Visual Content Analysis Research Articles

Emotional woman – rational man? Gender stereotypical emotional expressivity of German politicians in news broadcasts

Abstract Drawing on literature about the different television coverage of male and female politicians and gender-specific leadership behavior, differences in the visibility of female and male politicians’ emotions on television can be assumed. These assumptions are particularly relevant when considering studies on the effects of politician’s emotional displays on voters’ assessments. In order to examine the prevalence of female and male politicians’ emotions, we conducted a visual media content analysis of about 1,000 video sequences based on a sample of 66 news broadcasts. Since this comprehensive sample includes video sequences of German politicians holding various positions within the political system, it enables us to draw generalizable conclusions on the televised emotionality of leading politicians. We find that female politicians’ emotions can be seen more frequently on television than male politicians’ emotions. Moreover, female politicians’ positive emotions are shown more frequently than those of male politicians.

Pictorial Analysis of the Projected Destination Image: Portugal on Instagram

Destination image (DI) has an important role in destination choice. DI is considered as one of the main factors in destination competitiveness. The main aim of this study was to explore the projected image of Portugal as a tourism destination. The projected image was obtained through an analysis of the pictures of the official page of destination management organization of Portugal on Instagram (@visitportugal). The research used a sample of 1,306 photos. Samples included photographic and textual data. Visual content analysis and content analysis were adopted to analysis data. Appling content analysis for images refers to break a picture into a number of categories. The results showed that the projected destination images of Portugal were dominated by attributes related to natural attractions. In addition, the geographical distribution of the DMO photos showed that 880 photos (67%) of all 1,306 DMO photos were associated with nine destinations. Food/drink category was the most engaging image for followers. Additionally, the findings indicated that the most common applied hashtags for describing Portugal as a tourism destination and inspire travelers to visit were related to nature-based activities (e.g., nature, river, beach, ocean, sea).

Information vs enigma – exploring students’ understanding of artistic and conventional visual communication

This visual essay discusses how visual communication strategies in the context of art differ from visual communication strategies in everyday media. A quantitative visual content analysis of 23 art exhibition leaflets and 47 leaflets advertising everyday life events showed that readability is a significantly more important feature of conventional visual communication, whereas artistic visual communication tends to emphasize aesthetics and a sense of enigma. 322 students between the ages of 10 and 18 years participated in an online-survey designed to investigate their preconceptions about art and to measure their competencies in discriminating and naming characteristics for artistic communication strategies in opposition to conventional communication strategies with an emphasis on pictures. The students’ awareness of aesthetic communication strategies increased after completing the task of comparing and categorizing leaflets from artistic and other contexts.

Black is not beautiful: Persistent messages and the globalization of “white” beauty in African women’s magazines

ABSTRACTThis study examines the representation of African women in an era of globalization. Using Dyer’s concept of whiteness and a visual content analysis approach, this study focuses on how four influential African magazines portrayed African women from 2010 to 2015. Findings suggest that African magazines’ portrayal of beauty is not representative of diverse body sizes, skin tones, and hair types common among African women. Rather, magazines represent an image of beauty rooted in white/western/Eurocentric beauty standards.

Self-harm and social media: thematic analysis of images posted on three social media sites

ObjectivesTo explore the nature of images tagged as self-harm on popular social media sites and what this might tell us about how these sites are used.DesignA visual content and thematic...

Human Value Manifest in Instagram: A Visual Content Analysis of DMO Photography

The relationship of social media and tourism marketing through image projection by which visual content is produced was well documented. However, minimal research was reported on the human values promoted through the usage of social media in the context of marketing tourism by various elements of Destination Management Organization (DMO), such as government, tourism industry, and official marketing agency. Since visual content was widely used to attract visitors, this paper aims to highlight and discuss the prominent human values within photographs posted on Instagram of the three categories of DMO. Visual content analysis was applied to measure those values promoted through the collected photograph. Findings of this study shown values classified into self-transcendence and conservation categories are more prominent than those of self-enhancement and openness within Instagram of all marketer categories. Both theoretical and managerial implications of this study to tourism study were discussed. Keywords: Instagram, Human Value, Photography, Tourism Marketing DOI : 10.7176/NMMC/80-06 Publication date :May 31 st 2019

