Visual Frame Research Articles

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

). Synthesis of Philosophical-Aesthetic and Psychological Narratives in Modern Ukrainian Composers’ Creative Work

The purpose of the article is to determine the creative approach in composer activity and the perception of musical images, which lies in the aesthetic principles of individual creativity. The factors that influence this approach are the characteristics of human psychology and cognitive activity, the degree of synthesising worldview and artistic information, the individual’s sociocultural activity, and the effectiveness of their assimilation of the previous civilisational experience. The research also aims to investigate new ways of summarising information in the art of music, in connection with the introduction of the philosophy of pluralism and postmodern aesthetics in society; consider the phenomenon of influence on the consciousness of the composer of video-informational digital technologies. The research methodology lies in the analysis of the mechanisms of creativity, in particular in the systematic approach to the specifics of the aesthetic and psychological impact on modern society of "tying" sound forms to visual framing. Besides, it is based on studying the specified problem from different points of view: on the analysis of the inner impulses of the artist's own "I", solving professional tasks of the development of the musical genre, social challenges, which are realised by the creative personality as a real necessity, taking into account the transition from auditory verbal to synthetic perception of a musical work at the level of the synesthetic component and mystical suggestions. The scientific novelty consists in the generalisation of worldview and artistic information based on the sociocultural activity of the individual based on previous experience, the use in musicological analysis, in addition to the philosophical-aesthetic, but also the narratological approach, the identification of the conceptual sphere of creativity, its worldview, historical, ethno-national, psychological content, which is due to modern creative technologies. Conclusions. The sociocultural significance of composer creativity as a special type of activity, as a result of which new material and spiritual values arise, lies in the importance of its psychological and philosophical understanding for self-realisation, disclosure and understanding of the horizons of one's own spiritual life. Cathartic and compensatory processes of this direction of creative activity in the general human, historical-cultural, and individual sense contribute to the formation of a new socio-psychological reality of culture. Key words: synthesising, artistic information, composer creativity, sound forms, social challenges

Video-Based Cross-Modal Auxiliary Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis has a wide range of applications due to its information complementarity in multimodal interactions. Previous works focus more on investigating efficient joint representations, but they rarely consider the insufficient unimodal features extraction and data redundancy of multimodal fusion. In this paper, a Video-based Cross-modal Auxiliary Network (VCAN) is proposed, which is comprised of an audio features map module and a cross-modal selection module. The first module is designed to substantially increase feature diversity in audio feature extraction, aiming to improve classification accuracy by providing more comprehensive acoustic representations. To empower the model to handle redundant visual features, the second module is addressed to efficiently filter the redundant visual frames during integrating audiovisual data. Moreover, a classifier group consisting of several image classification networks is introduced to predict sentiment polarities and emotion categories. Extensive experimental results on RAVDESS, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI benchmarks indicate that VCAN is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art methods for improving the classification accuracy of multimodal sentiment analysis.

Visual portrayals of fun in the sun in European news outlets misrepresent heatwave risks

AbstractThe ways in which news media communicate about heatwaves can influence how society conceptualises and addresses heatwave risks. We examined visual news coverage of the 2019 heatwaves in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, using content and visual critical discourse analyses. Many visuals were positively valenced (in contrast to article texts), framing heatwaves as ‘fun in the sun’. The most prevalent type of images in all countries were photographs of people having fun in or by water. When images did depict the danger of heat extremes, people were largely absent. We conclude that this visual framing of heatwaves is problematic: first, by displacing concerns of vulnerability, it marginalises the experiences of those vulnerable to heatwaves; and second, it excludes opportunities for imagining a more resilient future. We conclude with suggestions to diversify the visual discourse on climate change and heatwaves in the news media.

Visual Framing: The Use of COVID-19 in the Mobilization of Hong Kong Protest

AbstractThis study focuses on the Hong Kong Lennon Walls and the communications posted there. We assert that the physical placement of COVID-19 related images on the Lennon Walls of Hong Kong and the replication of symbols and iconography from the Umbrella Movement and the Anti-ELAB Movement situated COVID-19 discourse not only physically within but also symbolically within the contentious politics of Hong Kong. We conclude that the messages and images posted on Lennon Walls between January and April 2020 have used COVID-19 to extend public expression of sentiment on the debates around the Hong Kong government and to further mobilize a sense of Hong Kong identity against China. The findings contribute to the understandings of how the cultural politics surrounding the pandemic became a collective action frame in the mobilization of a localized Hong Kong political identity against the Hong Kong and Chinese governments.

