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Intersemiotic emergence in sketchbook-mediated design learning Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 D.A. Restrepo-Quevedo, Roberto Cuervo, Juanita Gonzalez-Tobon, Jorge Camacho, Edgar Hernandez
This article presents the concept of intersemiotic emergence as a didactic strategy for design learning, discussed from the perspective of social semiotics and communication studies. With this strategy, students orchestrate autotelic relationships using modes and personalized semiotic resources. The primary value of intersemiotic emergence lies in its efficiency in making sense of the lecturer’s concepts
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Visual-related conflicts in close relationships Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Federico Lucchesi, Katharina Lobinger
This study explores visual-related conflicts, that is, interpersonal conflicts arising from the problematic use of visual communication and visual practices in close relationships. A total of 90 semi-structured pair and individual in-depth interviews with romantic partners and friends were conducted by applying a repertoire-oriented approach. The article explores how the polysemic nature of visuals
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A computer-assisted analysis of image representations of obesity: comparing UK news content with the World Obesity Federation Image Bank Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Luke C Collins, Paul Baker
Visual representations in news media contribute to the social construction of health concerns such as obesity. Media representations of obesity, however, have been shown to be stigmatizing, focusing on disembodied abdomens or depicting people in ill-fitting clothing, for example. In addition, analyses of image representations have typically focused on small datasets and relied upon inductive thematic
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Representing Her Trajectory: reflections on an arts-based research on women migration and data visualization Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Hong Zeng
In recent decades, women have increasingly left their countries of origin, leading to an increase in transnational migration. Her Trajectory (2020), a project created by the author, represents women migrants’ paths, affects and experiences through counter-mapping and data visualization. Presented in web form (see https://hertrajectory.com/ ), this arts-based research project shows the migratory trajectories
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Photographic ways of seeing: corporeal defamiliarizations within the mirror medium Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Lin Wei
This visual essay investigates two photographic techniques to challenge pre-existing notions of the human body that are derived from people’s locally consistent set of beliefs about bodily proportions, shapes and functions. These techniques centre around the mirror as the medium to investigate peculiar visual representations that take aim at normative concepts of what constitutes the human. The essay
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Authentic Roman type: historical legacies in contemporary Rome’s city brand Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Stefano Presutti
Typography has always played a key role in the creation of visual identity for socio-political or commercial purposes. Today there is a growing awareness that typographic features convey social meanings in brand logos of a specific territory and community. This study examines how the idea of authenticity related to the history of the city of Rome can be visually transmitted by the presence of traditional
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Literate matterings: young artists creating and talking about photography and meaning Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-04-28 AMANDA R SMITH
In this visual essay, both photographs and talk are presented as four teenage artists from the northeastern United States study their engagement with texts in their everyday lives. What emerges is ...
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Corpus-based insights into multimodality and genre in primary school science diagrams Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Tuomo Hiippala
This article presents a data-driven analysis of multimodal genre in a corpus of primary school science diagrams that contains multiple layers of cross-referenced annotations for multimodal discours...
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A blind spot in AI-powered logo makers: visual design principles Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Renato Antonio Bertão, Myeong-Heum Yeoun, Jaewoo Joo
Artificial intelligence is already embedded in several digital tools used across design disciplines. Although it offers advantages in automating and facilitating design tasks, this technology has c...
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Creative and visual communication of health research: development of a graphic novel to share children’s neighbourhood perspectives of COVID-19 lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Catherine Ma, Carol Green, Jinfeng Zhao, Victoria Egli, Terryann Clark, Niamh Donnellan, Melody Smith
Research dissemination to target stakeholders including communities, policymakers and practitioners is a fundamental element of successful research projects. For many of these stakeholders, however...
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Script-switching in Japanese pop culture: a social semiotic multimodal approach Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Yuki Matsuda
This article explores the nature of multimodal meaning-making in writing by analyzing the script-switching used in Japanese pop culture. Japanese intermixes multiple script systems in one text. Alt...
