Visual Research Research Articles

Posting environmental risk: Communicating with numerical and nonnumerical messaging across information modalities.

Risk communicators frequently engage members of the public through social media; therefore, it is important to understand how to effectively communicate risks about environmental and health issues. This experiment with U.S. adults (N=737) explored how message features in risk-focused social media posts-namely, message modality (text-only posts or text with the inclusion of photographs or data presentations) and risk representation (numerical risk details or nonnumerical summaries of risk information)-influence risk perceptions, perceived message informativeness, and intentions to share the content. To do so, we drew from research on visual communication and research on numerical and nonnumerical representations of risk. We assessed the robustness of these effects across three environmental risk domains (asthma, heat waves, and vector-borne diseases). We found that compared to text-only messages, text with a data presentation (i.e., graph or table) led to enhanced risk perceptions, perceptions of informativeness, and sharing intentions. Relative to nonnumerical messages, numerical messages generated greater perceived risk, were rated as more informative, and elicited greater sharing intentions. Additionally, the effects of risk representation depended on participants' numeracy level, such that numerical messages (vs. nonnumerical) elicited greater sharing intentions and perceived informativeness among high-numeracy individuals but had no such effects for low-numeracy individuals. We also found some evidence that message effects on perceived informativeness differed based on risk topic. Our results suggest that communicators can consider designing social media risk messages with numerical details and data visualizations.

Exploring safeguarding midwives' experiences of caring for pregnant women with substance dependency

Background/Aims Midwifery research exploring midwives' views and beliefs about pregnant women with substance dependency has centred on those working in clinic or hospital settings. There is little research exploring the relationship between these women and safeguarding midwives providing clinical care via a community-based midwifery-led continuity of care model. This study aimed to explore this relationship. Methods Using interpretative phenomenological analysis and visual inquiry techniques, five midwives participated in semi-structured interviews exploring their attitudes and emotions about working with women with substance dependency. Results Five superordinate themes were found: transformation, tug of war, reciprocity, proxy parenthood and the midwives' twitch Conclusions Midwives' relationships with women with substance dependency are based on partnership, honesty, trust, care and compassion. Midwives' perceptions of these women were transformed through reciprocal relationships facilitated by midwifery-led continuity of care and the women's life stories. Implications for practice Midwifery-led care models should be expanded to include women of all risk levels. Additionally, women's narratives should be included when educating student and qualified midwives about substance dependency in pregnancy.

The visible-invisible tension of slum tourism influencers

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the tension between the visible and invisible aspects in slum tourism influencers’ content, addressing a gap in the literature regarding this kind of influencers and enhancing visual methodologies by including the analysis of invisible phenomena. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a qualitative analysis of the most-watched slum tourism influencers’ content in Brazilian ‘favelas’ (totaling 24,000,000 views) using Rancière's (2004) visual research framework and interpretation of the most frequent words in 27,000 comments on these videos. Findings Slum tourism influencers often attempt to depict what cannot be shown due to risks to the hosts and influencers. The inability to show certain aspects is compensated by the proliferation of alternative images hinting at the unseen. Comments reveal that while the desire to perceive the unseen may drive viewership, the influencers and locals emerge as the primary visual focal points. Consequently, the marginalized setting of the slum fades into the background, with individuals taking precedence in viewers’ discussions. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to explore the role of the invisible in slum tourism influencer content and followers’ reactions. It illustrates that rather than imposing restrictions on the visible, the invisible serves as a catalyst for the proliferation of images through alternative means.

Envisaging Human-Nature Conflict in the Trailer for Oppenheimer (2023): A Multimodal Ecolinguistic Study

Ecolinguistics is widely acknowledged as a field of study that cares about the relationship between language and ecology. Since the conflict between humans and nature has been intensifying, ecolinguists have concentrated on ecological studies adopting discourse analysis approaches to demonstrate how discourse constructs the relationship between humans and the ecosystem. This study aims to conduct a multimodal analysis of ecological dynamic discourse in an attempt to integrate multimodality with ecolinguistic studies, an area which is still under-researched. The trailer for Oppenheimer (2023) comprises the data of the study. The movie is a dramatization of the life story of Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapons. The research focuses on exploring how the human-nature conflict is rendered via multimodal resources. The theoretical framework of the study dwells upon Visual Environmental Communication Research (Hansen 2018) supported by the updated version of the Relevance Theory (RT) as extended to multimodal communication (Forceville 2020). By utilizing ecolinguistics as an analytical lens and applying RT, this study uncovers how movie trailers significantly underscore the urgency and cruciality of the human-nature interconnection amid tragedy and destruction. The findings of the study indicate that multimodal affordances in Oppenheimer trailer, both verbal and non-verbal, contribute to portraying the complexities of nature-human interface.

