Visual Diary Research Articles

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.

‘This space inside’: An art-based autoethnographic exploration of the hysterectomy experience

This article presents an art-based autoethnographic account of the hysterectomy experience, from the perspective of a perinatal therapist based in a large maternity hospital. The key questions explored include the ways in which a sense of bodily and psychic integrity can be reclaimed post-operatively, alongside the integration of losses associated with a hysterectomy. The article is structured as an autoethnographic exploration, derived from a visual diary incorporating image-making, hand-stitching and writing. Four key themes are discussed with reference to specific images: ‘Navigating disruption’, ‘Adjusting to a changed body’, ‘Accommodating losses: Emerging into Otherhood’ and ‘Renewal: Recovering an inner space’. This personal account is considered against wider cultural and sociopolitical discourses which inform our constructions of femininity. The article offers a counterpoint to medical narratives which may assume recovery from a hysterectomy to be synonymous only with physical recuperation.

Translanguaging art – Questioning boundaries in Monika Szydłowska’s Do you miss your country?

Abstract Using the concept of translanguaging art that combines language(s) with other means of artistic expression, I discuss an artist’s book published in 2015 by Monika Szydłowska, who is a Polish-born visual artist living in the UK. Szydłowska’s book Do you miss your country? is a visual diary in which, using media traditionally associated with a travel journal (pencil and watercolours), the artist captures her experience of migration. The book depicts the everyday life of a young migrant woman from Poland, in the first years of her life in Scotland. The visual and textual narrative pinpoints the intricacies of the process of othering and identity building. I consider what the translanguaging art reveals about the process of identity creation in linguistically and culturally diverse communities and show how, through her choice of multi(trans)lingualism as a mode of writing and the form of a pocket-size sketchbook filled with watercolour drawings and speech bubbles, Szydłowska problematises the popular image of the migrant. I also discuss her engagement with the tradition of migrant writing and travel writing and her subtle subverting of these genres. I demonstrate how, by combining languages with visual means of expression choosing the form of a comic and the watercolour – a gendered and nationally loaded medium – she negotiates her identity and destabilises power relations historically operating within the migratory discourse. My conclusion suggests that her use of translanguaging enabled the artist to indicate the transformative and emancipatory potential of migration seen as the empowering rather than disempowering process for migrants and locals alike.

Epistemologies and Aesthetics of Curriculum, Pedagogical Praxis and Assessment in the Visual Arts: A Comparative Analysis of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and the New South Wales Stage 6 Visual Arts Syllabus

AbstractWe compare epistemologies and aesthetics in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and the Australian New South Wales Stage 6 Visual Arts Syllabus, focusing on curriculum content, pedagogical praxis, and assessment strategies. Both curricula feature making, reflexivity, and critique. International Baccalaureate components are Exhibition, the Process Portfolio, and the Comparative Study. In New South Wales Visual Arts they are the Body of Work and Visual Diary. Issues are the teacher as curriculum; uneven resources; shifting contexts and formulating standardized expectations. In both, qualitative assessment and examination are achieved via articulating criteria and levels of achievement, and examiner training. In International Baccalaureate, what counts as good work can vary in relation to Principal Examiner standards, particularities of context, pedagogy, and resources, with work ranging from sophisticated installations, to anime, to the school art style. In New South Wales Visual Art aesthetic conventions are reinforced because the system is less distributed than International Baccalaureate, where aesthetics become engrained, perpetuating conventions around what counts as good art. In spite of supervening assessment structures, teaching, learning, and assessment in visual arts education is always highly qualitative, unfolding, and rooted in the situated shifting conditions and ways of being in the world of each teacher, student, artwork, examiner, artist, and scholar.

LifeSeeker: an interactive concept-based retrieval system for lifelog data

Lifelogging was introduced as the process of passively capturing personal daily events via wearable devices. It ultimately creates a visual diary encoding every aspect of one’s life with the aim of future sharing or recollecting. In this paper, we present LifeSeeker, a lifelog image retrieval system participating in the Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) for 3 years, since 2019. Our objective is to support users to seek specific life moments using a combination of textual descriptions, spatial relationships, location information, and image similarities. In addition to the LSC challenge results, a further experiment was conducted in order to evaluate the power retrieval of our system on both expert and novice users. This experiment informed us about the effectiveness of the user’s interaction with the system when involving non-experts.

A dream, a visual diary: disruptive narrative modes in When the Camera Stopped Rolling (Jane Castle, 2021)

ABSTRACT Dubbed ‘a forgotten trailblazer’ of Australian filmmaking, Lilias Fraser was also the mother of cinematographer, Jane Castle, who spent more than a decade piecing together When the Camera Stopped Rolling (2021), a multifaceted documentary that draws on a rich archive of photographs, home movies and film footage shot by three generations of the Fraser-Castle family. Describing her love-hate relationship with the film, Castle says, ‘The final form was found through the making, rather than having a plan and applying a plan. I didn't know what it was about until it was finished.’ In its final form, When the Camera Stopped Rolling disrupts audience expectations of a hagiographic or elegiac narrative celebrating the lifetime achievements of Lilias Fraser. Ultimately, When the Camera Stopped Rolling is Jane Castle's story: an exquisite work of autofiction and self-extraction from the Fraser-Castle family and its audio-visual archives.

