Drawing upon visual ethnographic research carried out in two Spanish cities between 2015 and 2018, this visual essay explores the ability of street art to speak about violence against women. Posters, wall writings and stencils represent both visual communication and political expression that can give an insight into this gender-based phenomenon. Street art pieces are linked to broader social contexts

Industry and governments have deployed computer vision models to make high-stake decisions in society. While they are often presented as neutral and objective, scholars have recognized that bias in these models might lead to the reproduction of racial, social, cultural and economic inequity. A growing body of work situates the provenance of bias in the collection and annotation of datasets that are

In this research article, graphical analytics is presented as a method for the investigation of page/layout- and image-based materials. This approach is used to analyse image composition, image constellations and the layout of the examined books, and it facilitates a comparison across several books within a single visualization. The methodology is introduced and the epistemology explained, along with

This study explores the representations of female captives and survivors of Boko Haram in what the authors define as a transmedia project formed by an ensemble of interconnected multi-modal/media productions circulated through off- and online spaces, and merging photojournalism and humanitarian markets. The authors draw on semiotic analytical tools in unravelling the process of meaning-making and point

Musical numbers, as viral modes of entertainment, influential forms of visual culture and catalysts of popular discourse are dense with multivariate aesthetic performers, and are interlaced to punctuate the melodramatic narrative texture in advancement of the plot and characterization in musical films. Performing identity through dancing bodies has been the subject of several film, music, culture,

We’ve been so proud of the second-only editorial team for Visual Communication, but already the seismic shifts that move us all from time to time have impacted not one but three of our colleagues. All in a good way for them! Elisabetta Adami, Gunhild Kvåle and Francisco Veloso have moved on to other roles and other places that take them away from us. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts for

Multimodal graffiti are constrained by the environment in which they are written and by the activities in which graffiti writing takes place. This article examines graffiti collected in Graffiti Park and Nam Van Lake Underground in Macao. The graffiti in the two sites display systematic differences in topics, objectives, subjects, affordance, texture and framing, which are attributed to varied activity

Media professionals make use of various production techniques in the visual portrayal of politicians on television. A large body of literature indicates that these techniques exert varying influence on, for example, the evaluation of these actors, leading to the question of whether politicians are depicted in an equal way. Focusing on televised debates, this content analysis of five German debates

In compulsory education in Chile, Deaf students and their teachers must navigate through an educational system that relies heavily on verbal language to validate and communicate knowledge. Most educational resources available to students have been produced for and within a hearing community, privileging sound and written verbal materials over other ways of exchanging knowledge. In this practitioner

In February 2018, after three years of design and development work, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Weather launched its redesigned service across multiple platforms. The project involved new ways of cross-disciplinary communication design working across broadcast and digital services. This research examines these innovations and considers the transcorporeality of our relationship with weather

For over half a century, the ‘imagining’ of the Great War in the UK has been framed by the existence of two Western Fronts, one literary and the other historical. The authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, whose work has traditionally reflected a society’s values and pre-occupations, have remained remarkably faithful to the literary construct of the war as a futile and meaningless conflict

Military-themed videogames are significant cultural artifacts that shape popular geopolitical narratives and venerate dominant post-9/11 War on Terror discourses. Overwhelmingly resonant with the Military Entertainment Complex, these artifacts, not excluding America’s Army (2002–2013), envision the world through a Western lens. Over the past decades, America’s Army has come to challenge dominant orthodoxies

Research in fields such as multimodality and semiotics has focused on creation of value in different forms: aesthetic, economic and symbolic. However, the destruction of value has attracted much less attention. The aim of this article is to identify social, semiotic and ideological functions of acts of destruction based on an analysis of the traces these acts leave on the urban environment. Five overarching

This article examines how the use of emergent smart baby monitors re-mediates parent–baby touch, notions of connection, parental sensing and the interpretation of babies’ bodies, and contributes to the formation of subjectivities. Domestic baby monitors are a mid 20th-century phenomenon which normalizes parental anxieties. While baby monitoring is not new, the ‘next generation’ of wearable bio-sensing

This article employs a practice-led methodology to offer a creative examination of the digital trends, online practices, and shifting aesthetics of political documentary as it migrates in the interstices of social media. At the centre of this research is the production and circulation of Facebook-native microdocumentaries, labelled under the rubric of compact cinematics and radical videos. As a networked

Visual identities can be constructed from a number of elements which together can be described as the Visual Identity System (VIS). Typography is one of the VIS’s central elements. Typically, the VIS elements have been considered as static and associated with prescribable visual mandates; however, the hypermodernity paradigm boosted the notion of mobility in everything – and brands are no exception

The Irish state and Catholic Church established Magdalene laundries and Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. These institutions forcibly housed unwed women who became pregnant, the last of which closed in 1996. It is estimated that 35,000 women were forced into these institutions and 6,000 babies died in their care. In 2014, a mass grave of babies and children was found in the septic tank at Bon Secours