Unspoken, Unseen, Unheard: Using Arts-Based and Visual Research Methods to Gain Insights into Lived Experiences of Suicide in Young Adults

Suicide is often referred to as a silent killer, and the need to break down barriers and build bridges to communication and understanding remains of vital importance. Working within the field of further and higher education for more than 18 years with students experiencing suicidal thoughts, feelings, and behaviours has highlighted how often deep pain, grief, and trauma go unspoken, unseen, and unheard. Societal and cultural stigma, judgement, misunderstanding, and assumptions remain, all of which silence and can lead to a negative sense of self, others, and a person’s experience of being in the world. This article shows how using arts-based and visual research methods, as part of a mixed methods study, can offer unique insights into the inner world of lived experiences. It draws on analysis of 62 artworks made by 20 students between the ages of 16 and 25 with personal experiences of attempted suicide. These included two-dimensional pieces, sculpture, photography, poetry, and digital art. The research methodology is also discussed, including a 5/6-step approach to the analysis of visual data and data synthesis that has been created to ensure a robust, socially contextualised, and framed analysis. This follows polytextual thematic analysis using a multimodal approach and draws on visual social semiotics. Analysis of visual and arts-based data has revealed aspects of meaning that would otherwise not have been identified. This has led to the development of a model that can help us better understand the cycle of stigma and judgement and how we may be able to break it. This article demonstrates how a creative approach provides a means to share some of the complexity of feelings in a relatable way that has the capacity to bridge the divide between what is hidden and what is seen, bringing this human experience out of the shadows. It aims to honour everyone whose experiences have gone unseen, unspoken, and unheard, as well as the research participants’ wish for their artworks to be shared as a way to challenge the stigma that silences. It further hopes to demonstrate the power of arts-based and visual methods in research whilst also acknowledging some of their limitations so that they can be used more widely with under-represented, marginalised, and silenced voices.

Overview and Prospects of DNA Sequence Visualization.

Due to advances in big data technology, deep learning, and knowledge engineering, biological sequence visualization has been extensively explored. In the post-genome era, biological sequence visualization enables the visual representation of both structured and unstructured biological sequence data. However, a universal visualization method for all types of sequences has not been reported. Biological sequence data are rapidly expanding exponentially and the acquisition, extraction, fusion, and inference of knowledge from biological sequences are critical supporting technologies for visualization research. These areas are important and require in-depth exploration. This paper elaborates on a comprehensive overview of visualization methods for DNA sequences from four different perspectives-two-dimensional, three-dimensional, four-dimensional, and dynamic visualization approaches-and discusses the strengths and limitations of each method in detail. Furthermore, this paper proposes two potential future research directions for biological sequence visualization in response to the challenges of inefficient graphical feature extraction and knowledge association network generation in existing methods. The first direction is the construction of knowledge graphs for biological sequence big data, and the second direction is the cross-modal visualization of biological sequences using machine learning methods. This review is anticipated to provide valuable insights and contributions to computational biology, bioinformatics, genomic computing, genetic breeding, evolutionary analysis, and other related disciplines in the fields of biology, medicine, chemistry, statistics, and computing. It has an important reference value in biological sequence recommendation systems and knowledge question answering systems.

A bibliometric analysis of 30years of research on transarterial radioembolization (TARE) for hepatocellular carcinoma.

Patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have very limited treatment options, among which transarterial radioembolization (TARE) receives increasing attention, relying on its promising efficacy and fewer side effect. However, a bibliometric analysis of TARE for HCC is still lacking. This study employed bibliometric methods to analyze the related articles over the past three decades, and aimed to identify trends in clinical research comparing TARE to other treatments. Articles related with TARE for HCC were obtained from the Web of Science (WoS). After screening, the R package Bibliometrix was employed to explore the primary bibliometric characteristics. The number of publications was analyzed and mathematically fitted to a curve using Microsoft Excel 2021 and SPSS 25, and then was plotted in the graph using GraphPad Prism 8.0. VOSviewer, SCImago Graphica, and Pajek were utilized for the analysis of researchers' co-authorship, co-occurrence, and visualization. Keywords citation burst was detected by CiteSpace software. A total of 1,110 articles from 1993 to 2023 were included in our final analysis, among which the United States not only ranked the first in term of the number of published articles, also was at the forefront in other important indicators, including the total number of article citations and the average citation frequency. Riad Salem from Northwestern University, also being the organization with the greatest number of research papers, was the most active author and has published 96 papers. The keywords were classified into three clusters: 90Y microspheres for TARE, Basic research on TARE, and Clinical trial of TARE for HCC. Furthermore, we identified the most frequently cited keywords with strong citation bursts since 2020 were "multicenter," "overall survival" and "PET/CT." Our study employed a bibliometric approach to achieve the visualization research on TARE for HCC, and further revealed the trends and frontiers of TARE research, providing valuable information for researchers to identify the critical and persistent challenges and select potential partners in related area. Based on our analysis, future research focus include the clinical comparative studies on the effect of TARE and TACE combined with immunotherapies or targeted therapy, dosimetry, and personalized TARE therapy for HCC.