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Fictional mapping: the nature of cartography in film production Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Welby Ings
This practitioner piece considers cartographies that permeate and enable the practice of film production. Using his feature film PUNCH (2022) as a case study, Welby Ings discusses ways in which mud...
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The role of rhythm in science-animated videos: construing entities and bridging across different semiotic modes Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Yufei He
Recent decades have witnessed the increasing popularity of animation used for science education. However, the affordances of animation are still yet to be described in a comprehensive manner. Worki...
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How existing literary translation fits into film adaptations: the subtitling of neologisms in Harry Potter from a multimodal perspective Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Siwen Lu
Existing literature on adaptation studies focuses primarily on analysing film adaptations from an intralingual and monomodal rather than an interlingual and multimodal perspective. To fill this gap...
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Visual protest repertoires and protesters’ health identity: a battlefield of the anti-new normal movement Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Zhen Sun, Wei Luo
This study explores the health identity of the anti-new normal protesters during the coronavirus pandemic through analyzing the visual protest repertoires that were employed by the protesters in th...
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The clarity and correctness of visualized thrust actions: a description and insights from users and experts Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-12-10 Ielka Van der sluis, Gabriela Matoušková, Hannah Niemeier, Sophia Popp, Josephine Carstens
This article presents three studies that evaluate the effectiveness of instructional pictures that visualize Heimlich maneuver thrusts. Firstly, a corpus study is used to describe a collection of 3...
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A multimodal critical discourse analysis of city as text: investigation of meaning metafunctions of Rasht’s Imam Khomeini Street Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Aref Hosseini, Behzad Barekat
Studying the city as text is influenced by a phenomenon called the linguistic turn. This is because the text of the city is composed of different semiotic systems. This study employs multimodal dis...
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The optometry of visual communication: the Museum of Vision Science Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Jane Griffith
This article uses the Museum of Vision Science and other museums of optometry as an entry point for considering the science of seeing and the seeing of science. The Museum of Vision Science, the on...
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Typicality effect in data graphs Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Daniel Reimann, Marie Struwe, Nilam Ram, Robert Gaschler
Some types of data graphs are more easily understood than others. Following the suggestion that typically encountered graphs may activate individuals’ cognitive schema quickly, this study investiga...
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Applying health design thinking to uncover actors in the sustenance of health and wellbeing during hotel quarantine in Kuwait Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Juhri Selamet
This visual essay centers on the author’s hotel quarantine experience in Kuwait. While many quarantine stories have been recorded, personal stories involving the relationship between human and non-...
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Resemiotization: tracing the movement of resources in landscape architectural design trajectories Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Christine Price, Arlene Archer
University students in landscape architecture need to mobilize a range of resources in their design trajectories in order to resolve their designs. Often design education settings are influenced by...
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Michel Pastoureau and the history of visual communication Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Giorgia Aiello, Theo Van Leeuwen
Despite early and ongoing calls for a systematic engagement with history, social semiotics has largely emphasized research on the synchronic rather than diachronic dimensions of meaning-making. And...
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Visual communication and mental health Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Jill Bennett
This article conceptualizes the field of ‘visual communication and mental health’, prioritizing the question of how visual imagery is experienced. Taking as its starting point the challenge of over...
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Alien domesticity: representing home during a pandemic Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Brent Luvaas
Cultural geography and the related disciplines of urban sociology and anthropology have long focused their theoretical lenses on the city as a space of lived multiplicity. This photographic essay f...
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Generational differences in viewing behaviors: an eye-tracking study Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Eva Brumberger
Many scholars over the past two decades have contended that constant exposure to visually-oriented technologies makes younger individuals inherently more visually skilled than previous generations....
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Matter, meaning and semiotics Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Kay L O’Halloran
We inhabit two worlds – the world of matter and the world of meaning (see Halliday, ‘On matter and meaning: The two realms of human experience, 2005). In this article, these two worlds and the phys...
