Lesson 9: Visuals and Ethics


Copyright and Visuals

When you would like to use visuals in your personal life, your professional life, or in the instruction that you create, there are certain things you may have to take into account to avoid copyright infringements. While creating your own images may seem to be the best solution to avoid any copyright infringements, this is not always possible or desirable. Sometimes you may be faced with constraints, such as lack of budget or lack of equipment to create the images you need. In addition, the creation of visuals often takes a lot of time, which you may not always have. For these reasons, you may therefore want to use existing visuals in your work.

Before you simply decide to copy an image you find on the internet or any other source, you have to consider legal and ethical standards surrounding the use of the image. According to Curtis Newbold (2014), it is therefore important to become familiar with the following four terms: Copyright, fair use, creative commons, and public domain. While these terms and laws for using copyrighted images are rather complex, Newbold (2014) created a useful chart that can help you find out whether you can use an image that you have found. Use this visual as a guideline. When in doubt, always contact the copyright holder and look up the specific copyright laws pertaining to the visuals that you are using.


Source: http://thevisualcommunicationguy.com/2014/07/14/can-i-use-that-picture/

Using visuals in your teaching

When you design instruction or teach a class, you may not always know which visuals you can share with your students and which visuals you cannot share. The Association of Research Libraries (2007) has developed a short document that may help you make these decisions for both face-to-face instruction and distance education. You can read their document by following this link.

Using visuals for academic purposes

In the field of Instructional Design and Technology, we adhere to APA style for citation purposes. Whenever you use any visuals in your academic writing, you should therefore cite them using APA style. When you are writing an academic paper that you plan to publish (either in print or electronic form), simply citing your source is not enough, however. For publishing purposes, it is necessary to try to get written permission from the copyright holder for the reuse of the visual (American Psychological Association [APA], 2010). When you have obtained this copyright permission, you should also acknowledge the author and the copyright holder in the figure caption (APA, 2010). If you use images in your work that are taken by a photographer, you may also need to obtain permission from him or her to use the images. When you add a visual to an academic paper, this is how you would cite it according to APA style:


Figure X. Title. From “Title,” by A. A. Author and A. A. Author, Year, Journal/Publisher, p. xx. Copyright Year by source. Reprinted with permission.

A concrete example of a citation of a visual would therefore be:

Figure 1. Pyramid of media literacy competences. From “Media literacy and new humanism,” by J. M. P. Tornero, and T. Varis, 2010, Moscow, Russia: UNESCO/International Institute of Technology for Education, p. 74. Copyright 2010 by UNESCO IITE. Reprinted with permission.

For publications, such as dissertations or journal articles, you often also need to provide evidence that you actually obtained copyright permission. It is therefore important to keep a copy of the written permission that you have obtained from the copyright holder. This could be a letter or email from the copyright holder. Virginia Tech provides a sample letter that you can use to send to the copyright holder for images you would like to use in your thesis or dissertation. You can find this sample letter here.


Assignment 9: Visual Ethics


Description

  1. In your personal and professional life you are likely using or creating visuals regularly. Please describe an ethical issue that you have faced or that you may realistically face in the future. Explain how you have solved would solve this issue in an ethical way.
  2. In the paper by DeVoss and Platt (2011), you saw many examples of ethical issues related to visuals. Find two images that have been manipulated in a way that it may raise ethical issues and add the images to your Word document. Carefully analyze these two images by answering the following questions (in approximately 2 pages per image):
    1. Who made this visual (or who do you think made this visual if the author is unknown)?
    2. What is the purpose of this visual?
    3. How is the image altered to convey specific ideas or meaning (what techniques are used)?
    4. Which values and ideologies are (implicitly) conveyed by the manipulated visual?
    5. Which ethical issues could be raised by the manipulation of this visual for specific individuals, communities, or cultures?
    6. To what extent do the values and ideologies conveyed by the visual align with your personal values, ideologies, and ethical practices?

Submitting Your Assignment

At the end of this lesson you will submit your completed assignment. Assignment 9 should be prepared using Microsoft Word. At the top of your Word file, you should have the lesson name, and underneath that should be your name, email address, and the date. When you save the document as a file on your computer, make sure the file is named “Assignment9”. After you have saved your file, go to the student interface and submit your assignment for grading. Click here if you need additional information regarding the submission of your assignment.


Grading Criteria

  • Identified an ethical issue related to the use of visuals in your personal or professional life (3)
  • Provides an appropriate ethical solution to the issue (3)
  • Image 1: In-depth responses to all six questions show a clear understanding of the impact of image manipulation and the ethical issues surrounding the visual (7)
  • Image 2: In-depth responses to all six questions show a clear understanding of the impact of image manipulation and the ethical issues surrounding the visual (7)

Points: 20