Crossing the (Visual) Lines. Conceptualization of the Notion of Occupation in the Czech Modern History through Visual Representations
Abstract
The photography represents a key media, which has become a primary visual source of the reproduction of historical knowledge in the field of history education. This obvious trend, which leads to the inclusion of increasing number of visuals (photographs as well as illustrations or maps) into educational materials, reflects a general inclination of contemporary culture towards emphasizing the use of visual communication.
Despite the fact how extensive change had been brought by the pictorial turn into the disciplines of history, memory studies and history education, the importance of visual media for the history education has not been fully examined yet. It stays rather overlooked and underdeveloped from the theoretical as well as from the methodological point of view.
Through the media of photography, this chapter points out a relationship of visual and historical literacy. Based on a practical example of visually oriented research, it offers a tool how the content as well as the context of photography as educational media can be analyzed based on a mixed method approach.
The text has been centered around two main research issues. Firstly, it examines how three different educational media - textbook(s), online educational portal and museum exhibition - work with the media of photography in terms of its display, remediation and contextualization.
Specifically, it analyses the photographs depicting two crucial events of the Czech modern history - the Nazi occupation (1939) and the Soviet occupation (1968) - which have been displayed in the context of these three educational media. Secondly, it compares the set of photographs of the Nazi occupation with the set of photographs of the Soviet occupation in order to explore if any common visual features have been shared by these events, and thus if, potentially, a set of significant signs representing a historical event of "Occupation" exists.