Pictorial Systems Research Articles

Восприятие изобразительного текста: проблематизация, актуализация, новые методологические подходы

The problems of perception of various types and formats of texts that have been formed over a long historical period and are rapidly transforming into the digital and the coming post-digital era are in the research focus of a number of humanities disciplines. It is texts and their perception that are today an actual research platform for solving the fundamental scientific problem of modern communication. This article actualizes and problematizes the question of the nature and perception of visual content, which is becoming urgent today, forming the paradigm of the so-called visual research. The stated problem is considered taking into account its interdisciplinarity and the factors that have determined the strengthening of visuality in modern conditions. The article analyzes the discussions that have been going on since the second half of the twentieth century about visuality and visualization, as well as about the peculiarities of the perception of pictorial texts, the specifics of which in a particular era are determined by (1) historically conditioned visual and cultural norms, perceptual models that are formed under the influence of semiosociopsychological factors of modernity, (2) topics, the arsenal of supra-temporal universal constant perception structures formed in the centuries-old practice of human interaction with pictorial sign systems. The authors pay special attention to visual narrative - a generic concept of isocontent. Without claiming to fully characterize it, they highlight, based on existing research, the paradigm of its definitions, the features of its functioning and perception. The emphasis is placed on the uniqueness of visual language and visual thinking, on the internal verbality of the pictorial text, on its semiotic codes and semantic connectives, as well as on the transformations of the language of the visual narrative in the process of its perception. The transformations are reduced to a simultaneous and interrelated process of receiving a polycode text in two languages - verbal and visual - at once. Having analyzed different approaches to the pictorial text and its perception, the authors infer that, with a certain unity of views on the nature of the pictorial text and its reception, there are different opinions on the problem of its “regulation”: from the complete rejection of any interference with the skills and abilities of the “art of seeing” (reading visual text) to the development of specific teaching methods of such art. In conclusion, the article emphasizes that, for all their importance, it is not so much the author’s strategies for creating pictorial texts that are in a strong position, but rather the background knowledge (cultural memory) of recipients, their experience of communication with isocontent (the level of mastery of visual code, reading visual narrative, decoding pictorial texts and their transcoding, for example, in verbal text; finally, interpretation skills acquired in the intermediate processes of perception of iso-content of different types and formats) - all this, according to the authors of the article, not only allows competent management, but also needs it. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Interpretive impairment: how adolescents with mild mental retardation understand pictorial systems

Interpretive impairment: how adolescents with mild mental retardation understand pictorial systems

Beauties Moving from Jiangnan to Edo: Kanō Tan’yū’s Visual Transmission of Chinese Female-Figure Paintings

<p>明代中國繪畫傳至日本，成為江戶時代重要的創作素材。江戶早期狩野派畫家狩野探幽經多年蒐集和摹寫，繪製了大量以中國古畫為主的縮小摹本，稱作「探幽縮圖」。用於繪畫素材、鑑定筆記及門派傳承等，影響深遠。中國女性是其中重要題材。基於皆川三知關於「縮圖」中多於107幅「唐美人」圖的統計，本文從中日跨文化角度探討「縮圖」中國仕女圖的摹寫方法、來源和運用，並試論日本江戶時代對中國女性題材繪畫及其作偽的受容。發現「縮圖」多擅仕女畫的明代蘇州「吳門」畫家唐寅、仇英款，也有不長於仕女題材的江南名家如元代趙孟頫、趙雍，指出「蘇州片」為其重要來源。再以耕織圖、西王母圖為案例，探討了跨文化背景下中國女性圖像雜糅及重新詮釋問題。</p> <p> </p><p>"During the Ming dynasty, Chinese paintings were transmitted to Japan and became an essential visual source for Japanese paintings of the Edo period (1615-1867). Kanō Tan’yū (1602-1674), a leading artist of the early Edo Kanō School, spent his lifetime copying numerous earlier Chinese paintings, as well as some Japanese and Korean works. He left thousands of small-sized sketches, called Tan’yū Shukuzu [Tan’yū’s Small Sketches], leaving a lasting impact on the Japanese painting realm. They were made for multiple purposes, as painting models, authentication notes, teaching materials, and a symbol of a painter’s status. Sanko Minagawa’s research survey indicates the existence of more than 107 sketches of Chinese female images, as one of the major subjects, in Tan’yū Shukuzu. </p> <p> This paper focuses on Tan’yū’s copies of Chinese female-figure paintings (often called tobijinzu, “pictures of Chinese beauties,” in Japanese) that were largely overlapped with while beyond the scope of the shinü tu or meiren hua genre (paintings of beautiful ladies) in Chinese art. It discusses the reproduction mechanism of Shukuzu in comparison with the Chinese fenben practice. It also examines the attributed Chinese artists’ signatures copied by Tan’yū in Shukuzu, e.g., Qiu Ying and Tang Yin (famed for beautiful women paintings), Zhao Mengfu and Zhao Yong (no extant authentic female-figure paintings), and it identifies the late Ming Suzhou Pian workshop as an important original Chinese source. It provides a fresh angle to approach the perception of Chinese “forgery” paintings and the long-term use of Shukuzu in re-making and reinterpreting Chinese paintings in Edo Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Through two case studies from a transcultural perspective, it shows the combination of two Chinese pictorial systems, gengzhi tu (Pictures of Tilling and Weaving) and shinü tu, in a Kanō School scroll; and the transformation of the Queen Mother of the West, from a powerful female Daoist immortal signified by peaches of immortality to a secularized beautiful lady holding peach blossoms, in Kanō School paintings. </p> <p> </p>