This article proposes a framework for analyzing visual discourses of disability in press photographs: the Visual Discourses of Disability (ViDD) framework. The development of this framework is based on an analysis of 670 news photographs of disability published in a Malaysian English-language mainstream newspaper. Within the ViDD, the authors propose the notion of perspectivization of disability: how

The Discourse of Physics: Building Knowledge through Language, Mathematics and Image by Yaegan Doran is a recent volume in the series Routledge Studies in Multimodality. The book draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to explore the multimodal nature of physics and offers descriptions of its three key semiotic resources – language, mathematics and image. Complementing the description, the book

Among the different dimensions of visual experience that schools organize, model and reproduce, time is one of the least researched. Through the analysis of four images from four different elementary schools in Santiago, Chile, this visual essay explores ways in which the visual culture of schools refers to time, both as an organizational variable and as an interpersonal condition that, in turn, can

This article explores how digital intimacy is construed through ambient embodied copresence in ‘personal attention’ role play videos, a type of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) video that has become popular on YouTube. ASMR is the experience of positive sensations in response to visual and aural stimuli. Online video sharing platforms have provided a way for people who experience these ASMR

Understanding wind is an important part of understanding Country. Winds bring change, knowledge and emotions. Connected to the winds are budyaan, or the birds, who know the winds best. This visual essay traces the development of Wiradjuri dhawura gulbanha (Wiradjuri wind philosophy), a project conceived with Dr Uncle Stan Grant AM, a senior Wiradjuri elder and knowledge holder. Throughout this visual

In the first quarter of the 20th century, luminous neon signs paved the way for the multiscreen aesthetics now punctuating major intersections in metropolises around the world. And yet, these epicenters of spectacle currently bear little or no neon themselves. This article draws from visual studies and histories of electricity to chart a unique material history of neon from novelty to norm, to obsolescence

It is January 2020. Sydney is full of smoke and full of birds. In an inner-city park, near a pond, corellas scratch the crispy grass looking for a feed. Ibis are ever present, but their number has multiplied. A tiny nature reserve only a few kms from the CBD is now home to magpies, currawongs, owls, pelicans and ravens. For the past month a friend has been sending daily photos of a previously uninhabited

Digital photography is deeply embedded in people’s daily lives, as camera phones and digital compact cameras are widely used in social and cultural settings. People have an increased agency and choice over what they want to photograph, where and when; many people carry their smartphones everywhere and share their images instantly via social media platforms. Within the recent scholarship on everyday

This article focuses on the multimodal design process for a set of Valentine’s Day postage stamps. It shows how semiotic resources were used to create the overall mood of the design. In particular, the style of the images made the general mood melancholic. During the process, the design was adapted to a commercial Valentine’s Day context through changes in specific resources.

The visual imaginary of the future city is increasingly dichotomized between visions of hyper-technological digital urbanism and the city in a state of ruin, without people, overtaken by nature. These alternating imaginaries key into concerns over urban futures, as questions of sustainability and rising inequality come to bear on urban life. Such binary imaginaries produce volumes of visual material

The Australian White Ibis (Ibis) (Threskiornis molucca) is one of three endemic Ibis species in Australia. In a short time frame beginning in the 1970s, this species has moved from inland waterways to urban centres along the eastern and southeastern seaboards, Darwin and the Western Australian southwest. Today Ibis are at home in cities across the country, where they thrive on the food waste, water

Adopting a multimodal social semiotic approach, this study investigates the resemiotization of the story of Huineng in two theatrical performances, the opera Snow in August performed in Taipei in 2002, and the musical theater The Sixth Patriarch Huineng performed in Shanghai in 2007. Although both claim to have been based on the historical record of Huineng, especially the Platform Sutra, significant

Mapping and fitness apps, government agencies and departments, and citizen science projects provide a wealth of data on urban green spaces, charting parks, reserves, and green corridors in and around Sydney. These maps represent vegetation as surface and, as Doreen Massey in the 2005 book For Space noted about other types of Western maps, detach the observer from the object of their gaze. The authors

The case study presented in this article developed an improved intervention for visually communicating with persons diagnosed with a communication disorder known as aphasia. The Visual Interactive Narrative Intervention (VINI) assists health-care providers in educating post-stroke persons with aphasia (PWA) about their stroke, symptoms, rehabilitation options, and quality of life issues. Visual communication

This research employs visual narrative as a tool in processing past trauma and perceptions of an irradiated, contaminated and contagious stigma that created social barriers for residents of Fukushima Prefecture in a post-nuclear disaster context. Residents from Shinchimachi, a village 50km north of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, felt that the media’s limited portrayal of their village diminished

This article demonstrates the power of employing alternative, interpretative analysis techniques in ethnographic work. The author argues for the role of sensory interpretation as a valid and necessary method of analytical enquiry, particularly to challenge existing dominant, primarily written discourses that often strive for unrealistic empirical objectivity. In order to make this argument, he demonstrates

Despite well documented benefits of dual language (DL) programs which deliver educational content in two languages, there are still few DL programs in the United States. As such, there is a need to...