A Survey of Deep Learning Solutions for Multimedia Visual Content Analysis

The increasing use of social media networks on handheld devices, especially smartphones with powerful built-in cameras, and the widespread availability of fast and high bandwidth broadband connections, added to the popularity of cloud storage, is enabling the generation and distribution of massive volumes of digital media, including images and videos. Such media is full of visual information and holds immense value in today’s world. The volume of data involved calls for automated visual content analysis systems able to meet the demands of practice in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Deep learning (DL) has recently emerged as a prominent technique for visual content analysis. It is data-driven in nature and provides automatic end-to-end learning solutions without the need to rely explicitly on predefined handcrafted feature extractors. Another appealing characteristic of DL solutions is the performance they can achieve, once the network is trained, under practical constraints. This paper identifies eight problem domains which require analysis of visual artifacts in multimedia. It surveys the recent, authoritative, and the best performing DL solutions and lists the datasets used in the development of these deep methods for the identified types of visual analysis problems. This paper also discusses the challenges that the DL solutions face which can compromise their reliability, robustness, and accuracy for visual content analysis.

Склонность к аутоагрессивному поведению у подростков и информация, потребляемая ими в Интернете

The tendency to auto-aggressive, including suicidal, behavior in adolescents is a variant of deviant tendencies, which are formed under the influence of different factors. The consummation of destructive information on the Internet has been considered lately as one of such factors. The goal of this study was finding a correlation between auto-aggressive tendencies, character and frequency of consummation of destructive information on the Internet. Content-analysis and semantic analysis of verbal and visual content in a range of groups in the Internet allowed distinguishing groups with destructive information and a specially developed inventory — finding out the frequency of visiting these groups by adolescents. The sample consisted of 62 juveniles (mean age — 15.0 ± 1.0) who were divided into two categories of “visiting” and “non-visiting” destructive groups in the Internet. The results showed significant correlations between the frequency of visiting destructive Internet groups and auto-destructive and suicidal tendencies in adolescents. Moreover, there were broader correlations of these visits with other kinds of deviant tendencies. The correlation between the consummation of destructive information and such individual features as aggressiveness and anxiety were found. The data can be used in prevention of auto-aggressive behavior of adolescents.

Selfie: the visual communication on instagram

Social media sharing has become a strong trend among Kazakhstani women. Selfies are not merely pictures of oneself but an individual expression of the imagined virtual personality of the person. They are a means for social media communication, which invites for public recognition, liking and flirting. The purpose of the research was to explore the selfie as a self-presentation. It focused on the compositional characteristics of selfies of Kazakhstani women against the basic photographic rules and criteria. The need and rationale for the research stemmed in the lack of sufficient scientific research on the selfie phenomenon in Kazakhstan. The research methods the exploratory study employed were a qualitative visual content analysis with preset descriptors a research literature methodology. The results indicated that the imple-mentation of the basic rules and principles for a successful selfie such as the Rule of Thirds, Eye-in-Centre Principle, light, distance, and angle is limited. The value of the research is twofold. First, it contributed to an understudied scientific field of visual communication with a focus on Kazakhstan. Second, it provided practical guidelines for taking appealing selfies either for personal use or promotion purposes.

#Childathlete

The present study aimed to examine the tone and focus of the conversation associated with #childathlete on Instagram. Additionally, the visual content of five child athlete Instagram accounts were analyzed to determine if fitspiration (e.g., exercise, healthy eating, inspiration, showcase strength, and empowerment) or objectification (e.g., emphasis of specific body parts, suggestive posing, or emphasis on appearance) were promoted. Using Netlytic, a text analysis was conducted to analyze the conversation surrounding #childathlete and the top five child athlete accounts (based on likes) that were managed by parents were selected for visual content analysis. The text analysis revealed that the conversation was positive in tone and focused on sport/exercise. Analysis of the visual content indicated that the child athlete accounts focused athleticism, activity, and fitness, with little presence of objectification. Future research should further explore social media as a strategy for promoting and improving physical activity among users.

Visual Content Analysis of Japan’s Halal Tourism

Even though Japan is located by a great distance from Islamic countries, halal tourism prominence has become a rapidly growing interest of the country. In fact, in 2016, Japan won the “World’s Best Non-OIC Emerging Halal Destination.” The study attempts to describe an examination of the images found in Japan’s tourism promotional brochures. The study aimed at interpreting the denotative and connotative messages of the promotional images in the sampled brochures. A visual content analysis was applied to interpret the brochures’ layout and the promotional images. The findings of the study imply that distinctive Islamic Symbols and Japanese monumental structure are the prominent denotative elements of the brochure. Regarding the connotative elements, the analysis indicates that female Muslim and Halal food become the main Synecdoche in representing Japan’s Halal destination image.

