Choosing Images for Blogposts and Slides

I recently attended a workshop by Paul Prinsloo (of the University of South Africa, UNISA) at my institution. He started the workshop by telling us about his process of choosing the image for his title slide – that he chose to replace an image of Aristotle by one of a Hellinistic female scholar who lived in Alexandria, Egypt: Hypatia. He spoke about how our choices of image expresses a rhetoric, and conveys a message about our values. Himself being an African, presenting in Africa, he made a conscious choice to not go with the default image of an ancient white male thinker, and made a more thoughtful choice instead. Although I always knew this, it made me more conscious of my own choices. It reminded me that I often feel uncomfortable getting images from Flickr or Pixabay of people doing something, if I can possibly get photos that I myself took from my own context.

I remembered that when I publish something outside my own blogging spaces, and I don’t have control over the images used, I feel frustrated (I’m so glad I get to choose my own images for Prof Hacker) because images set the mood for an article or a slide, and it can also convey your values (e.g. some images would not sit well with my feminist values, or my religious values, or my attitudes towards race).

I was working on slides for a workshop, and I realized how the act of choosing each picture was in itself contributing to my thinking about the workshop. I think about keywords to use, which may not always be exactly the same words on the slide – and sometimes seeing an image makes me think about something more than what I had initially intended to say.

For example, this image for listening, makes me think of a lot more than just listening. They are two male bronze statues listening through a brick wall – it does not give the impression of empathic listening, for example, but rather (to me) a kind of eavesdropping. It also reminds me of a presentation I saw recently where someone used it (Paul again, I think).

Image credit: Pixabay shared under CC0 license.

Some tips for choosing images:

1. The first person who helped me think carefully about how to choose images for a blogpost was Alan Levine. For some tips on how to go about choosing images, see Alan Levine’s “ImageSeeking for Fantastic Visual Metaphors”.

2. If you don’t have the time to keep searching for images for your slides, Haikudeck makes this process so much easier and automatically does the citations for you (I wrote about it here).

3. To make sure you find Creative Commons licensed images, search different places by starting with http://search.creativecommons.org

4. If you use Flickr, you can save time on citations by using Alan Levine’s Flickr attribution helper.

While writing this brief list of tips, I realized it might be useful to share with students to help promote their digital literacy in the use of images for their blogs – they always, always, forget to check about copyright and often forget to attribute – every semester, every age group. but they also do not always use images that make me think. If this were a class exercise, I would add in an exercise where students look at images chosen for particular articles on the web or for memes and what kind of hidden messages they convey.

How do you choose images for your blogposts and slides? What tips do you have for others? Tell us in the comments!

[Featured image: Paul Prinsloo giving a workshop at the American University in Cairo. Taken by Maha Bali.]