Visual Diaries Research Articles

Exploring young children’s self and others: integrating visual diaries and the digital emotional expression application in art education

ABSTRACT This study explores the integration of technology-based and hands-on art practices in an early childhood art education program tailored to preschoolers in South Korea. The participants of this study included 20 young children aged five or six years old, who engaged in the program for a two-year period. By employing qualitative research methods, the results reveal the young learners’ enhanced expression of their emotion, including feelings, desires, and moods with the aid of visual diaries in conjunction with a digital emotional expression application supported by teacher intervention. Further, the young learners were stimulated to engage in self-discovery, self-awareness, and understanding of others. Ultimately, young children’s visual diaries enhanced educators’ and parents’ comprehension of their emotions. Moreover, showcasing these visual diaries and collaborative artwork promoted numerous opportunities for engagement and resonance with the local community. The fusion of visual diaries and the digital emotional expression application is viewed as a practice of emotional meaning making, wherein art and technology agency is distributed.

Engaging visual diaries in early childhood nature play as pedagogical arousal

This paper explores one element of a multi-faceted project that sought to investigate nature play in early childhood, namely the creation and co-creation of visual diaries by educators, children and academics. The methodology was participatory cartography, which involved the creation of visual and verbal mappings of nature play pedagogies by early childhood educators and academics, as well as visual mappings of nature play experiences by 4-5-year-old children. The visual diary supported, articulated, portrayed and documented the implementation of nature play pedagogies (by the educators), the experiences of nature play (by the children) and the analysis of data (by the academics). This paper explores this methodological slice of the project. It asserts that the visual diary is a useful, arousing and potentially aesthetic inquiry, documentary and resource apparatus for educators, enabling collaborative artmaking moments with children.

Images Connect Us Together: Navigating a COVID-19 Local Outbreak in China Through Social Media Images

Social media images, curated or casual, have become a crucial component of communicating situational information and emotions during health crises. Despite its prevalence and significance in informational dissemination and emotional connection, there lacks a comprehensive understanding of visual crisis communication in the aftermath of a pandemic which is characterized by uncertain local situations and emotional fatigue. To fill this gap, this work collected 345,423 crisis-related posts and 65,376 original images during the Xi'an COVID-19 local outbreak in China, and adopted a mixed-methods approach to understanding themes, goals, and strategies of crisis imagery. Image clustering captured the diversity of visual themes during the outbreak, such as text images embedding authoritative guidelines and "visual diaries" recording and sharing the quarantine life. Through text classification of the post that visuals were situated in, we found that different visual themes highly correlated with the informational and emotional goals of the post text, such as adopting text images to convey the latest policies and sharing food images to express anxiety. We further unpacked nuanced strategies of crisis image use through inductive coding, such as signifying authority and triggering empathy. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of crisis imagery and provide design implications to facilitate effective visual crisis communication.

Professional Development and Changes in Teachers’ Teaching Practices: A Pilot Study

Current efforts to improve physical education programs involve providing teachers with quality preparation professional development opportunities, especially for elementary classroom teachers (ECTs) who deliver physical education without adequate preparation (DeCorby et al., 2005).[5] However, little is known about the role of continuous professional development (CPD) in changes in ECTs’ practices regarding teaching physical education (Parker et al., 2022).[23] This study utilized visual methods to explore changes in ECTs’ practices regarding physical education teaching throughout their participation in a state-funded, five-month-long CPD initiative. The participants were four elementary classroom teachers in rural California. The CPD initiative consisted of a three-day summer institute and two follow-up sessions. Participant-generated visual diaries and focus group interviews were used to capture teacher practice changes. Findings revealed three themes: a) A focus on standards-based instruction facilitated teacher’s change; b) Involvement in a community of learners can be a powerful source of change; and c) Teacher change is a time-consuming process. This study highlights that ECTs who receive inadequate training in physical education teacher education are more likely to have a lack of competence and confidence in teaching physical education. The CPD activities can potentially enhance ECTs’ skills in planning and teaching practice, thereby boosting their confidence.