Entanglements for Visualization: Changing Research Outcomes through Feminist Theory.

A growing body of work draws on feminist thinking to challenge assumptions about how people engage with and use visualizations. This work draws on feminist values, driving design and research guidelines that account for the influences of power and neglect. This prior work is largely prescriptive, however, forgoing articulation of how feminist theories of knowledge - or feminist epistemology - can alter research design and outcomes. At the core of our work is an engagement with feminist epistemology, drawing attention to how a new framework for how we know what we know enabled us to overcome intellectual tensions in our research. Specifically, we focus on the theoretical concept of entanglement, central to recent feminist scholarship, and contribute: a history of entanglement in the broader scope of feminist theory; an articulation of the main points of entanglement theory for a visualization context; and a case study of research outcomes as evidence of the potential of feminist epistemology to impact visualization research. This work answers a call in the community to embrace a broader set of theoretical and epistemic foundations and provides a starting point for bringing feminist theories into visualization research.

An Empirical Evaluation of the GPT-4 Multimodal Language Model on Visualization Literacy Tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 which support multimodal input (i.e., prompts containing images in addition to text) have immense potential to advance visualization research. However, many questions exist about the visual capabilities of such models, including how well they can read and interpret visually represented data. In our work, we address this question by evaluating the GPT-4 multimodal LLM using a suite of task sets meant to assess the model's visualization literacy. The task sets are based on existing work in the visualization community addressing both automated chart question answering and human visualization literacy across multiple settings. Our assessment finds that GPT-4 can perform tasks such as recognizing trends and extreme values, and also demonstrates some understanding of visualization design best-practices. By contrast, GPT-4 struggles with simple value retrieval when not provided with the original dataset, lacks the ability to reliably distinguish between colors in charts, and occasionally suffers from hallucination and inconsistency. We conclude by reflecting on the model's strengths and weaknesses as well as the potential utility of models like GPT-4 for future visualization research. We also release all code, stimuli, and results for the task sets at the following link: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F39J6.

"I Came Across a Junk": Understanding Design Flaws of Data Visualization from the Public's Perspective.

The visualization community has a rich history of reflecting upon visualization design flaws. Although research in this area has remained lively, we believe it is essential to continuously revisit this classic and critical topic in visualization research by incorporating more empirical evidence from diverse sources, characterizing new design flaws, building more systematic theoretical frameworks, and understanding the underlying reasons for these flaws. To address the above gaps, this work investigated visualization design flaws through the lens of the public, constructed a framework to summarize and categorize the identified flaws, and explored why these flaws occur. Specifically, we analyzed 2227 flawed data visualizations collected from an online gallery and derived a design task-associated taxonomy containing 76 specific design flaws. These flaws were further classified into three high-level categories (i.e., misinformation, uninformativeness, unsociability) and ten subcategories (e.g., inaccuracy, unfairness, ambiguity). Next, we organized five focus groups to explore why these design flaws occur and identified seven causes of the flaws. Finally, we proposed a research agenda for combating visualization design flaws and summarize nine research opportunities.

