Representing Academic Disciplines on Academic Book Covers

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of technological inventions, visual communication has become a scientific field that has greatly impacted the design of book covers, which were, mainly used to keep the pages of a book together. This study investigates the meaning(s) that visuals on academic book covers instigate in viewers. It primarily focuses on the interactions between the visual image and the book title, and how such an interaction yields in more “contextual implications”. It also examines the dominant visual images on academic book covers, viewers’ ability to tell the academic discipline of the book from the visual, the connection between the book title and the visual, and the impact of the academic discipline on the choice of the visual image. Results show that understanding the meaning of images needs to be always related to, or in some way dependent on, verbal texts to provide a more substantive interpretation of the meaning of visuals on academic book covers. Results also suggest that that the visual is subordinated in terms of its semiotic function to the verbal text, which it illustrates. Results further indicate that visuals on book covers are driven by the nature of the academic discipline of the book.