ВЕРБАЛЬНО-ПИКТОРИАЛЬНЫЕ ГИБРИДЫ КАК ОБЪЕКТ ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКОГО ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ: К ПОСТАНОВКЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ

Verbal-pictorial hybrids are peculiar semiotic entities where the components of the verbal and pictorial sign systems are blended in such a way that they form an indissoluble entity and, thus, double their functional yield. Verbal-pictorial hybrids are kinds of сreolized (polycode) texts in which the convergence between verbal and pictorial components becomes the strongest and their formation is conditioned by the use of the same visual information transfer channel which is shared between both the written speech and images. The category in question includes calligrams, ASCIIart, pictorial puzzles, graphemic emoticons, specific forms of the graphic metaphor, marketing communication products (advertisements, logos) and all these give rise to a new unique category in the linguistic and semiotic studies. Verbal-pictorial hybrids belong to different discourses and genres and can be classified in accordance with their innate properties: antecedence/ subordinance of verbal and pictorial elements and, also, in accordance with the extent to which one of the semiotic dimensions loses its properties after becoming part of the hybrid entity.

The Lords of Tetzcoco: The Transformation of Indigenous Rule in Postconquest Central Mexico

In The Lords of Tetzcoco, Bradley Benton provides a much-needed overview of sixteenth-century Tetzcoco and its Native nobility. Perhaps best known as the second most powerful city within the Aztec empire, Tetzcoco was the capital of the larger Acolhua domain, Acolhuacan, and sold itself as the intellectual and cultural hub of central Mexico. Benton’s concern is not so much on the preconquest reputation of the city but instead on how its Indigenous rulers adapted to colonial rule and managed to retain relative power and affluence despite the fact that many other Indigenous nobles suffered a loss of political and economic power during the sixteenth century. Benton associates the relatively better fortunes of Tetzcoco’s leading nobles to their active responses to Spanish colonial rule and astute negotiations of new positions of power under this rule.Benton’s approach is largely chronological. He first explains the political situation in Tetzcoco in the years immediately before the conquest and in the first decades after the imposition of colonial rule. Just before the arrival of the Spaniards, Tetzcoco had experienced a breakdown in authority, with different factions of nobles competing for control over the city-state. Benton painstakingly reconstructs these different factions, their various familial connections, and their claims to power, which remained largely unresolved throughout the first decades of colonial rule. Benton uses the well-known inquisition trial of don Carlos Ometochtzin to shed light on some of these rivalries. As Benton shows, Ometochtzin’s denouement hinged more on the familial and political tensions that characterized 1530s Tetzcoco as well as Spanish norms regarding sexual practices and concubinage, than the more commonly referenced idolatry for which he was also accused.From 1540 through the mid-1560s, Tetzcoco experienced a time of relative stability, with two Tetzcoca nobles, don Antonio Pimentel Ihuian and his nephew don Hernando Pimentel Ihuian, reasserting traditional authority over the city. In chapter 2, Benton links their success to an adroit embrace of Christianity, their provision of basic services to the people of Tetzcoco, their legal responses to Spanish incursions on Native lands, and use of pictorial documents and letters to the king that promoted Tetzcoco’s preconquest greatness. Nevertheless, after 1564, Tetzcoco experienced increasing instability, with the city’s nobles losing political authority and Tetzcoco itself facing increasing economic pressure. And yet, despite these challenges, the noble family of Tetzcoco managed to retain some measure of wealth. In the second part of the book, Benton traces the survival of the family and its cacicazgo, or entailed estate. He focuses on particular family lines, paying special attention to the noble women of Tetzcoco and their mestizo children, including the well-known writers and cousins, Juan Bautista de Pomar and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl.Throughout the book, Benton explains his sources—which span the Native and Spanish spheres and include both alphabetic and pictorial systems of writing—with clarity and logic. In recent years, Tetzcoco has appealed to an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose works have contributed to an increased understanding of specific aspects of preconquest and early colonial Tetzcoco. By taking a wider approach to Tetzcoco and the fortunes of its leading families throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, Benton’s work helps to contextualize these other, more focused studies and provides students and scholars a necessary starting point for future works on Tetzcoco and the Acolhua peoples.