Mask Aesthetics: Prophylaxis, Post -Digital Arts, and Reimagining Vulnerable Selves

Affirming masks’ proven efficacy in preventing the airborne transmission of COVID-19, this paper seeks to understand face covering during the pandemic from a different but complementary angle: that is, as a deeply relational and thoroughly multimodal practice. Drawing on concepts of automediality, crip and feminist theories of affect and embodiment, biopolitics, and pandemic temporalities, I analyze artists’ mask-themed projects created during the first two years of the pandemic across forms including sculpture, performance, digital photography, social media, online visual diaries, and mutual aid projects. Through theoretical, analytical, and self-reflexive writing, the discussion draws out the shifting, contingent meanings of masks; their relation to currents of power, affect, and memory; and their implications for selfhood, community, and solidarity. Artists’ automedial projects show how masks have become integral to the life of the body, the upheaval of our lives, the losses we are mourning, the overlapping injustices we must fight, and the stories we tell about what it was and is like to be in our situations and to be connected to one another during the pandemic.

Youth4Sea and marine debris: An arts-based, site-specific, youth-framed inquiry

This arts-based project engaged youth (between 18 and 24 years of age) living in Byron Bay to co-design an inquiry addressing the increased pollution created during the period of Schoolies. Through a youth-framed participatory research design, the project team engaged local youth in researching young people’s marine pollution understandings, attitudes and behaviours. It then supported their ideas as they created, instigated and assessed an intervention campaign, targeted at Schoolies tourists, to reduce the amount of beach litter (). The young people conducted video interviews with their peers, created visual diaries, took photographs, and designed and implemented an intervention plan. Seeking a feasible action and realizing the enormity of the issue of marine pollution, they decided to target the beach as a specific site for intervention, and in particular, the issue of cigarette butt litter. The young people then engaged in a suite of arts-based analyses, including photographs of the intervention in-process, a documentary film, visual diaries () and a collaborative, large-scale canvas painting (; ) as an analytical riposte.

Towards Sustainable Food Consumption: Emerging Tensions Behind the Plate in a Colombian University Community

ABSTRACT The study of sustainable food consumption is key in the transformation of current unsustainable food systems. We explore the tensions that emerge between individual motives and sustainability spheres when making food consumption choices in a university community in Bogotá, Colombia. This complex phenomenon is addressed through a qualitative methodology based on observations, visual diaries, and a game-based protocol, which allow us to delve into food consumption motives while trying to avoid social desirability bias. Our results show a plate that is high in cereals, roots, tubers, plantains, and animal-based protein, and low in vegetables, fruits, and plant-based proteins. Behind this plate, most tensions emerge between family traditions and other sustainability spheres. These tensions are related to socio-affective risks, animal suffering, time constraints, effort, and monetary costs. Integrating sociocultural elements such as family traditions in public policy becomes fundamental when promoting sustainable diets in similar contexts. This study contributes to the discussion about the sociocultural changes required in the transition toward sustainable food systems.

From Ugly to Angry

In the beginning, there was the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s. With Ukraine's independence at the end of 1991, this art was rediscovered and reinterpreted. “Ugly design”, which was trending around the world, appeared in Ukraine in the early 1990s. Today, Ukrainian book design is embedded in global markets and trends, but it has preserved its national traditions and peculiarities in both theory and practice. Ukrainian illustrators are keeping visual diaries of the war. They are chroniclers of Russia’s war crimes and are creating angry, bold art.

Writing memory: Three visual diaries related to ‘pharmacy’

Diaries offer a private space to play tic-tac-toe with intellectual, artistic and personal complexities, practice wielding or calling upon language, confess amorous feelings, sharpen the switchblades of resentment, and so on. Accompanied by this general outline of what a diary is for, the diaries made by contemporary Chinese artists related to COVID-19 are neither written for themselves or for their future readers. It should belong to the third category as a public diary for living contemporary people. It challenges the concept of ‘author’ both in literal and art discourse and might make the identity of the diary more and more obscure. Are these diaries still private art? Or before it was created, has it already become public art? This article will focus on visual diaries made by three contemporary Chinese artists, and study how the artists ‘write’ their own ‘memory’.

Exploring the adolescent-self through written and visual diaries

Memories about our childhoods and adolescence may not always be accurate, but they do influence how we position ourselves as adults. In this paper, I assert that written and visual diaries can be used as a way to access the most accurate version of one’s younger years, and thus, they can help one explore their self-narrative and enhance their self-understanding.In this auto-hermeneutic inquiry, I studied the therapeutic potential of exploring my own early diaries and attempted to answer how reviewing one’s early thinking and emotions might influence a person’s current self-identity. In this research, I identified three aspects that enriched my understanding of my adolescence, and hence, my current self. First, the recurring narratives found in my adolescent diaries enhanced my understanding of the way I feel about particular things today. Second, I realized that the narrative I built around my teen self was not actually an accurate representation of my younger self. Third, using my diaries allowed me to identify important correlations between my past experiences and my current self.I conclude that adolescent diaries are one useful way to explore autobiographic memory and self-identity. Realizations drawn from earlier diaries can then be explored further through art therapy.