Stücke: Graphic Vignettes and the Haptic Response in László Nemes’s Saul fia

This article examines László Nemes’s film Saul fia (2015) and its visual and sonic use of brutalized human bodies to induce a haptic response in its audience. Presented out of focus and often at the periphery of the shot, the visual frame of human death causes viewers of the film to recoil into the centre of the frame—a space typically occupied by the film’s protagonist, Saul Auslӓnder. This article argues that these visually and sonically induced haptic triggers, and the claustrophobia that results, tether the audience to Auslӓnder to re-centre the viewer’s gaze as that of a companion rather than perpetrator. Drawing from extant literature on cinematic haptics and filmic representations of the Holocaust, this article engages with contemporary discourses on graphic Holocaust representations in contemporary feature-length films to examine the impact of graphic imagery and haptic cinematics on the perspective and ability of the viewer to subvert the perpetrator gaze.

Verbal and Visual Framing of Responsibility for Type 1 Diabetes by Patient Influencers on Instagram

Visuals remain understudied in health-related framing research. On Instagram, users who have been patients of long-term health conditions, such as type 1 diabetes (T1D), and who regularly share their experiences with a wider audience, that is, patient influencers, have become an increasingly important source of health information. Both their verbal and visual portrayal of health issues and how they frame causal and treatment responsibility for them matters for the public perception of health and illness. We aimed at determining how patient influencers verbally and visually portray T1D on Instagram, thus incorporating verbal and visual frame analysis by conducting a multimethod study. Combining insights from a qualitative image sorting study ( N = 168 images) and a quantitative content analysis of N = 280 posts by German patient influencers on Instagram, we show that these influencers frequently share how they feel about their illness and verbally emphasize individual treatment responsibilities. Visually, they mostly share images of their diabetes devices, such as insulin pumps. Overall, the visuals used on Instagram tend to enhance the verbal responsibility frames in the captions, with one specific visual frame attributing individual treatment responsibility.

Visual odometry of Rhinecanthus aculeatus depends on the visual density of the environment

Distance travelled is a crucial metric that underpins an animal’s ability to navigate in the short-range. While there is extensive research on how terrestrial animals measure travel distance, it is unknown how animals navigating in aquatic environments estimate this metric. A common method used by land animals is to measure optic flow, where the speed of self-induced visual motion is integrated over the course of a journey. Whether freely-swimming aquatic animals also measure distance relative to a visual frame of reference is unclear. Using the marine fish Rhinecanthus aculeatus, we show that teleost fish can use visual motion information to estimate distance travelled. However, the underlying mechanism differs fundamentally from previously studied terrestrial animals. Humans and terrestrial invertebrates measure the total angular motion of visual features for odometry, a mechanism which does not vary with visual density. In contrast, the visual odometer used by Rhinecanthus acuelatus is strongly dependent on the visual density of the environment. Odometry in fish may therefore be mediated by a movement detection mechanism akin to the system underlying the optomotor response, a separate motion-detection mechanism used by both vertebrates and invertebrates for course and gaze stabilisation.

Learning body part‐based pose lexicons for semantic action recognition

AbstractSemantic action recognition aims to classify actions based on the associated semantics, which can be applied in video captioning and human‐machine interaction. In this paper the problem is addressed by jointly learning multiple pose lexicons based on multiple body parts. Specifically, multiple visual pose models are learnt, and one visual pose model is associated with one body part, which characterises the likelihood of an observed video frame being generated from hidden visual poses. Moreover, multiple pose lexicon models are simultaneously learnt along with visual pose models. One pose lexicon model is associated with one body part that establishes a probabilistic mapping between the hidden visual poses and semantic poses parsed from textual instructions. To capture the temporal relations among body parts, a transition model is also learnt to measure the probability of the alignment transitioned from one position to another position. The body part‐based pose lexicon learning provides a novel method of cross‐modality semantic correlation, which can be applied in other spatial and temporal data. Action classification is finally formulated as the problem of finding the maximum posterior probability that a given multiple sequences of visual frames follow multiple sequences of semantic poses, subject to the most likely visual pose sequences and alignment sequences. Experiments were conducted on five action datasets to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Testing the influence of visual framing on engagement and pro‐environmental action