Children’s Eye Movements, Miscue Analysis Patterns, and Retellings When Reading a Counterpoint Picture Book

This study incorporated eye movement miscue analysis to investigate two second-graders’ oral reading and comprehension of a counterpoint picture book. Findings suggest the second-graders’ strategies when reading the written and pictorial text affected their comprehension as opposed to the number and location of their eye movements. Specifically, the data highlight the contextual nature of the counterpoint picture book and how the readers’ strategies influenced the ways students navigated the text, what they fixated on while reading the written and pictorial texts, and the effects of these eye movement data on their comprehension. These results highlight the importance of young students’ need to be able to distinguish and value the role of written and pictorial sign systems to facilitate success in an ever-expanding multimodal world.

Semiotic Landscapes in Commercial Communication

The analysis of a sample of characteristic commercial shop signs in today's Limassol, Cyprus, asserts their anchorage function as syncretic/polysemiotic texts relying upon the synergy of semiotic systems, in their commercial and broader informational function. The study of intersemiosis, i.e. of the translation between pictorial and linguistic semiotic systems and their hierarchy, can provide the basis for an in-depth semiotic study of the socio-economic and historical-aesthetic landscape of the city. This study offers a preliminary methodological separation of sign systems on the shop signs in Limassol, showing up the ways intersemiosis remains the standard historical communication method of shop signs since the advent of mass commerce.

Fotografia contemporânea e intersemioticidade

This article aims at investigating the relationships between the pictorial and photographic systems that are present in the work of contemporary photographers such as Miguel Rio Branco. Since its invention, photography has been placed on dialogue with other visual media, especially the pictorial ones. From technical to semiotic perspectives, these images were initially understood in terms of their uniqueness and aesthetic similarities with painting, which made the blurry technique an important characteristic of the pictorial style in photography. In the 1920s, a necessary break occurs: photographers, such as Man Ray, begin experimenting with the expressive potential of photography. Such actions prepare the field for the emergence of the 1960s’ contemporary photography. By exploring the dialogue between visual systems, the work of artists such as Miguel Rio Branco motivates our research on the intersemiotic feature of contemporary photography. Expressive possibilities typical of photography, e.g. the photographic cut, coexist with investigations which are characteristic of the pictorial system. Miguel Rio Branco appropriates chromaticism to establish such dialogue among visual systems, dialogue which is here analyzed in a diptych by the photographer, taken as an example. Our focus is on enunciation strategies that invite us to relate the picture with an iconographic repertoire and apprehend how to build a visual message that exceeds the photographic language, in these images.

For Your Information – May 2011

From students ready to solve pictorial systems of equations, to teachers looking for a creative way to reinforce the concept of variable and solution, to parents looking for extra mathematics challenges for a precocious child—these three booklets offer entertaining doublesided, tear–out activity sheets for practicing algebraic reasoning.

Deriving topological relations between regions from direction relations

The integration of topological and direction relations plays an important role in many applications, like spatial databases and pictorial retrieval systems. The method for deriving composition of binary topological relations cannot always yield unique or interesting results. Therefore, to integrate efficiently topological and direction relations, some new mechanisms are required to derive topological relations from direction cases when the above situations occur. This paper presents the computation methods for deriving topological relations from direction relations. The methods fall into two categories: the derivation of topological relations from one direction relation and two direction relations. Our methods can provide topological information when topological relations are unavailable, or more precise results are expected. Thus they are helpful in the integration of the calculi for topological and direction relations.