Visual borderlands: Visuality, performance, fluidity and art-science learning

The image is the raw material of the twenty-first century. Images infiltrate all social and cultural spaces. Its digital-mediated realities drive communication, industry and knowledge. Images saturate life and adolescent learners are familiar with the participatory nature of image production and its social, educational and personal communicative realities. Vision and visibility, seeing and being now dominate how we inter-subjectively recognise ourselves and perform our world. We also find our aesthetic and embodied self increasingly constituted within imaging acts that are relational. Visual culture may have colonised the self and learning, but imagination is without borders. The current pictorial turn opens possibilities to explore truth in flux through visual artistic acts. This article embeds Deleuzian method, which is one of intuitions, going beyond the actual, or our limited forms of representing life, to recognising that life has future imaginative potential forms and is always becoming. The article discusses an arts-based inquiry project for gifted artist visualiser/learners at an Australian regional university who are given broad topics on science phenomena and asked to give them expression. It suggests that pedagogies of the visual with their performative acts can prise open curriculum where an art-science interchange between two disciplines is made difficult by the current siloed nature of curriculum knowledge. Drawing on an analysis of Anika’s and Joel’s artworks and visual diaries it aims to reveal how their learning events dwell and are performed in aesthetic borderlands and how visual pedagogies forge new fluid visual borderlands and new learning.

Physical Activity Experiences of Adolescent Girls Living in a Rural Community

This study explored the daily life physical activity (PA) experiences of 11 adolescent girls living in a rural community in the Northwest of the United States. This qualitative study employed visual methods to explore adolescent girls’ PA experiences in their daily lives. Specifically, this study used visual diaries and photo-elicitation interviews to capture girls’ PA experiences. Data from this study revealed two distinct PA patterns among the 11 participants: casual movers and sporty girls. Casual movers have a much less structured approach to PA. They engage in a wide variety of PA types—mostly individual forms of PA and PA geared towards recreation. They describe fun, enjoyment, and task mastery as their main motivations to be physically active. Casual movers often engage in PA with family members and are compelled to be active outdoors and in their homes or neighborhoods. In contrast, all five sporty girls belong to competitive sports teams and have a more structured PA routine. They seek performance improvement and have high perceptions of physical competence. Sporty girls value being active with their teammates and receive strong support from their families in the form of encouragement, role modeling, and financial/structural assistance. Sporty girls feel confident being active in their schools’ fields, courts, and gymnasiums, but also appreciate the outdoors environment. Findings from this study support the need for schools to increase access to PA opportunities that are not focused on skill or fitness performance, thus appealing to casual movers’ approach to physical movement.

Forever ‘Becoming’? Negotiating Gendered and Ageing Embodiment in Everyday Life

Drawing upon 62 participant-produced visual diaries and accompanying interview narratives, this article explores the significance of everyday body work for people in mid- to later life. Departing from previous work that has explored the intersections of gender and age in relation to a single embodied practice, this article highlights the salience of a myriad of bodily practices for the everyday ways that gender and ageing identities are constituted, specifically hair styling, beauty work, clothing, and dieting. We argue that women negotiate a gendered pressure to age well, which results in an in/visibility paradox, in which they are at one and the same time seen, but not seen. Consequently, we question whether women are thus forever ‘becoming’ – attempting to become embodied subjects, alongside subjecting to ‘becoming’ – aligning with normative discourses. The article examines the competing ways that ageing and gendered bodies are constructed, together with participants’ embodied resistance to negative normalising discourses.

Visual Culture-Based Workshop: Visual Diaries

Images have become popular via advertisements, video games, fine arts, television, series, movies and other types of images. These images that we see around us our for whole life comprise a great proportion of visual culture. With a visual culture-based workshop, the students would acquire skills to make sense of and interpret what they see with artistic and aesthetic concerns in the workshop studies. In this respect, the students created visual diaries, in which they could reflect/question the experiences they acquire about their daily lives, and with which they could express themselves. The study adopted an art-based qualitative research approach. The study had been conducted in the fall and spring semesters of 2016-2017 academic year in the art drawing workshop course. The participants of the study were comprised of 7 students. The data of this study were collected using semi-structured interviews, document review (on visual diaries) and the art works of the student1s. The data of the study were analyzed using descriptive analysis. When the findings of the study are considered, it is seen that questionings about daily life, course notes, visual and textual interpretations, sense-making processes, and expression styles (sketch, drawing etc.) about their artistic work were included in students’ visual diary experiences in the workshop course. They visually reflected many things they notice around themselves and supported this with texts.