Looking at (Overlooked) Lichen: Visual Journaling as Part of Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees

The daily practice of photographing lichen on bark developed from my interest in the bark of trees during the project Performing with Plants (2017-2019) and continued during the project Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees (2020-2021). In this essay I return to these visual fieldnotes, compare the visual diary on Flickr with my previous journals on social media, and consider the potential of such practices for developing awareness of and a respectful relationship to other beings that we share this planet with.

Exploring the experiences of individuals living with persistent pain using a visual art diary

Introduction Persistent pain significantly impacts daily living. Visual arts interventions can have positive outcomes, but little is known about benefits for people with persistent pain. This study aimed to explore participant experiences of utilising visual art in expressing and managing their persistent pain experience through a visual diary. Method As part of a small exploratory study nested in a larger project, participants with a history of persistent pain were recruited from a local pain management clinic. Six participants with persistent pain attended five weekly intervention sessions involving art observation, creation and discussion, at the Art Gallery of NSW. Participants explored their ideas about their pain experience through artmaking using visual and written data from self-reported pain diaries. Thematic analysis was used. Results Analysis of five diaries was conducted. Visual and written expressions of the pain experience varied. Colour was used by participants to represent ideas and emotions. Capital letters were used to convey tone, or emphasis. Three main themes emerged from the written and visual data: ‘The lived experience of pain’, ‘The powerful drive for growth beyond change itself’ and ‘Personal values and perceptions guiding daily living and decision-making’. Conclusion This study provides insights into the potential benefits of using visual arts to help manage persistent pain experiences and improve health outcomes.

The feeling, embodiment and emotion of hallucinations in first episode psychosis: A prospective phenomenological visual-ecological study using novel multimodal unusual sensory experience (MUSE) maps.

BackgroundResearch and practice typically focus upon unimodal hallucinations, especially auditory verbal hallucinations. Contemporary research has however indicated that voice-hearing may co-occur within a broader milieu of feelings, and multimodal hallucinations may be more common than previously thought.MethodsAn observational design asked participants to prospectively document the feeling and modality of hallucinations for one week prior to an interview. Novel visual diary methods involving drawing, writing and body-mapping generated 42 MUSE maps (multimodal unusual sensory experience), analysed with a participatory qualitative method. Twelve people took part: all experiencing hallucinations daily, accessing early intervention in psychosis services, given psychotic-spectrum diagnoses, and living in the community. The study took place during a seven-month period in 2018 at Leicestershire and Rutland's Psychosis Intervention and Early Recovery service (UK).FindingsAll documented hallucinations co-occurred with bodily feelings. Feelings were localised to specific body areas, generalised across the body and extended beyond the body into peripersonal space. Co-occurring emotional feelings most commonly related to confusion, fear and frustration.InterpretationHallucinations were characterised by numerous feelings arising at once, often including multimodal, emotional, and embodied features. Within this study, the immediate feeling of hallucination experiences were readily communicated through prospective, visual, and ecological information gathering methods and particularly those which offer multiple modes of communication (e.g. body-map, visual, written, oral). Uptake of visual, ecological and prospective methods may enhance understandings of lived experiences of hallucinations.Funding: University of Leicester.

Archive Photography That Forms a Personal and Collective Memory

Personal and family albums created by Latvians in the period from 1939 until the 1950s are placed in a wider social and historical perspective by analyzing its content, as well as the individual intent to create it. This work explores photography album as a tool to organize memories and how historical, personal photography albums serve and interact as evidence of private as well as a public past. The research tries to prove the historical authenticity in two personal albums created by Latvians during the Second World War and the following years – a visual diary illustrating the imprisonment in the Soviet working camp in Siberia and a family album memorializing the way and life of the Latvian refugees in the Alt Garge camp, Germany. Two personal albums (currently stored at the archive of the Museum of Occupation of Latvia) have become objects of historical value and are an informative source for learning, analyzing and educating about historical events.

The Progression of Essential Tremors: Illustrative Videos.

Background:Essential tremor (ET) is a progressive neurological disease whose natural history is one of progressive increase in tremor severity over time; surprisingly though, there are no published videotape diaries that visually and tangibly portray this progression over time.Phenomenology:Progressive, stepwise increase in limb tremor severity over a ten-to-fifteen-year period in three patients with ET.Educational value:We hope that this brief visual diary will serve as a useful teaching tool for students, primary care physicians, and neurologists to “see with their own eyes” the extent of change that can occur in the ETs.

