Graphic Imagery Research Articles

Psychological norms for simple three-line graphic shapes

There is a longstanding tradition in psychological research for norming lists of words that are used in experimental studies. The present study extends this practice to graphic imagery by obtaining norming data on 24 simple abstract graphic shapes composed of three straight-line segments. The attributes obtained in the norming procedure were the shapes' familiarity, describability, associability, availability, and potential for word association. Results from rating data indicate significantly different, yet reliable, responses by participants to the various shape configurations. Multidimensional scaling analysis of shape ratings identified two underlying dimensions of perceived differences: the continuity of a shape's linear direction and the consistency or regularity of its interior angles. By contrast, performance in generating word associations for figures appeared to be linguistically driven, with initial responses related to the similarity of shapes to letters of the alphabet. The norms and the computer program used to collect them can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Show the Truth and Let the Audience Decide: A Web-Based Survey Showing Support among Viewers of Al-Jazeera for Use of Graphic Imagery

This survey examines how viewers of Al-Jazeera perceive the network's presentation of graphic and war-related visuals and whether the viewers perceive that the TV channel provides visual information they cannot find in national Arab media, CNN, and other Western media. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents supported the use of graphic imagery saying watching those visuals was a good decision for them and that the network provides a unique source of visual information. Further, attitudes toward press freedom and media reliance correlated with support for graphic visuals after controlling for demographic variables.

The Geography of Cannibalism: Specificity in Sixteenth-Century New World Cartography and Literature

There has long been debate about the practice of cannibalism by Amerindians. Many scholars argue that Columbus, Vespucci and the other Europeans that came to the New World used the specter of cannibalism to justify the conquest, enslavement, and death of the indigenous populations. William Arens, in his book, TheMan-Eating Myth, goes further and asserts that the belief that cannibalism was a prevalent Amerindian practice represented the prejudice and racism of the Europeans encountering unknown peoples. Excluding incidents of survival cannibalism, Arens claims that are no credible first-hand accounts of cannibalism.1 I disagree with his assessment of the accounts. Delving into the extant maps, travel logs and literature, I have come to a different understanding of the accounts and, often, graphic imagery of savages roasting and gnawing on human limbs found on, and in, the early primary sources from the Columbian Encounter. Almost all references to cannibalism and the accompanying illustrations in sixteenth-century literature refer to areas of the New World from the Gulf and Mesoamerica to South America. During the first centennial of contact, journals, logs, letters and histories of the Columbian Encounter are replete with commentary about the practice of cannibalism. This literature is geographically specific. The cartography that accompanied the European exploration and mapping of this fourth part of the world is also geographically specific in its depictions of cannibalism. As stated earlier, the preponderance of journals and imagery on maps discussing or illustrating cannibalism respectively, were located in the Lower Antilles, Mesoamerica and South America (especially the northern Gulf region and the interior of Brazil the elbow or bulge). The indigenous people of North America were not literally or graphically depicted as cannibals. I assert that the lack of literary or graphic reference to the indigenous peoples of North America as cannibals is not an omission. It is instead an affirmation that Europeans encountered the practice of cannibalism in specific areas of the New World. The encounters in the Lower Antilles and Mesoamerica were chronicled in accounts by early and the cartography of the first decades of exploration contained labels indicating the presence of cannibals in the Lower Antilles. However, for over a century, the tales of encounters and the vast majority of cartographic depictions of cannibals were located in South America. From initial contact, Columbus began to fuse expectations, myths and reality in his description of the Amerindians. During his first voyage, Columbus interpreted hand signals and facial expressions as a description of a fierce rival tribe, caniba or carib.2 His log entry for 23 November 1492 contained a description of a rival tribe that Columbus extrapolated through the language barrier from the Taino, the gentle Arawak people of first contact. This description referred to another island where there were people on it who had one eye in their foreheads,

Smokers' reactions to cigarette package warnings with graphic imagery and with only text: a comparison between Mexico and Canada

This comparison of population-based representative samples of adult smokers in Canada (n=1 751) and Mexico (n=1 081) aimed to determine whether cigarette packages with graphic warning labels in Canada had a stronger impact than the text-only warning labels in Mexico. Bivariate and multivariate adjusted models were used in this study. Results. Canadian smokers reported higher warning label salience (i.e., noticing labels & processing label messages) than Mexican smokers, and warning label salience independently predicted intention to quit. Moreover, Canadians had higher levels of knowledge about smoking-related health outcomes that were included as content on Canadian, but not Mexican, warning labels. Finally, a majority of Mexican smokers want their cigarette packs to contain more information than they currently contain. These results are consistent with other studies that indicate that cigarette packages whose warning labels contain prominent graphic imagery are more likely than text-only warning labels to promote smoking-related knowledge and smoking cessation.