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Design and repair: from object conservation to material transformation Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-06 Kate Scardifield, Megan Hall
This visual essay utilizes a series of images from Make Do and Mend, a participatory workshop that brought together designers, a museum conservator and the general public to explore design for repa...
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Visually informed accounts: instructed achievements during planetarium visits and sky observations Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-11-06 Ricardo Moutinho, Andrew P Carlin, Joana BV Marques
In this article, the authors explore participants’ accounts of visual scenes produced during the instructed work of observing celestial bodies at planetarium sessions and star-parties. They use as ...
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‘Foodstagramming’ in Early 20th-Century Postcards: A Transhistorical Perspective Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Lauren Alex O’Hagan
Introduced in 1907, the ‘real photo’ postcard destabilized the boundaries between private and public life, enabling people to perform identity in ways that anticipate contemporary social media prac...
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Imaging cancer: image-based diagnostic communication in radiologists’ embodied cognition Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-09-12 Mindaugas Briedis
This article thematizes the specific process of cancer detection in radiology, which presupposes a delicate synthesis of the specifics of oncoradiology images and the skilful actions performed by t...
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Female archetypes in car advertising: the case of Audi Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 María del Mar Rubio-Hernández, Ángeles Martínez-García
The representation of women in advertising is based on constructs that have become consolidated in Western culture, giving rise to different archetypes that express the values and ways of thinking ...
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Visual communication and the management of passenger conduct: A visual analysis of transit etiquette posters by Japanese railway companies Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-08-10 Christoph Schimkowsky
The visual communication of behavioural expectations plays an important role in the management of contemporary urban spaces. This is evident in mass transit settings where posters and signage promo...
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Drawn into the future: The epistemic work of visual scenarios in the configuration of human–robot encounters Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-08-10 Christian Pentzold, Ingmar Rothe
This article looks at artistic impressions of future robotics and considers how they inspire research into human–machine interaction. Our analysis of visual scientific practices and the epistemic r...
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Forging New Narratives Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir, Laura Dudek, Tomica, Arthur Wilson
Visualizing information is a process of exposure. All data tells a story. The science and art of information design lies in choosing which one to tell—and how to get others to listen.
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The Riverine Archive: nausea and information loss on the neoliberal ship of fools Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Alexandra Antonopoulou, Eleanor Dare
Within academia, as in other corporatized environments, there are irreconcilable tensions embedded in the managerial data imaginary, in contrast to the messy reality of lived experience and increasingly precarious working conditions for those at the coalface of Higher Education. Combined with student debt and escalating surveillance via so-called ‘artificially intelligent’ transactional data analysis
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‘Imagine talking about politics in a kids’ game’: making sense of #BLM in Nintendo’s Splatoon 2 Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 David Mee, David Jackson
On Twitter and other established digital social networks, references to the Black Lives Matter movement almost doubled after George Floyd’s murder (see Giorgi et al., 2020, ‘Twitter corpus of the #blacklivesmatter movement and counter protests: 2013 to 2020’), alongside a similar rise in references to the counter-protest terms ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter’. Around the same time, the authors
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Taking a knee: Haunted memetic counter-activism Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Solomon Lennox
In May 2020, the world witnessed Derek Chauvin, a serving White police officer, murder George Floyd, a Black American male. A video of the murder, shot by Darnella Frazier, documented Chauvin kneel...
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Learning through mess: Sensemaking visual communication practices in a UK multidisciplinary applied health study Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Ian Robson
This article addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with the development of new visual communication practices and outputs, using an example of such work conducted in a UK interdisci...