AbstractAlthough images play a significant role in environmental communications, few studies have empirically examined whether positive or negative images are more effective at engaging attention and promoting behavior change. We conducted a 6‐week public experiment at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida, to test whether viewing a photography exhibit featuring images of the impacts of marine plastic pollution on ocean ecosystems (negative valence) or images of pristine ocean ecosystems (positive valence) would increase engagement, monetary donations to conservation, and pledges to help protect the ocean from plastic pollution. We tracked 1179 adults while observing the negative exhibit and 1304 adults while observing the positive exhibit. Of the adults tracked, significantly more engaged with the negative exhibit (270; 22.90%) than the positive exhibit (159; 12.19%). The mean number of pledges per visitor for the negative exhibit was significantly higher than for the positive exhibit. However, there was not a significant difference in donations between the two exhibits. These results suggest that environmental organizations that seek to capture attention should consider using images that show the negative impacts of human behavior on the environment.

Comparative Study of the Information about the COVID-19 Pandemic and COVID-19 Vaccines on the Covers of United Kingdom, France, Spain and United States’ Main Newspapers

This study compares the information coverage of the vaccine against the information of the COVID-19 pandemic in eight newspapers (two per country) from the United Kingdom, France, Spain and the United States. The newspapers analyzed are The Times and The Guardian (United Kingdom), Le Monde and Le Figaro (France), El País and El Mundo (Spain), and The New York Times and The Washington Post (United States). On a methodological level, the work uses a descriptive approach of hemerographic analysis. As a result, it is observed—in the case of coverage of the pandemic—that the presence of affected persons and health personnel in the front-page information was negligible, with a predominance of news journalistic genres (brief and newsworthy, especially), evidencing a leading role of political figures and the high degree of politicization of the crisis. In addition, the visual frames in the analyzed newspapers tended to promote humanization through emotional representation. On the other hand, the results of the news coverage of the vaccine showed a predominance of news journalistic genres, wherein supranational entities and pharmaceutical companies starred in the front pages to a greater extent. The study denotes the importance of media literacy among citizens, especially in the face of this type of informational events of global significance.

Nameless, Voiceless, and Helpless: Visual Framing of Distant Outgroups in Online Humanitarian Appeals

ABSTRACT The current study examines how distant outgroups are portrayed in humanitarian appeals on a popular social media platform, YouTube. Social media is a growing platform for humanitarian organisations to spread messages about crises, as they can reach a wide audience in a quick and costless manner. Drawing from theories of visual framing and intergroup relations, this study analyses how organisations frame the outgroup beneficiaries in their online donation appeals. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to explore online humanitarian donation appeals, with a focus on the visual content used to portray outgroup beneficiaries. The study sampled 187 videos from 10 prominent humanitarian organisations’ YouTube channels. Findings indicate that while humanitarian organisations have largely moved away from an explicit rhetoric of frail, dying, and suffering subjects, subtle notions of helplessness are still prevalent. The narrative that outgroup beneficiaries are passive sufferers can hence be detrimental to intergroup relations.

The Influence of Visual Frame Combinations in Solutions Journalism Stories

This study investigated how visual framing influences discrete emotional responses, empathy, behavioral intentions, and efficacy in reaction to visual solutions journalism. A 2 (story topic: drug addiction, homelessness) × 4 (visual frame condition: no photo, solution-only, problem-only, combination) mixed design experiment revealed that images showing only social problems elicited the lowest levels of compassion in viewers, challenging long-held assumptions about the utility of social problem imagery. Image pairs showing both problems and solutions were revealed to be effective at eliciting moderate levels of emotional response, including hope, compassion, and empathy.

Visual Framing of the Rohingya Refugees: A Comparative Examination from Newspapers in four Countries

Media depictions of refugees play a significant role in determining public attitudes toward policies and dispensation of aid. Given this centrality, the study analyzes prominent visual frames of the Rohingya refugee crisis in newspapers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the United States, and Canada. We also examine the frames qualitatively. Findings show that overall coverage tended to focus on negative aspects by highlighting refugees’ vast numbers, vulnerability, gendered stereotypes, and dependence on Western benevolence. Results show cross-cultural appeal of frames such as “Exodus” and “mother and child,” both of which have roots in the Biblical tradition. Even though visuals came from different sources, there were not many differences among the newspapers. This suggests the role of standardized journalistic routines across multiple organizations.