Finding synergy between oral and visual narratives on memorable and meaningful tourism experiences

Personal technologies are widely used to capture the memorable and meaningful experiences travellers have during their journeys. These digital footprints serve as memorabilia for travellers to share and reminiscence about these special experiences. This study showcases an exploratory study of the creation of a travel diary from the traveller’s digital footprints to facilitate the expression of and reminiscences about memorable and meaningful moments. In this study, 15 participants were asked to share their memorable and meaningful travel experiences and were then instructed to use their photos and a set of prototyping tools to create a paper-based visual diary of their experiences. The goal of this study was to examine the process of creating a visual diary to understand the differences in how these experiences are recounted and the ways they are expressed. We used a Labovian approach to compare and contrast the participants’ oral narratives and visual diaries. As in comics studies, the visual diaries are analysed with respect to their spatio–temporal dimensions and the recurring patterns in these two narrative forms are discussed. Based on the results, recommendations are made regarding the future design of travel diary platforms.

Multiple Exposures: Sean Fader's #Wishingpelt And Humor In Social Media Performance

Multiple Exposures:Sean Fader's #Wishingpelt And Humor In Social Media Performance David J. Getsy (bio) It was a laughable premise. Sean Fader staged a performance at a 2014 art fair in New York City in which he invited participants to rub his chest hair and make a wish. And they did. Lots of them. He and I are good friends, and he told me about his plans for #wishingpelt in advance. I told him not to do it, and I was worried that it would make his work seem unserious. I didn't get that the joke was the bait, and the ludicrousness of the situation was a Trojan Horse. For the past ten years, Fader has been using social media as a photographic and collaborative medium (rather than just a distribution platform), and he designed #wishingpelt for the context of an art fair with its saturation of art-related information, commerce, aspiration, and attention-grabbing. Participants queued up for the event, and Fader stood on a spot-lit pedestal in a darkened room, with attendants managing the crowd. As each participant was called, they were asked to hand their phone to the attendant who then directed the participant to ascend the pedestal, rub Fader's ample pelt, and whisper a wish into his ear. The wish was sealed when the attendant photographed the scene and the participant posted the photograph on Instagram with the titular hashtag. In its art fair premiere, the performance went Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sean Fader, #wishingpelt Instagram image #907 (2014). Digital photograph posted on Instagram from PULSE Art Fair, New York. Image courtesy of the artist. [End Page 515] on every day for five days, with Fader standing motionless on the platform for the full opening hours of the fair—for a total of almost fifty hours. Since its inception, over 2,500 people have posted hashtagged images from the performance.1 Infiltrating the buzz of the art fair, word of #wishingpelt spread fast. The line was long, creating a scene. Photographs of Fader popped up in more and more social media feeds. Instagram had only recently become a major lubricant of the art world, and at this time in the dawn of the age of influencers it was still often used as visual diaries.2 A crucial part of Fader's work was the co-option of this social medium as a site of performance. Fader activated the potential of hashtags to metastasize, and soon Instagram feeds throughout the fair (and beyond) were flooded with more and more of these posts. Fader's performance overtook the art fair as his photographs appeared on thousands of hand-held screens. The images seemed earnest to some and, to others, as risible, but their unorthodoxy and consistent visual style drew attention, comment, interest, and more sharing and searching of the #wishingpelt hashtag. The absurd premise of Fader's performance acted as lure, with incredulous fairgoers becoming unsure about how to manage (or avoid) this distributed performance. #wishingpelt persisted after the fair, but it is important to understand that it was also a live durational performance involving hundreds of participants (both active and passive) that occurred on and through social media across those five days. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Sean Fader, #wishingpelt Instagram image #1479 (2014). Digital photograph posted on Instagram from PULSE Art Fair, New York. Image courtesy of the artist. The performance co-opted the social media platforms with which members of the art world follow trends, present themselves, and decide priorities. In these practices, the individual photographic image is only one component of a larger, exponential circulation of images, hashtags, and viewer comments online. The critical effect of Fader's #wishingpelt was to expose the instrumentalization of social media while, at the same time, to offer alternative sites of real-time connection and exchange in the form of the live performance.3 Despite the work's humor, it was not cynical. I've talked to Fader a lot about his experience, and he has repeatedly told me that it was moving and emotional. However ludicrous the premise might have been, the people who...

