ABSTRACT
When working on college assignments students frequently ask if they are ‘allowed’ to include visual images in their written work. What the query reveals is an anxiety about images. Interestingly it is not a worry over how to include images, i.e. from a technical point of view, but rather a question about the legitimacy of including images in the first place. Dissertations on visually rich topics from Japanese ukiyo-e prints to computer-generated imagery (CGI), tattoo art, Bollywood films, and nanoart, often banish images to the end of the assignment as appendix material. This handling of images would seem to hark back to a time when printing costs prohibited the reproduction of images, and/or more rudimentary printing processes required images to be handled separately. In fact it is still common in books to find colour images printed as ‘plates’ on high-grade paper and inserted at an arbitrary point in the book (usually without page numbering). However, printing and reproduction technologies allow for more sophisticated handling of both text and image, whether reproduced in full-colour or greyscale. Furthermore, word processor and graphic editing software have become increasingly powerful in manipulating and laying-out the page.