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Golden Dawn's Visual Diary: An Analysis of Content Shared by Greek Extremists on Youtube from 2012 to 2019

New media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter introduced the world to a new era of instant communication. During this era where online interactions can even replace offline actions, Golden Dawn was the first openly neo-Nazi party after World War II to win seats in the parliament of a European country. Mainstream media banned its leaders indefinitely after Ilias Kasidiaris physically attacked Liana Kanelli, a member of the Greek Communist Party, on live TV in June 2012. Many scholars seem to believe that Golden Dawn mobilised its voters online. This approach played a significant role in spreading their messages while trying to appeal to wider audiences. This paper uses visual and text analyses to investigate Golden Dawn’s activity on YouTube from 2012 to 2019. Official channels and politicians’ personal profiles are analyzed to explore their key messaging and style. Results of my analysis show that Golden Dawn’s messaging is ultranationalist, populist and adopted negative and emotional language. Additionally, their content openly promoted xenophobia and violence, and aimed at causing insurrection by mobilizing supporters or in some cases calling for the executions of political opponents.

Outside the Frame: The Josef Nassy Collection and the Boundaries of Holocaust Art

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s largely unknown Josef Nassy Collection is situated at the intersection of multiple cultural histories of migration and oppression. Josef Nassy (1904–76) was an artist of African, Sephardi, and European descent from the Dutch Caribbean colony of Suriname. While interned in Belgium and Germany from 1942–45, he created a poignant visual diary that brings into view unfamiliar facets of the Nazi camp system as well as unexpected points of intersection between Jewish and African diaspora experience. This article traces the story of the Nassy Collection’s wartime creation and postwar reception to illustrate how entrenched categories of art and victimhood can obstruct our access to the past. In contrast to this reception history, Nassy’s artworks encourage a relational approach to Holocaust studies, one that is attuned to the entanglement of European and colonial wartime experience and the diversity of Jewish identities.

Young Cancer on <em>Instagram</em>

Young Cancer on <em>Instagram</em>

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.

Twilight zones of history: Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia and the Serbian alternative comics of the 1990s

ABSTRACT This article analyzes Regards from Serbia (2007), a comic strip diary by Aleksandar Zograf, a Serbian underground cartoonist, as an instance of the alternative, anti-nationalist oppositional media space during the Yugoslav War. Drawing on comics scholarship and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, the article explores Zograf’s use of the fantastic and surreal aesthetics to depict the political spectacle of Serbian nationalism during the 1990s, a historical time which Zograf imagines as a collective dream or, alternatively, a nightmarish mass hallucination. The visual diary spans the entire decade of the 1990s, a period of war, privation and authoritarian rule in Serbia: from the internationally imposed sanctions in the early 1990s to the overthrow of the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milošević, following the U.S led NATO-bombing campaign. By examining the overall narrative progression of the comics diary and the use of surrealist themes, I view Zograf comics as site of dialectical images that critically reframe both the political rhetoric of Milošević’s nationalist regime as well as international mass media representations of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

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.

Virtual labyrinths: Nancy K. Miller’s and Susan Gubar’s narratives of cancer

Abstract In the midst of the age of memoir, where the demarcation between public discourse and private lives has been eroded, a number of life-writing genres figure prominently as identity narratives. Specifically, illness narratives proliferate in both digital and non-digital forms, thus becoming powerful social and cultural forms to understand illness today. This article aims to analyze how online forms are bringing relevant changes both to the genre and to the actual communication of cancer experience. Nancy K. Miller and Susan Gubar choose different forms (visual diary and blog, respectively) to help readers “acknowledge the place of cancer in the world”. Having lived in cancerland for a while, both reject widespread stereotypes about illness, such as being a cancer survivor, the role of the good patient or the need to reject negative emotions such as anger, fear or sadness. Specifically, I will use the concept of automediality in order to explore how subjectivity is constructed in their use of images and new media. This concept may help us further explore the ways in which online forms offer new ways of self-representation and mediation between technology and subjectivities.

Visual Diary: How Photos Represent the Context of Field Research

The article addresses the possibility of using visual data in field research. The article is based on the visual data obtained in the frame of the author's research projects of 2017—2019, aimed at studying everyday life of industrial workers in Yekaterinburg and the transformation of industrial territories in Moscow. The article is the additional visual material to the authors methodological manual “How to Collect Data in the Field [Qualitative] Research”. The authors have shown both the analytical significance of visual materials and their didactic potential. The article demonstrates how the research practice of photographing is organically integrated into the classical stages of fieldwork — access to the field, data collection, analysis and presentation of the results. At the same time, photographs are the relevant source of data about everyday life of citizens — material culture, spatial practices, emotions, identities. The authors make an attempt to visualize the process of field research, show the process of conducting projects through the photographs and demonstrate the genre of empirical materials as a visual diary.