Political hashtag publics and counter-visuality: a case study of #fertilityday in Italy

ABSTRACT In 2016 the Italian health ministry launched the ‘Fertility Day’ campaign, aimed at tackling Italy’s low birth rate. Under the accusation of delivering sexist and racist messages, the campaign became a trending topic on Twitter, and a protest was launched to be held during Fertility Day. By applying a combination of digital methods and visual content analysis to the #fertilityday Twitter stream, this paper contributes to existing research on the deliberative strength of political hashtag publics, with a particular focus on their power structures, communication patterns and visual content use. Findings on gatekeeping dynamics downsize optimistic views on the democratising potential of Twitter’s socio-technical infrastructure as they point to the emergence of online satirical media and ‘tweetstars’ – along with mainstream news media– as main producers of spreadable content, with ordinary users only surfacing when traditional media elites and new satirical actors lack or lose interest in the debate. Results confirm that political hashtag publics follow acute event communication patterns, with users highly engaged in retweeting and referencing external material and visual content playing a key role in these gatewatching practices. The transient counter-visuality – or critical stance – of tweets with user-manipulated images, however, also suggests that the deliberative potential of these publics is not easily sustainable over time.

“Talking” Containers. Visual Heterotopias in the Picture-Books Illustrated by Svein Nyhus

Abstract The article discusses picturebooks illustrated by a Norwegian artist, Svein Nyhus, to show his specific symbolic manner of depicting the child’s environment. It is argued that the illustrator employs characteristic recurrent elements of home representations and elaborates an interesting interplay of outer and inner spaces, consistently focusing the child’s perspective. This is demonstrated by an analysis of four picturebooks by the Norwegian artist: Pappa! (1998, Daddy!), Snill (2002, Nice), Sinna mann (2003, Angry Man) and Håret till mamma (2007, Mum’s Hair). The books have been regarded as ambitious literature for children, addressing difficult issues or even sometimes breaking a taboo. To show Nyhus’ visual method of thematising childhood’s traumas in relation to a home space is also one of the aims of the paper. The analysis of visual content is carried out with references to the textual narratives, drawing on ideas about heterotopia by Michel Foucault (1984), self-effacement by Karen Horney (1997) and the poetics of space by Gaston Bachelard (1969).

Body image in Egyptian magazine covers: A visual and textual content analysis

Research Objectives: This study aims to answer the main question of how magazine covers depict body image visually and verbally. In order to answer this question some subquestions are answered: RQ1: What is the visual content of the magazine covers concerning body image? RQ2: What is the textual content of the magazine covers concerning body image? Conclusion: The most important findings of this paper are that men and women are depicted differently visually and textually. Different themes are connotated to men and women. Different descriptions whether positive or negative are given to men and women as well. This paper has answered the three of the analysis suggested by Mueller. The first level which is the surface structure analysis was analyzed through an in-depth analysis of the objects and the persons in the magazine cover. The detailed structure analysis that includes symbols and stereotypes is discussed here. While the stereotypes of men are the strong and unbeatable, women are more stereotyped as weak and fragile. The importance of the looks of women on the analyzed magazine covers such as their makeup, their hair, their skin and dresses are very contrasting to men`s body image. Men are depicted in the analyzed magazine covers in relaxed clothes and less fake settings. When comparing my results to previous literature, I see similarities and little differences. The most relevant similarities are that women are depicted differently than men on magazine covers. The stereotypical women: the thin, the middle-aged who shows off some skin and a smile is existent in both previous literature and in this paper.

2017 Elliot Eisner Award Invited Paper: Crowdsourcing Global Culture: Visual Representation in the Age of Information

Abstract In the age of information, imagery continues to be consumed and circulated at exponential rates, influencing and changing global flows of information that parallels Internet communication technology as it penetrates and gains ubiquity in new regions. To investigate the visual, media, and cultural phenomena that lie within these globalized pictorial exchanges, a flexible, visually based inquiry is essential. This paper provides an overview of a novel visual methodological approach to research, and reviews the most impactful findings from the 2017 winner of the Elliot Eisner Research Award. The qualitative visual-ethnographic study was conducted over the Internet and aims to help inform visually based literacy and media studies and further image-based research methodologies. The researcher collected over 1,500 drawings from 61 countries diverse in geography and culture. Through an interpretive and visual content analysis of the drawings, the researcher reveals fresh insights into the visual-textual relationship, identity, and representation in a globalized context, specifically looking at emergent tensions between local and global ways of interpretation and meaning construction online. The researcher also remarks on the perils of being visually ignorant in a visually dominant world, making connections between visual consumption, Internet giants, and the “filter bubble.”