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Editorial: Information Is Ugly Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 John Fass, Dylan Yamada-Rice, Shelley James, Matt Lewis, Grace Pappas
Design frameworks that outline the benefits of thinking in terms of binaries suggest that, as designers, we can situate ourselves and our work in relation to opposite extremes. Doing so is more likely to bring about innovation and imagine ideological possibilities. This Special Issue creates a binary between ugly and beautiful with a specific focus on the former. The standard dictionary definitions
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Evading Big Brother: using visual methods to understand children’s perception of sensors and interest in subverting digital surveillance Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Angus Main, Dylan Yamada-Rice
In relation to this Special Issue’s focus on ugly information, this article examines children’s perception of the often invisible interactions they have with sensor-enabled digital devices and, when prompted, their interest in subverting or blocking these sensors to evade surveillance. The authors report on a study of 12 children, aged 8–12 years, that investigated their knowledge of the sensing abilities
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Sculpting the interpersonal: towards a social semiotic framework for analysing interpersonal meaning in statues Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-07-08 Wendy L Bowcher, Jennifer Yameng Liang
The underlying question of this article is ‘how do statues convey interpersonal meaning?’ To answer this question, the authors briefly critically examine the current social semiotic analytical framework for statues and develop a revised framework for analysing interpersonal meaning in which features from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006) and selected features
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Rethinking visual criminalization: news images and the mediated spacetime of crime events Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-06-29 Kathryn Claire Higgins
This article explores the mediated spacetime of crime events to reconsider how criminalization works through visual journalism. Drawing on close analysis of 45 images from Australian newspaper reports about so-called ‘African gang crime’ events in the city of Melbourne, it develops a typology of five distinct ‘ways of looking’ at crime that news images can open for their viewers. Each extends unique
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Exploring the contemporary Moon Under Water through illustration: nostalgia and the power of the image Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Stephanie Black
This article uses images from the visual essays produced for Plume of Feathers, an audio-visual project, to examine the notion of ‘reflective nostalgia’ as an attitude towards meaning-making within image creation, in particular illustration that can counter certain political uses of images that present a restorative–nostalgic world view. The project at the core of the article is concerned with the
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Book review: Empirical Multimodality Research: Methods, Evaluations, Implications Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Alex Christiansen
The notion that the world is becoming increasingly multimodal is far from a novel one, nor is it distinctly recent. Yet just 10 years ago, quantitative approaches to multimodality were still considered ‘in its infancy’ (Knight, 2011) and researchers across disciplines continue even now to call for new approaches to large-scale multimodal analysis (Caple, 2018).
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Understanding emotional responses to visual aesthetic artefacts: the SECMEA mechanisms Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-06-09 Chris Van Der Lee, Renske Van Enschot
While many models attempt to explain the aesthetic experience, most limit themselves to art as their focal point and only a few look into why we arrive at a certain response to a visual aesthetic object. This article attempts to offer an extension to the current models by focusing on the mechanisms that induce emotions in relation to visual aesthetic objects. It takes Juslin’s (2013) BRECVEM mechanisms
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Drone views: a multimodal ethnographic perspective Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-05-16 Elisa Serafinelli, Lauren Alex O’Hangan
Drone visuals are rapidly becoming part of our sociocultural imaginaries, generating distinct images that differ from traditional visual conventions and producing unexpected perspectives of the world that reveal hidden aspects of our surroundings. Despite the growing use of camera-laden drones in a range of commercial and non-commercial activities, to date, little scholarly attention has been paid
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The rhythms of cancer survivorship Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-05-10 Stefanie Plage
This visual essay incorporates photographs from a research project on the changing landscapes of cancer survivorship in Australia. Study participants were asked to tell the story of what cancer looks and feels like and what it means to them. The photographs were captioned and discussed during a follow-up interview. Employing Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, these photographs, captions and narrations
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The mediatic dimension of images: visual semiotics faced with Gerhard Richter’s artwork Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-04-21 Enzo D’armenio
In this article, the author endeavours to analyse Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings for the way they build an intersemiotic dialogue between photography and painting. On the one hand, he tries to characterize the modalities of this dialogue and to provide an original interpretation of Richter’s work. On the other hand, he uses the special case of Richter’s work as a starting point for a conceptual
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Book review: Flags, Color and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity and Critique Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-04-20 Jody Watts
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Editorial: in memoriam Martin Thomas Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-03-20 Visual Communication Editorial Team
The editorial team of Visual Communication is deeply saddened by the loss of our team member Dr Martin Thomas, who died suddenly in January this year. The news of his death hit us in the midst of our joint efforts for the journal and we are very sad that we can no longer talk to Martin or say goodbye to him.