Who Is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project and the Legacy of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? THE YOMIURI PROJECT AND THE LEGACY OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC WAR IN JAPAN* James E. Auer ed., From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?, Tokyo, Yomiuri Shimbun, 2006, ISBN 4-643-06012-3. Debating War History and Responsibility in Japan When, in mid-2005, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible? There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed of East Asia's history wars-the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for Japan's twentieth-century military expansion in Asia and the Pacific. To assess the significance and impact of the Yomiuri project, though, it is important to see it in the context of writing in Japan and of contemporary Northeast Asian international relations. Before beginning to assess the content of the Englishlanguage volume, therefore, it is worth emphasizing what is not new about this work. There is nothing novel or unusual in Japanese historians or journalists publicly debating the problem of war responsibility. They have been doing so, with much passion and soul-searching, for more than sixty years. During a recent visit to Tokyo, a Japanese colleague showed me the cover of a journal he had unearthed from the early 1950s, published by a group affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party. The cover featured a striking cartoon of Emperor Hirohito standing atop a mountain of skulls. Such graphic imagery is certainly highly risque in the Japanese political context, where a miasma of taboo still surrounds critical comment on the person of the emperor. It is almost impossible to imagine any major journal agreeing to publish such an image. But its presence on the cover of this long-forgotten small-circulation magazine provides a stark reminder of the fact that questions of war responsibility, including those of the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito himself, have been ongoing topics of heated discussion in Japan. Indeed, for historians of twentieth-century Japan, a key task has been the search for an understanding of the processes that led to the Manchurian Incident, the war in China, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Japan's disastrous defeat in war. One of the most influential early attempts to address this conundrum was the best-selling paperback (A History of Showa-Showa being the reign of the Emperor Hirohito), published in 1955, which sold more than 100,000 copies in the six weeks following its publication. The book generated a prolonged public controversy now remembered in Japan as the Showashi Debate. Written by the eminent Marxian historians Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi, and Fujiwara Akira, Showashi's approach was very different from that of the current Yomiuri volume. It sought, not so much to judge personal war guilt, as to define the underlying social and economic forces that led to war.1 The popular success of is a reminder of the powerful influence that Marxism exerted on postwar Japanese intellectual (though not political) life. However, searching criticisms of war responsibility were of course not confined to Marxists. Critical liberal intellectuals such as Maruyama Masao made profound contributions to the debate-Maruyama's work focusing particularly on the aspects of Japanese social structure and patterns of thought that had created fertile ground for the rise of militarism.2 In the 1950s and 1960s, war responsibility was debated not only in academic works, but also in massively popular novels and films such as Gomikawa Jumpei's Ningen no Joken (The Human Condition), which appeared in novel, movie, and manga form, and included graphic representations of acts of brutality committed by members of the Japanese armed forces in China. …

Exploring visual and automatic measures of perceptual fidelity in real and simulated imagery

This paper introduces a new psychophysical experiment developed to enable observers to judge the quality of computer graphics imagery with respect to the real scene it depicts. This new framework facilitates perceptual judgment of images against a real scene. Unlike previous work, which examined primitive objects under basic illumination, this experiment examines complex geometry illuminated using a calibrated light source. To ensure valid results, a commercial lighting booth containing rapid prototyped three-dimensional (3D) objects serves as the real scene. For comparison, a series of representative images, of varying quality, were rendered using the physically based Radiance lighting simulation software. Results from these experiments show that higher parameter settings, which lead to longer processing times, do not necessarily lead to higher quality images. To demonstrate that there is only modest benefit to setting parameters higher, images are subjected to further testing using two different visual quality discrimination operators; the Visual Differences Predictor (VDP) and the Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) for image-quality assessment. The results from the automatic operators correspond well with each other, in addition to yielding comparable outcomes as the psychophysical experiment. Although, a single scene was considered in the experiment, several scenes are tested using the image-quality metrics to lend further reliability to the assertion that higher parameter settings, which lead to extended processing times, do not necessarily lead to superior quality results.

Automated three-axis gonioreflectometer for computer graphics applications

We describe an automated three-axis gonioreflectometer, which can help increase the physical realism of computer graphics renderings by providing light scattering data for the surfaces in a scene. The gonioreflectometer performs rapid measurements of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) for flat, isotropic, sample surfaces over the complete visible spectrum and over most of the incident and reflection hemispheres. The instrument employs a broadband light source and a detector with a diffraction grating and linear diode array. Validation is achieved by comparisons against reference surfaces and other instruments. The accuracy and spectral and angular ranges of the BRDFs are appropriate for computer graphics imagery, while reciprocity and energy conservation are preserved. Measured BRDFs on rough aluminum, metallic silver paint, and a glossy yellow paint are reported, and an example rendered automotive image is included.

