A Cross-Disciplinary Bibliography on Visual Languages for Information Sharing and Archiving

: This bibliography offers citations for people who are interested in learning more about visual language, new types of communicating and archiving information with emphases on novel technologies and theoretical works in these multidisciplinary areas. This bibliography is considered in its broadest sense and covers references of research in humanities and social sciences as well as computer technology. Far from being exhaustive, it nevertheless covers essential resources in a selective way, so that the material can provide starting points for many different directions. What is not included here are references to visual programming languages.


A Introduction
In [MSC03] we gave an introduction in the scientific backgrounds and the historic development and significance of various aspects of visual communication.We also investigated current and future computer technologies with respect to their potential to support visual person-to-person communication and archiving of visual information.In the course of this work we found that very little cross-disciplinary research has been done so far on these issues and also, that in our own work we had just "scratched the surface".However, vast resources exist in numerous fields that are worth to be considered when acting in this area.
The purpose of this bibliography is to make available a first list of what we think is the most important literature on the relevant topics.We cover wide ranges in a number of "thematic dimensions", from foundations to history to applications, to technical development and its implications.In general, we attached great importance to a well-balanced presentation of resources from the main fields of humanities and technology.
Because the materials listed here can very often be assigned to more than one field, categorization (not to mention restriction to the essential) was not an easy task.In our approximation we followed pragmatic considerations and always kept in mind the focus and context of this work: the purpose of this bibliography is to support the Stafford, Barbara Maria: Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images.MIT Press, Cambridge 1996.

Linguistics
Linguistics is a vast field.It is the scientific study of language in general and specific languages in particular.It is concerned with the study of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and disorders, historical linguistics and many other important issues, like psycholinguistics and computer linguistics.A number of these sub-fields are relevant in our context of visual communication.

General Aspects and Basics
This section covers introductions to contemporary linguistic theories and methods of linguistic analysis.Some books draw the attention on language, cognition and mind.

Sign Languages of the Deaf
Sign languages are the natural language of deaf people.This form of non-verbal communication has been developed by deaf people throughout the world.It started with simple hand gestures to express words, to the many complex sign languages throughout the world today.Latin Bibles from the 10 th century already show drawings of finger spellings.As purely visual, dynamic languages that do not require any specific artificial medium they represent an intersection of linguistic and pictorial issues (including movement) that is particularly relevant in our context.
This section covers the core of this bibliography: all computer related issues necessary to understand, develop and apply computer technology with the aim of supporting with visual tools the communication between humans and the creation and archiving of visual materials.This includes visual digital media (with a focus on visual computer interaction) but also touches computer related language issues.What we did not include here (or at any other place in this bibliography) are references to visual programming languages.This is a large field in itself, often hiding all other aspects of visual languages which are numerous.

Computer-Mediated Visual Interaction and Communication
This comprehensive category includes a few general references on visual aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and visual information systems (how can visual information be retrieved from computer systems).The focus, however, is on particular issues of graphic, iconic -in general visual -information related to computer technology.Note the two different motivations behind visual humancomputer interaction.Users might need to interact with computers in order to use particular software or they might want to use a computer as a medium to communicate with fellow humans.The latter is the case we focus on but naturally the two fields often intersect heavily.
van Wijngaarden, Aad.: Orthogonal Design and Description of a Formal language.Technical report, MR 76.Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam 1965.