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Visual narratives of environmental change: collective memory and identity at New Zealand heritage sites Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Olli Hellmann
This article interrogates historical photographs exhibited at public heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis reveals that – by portraying 19th-century environmental change as a ‘heroic’ narrative of ‘progress’ – the photographs construct New Zealand national identity in opposition to nature, rather than promote a sense of connectedness with the natural environment. The article thus makes
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Rhythm in literary apps Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Anette Hagen, Kathy A Mills
This article addresses how rhythm may function in literary apps. The article has two aims: increasing the knowledge of how literary apps work as texts, by exploring their aspects of rhythm, and developing the understanding of the theoretical term of rhythm. The authors propose a rhythmanalysis in which two different types of rhythm – reading rhythm and narrative rhythm – are taken into account. The
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Computing colorism: skin tone in online retail imagery Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-03-13 Chelsea Butkowski, Lee Humphreys, Utkarsh Mall
A long legacy of media imagery persistently distorts, stereotypes, and ignores marginalized racial and ethnic groups despite widespread calls to diversify media representations. In particular, fashion and beauty media continue to feature light-skinned models and celebrities over dark-skinned individuals, even lightening dark skin with photo editing to achieve ideals of whiteness and lightness. This
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Book review: Communicating Knowledge Visually: Will Burtin’s Scientific Approach to Information Design Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-03-08 Steven Skaggs
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The Rijksmuseum’s Slavery exhibition, 5 June–29 August 2021 Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-03-08 Pao-Yi Yang
In early June, after months of closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Rijksmuseum finally greeted its audiences with an exhibition theme that the museum had never mounted before: Slavery. The exhibition focused on the role of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in trans-Atlantic slavery and the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) colonial slavery in Southeast Asia between the 17th and 19th centuries
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Book review: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-02-12 Nataliia Laba
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The politics of typographic placemaking: the cases of TilburgsAns and Dubai Font Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-02-12 Johan Järlehed, Maryam Fanni
This article explores typographic placemaking by comparing the design and public launch of two city fonts: TilburgsAns (2016) and Dubai Font (2017). Building on recent work on semiotic technology and graphic ideology, the authors examine how these fonts’ visual features and the promotional discourses surrounding their launch are utilized for placemaking, and how this is facilitated and constrained
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Tailings and tracings: using art and social science to explore the limits of visual methods at mining and industrial ruins Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Kevin Walby, Ben Davis
This article examines a novel approach to visual methods that artist Ben Davis has developed based on sociologist Kevin Walby’s research into decommissioned industrial sites, which is referred to here as tracing. Disrupting the over-reliance on photographic representation in visual methods in the social sciences, the authors integrate audio recordings of interviews, as well as photos, maps, and building
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Opening up semiotic spaces for gender expression: a case study of the construction of gender in Australian award-winning early childhood picture books Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-01-27 Helen Caple, Ping Tian
This article examines the visual and verbal expressions of gender in Australian award-winning early childhood picture books. It brings together social semiotic analysis and the narratological concepts of narration and focalization to examine the extent to which one community of practice (authors, illustrators, publishers and awards council) reproduces symbolic manifestations of gender, or offers readers
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Analyzing picturebooks: semiotic, literary, and artistic frameworks Visual Communication (IF 1.79) Pub Date : 2022-01-27 Frank Serafini, Stephanie F Reid
The multimodal and visual nature of children’s picturebooks has been documented in research emanating from multiple fields of inquiry. In this article, the authors present three types of analytical frameworks that are useful for conducting research on contemporary picturebooks as multimodal entities. Each framework draws upon different aspects of visual images, design features, and written language