Building a framework for public and patient involvement in dry eye disease research. A case study

Aims/Purpose: This study aims to improve bidirectional communication strategies between patients/public, preclinical researchers, and clinical experts to address the lack of effective public and patient involvement (PPI) in preclinical vision research, aiming to refocus research on actual patient needs.Methods: An international team conducted multiple PPI activities, including a critical review on PPI in preclinical ocular research1, World‐café workshops, patient interviews, structured surveys, and round‐table discussions. Dry Eye Disease's wide clinical presentation and impact on daily life were explored. Patient experiences were shared to better understand their needs, increase research value, awareness, and advocacy.Results: Activities highlighted the need for incorporating PPI in ocular research at the preclinical stage. Recurrent themes were identified across patients and researchers. From 20 patient interviews and 50 surveys, 82% responded that they received most information from clinical spaces and were unaware of current research.2 Patients did not know how to become involved in PPI. In a PPI Training Course, 19 preclinical researchers agreed on the need for clearer PPI guidelines and training.Conclusions: PPI activities emphasized DED's severe impact on QoL and the need for new treatments. Round‐table discussions fostered connections and deeper understanding of DED, shifting researchers' focus to unmet patient needs. Further integration of PPI into preclinical research will benefit both researchers and patients. This multimodal PPI approach can benchmark incorporating patient perspectives in preclinical ocular research. Next steps – with patients, create a tool kit for communications skills development for pre‐clinical researchers.References Ames T, Matthews E, Reynolds A et al. How patient/public involvement impacts the research journey – an overview of the visual impairment research field, Open Res Europe 2023, 3: 135. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16057.1. Ames T, Matthews E, Reynolds A et al. ARVO. 2024. Dry Eye Disease as a case study to understand the public and patient involvement gap in lab‐based preclinical vision research using interdisciplinary approaches [Poster].

Effective data visualization strategies in untargeted metabolomics.

Covering: 2014 to 2023 for metabolomics, 2002 to 2023 for information visualizationLC-MS/MS-based untargeted metabolomics is a rapidly developing research field spawning increasing numbers of computational metabolomics tools assisting researchers with their complex data processing, analysis, and interpretation tasks. In this article, we review the entire untargeted metabolomics workflow from the perspective of information visualization, visual analytics and visual data integration. Data visualization is a crucial step at every stage of the metabolomics workflow, where it provides core components of data inspection, evaluation, and sharing capabilities. However, due to the large number of available data analysis tools and corresponding visualization components, it is hard for both users and developers to get an overview of what is already available and which tools are suitable for their analysis. In addition, there is little cross-pollination between the fields of data visualization and metabolomics, leaving visual tools to be designed in a secondary and mostly ad hoc fashion. With this review, we aim to bridge the gap between the fields of untargeted metabolomics and data visualization. First, we introduce data visualization to the untargeted metabolomics field as a topic worthy of its own dedicated research, and provide a primer on cutting-edge visualization research into data visualization for both researchers as well as developers active in metabolomics. We extend this primer with a discussion of best practices for data visualization as they have emerged from data visualization studies. Second, we provide a practical roadmap to the visual tool landscape and its use within the untargeted metabolomics field. Here, for several computational analysis stages within the untargeted metabolomics workflow, we provide an overview of commonly used visual strategies with practical examples. In this context, we will also outline promising areas for further research and development. We end the review with a set of recommendations for developers and users on how to make the best use of visualizations for more effective and transparent communication of results.

Discursive Patinas: Anchoring Discussions in Data Visualizations.

This paper presents discursive patinas, a technique to visualize discussions onto data visualizations, inspired by how people leave traces in the physical world. While data visualizations are widely discussed in online communities and social media, comments tend to be displayed separately from the visualization and we lack ways to relate these discussions back to the content of the visualization, e.g., to situate comments, explain visual patterns, or question assumptions. In our visualization annotation interface, users can designate areas within the visualization. Discursive patinas are made of overlaid visual marks (anchors), attached to textual comments with category labels, likes, and replies. By coloring and styling the anchors, a meta visualization emerges, showing what and where people comment and annotate the visualization. These patinas show regions of heavy discussions, recent commenting activity, and the distribution of questions, suggestions, or personal stories. We ran workshops with 90 students, domain experts, and visualization researchers to study how people use anchors to discuss visualizations and how patinas influence people's understanding of the discussion. Our results show that discursive patinas improve the ability to navigate discussions and guide people to comments that help understand, contextualize, or scrutinize the visualization. We discuss the potential of anchors and patinas to support discursive engagements, including critical readings of visualizations, design feedback, and feminist approaches to data visualization.

From Instruction to Insight: Exploring the Functional and Semantic Roles of Text in Interactive Dashboards.

