Iconic turn

From Geography

The term iconic turn, also called the pictorial turn refers to the change in science in which icons and pictures became an important element in research. Through studing and analyzing images, scientists try to get new knowledge. It's a turn that started in the last half of the twentieth century and took a flight through the attendance and expansion of the internet. This is mainly why the use of image-processing procedures and techniques and their products – photographs, aerial photographs, satellite images, maps – and the application of GIS and GPS, so-called “geomatics”, are taken for granted in academic geographical practice today (Schlottmann & Miggelbrink, 2009). The iconic turn involves, like the other big turns in philosophy and science, new sets of questions, rescaling of perspectives, adopting new research techniques and refocusing attention. It's an interdiciplinary shift in which the science 'meets' with, art, culture, society and history. It is not so much an expression of a new interest in images, visuality, or, more generally, sensory perceptions, because these are virtually constitutive of the subject. Instead it is a manifestation of the attempt to deal critically and reflectively with geographical visualisations, as well as to take into account the significance of visuality in the constitution of spatio-temporal realities (Schlottmann & Miggelbrink, 2009). The iconic turn runs analog to the Linguistic turn.

References

• Alexander, J.C., Bartmanski, D., & Giesen, B. (2012). Iconic power materiality and meaning in social life. Palgrave Macmillan: New York.
• http://www.iconicturn.de
• Schlottmann, A., Miggelbrink, J. (2009). Visual Geographies - an editorial. Social Geography Net, found on http://www.soc-geogr.net/4/1/2009/sg-4-1-2009.pdf (24 October 2012)

Contributors

• Page created by Lars Paardekooper 22 October 2012

• Page edited by Rens Mennen --RensMennen 16:06, 24 October 2012 (CEST)