Social Media Visual Framing towards Political Participation: An Analysis on BERSIH 2.0

The political atmosphere in Malaysia had witnessed a growing trend of social movement organisations and protests. The recent attention is on the phenomenal record usage of social media platforms as tools to spread political ideology. The multimodal nature of social media has made it an efficient tool where users can post textual information as well as visual materials to reach out to its audience. This article sets out to examine the visual strategy of one of the largest political social movements in Malaysia, the BERSIH movement, within a social media setting. Building on the existing work on visual framing, it asks: How were issues visually portrayed on the BERSIH social media account during the peak of the movement in Malaysia? In this context, Facebook was chosen as the social media platform analysed as it is the main social media used by the movement. Adapting on the level of visual framing, a content analysis was done to a sample of 59 (N=59) top liked photos posted on the Bersih 2.0 Official Facebook account which received more than 0.5% engagement rate (ER= >0.5%). The findings showed that at the denotative level, the main forms of visuals used were photos of protesters, followed by posters and photos of important individuals. The findings also showed that at the connotative level, the main frame highlighted was ‘solidarity’ followed by ‘call for action’ in the form of direct and symbolic visuals. Keywords: Visual framing, framing, social movement, political communication, social media.

A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis of Human Capital and Sustainability

The extensive and practical usage of human capital for sustainability in organizations has emerged as a popular topic in the research domain. An in-depth bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer software is used to analyse and visualize a conceptual and knowledge growth map of human capital and sustainability. Bibliometric indicators like citations are accustomed to establishing the sphere structure and the visual map to determine the research growth trends in a defined area. From January 1993 to March 2021, 573 papers were obtained through Scopus-listed journals related to human capital and sustainability. In the current article, co-citation analysis and annual trends for the top keywords are provided. Network analysis is to identify authors, publications and other research groups. Data mapping techniques diagrammatically depict the evolution of publications over time and determine trending interests in research and potential indications for future applications in achieving sustainability. Co-authorship analysis, co-citation and co-authors of the origins are also defined. In addition, country-wise quantitative analysis and temporal of publications with highly cited papers are marked and identified. The study provides analysers and practitioners with a visual and simplified frame of research on this content.

ClockBoard: A zoning system for urban analysis

Zones are the building blocks of urban analysis. Fields ranging from demographics to transport planning routinely use zones - spatially contiguous areal units that break-up continuous space into discrete chunks - as the foundation for diverse analysis techniques. Key methods such as origin-destination analysis and choropleth mapping rely on zones with appropriate sizes, shapes and coverage. However, existing zoning systems are sub-optimal in many urban analysis contexts, for three main reasons: 1) administrative zoning systems are often based on somewhat arbitrary factors; 2) zoning systems that are evidence-based (e.g., based on equal population size) are often highly variable in size and shape, reducing their utility for inter-city comparison; and 3) official zoning systems in many places simply do not exist or are unavailable. We set out to develop a flexible, open and scalable solution to these problems. The result is the zonebuilder project (with R, Rust and Python implementations), which was used to create the ClockBoard zoning system. ClockBoard consists of 12 segments emanating from a central place and divided by concentric rings with radii that increase in line with the triangular number sequence (1, 3, 6 km etc). 'ClockBoards' thus create a consistent visual frame of reference for monocentric cities that is reminiscent of clocks and a dartboard. This paper outlines the design and potential uses of the ClockBoard zoning system in the historical context, and discusses future avenues for research into the design and assessment of zoning systems.

A Multi-Stream Sequence Learning Framework for Human Interaction Recognition

Human interaction recognition (HIR) is challenging due to multiple humans’ involvement and their mutual interaction in a single frame, generated from their movements. Mainstream literature is based on three-dimensional (3-D) convolutional neural networks (CNNs), processing only visual frames, where human joints data play a vital role in accurate interaction recognition. Therefore, this article proposes a multistream network for HIR that intelligently learns from skeletons’ key points and spatiotemporal visual representations. The first stream localises the joints of the human body using a pose estimation model and transmits them to a 1-D CNN and bidirectional long short-term memory to efficiently extract the features of the dynamic movements of each human skeleton. The second stream feeds the series of visual frames to a 3-D convolutional neural network to extract the discriminative spatiotemporal features. Finally, the outputs of both streams are integrated via fully connected layers that precisely classify the ongoing interactions between humans. To validate the performance of the proposed network, we conducted a comprehensive set of experiments on two benchmark datasets, UT-interaction and TV human interaction, and found 1.15% and 10.0% improvement in the accuracy.