Low-rank regularized multi-view inverse-covariance estimation for visual sentiment distribution prediction

With the increasing tendency of using images to express opinions and share experiences, sentiment analysis of visual content has aroused considerable attention interests in the past few years. Traditional sentiment analysis methods mainly focus on predicting the most dominant sentiment category of images while neglecting the sentiment ambiguity problem restricted by various factors such as environment, subjectivity, and cultural background. To tackle this problem, visual sentiment distribution prediction has been put forward to characterize images by distributions over a set of sentiment labels instead of a single distinct label or multiple distinct labels. Nevertheless, existing approaches usually separate feature embedding and distribution prediction.In this paper, we propose a novel supervised visual sentiment distribution prediction model, termed as low-rank regularized multi-view inverse-covariance estimation, in which feature embedding and distribution prediction are jointly performed. Specifically, our proposed model contains two main components: multi-view embedding and inverse-covariance estimation terms. The multi-view embedding term is restricted by low-rank constraints to seek the lowest-rank representation of samples. The inverse-covariance estimation term is restricted by structured sparsity regularization to learn a more reasonable distribution prediction model. We develop an alternative heuristic optimization algorithm to solve the objective function of the proposed model. Experiment results performed on three publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.

“Magic Happens Here”: Environmental Serenity in Residential Hospice Care

The purpose of this study was to explore the unique interaction between the care that is provided in and the environmental features of hospice residences. Interviews with 40 professionals from eight hospice residences focused on elements of care. Visual content analysis was conducted with 187 photographs of internal and external environments. Three themes illuminated residential care as (a) patient-family-centered, (b) flexible, and (c) comfort-focused. Six environmental features are described as (a) site and context, (b) nature connectivity, (c) arrival spaces, (d) communal spaces, (e) private spaces, and (f) transitional spaces. The interaction between residential care and the environmental features creates environmental serenity.

Stigmatizing images in the media - a cross-national survey.

Images accompanying articles on obesity in the media may contribute to a stigmatizing narrative of personal blame for the condition. We report a pilot study of online newspapers in 15 countries to determine the use of positive and negative imagery used to accompany articles on obesity. We undertook a visual content analysis of images accompanying articles on obesity from the top five newspapers of each country. We then ranked countries according to the ratio of positive to negative imagery used. A total of 195 images were analysed. The majority of images scored negatively (i.e. were likely to be stigmatizing). Media in Hong Kong, South Africa, Italy and Morocco had the highest prevalence of stigmatizing imagery, whereas Japan and New Zealand displayed the lowest. Public media in all the countries surveyed show stigmatizing imagery associated with obesity, but there was variability between countries. As the global prevalence of obesity rises and advocacy groups raise awareness of stigma, we hope for an improvement in the images used in the media.

From confrontations to civil liberties: Newspaper photo framing of police brutality and riots in Los Angeles 1992 and Ferguson, Missouri 2014

This study compares the news media’s visual framing of the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and the Ferguson, Missouri, riots of 2014. A visual content analysis of 387 news images published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Atlanta Journal-Constitution was conducted. Results show that newspapers’ visual portrayals of civil unrest have shifted focus from the confrontation between protesters and the police to an emphasis on the depiction of morality, human interest and civil emotions.

Integrating complementary methods to improve diet analysis in fishery-targeted species.

Developing efficient, reliable, cost‐effective ways to identify diet is required to understand trophic ecology in complex ecosystems and improve food web models. A combination of techniques, each varying in their ability to provide robust, spatially and temporally explicit information can be applied to clarify diet data for ecological research. This study applied an integrative analysis of a fishery‐targeted species group—Plectropomus spp. in the central Great Barrier Reef, Australia, by comparing three diet‐identification approaches. Visual stomach content analysis provided poor identification with ~14% of stomachs sampled resulting in identification to family or lower. A molecular approach was successful with prey from ~80% of stomachs identified to genus or species, often with several unique prey in a stomach. Stable isotope mixing models utilizing experimentally derived assimilation data, identified similar prey as the molecular technique but at broader temporal scales, particularly when prior diet information was incorporated. Overall, Caesionidae and Pomacentridae were the most abundant prey families (>50% prey contribution) for all Plectropomus spp., highlighting the importance of planktivorous prey. Less abundant prey categories differed among species/color phases indicating possible niche segregation. This study is one of the first to demonstrate the extent of taxonomic resolution provided by molecular techniques, and, like other studies, illustrates that temporal investigations of dietary patterns are more accessible in combination with stable isotopes. The consumption of mainly planktivorous prey within this species group has important implications within coral reef food webs and provides cautionary information regarding the effects that changing resources could have in reef ecosystems.