Collective bread diaries: cultural identities in an artificial intelligence framework

The complex relationship between the current advancement of technology, including the wide scope of settings at which machinery plays substantial roles, and the cultural, historical, and political realities that have long existed across the history of mankind, is one that deserves absolute attention and exploration. This interconnection has been investigated in light of bread, and the meaning it signifies to people from all over the world. Drawing on the commonly unnoticed value of bread, and the everlasting impregnable imprint it has always had on revolutions throughout history, “Collective Bread Diaries” came to being as an interactive art project, employing the artificial intelligence of the MTurk platform in its investigation of “bread” as one’s peculiar voice and political statement. The author amongst other participants was granted the opportunity to draw and share personal visual representations of bread, eventually forming an array of visual diaries, each peculiar to its creator and each reflecting the cultural significance of the place from which it originated. The results are exceptionally reproduced drawings by a machine, with no apparent threads to culture, tradition, or history, emphasizes the conscious perception of one’s distinct identity. A number of 100 distinct drawings were machine-generated featuring various bread types. The process eventually investigates one’s perception of cultural identity, by exploring the cultural, socio-political, and religious threads that have long been weaved into the definition of “bread” across history.

The Photographs of Dead Animals

“Why look at animals?” asks art critic John Berger. I would like to address this question by paraprashing it and asking instead, “why look at dead animals?” Extinct or rare animals are the most interesting objects of the camera of curiosities and natural history museums. Hiroshi Sugimoto focuses on the dioramas where animals are shown in their habitats. Lynn Savarese revitalizes taxidermied animals as heroes of a story. Humans and animals have equal value in Michael Ackerman’s photographs. Nobuyoshi Araki’s visual diaries contain stories on life and death. Nezaket Tekin creates utopist scenes using insects. Her other work also involves documenting dead animals. Keywords: dead animals, dead people, photographs of dead animals, post-mortem photography, spirit photography

Encontro com diários visuais e/ou textuais: espaço disparador do pensar na experiência educativa

Resumo Este texto, recorte de pesquisa de doutorado, intenciona discutir como ocorre em uma experiência educativa o encontro com diários de aula, oferecendo um sobrevoo sobre eles, com eles e para além deles. Dessa forma, buscando atender aos anseios desta investigação, optou-se pela perspectiva narrativa, presentificada na problematização dos diários (visuais e textuais) produzidos pelos acadêmicos do curso de graduação em artes visuais da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria e nas redes de afetos que potencializaram ou não o pensar da experiência docente. Assim, com o intento de dar conta das exigências suscitadas pelas narrativas produzidas nos diários, passou-se a dialogar com o conceito de acontecimento. Neste tangenciar de narrativas próprias e alheias, foi possível desenhar outras paisagens e pensar na docência como um processo em constante renovação e invenção.

SYMPTOMATIC AND CYSTOSCOPIC PATTERN IN WOMEN WITH THE BLADDER PAIN SYNDROME

Introduction. The relevance of the problem is in high incidence of bladder pain syndrome (BPS) and a significant effect on the quality of life of patients. The objective of the research is to study the relationship between clinical manifestations and the cystoscopic pattern in women with BPS. Materials and methods. The results of a survey of 61 women with BPS aged 39 to 68 years are presented. The severity of clinical symptoms was assessed using a PUF questionnaire, a visual analogue pain scale and diaries of urination. All patients underwent cystoscopy after a preliminary hydrodistension of the bladder. Depending on the severity of the clinical manifestations of BPS all patients were divided into 3 groups. Results. Patients with more severe symptoms of BPS experienced more pronounced changes in the bladder during cystoscopy. Thus, the Gunner lesions were detected only in patients of the 3rd group with the most severe clinical symptoms and in none of the patients of the 1st (mild degree) and the 2 nd group (moderate degree). At the same time, none of the patients of the 3rd group had cystoscopy with normal cystoscopic pattern. Conclusions. The results of the study showed a correlation between the clinical manifestations of BPS in women and the changes in the bladder detected in cystoscopy after bladder hydrodistension.