Teaching the Holocaust: The Use of Graphic Imagery

Teaching the Holocaust: The Use of Graphic Imagery

Photojournalists' and Photo Editors' Attitudes and Perceptions: The Visual Coverage of 9/11 and the Afghan War

A survey of photojournalists and photo editors (N = 516) revealed that the vast majority of the respondents believe the U.S. press differed from foreign press in the visual depiction of human suffering, patriotism, political climate, and global reactions. Findings also indicated the majority of the respondents support the use of graphic imagery and perceive the context of news influences the selection of graphic photographs under certain circumstances. Respondents reported political sensitivity ranked higher for selecting graphic images of the Afghan War than for selecting graphic images of 9/11. Results also suggest significant but not meaningful differences on the influences of readers' criticisms, taste, self-censorship, and personal ethics in the visual gatekeeping process. The limited consideration for organizations' codes of ethics and the lack of necessary access to photograph the Afghan War also were noted.

Statistical characterization of real-world illumination

Although studies of vision and graphics often assume simple illumination models, real-world illumination is highly complex, with reflected light incident on a surface from almost every direction. One can capture the illumination from every direction at one point photographically using a spherical illumination map. This work illustrates, through analysis of photographically acquired, high dynamic range illumination maps, that real-world illumination possesses a high degree of statistical regularity. The marginal and joint wavelet coefficient distributions and harmonic spectra of illumination maps resemble those documented in the natural image statistics literature. However, illumination maps differ from typical photographs in that illumination maps are statistically nonstationary and may contain localized light sources that dominate their power spectra. Our work provides a foundation for statistical models of real-world illumination, thereby facilitating the understanding of human material perception, the design of robust computer vision systems, and the rendering of realistic computer graphics imagery.

Transforming Shape: Hybrid Practice as Group Activity

Printed textile and garment design are generally taught and practised as separate disciplines. Integrated CAD software enables textile and clothing designers to envisage printed garments by assimilating graphic imagery with 2D garment shapes and 3D visualizations. Digital fabric printing can be employed to transpose print-filled garment shapes directly onto cloth. During a recently completed practice-led PhD (1998-2003), I researched the aesthetic design potential of combining new CAD technology with garment modelling methods to create new innovative printed textiles/garments. The merging of physical and screen-based making resulted in a hybrid 3D approach to the body, cloth and print referred to as the ‘simultaneous design method’.In 2001 this hybrid practice provided the catalyst for a collaborative textile research project at the Nottingham Trent University, UK. The group included surface, shape and multimedia designers. The key group aim was to explore the transforming effects of computer-aided textile design through dialogues between two and three dimensions. In parallel with my own practice, print and embroidery were considered from a 3D starting-point through the relating of geometric cloth shapes to the form. Each designer took an idiosyncratic approach to the selection and integration of imagery with the shapes.The novel consideration of the final modelled textile at the start of the designing process influenced each designer in different ways, leading to a collection of contrasting, original outcomes that were displayed in the exhibition Transforming Shape (UK 2001, Denmark 2003). The exhibition demonstrated the design opportunities (and limitations) of new and existing technologies, specifically the relationship between innovative textile imagery and three-dimensional form. The designs illustrated the premise that surface designs can be engineered through different pattern shapes and that engineer-printed shapes transform the body.

Reading in the Dark

Reading in the Dark

Antimasonic Satire, Sodomy, and Eighteenth-Century Masculinity in the "Boston Evening-Post"

N January 7, 1751, readers of the Boston Evening-Post found a full-column poetic letter, entitled In Defence of Masonry, occupying half of the front page. At the top was one of the earliest engravings accompanying a poem to appear in a newspaper. It depicted two men, one bent over, the other penetrating him with a trunnel, or wooden spike. Here graphic imagery with sodomitical overtones accompanied stanzas containing phallic references and allusions to homoerotic group activities. Sodomy was still a capital crime in eighteenth-century Massachusetts-could symbolic sodomy have been a source of emasculating satire?1

The Jungle

Jack London proclaimed that Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906), an anatomy of American immigrant working-class life set partly in Chicago's wretched and unsanitary packinghouses and their environs, might prove to be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery. That it did not, according to Sinclair's own often-quoted analysis, stemmed from his inaccurate aim: his literary bombshell struck the public, not in the heart, but “in the stomach ” A novel that was intended to dramatize the crises of the modernizing industrial workplace and community and to suggest a radical solution was overwhelmed by its own graphic imagery and came to be seen principally as a catalyst for federal meat inspection legislation. The documentary film The Jungle, which interweaves dramatizations of scenes from the novel, historical commentary illustrated with period photographs and film clips, and modern examples of meat-related scandal and changing regulatory policy, both comments on and extends this interpretive tradition.