There is increased interest in understanding the interplay between text and visuals in the field of data visualization. However, this attention has predominantly been on the use of text in standalone visualizations (such as text annotation overlays) or augmenting text stories supported by a series of independent views. In this paper, we shift from the traditional focus on single-chart annotations to characterize the nuanced but crucial communication role of text in the complex environment of interactive dashboards. Through a survey and analysis of 190 dashboards in the wild, plus 13 expert interview sessions with experienced dashboard authors, we highlight the distinctive nature of text as an integral component of the dashboard experience, while delving into the categories, semantic levels, and functional roles of text, and exploring how these text elements are coalesced by dashboard authors to guide and inform dashboard users. Our contributions are threefold. First, we distill qualitative and quantitative findings from our studies to characterize current practices of text use in dashboards, including a categorization of text-based components and design patterns. Second, we leverage current practices and existing literature to propose, discuss, and validate recommended practices for text in dashboards, embodied as a set of 12 heuristics that underscore the semantic and functional role of text in offering navigational cues, contextualizing data insights, supporting reading order, among other concerns. Third, we reflect on our findings to identify gaps and propose opportunities for data visualization researchers to push the boundaries on text usage for dashboards, from authoring support and interactivity to text generation and content personalization. Our research underscores the significance of elevating text as a first-class citizen in data visualization, and the need to support the inclusion of textual components and their interactive affordances in dashboard design.

Research on the Relationship Between Urban Visual Quality and Students’ Emotional Experience Driven by Multimodal Data: A Case Study of Beijing Olympic Park Museum Group

The technological leap in the digital age has triggered a higher demand for emotional experiences. Since vision has long been recognized as the most important source of information for people to perceive the city, the visual characteristics of the urban built environment have an important impact on the emotional experience it creates. This study takes the facades and external environments of the representative urban public building category, museums, as the research objects, to explore how different types of built environment elements that make up the museum’s facade and surrounding environment affect the people’s emotional experience by affecting the urban visual quality. Tobii Pro Fusion devices and emotion scales are used for the collection of multimodal data. A total of 298 participants aged between 20 and 25 were recruited to participate in the experiment voluntarily and 229 valid data were finally obtained. The results show that different types of museum facades and external environmental elements have different effects on visual quality and people’s emotional experience: (1) Interactive elements show the most significant impact on visual quality and emotional experience. (2) The impact of artificial elements on visual quality is related to their size and spatial composition on the museum facade. When artificial elements have uniqueness, regionality, and symbolism associated with the museum, they are more likely to trigger people’s emotional experiences. (3) Visual quality is significantly correlated with people’s emotional experience through both preconscious and conscious emotional cognition. The results reveal the impact of different types and characteristics of built environment elements on the visual quality of the urban environment and proves the important role of visual quality in students’ emotional experience, further illustrating that designing and creating a good visual environment is conducive to promoting a humanistic urban environment. Meanwhile, this study also promotes a method of urban visual quality research and evaluation from an emotional perspective, providing a more scientific and objective way for the intervention of “emotions” in built environment research.

Making Hidden Sustainable Urban Planning and Landscape Knowledge Visual and Multisensorial

Many cityscapes and landscapes create reactions of awe due to their unexpected characteristics or uniqueness. First glance observations may not reveal or enable the understanding of all natural, social, economic, environmental, and cultural processes taking place at a given moment or, particularly, how those places have evolved and been transformed into being what they are today. Research helps to uncover hidden layers of reality and make sense of relationships among elements, dimensions, and processes. Distinct research styles of variable intensity and comprehensiveness are required to respond to the needs of multiple stakeholders. Quantitative research methods have become increasingly sophisticated, and while they serve to enhance one’s knowledge of complex phenomena, they can also be difficult to understand. To what extent can urban planners and landscape architects utilize visual and multisensorial literacies to bring about more transparency and significance to territorial transformation processes? This paper analyzes how four educational and research programs implemented at the University at Albany built upon visual and multisensorial research methods to augment educational outcomes, bolster scholarly significance, and provide up-to-date knowledge to empower concerned stakeholders to help change unsustainable urbanization practices, social inequities and injustices in cities, car dependence and sedentary lifestyles, protect natural resources and livelihoods, while reducing environmental and social harm. The methods comprised literature reviews, self-reflections on the implemented programs, and analyses of participant evaluations of various outreach activities. The paper concludes with remarks for other researchers interested in making their pedagogical and scholarly activities more effective and rewarding for themselves and their intended beneficiaries.