Finding minimal and maximal sets of spatial relationships in pictorial retrieval systems

Spatial reasoning is an important component in pictorial retrieval systems. There are two approaches to handling spatial relationships: the well-known one is to use algorithms on which most earlier work such as (13, 17, 21) is based, and the recent one (30) is to construct deductive rules that allow spatial relationships to be deduced. Sistla et al. (30) developed a system of rules R on reasoning about basic spatial relationships that are of common interest in pictorial databases. In this paper, we consider the following two problems with that system of rules R: the deduction problem (that is, to deduce new spatial relationships from a given set F of spatial relationships) and the reduction problem (that is, to eliminate redundant spatial relationships from F. We use the mathematically simple matrix representation approach to show that these two prob- lems can be solved by efficient (i.e., polynomial-time) algorithms. The time required by both of them is at most a constant multiple of the time to compute the transitive reduction of a directed graph with n vertices or to compute the transitive closure of a directed graph with n vertices or to perform n × n Boolean matrix multiplication, and thus is always bounded by time complexity O(n 3 ) (and space complexity O(n 2 )), where n is the number of all involved objects.

The bronchopulmonary pathology of alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) deficiency: Findings of the death review committee of the national registry for individuals with severe deficiency of alpha-1 antitrypsin

To assess the pathological changes in the lungs and liver of 42 individuals who died while enrolled in the Registry of Individuals with Severe Deficiency of Alpha-1 Antitrypsin (AAT), all available histopathologic surgical or postmortem-derived specimens were reviewed by the pathologist member of the Death Review Committee. The underlying cause of death was emphysema in 34 patients and cirrhosis in 2 patients. Slides of lung were graded for emphysema, and liver specimens were graded for fibrosis, using respective pictorial scoring systems. Correlations between the degree of pathological abnormality and clinical features were evaluated. All lungs exhibited severe panacinar emphysema (mean emphysema score, 7.9 ± 1.06 [standard deviation], where 10 represents the greatest severity) with a lower lobe predominance. Centriacinar emphysema was minimal. No correlation was found between the pathological severity of emphysema and pulmonary function measurements, and no significant correlation was found between the degree of emphysema and the degree of hepatic fibrosis. Mildly increased bronchial gland-to-wall ratio accompanied mild inflammation and goblet cell hyperplasia. There were minimal changes in small airways. Dilatation of membranous bronchioles was a frequent finding; however, bronchiectasis of larger airways was a minor feature in only 6 patients (15%). Airway morphological features did not correlate with the clinical presence of chronic bronchitis or asthma. Although the lack of correlation between liver and lung pathological changes may reflect different pathogenetic mechanisms of liver disease and lung disease, the lack of correlation between emphysema grade and lung function likely reflects the skewed sample in a series of patients with advanced lung disease.

Research topics in pictorial databases

Pictures are natural and effective means of communication among people, computers, and robotics. A pictorial database is a collection of sharable pictorial data encoded in various formats. During the past several years, pictorial databases have attracted growing attention as an important component in building pictorial information systems as well as intelligent information systems. Eight research tasks are presented. They are comparing the numerical and the linguistic variable approaches, examining new linguistic hedges, studying the similarity of various similarity measures, investigating pictorial data compression techniques, performing pictorial data compression using array grammars, applying the entity‐relationship (ER) model to picture description; further investigating the relationship hierarchy for picture representation using ER diagrams, and extracting pictorial knowledge from pictorial databases. The research results may have a major impact on the development of object‐oriented pictorial databases.

On Completeness of Reasoning about Planar Spatial Relationships in Pictorial Retrieval Systems

In this paper we consider the completeness problem of reasoning about planar spatial relationships in pictorial retrieval systems. We define a large class of two-dimensional scenes, the extended pseudo-symbolic pictures. The existing rule system R is proved to be complete for (ex- tended) pseudo-symbolic pictures. We also introduce a new iconic indexing, the (extended) pseudo- 2D string representation, for them. The (extended) pseudo-2D string has the good properties of the 2D string. It is unambiguous, like the augmented 2D string, and has a compact form suitable for image retrieval. We then present efficient algorithms to determine whether a given planar picture is (extended) pseudo-symbolic or not, and if it is, these algorithms also return its (extended) pseudo-2D string representation. Picture retrieval by (extended) pseudo-2D strings is also discussed. 1. Introduction. Image database systems have been much studied over the past 20 years. One of the most important problems in the design of image database systems is how images are stored in the image databases (5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 24). While the use of indexing to allow database accessing has been well established in traditional database systems, content-based picture indexing techniques need to be developed for facilitating pictorial information retrieval from a pictorial database. Tanimoto (25) suggested the use of picture icons as picture indexes, thus intro- ducing the concept of iconic indexing. Subsequently, Chang et al. (11) developed the concept of iconic indexing by introducing the 2D string representation of the image. The 2D string approach is based on the idea that the spatial knowledge contained in a real picture can be suitably represented by a symbolic picture (i.e., a matrix of symbols) where every symbol corresponds to a significant element of the image. The position of a symbol in the grid corresponds to the position of the centroid of the rep- resented significant element. Depending on the application, the significant elements of the image can be pixels, lines, regions, and objects, etc. A 2D string representing a symbolic picture is derived from the picture by orthogonally projecting its symbols by columns and by rows. This approach gives an efficient and natural way to con- struct iconic indexes for two-dimensional pictures. With the 2D string approach, the problem of pictorial information retrieval for 2D pictures becomes a problem of 2D