A Political Economy of “Doves”

Codified references to the illegal drug Ecstasy in rave-party advertisements have become a focus of attention with the increased use of Ecstasy at rave parties during the 1990s. This article explores the political economy of a particular type of Ecstasy tablet—“Dove” Ecstasy—through discourse analysis accompanied by ethnographic description. The analysis traces the movement of value from the dove sign to the discursive practices and mimetic processes that characterize the political economy of this illegal-drug sign. The dove can be used to indicate the qualities of the drug, the social-world affiliation of the user, advertising for a particular type of music, and/or a commercial logo, and signify broader ideological processes apparent in consumer culture. The slippage of meaning of the dove sign arises from the possibility for multiple iterations in different contexts. This iterability may be an important feature of the social world and has implications for the use of graphical imagery in harm-reduction strategies. The application of political economy in this study has theoretical implications for understanding the movement of capital in drug-using cultures.

Visual Perception in Realistic Image Synthesis

Realism is often a primary goal in computer graphics imagery, and we strive to create images that are perceptually indistinguishable from an actual scene. Rendering systems can now closely approximate the physical distribution of light in an environment. However, physical accuracy does not guarantee that the displayed images will have authentic visual appearance. In recent years the emphasis in realistic image synthesis has begun to shift from the simulation of light in an environment to images that look as real as the physical environment they portray. In other words the computer image should be not only physically correct but also perceptually equivalent to the scene it represents. This implies aspects of the Human Visual System (HVS) must be considered if realism is required. Visual perception is employed in many different guises in graphics to achieve authenticity. Certain aspects of the visual system must be considered to identify the perceptual effects that a realistic rendering system must achieve in order to reproduce effectively a similar visual response to a real scene. This paper outlines the manner in which knowledge about visual perception is increasingly appearing in state‐of‐the‐art realistic image synthesis. After a brief overview of the HVS, this paper is organized into four sections, each exploring the use of perception in realistic image synthesis, each with slightly different emphasis and application. First, Tone Mapping Operators, which attempt to map the vast range of computed radiance values to the limited range of display values, are discussed. Then perception based image quality metrics, which aim to compare images on a perceptual rather than physical basis, are presented. These metrics can be used to evaluate, validate and compare imagery. Thirdly, perception driven rendering algorithms are described. These algorithms focus on embedding models of the HVS directly into global illumination computations in order to improve their efficiency. Finally, techniques for comparing computer graphics imagery against the real world scenes they represent are discussed.

The animated film encyclopedia: a complete guide to American shorts, features, and sequences, 1900-1979

Explains the course of events leading from the early days of animation through to advent of computer graphics imagery.

Civic Discourse Amid Cultural Transformation

We live in an age of cultural transformation. The industrial age has finally surrendered to the information-based service economy. The era of the printed word is edging into history, ever more rapidly replaced by graphic imagery, whether the still photo, the staccato pulse of television, or the interactive imagery of the Web. Popular culture a localized culture of public participation, whether through town meetings, county fairs, the community picnic on the Fourth of July, attending the high school football game, or something else has largely passed away, replaced by a culture of mass entertainment Disney World, MTV, Hollywood productions, the Super Bowl, or anything skillfully packaged for mass consumption. Authentic experience has begun to be replaced by ersatz experience. No longer does one have to visit Paris or New York; now Las Vegas will do almost as well. Who needs to visit Tierra del Fuego to see penguins when their brightly defined and highly resolved images cavort on large illuminated screens in your home? These and other alterations of culture have produced, and will continue to produce, a distinct and discernible effect on civic discourse. In as few words as possible I hope to outline some of the major cultural transformations that recently have occurred or now are occurring, to relate those events to discernible changes in the nature of civic discourse, and to hazard some guesses about the future direction of our culture and our public discourse.

The Symbolic Graphic Life-Line: Integrating the past and Present through Graphic Imagery

This paper introduces an art therapy task, the symbolic graphic life-line, and its integration into group art therapy. The symbolic graphic life-line has been utilized in both long-term and short-term partial adult psychiatric facilities for several years. The use of time-lines or life-lines is not new to the mental health field and has been utilized for many years. The unique quality of this life-line is its ability to express feelings through an art task that creates a visual graph. The dual graphic and symbolic qualities inherent in this art task serve to stimulate client involvement in the group process. The visually expressed information has been found to be clinically therapeutic by suggesting treatment goals and by integrating the client's past and present feelings and thoughts in relation to memories, events, and milestones.

The UPIC system as an instrument of learning

The conceptual basis of the UPIC system is described and discussed, in particular its relation to the work of its orginator, Iannis Xenakis, to the science of acoustics and to the development of an intuitive graphic imagery. A possible pedagogical approac h to musical creation using the resources of the UPIC is developed, and the particular pedagogical ethos of the system is emphasised. There follows a detailed description of the practical arrangements for a number of different workshop situations using the UPIC system in which the author has participated, and an evaluation of the outcomes of using the system in this way.