing knowledge implies some theory of knowledge and its structures.

Clare Beghtol, an important writer on KO theory, contrasted the systems developed for the retrieval of already available knowledge, which are based on explicit principles developed by experts in KO, with the ‘naive’ systems that organize new knowledge and are developed by people with no particular interest in KO (Beghtol, 2003). Hjørland and Nicolaisen (2004) replied to this that the contrast is only apparent, because even ‘naive’ systems are based on some principle. No system can be truly atheoretical (Hjørland, 2016).

Organizing phenomena

In this final chapter we will consider how the principles and techniques of KO can be applied in practice to the variety of knowledge resources. We start again with the first dimension of knowledge that is relevant to KO: classes of phenomena.

One simple need of human knowledge is to organize its objects into manageable groups, to be discussed and further examined. In all sciences an important component is what is variously called ‘systematics’, ‘taxonomy’ or ‘classification’ of the phenomena studied. In our review of KOS types we saw that the term taxonomies is often adopted for hierarchical systems of objects, such as plants, wines or cars, as distinguished from systems of document subjects (see section 4.4.2).

For example, systematic biology is the branch of biology dealing with the ordering, listing and nomenclature of the different kinds of organisms. Systematic biology produces hierarchical KOSs of animals, plants, fungi, etc. that are biological taxonomies. The term classification in this field is usually reserved to the act of identifying the species and the higher groups (taxa) to which a specimen belongs by inspecting its relevant characters (say, shape of leaves, number and color of petals, etc.) and comparing them with those of groups known in the literature.

Systematics often develops quite early in the history of a science. After some general description, the variety of objects needs to be organized at least in some provisional way in order to get a picture of the field. While animals and plants were already described by simple lists in antiquity, such phenomena as climates, soils or languages have started to be systematized only relatively recently. This is because such objects are more complex and need a greater effort to be defined, identified and compared: for example, while a giraffe is clearly different from an antelope, the dialects of Occitan are articulated systems of spoken sounds that need long research before being described and distinguished from those of Catalan (systematic work in linguistics is known as ‘typology’).

As work proceeds, groups of languages may be identified as part of more general categories, such as Romance languages, in turn grouped in Indo-European languages and so on: in this way a hierarchy of classes and subclasses is developed.

The notion of KOS

In order to perform KO we need some schemes according to which subjects can be ordered. Any such scheme, whether simple or complex, is called a knowledge organization system.

This term is relatively recent, being connected with the increasing acknowledgment of KO as a unified field (see section 1.4.7). It has been spreading especially in the context of information representation and management on the world wide web, where a variety of conceptual tools are now described by this name. People thus discuss networked KOSs in a long-living series of workshops, and publish schemes in the SKOS format (see section 5.4).

In a similar way, the term controlled vocabulary (see section 3.2) is also used. Both a simple list of country names and a rich thesaurus can work as controlled vocabularies, stored in tables that can be related to other tables in the global data network; for example, the name of a product can be associated with the country where it is produced, and the label for the country will be taken from a controlled vocabulary of countries to ensure data consistency. However, the notion of KOS is broader than that of controlled vocabulary, as there are KOSs consisting of non-controlled labels, such as simple keywords.

Actually, schemes for organizing knowledge have existed since long before the term KOS appeared. Some decades ago they were often called indexing languages, as they usually consisted of words (or symbols working in a way similar to words) and worked according to morphological and syntactical rules that can also be found in the grammar of natural languages. Hutchins (1975) has a good discussion of the linguistic properties of KOSs.

Other terms that are often used to generically denote KOSs are classification (especially in a traditional or scientific context), taxonomy (especially in the context of website information architecture) and ontology (especially in computer science). Unfortunately, the term chosen depends more often on the cultural background of the author than on any differences in intended meanings. While all these terms may occasionally be meant as synonyms of KOS, they should properly denote different, specific KOS types. Therefore we will use them in their specific senses, which are discussed in detail in the following sections of this chapter.

Headings in paper catalogs and indexes

The subject of ontologies, which we discussed at the end of the previous chapter, has introduced the problem of the formal representation of KOSs. Although this is especially important in ontologies, some form of representation is also needed for any other KOS. This chapter will briefly discuss the main aspects of this. When titles and headings began to be used to organize manuscript texts (which to begin with were simple strings of words and sentences), these had to be demarcated using some different graphic style. One common style was to use red ink, as opposed to black ink for main text. This practice became known as rubrication, from the Latin rubrum, ‘red’.

Perhaps as a legacy from that time, subject headings were still written in red in some library card catalogs until the 20th century. For centuries, catalogs were kept in the form of books in which the subjects and titles were listed in some order (and we saw in section 1.4.1 something akin to a catalog inscribed on the walls of a library). At the end of the 18th century catalogs written on movable cards were introduced in France. A century later, the Italian businessman Aristide Staderini patented the ‘Vittorio Emanuele Library’ card catalog (named after the National Library in Rome that first adopted it), consisting of cards with holes punched on the left side, by means of which they could be inserted into binders. The catalog consisted of a series of such binders, each covering a section of the alphabetical or systematic order.

Later, the traditional card catalog was developed in which cards with a hole punched in the center of the bottom edge are bound together in a drawer by means of a metal crossbar. The catalog consisted of a set of such drawers arranged in one or more cabinets. Such catalogs can still be seen in many old libraries. Cards of various sizes have been used, but standard measurements became common so that new cards could be purchased or exchanged across different catalogs; the final standard international format was 12.5 × 7.5 cm.