Revisiting the Eastern Fence: Tao Qian's Chrysanthemums

The poet Tao Qian (365–427), who retired to the country to farm, drink, and write, was fond of chrysanthemums. Tao came to be one of China's best-loved poets, and the chrysanthemums in later art and literature served to represent personal, philosophical, and political values associated with him. Those values, however, could be variously construed, and the meanings and uses of chrysanthemums in visual culture are accordingly mutable and complex. The chrysanthemum's iconographic multivalence testifies to the protean vitality of the culture hero in Chinese history and demonstrates how such signs function dynamically in Chinese pictorial systems.

Vision and Cognition in Picture Perception*

In recent papers [1997, in press] I have explored how two seemingly conflicting paradigms inform the conception and study of picture perception. The dominant paradigm, one especially favored by vision theorists, claims that seeing a pictorial representation of an object is, with qualifications, like seeing the object itself. The picture, being a geometrically sanctioned projection of its object, resembles it, or otherwise serves as a mimetic surrogate, re-presenting what it depicts [Danto, 1982]. Accordingly, pictorial representation is at its best when, as in trompe l'oeil paintings, viewers can not tell the picture, the stand in or substitute, from the real thing.' An alternative paradigm, the symbolic model, championed most forcefully by Nelson Goodman [1968], focuses attention on syntactic and semantic features of pictures. On this account, pictures are importantly allied with other forms of representation, including languages, maps, and music notation, and picture perception is to be understood in this context. In my earlier work, I attempted to show how adopting the symbolic approach could provide a framework for explaining several persistent problems in the study of picture perception-a topic I will return to later. I also maintained that vision theorists' reluctance to embrace this approach often rests on a misunderstanding. Although the symbolic paradigm does stress that pictures, as representations, function like languages, it does not claim they are linguistic symbols. The model, in fact, insists there are significant syntactic and semantic distinctions between linguistic and pictorial systems.

The Behavior Chain Interruption Strategy: A Review of Research and Discussion of Future Directions

This review examines research studies that utilize the behavior chain interruption strategy (BCIS) to teach communication skills to individuals with severe disabilities. The BCIS is a naturalistic teaching procedure that uses an interruption to a behavior chain (i.e., a routine) as the point of instruction. The BCIS has been successfully applied to the teaching of communication skills to individuals across a wide range of ages and of levels of disability, including learners with multiple disabilities. It has been employed to teach a range of communication forms, including pictorial communication systems, natural gestures, signing, and a switch activated communication device. However, a number of questions remain regarding the BCIS. In particular, it is questioned whether the type of interruptions employed in the procedure are likely to occur outside a training context and whether communication taught with the procedure generalizes to out-of-routine contexts. Implications for practice are considered and suggestions are offered for future research.

The consistency problem of content-based pictorial description in pictorial database systems

The consistency problem of content-based pictorial description in pictorial database systems

Pictorial archiving communication systems (PACS): how can you not go filmless?

Pictorial archiving communication systems (PACS): how can you not go filmless?

Breadth-first search oriented symbolic picture representation for spatial match retrieval

To provide sufficient information for percepting symbolic objects among pictures from pictorial information systems, an efficient spatial data structure is needed to identify objects and to specify the spatial relationships among objects in a picture. In this paper, a new symbolic picture representation is proposed through the traversal of a quadtree corresponding to a given picture using breadth-first search and thus is called BFS string. An iconic indexing scheme for retrieving symbolic pictures based on the proposed BFS strings is presented and the algorithms introduced in the bin-tree oriented iconic indexing scheme by Chang and Lee (1998b) [Journal of Data and Knowledge Engineering 26 (2)]. is applied to the scheme for manipulating spatial relationships among objects. Compared with the bin-tree oriented scheme in storage complexity, experimental results show that the proposed BFS string requires less storage space when the picture has a great number of objects.