Transformation of the frame of the «picturesque Ukrainian village» as a visual representation of some features of national character in the late ХІХ – early XXI century

The purpose of the article is to compare some visual frames, produced by narrative ideas about the Ukrainian national character in the XIX-XX centuries, with visual representations of these ideas in popular Ukrainian social media and networks in the first quarter of the XXI cent. The research methodology combines quantitative (content analysis, statistical calculations) and qualitative (structural semiotic-semantic analysis) methods with culturological interpretation of the results. The scientific novelty lies in the establishment of external and internal changes in the visual representations of the Ukrainian national character in the socio-cultural context of «secondary» modernization. Conclusions. The frame of the «picturesque Ukrainian village» as a visual representation of the leading features of the Ukrainian national character — «emotionalism and sentimentalism, sensitivity and lyricism» and partly «individualism» (D. Chizhevsky), has been created in the fine arts of the late ХІХ cent. In Ukraine at the beginning of the XXI century in the popular social media and networks, this frame has changed only insignificant internally (changing the perspective of the image, increasing the scale of the image, expanding the landscape component). Instead, its external transformation into a global media product was taking place. This transformation indicates the incompleteness of the modernization processes in Ukraine, the conservation of a significant pre-modern component in its culture.
 Key words: "picturesque Ukrainian village", national character, narratives, visual representations, fine arts, socialmedia

Determinants of Laypersons' Trust in Medical Decision Aids: Randomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundSymptom checker apps are patient-facing decision support systems aimed at providing advice to laypersons on whether, where, and how to seek health care (disposition advice). Such advice can improve laypersons’ self-assessment and ultimately improve medical outcomes. Past research has mainly focused on the accuracy of symptom checker apps’ suggestions. To support decision-making, such apps need to provide not only accurate but also trustworthy advice. To date, only few studies have addressed the question of the extent to which laypersons trust symptom checker app advice or the factors that moderate their trust. Studies on general decision support systems have shown that framing automated systems (anthropomorphic or emphasizing expertise), for example, by using icons symbolizing artificial intelligence (AI), affects users’ trust.ObjectiveThis study aims to identify the factors influencing laypersons’ trust in the advice provided by symptom checker apps. Primarily, we investigated whether designs using anthropomorphic framing or framing the app as an AI increases users’ trust compared with no such framing.MethodsThrough a web-based survey, we recruited 494 US residents with no professional medical training. The participants had to first appraise the urgency of a fictitious patient description (case vignette). Subsequently, a decision aid (mock symptom checker app) provided disposition advice contradicting the participants’ appraisal, and they had to subsequently reappraise the vignette. Participants were randomized into 3 groups: 2 experimental groups using visual framing (anthropomorphic, 160/494, 32.4%, vs AI, 161/494, 32.6%) and a neutral group without such framing (173/494, 35%).ResultsMost participants (384/494, 77.7%) followed the decision aid’s advice, regardless of its urgency level. Neither anthropomorphic framing (odds ratio 1.120, 95% CI 0.664-1.897) nor framing as AI (odds ratio 0.942, 95% CI 0.565-1.570) increased behavioral or subjective trust (P=.99) compared with the no-frame condition. Even participants who were extremely certain in their own decisions (ie, 100% certain) commonly changed it in favor of the symptom checker’s advice (19/34, 56%). Propensity to trust and eHealth literacy were associated with increased subjective trust in the symptom checker (propensity to trust b=0.25; eHealth literacy b=0.2), whereas sociodemographic variables showed no such link with either subjective or behavioral trust.ConclusionsContrary to our expectation, neither the anthropomorphic framing nor the emphasis on AI increased trust in symptom checker advice compared with that of a neutral control condition. However, independent of the interface, most participants trusted the mock app’s advice, even when they were very certain of their own assessment. Thus, the question arises as to whether laypersons use such symptom checkers as substitutes rather than as aids in their own decision-making. With trust in symptom checkers already high at baseline, the benefit of symptom checkers depends on interface designs that enable users to adequately calibrate their trust levels during usage.Trial RegistrationDeutsches Register Klinischer Studien DRKS00028561; https://tinyurl.com/rv4utcfb (retrospectively registered).