Blog Post 3: Research Gaps

Having recently turned in my literature review, I will now turn to the relationship between technical drawings, diagrams, and illustrations and visual encyclopedias — a relationship not addressed by name. To be fair, there is much existing scholarship on technical, diagrams, and illustrations, given their importance clarifying and elucidating the anatomy, inner workings, and other aspects of various objects, items, and mechanisms. The techniques and visual rhetoric encoded in their usage is highly varied — cross-sections, cutaways, exploded-view drawings, and so on and so forth — and can be used to explain any subject matter that involves machinery, structures, or processeses (which is essentially all of them). Combined with increased demand for technical-communication deliverables and materials spurred by technological innovation (such as the Digital Revolution), and the modern landscape is awash in scholarship that not only analyzes, contextualizes, and discusses technical drawings, diagrams, and illustrations as artifacts of interest in of themselves, but also recommends guidelines, best practices, and other input, as well as reconciling and synthesizing it with other fields and disciplines.

More perplexing, however, is the lack of scholarship on visual encyclopedias. Although encyclopedias themselves are readily available (both online and in print form), there is to my knowledge no noticeable scholarship on the visual rhetoric within visual encyclopedias. This discrepancy can seem surprising and counterintuitive, as encyclopedias serve as general-purpose reference books that compile an entire field of knowledge's definitions, facts, concepts, and other elements into a "book-bound" list of entries, which often expand on them and provide additional background information (if mainly on a surface level). Naturally, photos, illustrations, and other visual aids follow and depict the subject further, making visual aids — and their size, spacing, placement, design, and other features — and therefore, the visual rhetoric they convey — a core and highly strategic element of visual encyclopedias.

Nonetheless, scholarship that explores the role and inclusion of these visual aids (technical drawings, diagrams, and illustrations especially) within a visual-encyclopedia format remains absent, a research gap that I aim to fill. Per the above, I have had to synthesize from preexisting scholarship that is available and cohere a thesis and research foundation together, though my research proposal will specify and finalize methods for illuminating the relationship between technical drawings, diagrams, and illustrations and visual encyclopedias, as well as the visual-rhetoric considerations that shape their creation and audience responses, behaviors, and takeaways and interpretations that result from these.