The movable card format made it possible to insert any number of new cards into the appropriate place in the alphabetical sequence of authors or subject headings (in the less common classified catalogs, the order could be a systematic one, by classification notation).

Words in natural language

As mentioned in section 2.2, concepts are the basic units of KO. Concepts classify the variety of experience in individual notions, which can be related to other concepts in information networks. However, concepts are not material entities. In order to be shared and transmitted in a culture through its media, either oral or recorded, they need to be expressed in some way.

The most common way to express concepts is by words; other symbols, like gestures, icons or any shared code, can also work. In a sense, then, words in natural languages are a basic form of KO: when we say that cat, we are classing the phenomenon we observe as an instance of the class of cats.

Words are listed in dictionaries with a definition that describes their meaning. Cat means ‘a small carnivoran mammal with tail …’, etc. Such definitions are intended to enumerate the essential characteristics of a class, according to the classical philosophy of language, which refers to Aristotle's logic. Essential characteristics, such as being a mammal or having a tail, are opposed to accidental ones, such as having an injured nose or enjoying pasta, which may occur but are not necessary in order to be classed as a member of cats.

However, even supposedly essential characteristics may occasionally be missing: a breed of cat from the Isle of Man is tailless. This has led some language psychologists, especially Eleanor Rosch, to argue that classes refer only to prototypes: although the prototypical cat has a tail, certain tailless animals can still be called cats, as they have several other characteristics of the class.

Because many documents are in the form of written texts, their words and phrases can be a starting point for KO. Nowadays words are usually recorded in a digital format, either originally or after a digitalization procedure by optical character recognition. The full text of a document can then be scanned by a search engine for any particular word or combination of words that a user is interested in. Document editors may have emphasized certain words by writing them in italic or bold type, or by putting them in the title, section headings, abstract or keyword list, and searching can exploit this by assuming that these words are especially relevant in that document.

Introduction

A full history of IL remains to be written. A commonly-stated position – so frequently presented that it has become a fundamental trope of the field – is that the concept was created in a 1974 report by Paul Zurkowski, presented to the US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and entitled The Information Service Environment: Relationships and Priorities. In Kelly's eulogy to this work and its author, he writes (2014, 1): ‘The power of Information Literacy was unleashed in 1974 when Paul G. Zurkowski, Esq., founded the IL movement at the dawn of the Information Age.’ The statement is, at best, an exaggeration. Yet, many other writers (Rader, 2002; Eisenberg, Lowe and Spitzer, 2004; Markless and Streatfield, 2007) consider Zurkowski (1974) as such a seminal piece that their histories pay no attention to relevant work that comes before it.

Computerisation may have brought about significant changes to how we work with and learn about information landscapes, but the value of information per se has been recognised for millennia. Socrates recognised ‘that knowledge ought to be applied to conduct in the same way as it was already applied with such success to carpentry, shoemaking or medicine’ (Lindsay, 1906, xii). Plato would ‘persuade those who are to share in the highest affairs of the city to take to calculation, and embrace it in no amateur spirit… until they arrive by the help of sheer intelligence at a vision of the nature of numbers’ (Lindsay, 1906, 219). In other words, he affirms the importance of information, an ability to handle it effectively and an objective, dispassionate viewpoint, when it comes to taking effective decisions and planning (military) strategy.

Information, and by extension those trained in its effective use and application, has always been valuable to power holders. The history of espionage, propaganda and surveillance acknowledges this, whether in wartime and/or in asserting political strength at home. Control over information gathering and dispersal is a key element in how consent to dominant political orders is secured less through overt force and more through the manufacturing of consent, or what Gramsci (1971) called hegemony. Hegemonic processes include control over culture, education and the media. Dahl (1961) included ‘control over information’ in his analysis of key political resources.

Ground-breaking can be an overused and hackneyed phrase but it is entirely true in this case, and an apt pun, for a book that focuses on information landscapes in their infinite variety. But that's not to say that it is narrow in view, this is a much broader treatment on the discourse of information literacy – it is a sure-footed and forensic exploration of the topic. Drew's discussion on the history of information literacy is a very clear break with received wisdom of the past and especially questions the hegemony of thought embodied in powerful Western voices. Drew provides us with a critical overview, in a sense an information literacy of information literacy, which has been sadly lacking but now rectified in this volume. However, it is the notion of the information landscape that defines this work.

When Mark Hepworth and I wrote our book on information literacy, we were very conscious of the ‘information character’ of an information source (whatever that might be), but never fully developed what we meant by that. Drew gives us a clear notion of what information character is through this notion of an information landscape (not as metaphor but as embodied social practice); how we inhabit, map and navigate it to become, not just informed, but to make well-calibrated judgements of the information we encounter. It is notable that Drew draws our attention to the overlooked, and often misunderstood issue by those outside the information profession, that information literacy is not simply about technical competencies, no, it is much more than this. Indeed, it is about our practice as we move through, encounter and use information for whatever purpose.

Information literacy is a social and cognitive set of practices which help us locate ourselves in the world. These practices are contextual (work, education or play), negotiated and re-negotiated and, are not entirely rational. Therein lies a problem, which Drew highlights very eloquently, in effect the limited perspective that information literacy taught in higher education brings. Educators are excellent at enabling or even empowering students to become information literate within the educational context but this does not translate well to the workplace because, like the geographical landscape where mountains and valleys are very different places, the information landscapes of education and work are entirely different too.

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