Photojournalism professionals play a key role in producing and choosing the visual coverage that we see in the daily news media. This article focuses on photo editors and other photojournalism prof...

Germs have been visually represented in popular texts for over 100 years, yet little is understood about the dominant practices/concepts resident in such images. This article presents a new typolog...

This article investigates a semiotic phenomenon within the global fashion industry: the branding of designer jeans as ‘authentic’ and ‘genuinely local’, focusing on the Swedish brand Sarva. Drawing...

Photo sharing has become a routine everyday practice and an object of increasing scholarly interest in visual communication research. Previous studies focused on single photo-sharing practices and ...

This visual essay explores the anatomy of model trees and the beauty evident in their creation. The aim is to explore the interpretive aspect that both drives and allows for this inventive exploration of trees. The authors highlight the important interplay between landscape, botany, architecture, art, and design, all of which will aid readers in formulating their own vision of trees.

This article discusses how popular culture products – digital greeting cards – interact with hegemonic historical narratives in the context of war remembrance. It employs the Foucauldian concept of...

The Graphics of Carving is a study of infographics - images used to teach a skill. Carving was once considered a vital accomplishment because it involved issues of social status, etiquette and hygi...

Visual media representations of protests are a part of politics in general. A protest is about creating a mediated political event with its own performative bodily and emotional aspects, and cultur...

Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen’s term ‘semogenesis’ refers to how meaning potentials are created through processes on many co-occurring time frames, most prominently those referred to a...

This article analyses how pre-internet historical images of atrocity are used on social media in the era of misinformation, disinformation and a rising radical right. Combining scholarship in cultu...

Signs in public space reflect ‘normalcy’ in a community. The authors ask what restricting signs tell us about a society? In order to explore the system and variation in the ways dog signs manifest ...

This article compares the use of metaphors in breast and lung cancer awareness advertisements in order to examine the positioning and identity construction of the respective cancer patients. A sema...

Gunther Rolf Kress passed away suddenly as we gathered in Rome, June 2019, to attend the A-MODE conference at which he was to give a keynote speech. To celebrate his tremendous contribution, particularly to visual communication (see Bezemer, 2019, for an overview of Gunther’s work), we return to some visuals that we worked on with Gunther to begin to reflect upon and explore how to take his legacy

This visual essay, along with the Black Screens photographic series upon which it is based, has two aims. On the one hand, it is intended as a visual exploration of the increasingly central role th...

Research on (verbo-)pictorial metaphors and other rhetorical figures is primarily focused on the genre of advertising, leaving other genres under-investigated. In this study, the authors focus on s...

This article explores the social implications of the page layouts of ‘inventory books’, a series of non-fiction mass-market paperbacks published during the 1960s and 70s that employed eccentric pri...

Negative perception of scientists is disquieting for the future of science and US economic and scientific competitiveness. Drawing on studies suggesting that warmth guides people’s judgments of soc...

In this article, the authors argue that typography at times functions as a primary semiotic resource when compared to the semantic meaning of text. The central inquiry further claims that this phen...

In the wake of growing legalization efforts, both medicinal and recreational marijuana use in the US is becoming more prevalent and societally acceptable. However, racial, criminal and cultural stereotypes linger in mediated visual portrayals. This study examines the extent to which mediated visual portrayals in mainstream news have been impacted by these recent legalization efforts. Employing a quantitative

Discourses on storage and clutter have become central issues in contemporary domestic space. The anxiety caused by accumulation and disorder are directly related to the progressive entry of goods into homes. Now, what happens in the case of some elderly homeowners whose lifestyles have changed little over the past decades and have a much different relationship to current consumer culture and domestic

Research methods and analytical approaches that support inquiry in the social sciences need to respond to continual changes in the theoretical frameworks, research methods, and technologies used to...

In this article, the authors analyse a selection of 30 online visual artworks in order to identify conceptual metaphors related to the target domain of DEPRESSION. While a lot of research has ident...

This article considers the ways in which displaced artists represent the experience of displacement, their cultural traditions and the longing for home through paintings and how, by doing so, they ...

With the development of visual digital technologies it has become more common in the social sciences to both use and present research visually. This article explores different strategies for workin...

This article examines the interaction between deaf and hearing interlocutors in order to demonstrate how understanding (and misunderstanding) can be expressed and inspected through the situated use...

Studies into affective publics often involve textual communication. However, emotive communication is increasingly visual. This study zooms in on the representation of the suffering other in seven ...