Characteristic visual phenotypes in Korean wild mice (KWM/Hym)

Abstract Background In the last few decades, numerous efforts have been made to develop a better mouse model to overcome the current limitations of laboratory inbred mouse models such as have a weaker and simpler immune status. As part of these efforts, in Korea, the Hallym university medical genetics research team has been developing a new inbred strain of Korean wild mouse KWM/Hym. It was suggested that this strain, which is derived from wild mice, might be useful for genetic research and may become a valuable tool for overcoming some limitations seen in inbred mice that are currently used in the laboratory. Furthermore, for this study, we aimed to determine the visual phenotype of this unique strain KWM/Hym, and consider whether and if they are suitable for visual research. To analyze their visual phenotype, we performed the functional and morphological examinations in KWM/Hym mice and compared the results with laboratory mice which are the most common background strain. Results KWM/Hym had a thin corneal phenotype, thin but well-ordered retina due to their light body weight characteristic, and normal visual function similar to control mice. Unexpectedly, the KWM/Hym mice developed cataracts only at around 25 weeks old. Conclusions We suggest Korean wild mouse KWM/Hym is useful for visual experiments and could be an animal model of eye disease in humans.

Visualizing Engineering: A Practitioner’s Perspective on Engineering Education

Visualizations are integral to the fields of science and engineering, serving as essential tools for both education and professional practice. They encompass a diverse range of modalities, from illustrations to simulations, and play vital roles in facilitating conceptual understanding, scientific discovery, and communication. In engineering education, visual representations are fundamental to problem-solving approaches, requiring learners to navigate complex information through graphical, conceptual, and mathematical components. This paper delves into the role of visualizations as didactic external representations – emphasizing the importance of design choices informed by both empirical evidence and craft-based knowledge. We discuss the gap between visualization research and practice, and showcase visualization stimuli across various scientific subject matter, exemplifying the diverse applications and pedagogical potential of visualizations for engineering education. We also outline key research challenges and opportunities, advocating for partnership between visualization practitioners, researchers and educators to address these challenges.

A Toolbox for Generating Multidimensional 3-D Objects with Fine-Controlled Feature Space: Quaddle 2.0.

Multidimensional 3D-rendered objects are an important component of vision research and video-gaming applications, but it has remained challenging to parametrically control and efficiently generate those objects. Here, we describe a toolbox for controlling and efficiently generating 3D rendered objects composed of ten separate visual feature dimensions that can be fine-adjusted using python scripts. The toolbox defines objects as multi-dimensional feature vectors with primary dimensions (object body related features), secondary dimensions (head related features) and accessory dimensions (including arms, ears, or beaks). The toolkit interfaces with the freely available Blender software to create objects. The toolbox allows to gradually morph features of multiple feature dimensions, determine the desired feature similarity among objects, and automatize the generation of multiple objects in 3D object and 2D image formats. We document the use of multidimensional objects in a sequence learning task that embeds objects in a 3D-rendered augmented reality environment controlled by the gaming engine unity. Taken together, the toolbox enables the efficient generation of multidimensional objects with fine control of low-level features and higher-level object similarity useful for visual cognitive research and immersive visual environments.

Sketching across borders

This article explores borderscapes as multilayered or displaced geopolitical and cultural borders through a/r/tography as living inquiry. Art making (via cartoons), arts-related research, a/r/tography, and border studies constitute a broad interdisciplinary framework for the study. The starting point is that a/r/tography as living inquiry provides an approach where interdisciplinarity can be seen more in terms of a “rupture where in absence, new courses of action unfold”, than as “a patchwork of different disciplines” (Springgay et al., 2005, p. 898). Hence, the main research question asked is: What kinds of new actions and understandings develop with ruptures involving visual arts-related research and the borderscape notion featured in this project? The focus is on the cartoons that address borders from different perspectives. The a/r/tographic viewpoints of metaphor and metonymy, openings, and embodiment are used to analyze these cartoons, their making processes, and ruptures that are linked to them. Moreover, I use general vantage points such as playfulness and temporality (memory) in my analysis. What was learned from a/r/tography in this study is how an a/r/tographic viewpoint could help to specify the symbolic ruptures within the visual and theoretical understandings of borders. In addition, the idea of playful openings was developed here to overcome not only the visual ruptures in the cartoons, but also those ruptures that are caused by the limitations of memory. Consequently, four ruptures – symbolic, visual, internal, and temporal – were approached as new actions and understandings that help to reconsider the border theory. For instance, it became clearer how the idea of borderscape touches on shifts of perspectives (identities) besides border spaces and other border processes. Thus, the observations in this paper can be used in the future for developing the study of the diversity of the border studies conceptualizations. Furthermore, the article provides insights through which to rethink connections between arts, scholarly disciplines, learning, and living inquiry; inward and outwards, as well as back and forth in time. Comic strip: Kari Korolainen