Visual Semiotics Research Articles

Correction: Organizing Microbial Diversity and Interspecies Relations through Diagrams: Trees, Maps, and the Visual Semiotics of the Living

Correction: Organizing Microbial Diversity and Interspecies Relations through Diagrams: Trees, Maps, and the Visual Semiotics of the Living

CHILDREN'S UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY THROUGH VISUAL SEMIOTICS IN THE MUSIC VIDEO OPPOSITES WORD POWER BY PINKFONG YOUTUBE CHANNEL

The lack of English language skills and understanding in Indonesian primary school children is caused by many factors such as, limited teachers, unfamiliarity, unsupportive environment, and various other things. This is a challenge for individuals to learn English and teachers as teachers. In addition to the seriousness of children in learning English, the accuracy of the teacher in choosing the learning methods given to children must also be appropriate. In the current era of digitalization, learning methods through YouTube videos can have an impact on children's knowledge and understanding of English if implemented properly. In this case, learning English can be obtained by listening to videos that apply visual semiotics in it. The application of visual semiotics can be applied in teaching English to children from a video. The form of application can be like in the music video [Opposites Word Power | PINKFONG Songs for Children]. In this music video, explaining the opposite meanings of eight English vocabularies visualized in the form of icons and symbols. This research is descriptive research using a qualitative approach. The data collection conducted by the researchers used random sampling technique with ten public elementary school children aged 8, 9, and 10 years old as respondents. The data collection activities are carried out by asking questions related to knowledge and understanding of vocabulary in the music video to each children after the researchers show the YouTube music video [Opposites Word Power | PINKFONG Songs for Children]. The result of this study is to explain the extent of understanding of English vocabulary by children through visual semiotics displayed in the video. The results show that the icons and symbols displayed in the video mostly help the children understand the meaning of the English vocabulary displayed. This research also proves that visual semiotics is a sign whose meaning is universal so that it can be used as a learning method used by educators in teaching English in public elementary schools in Indonesia.

For a semiotic AI: Bridging computer vision and visual semiotics for computational observation of large scale facial image archives

Social networks are creating a digital world in which the cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic value of the imagery of human faces and bodies is arguably changing. However, researchers in the digital humanities are often ill-equipped to study these phenomena at scale. This work presents FRESCO (Face Representation in E-Societies through Computational Observation), a framework designed to explore the socio-cultural implications of images on social media platforms at scale. FRESCO deconstructs images into numerical and categorical variables using state-of-the-art computer vision techniques, aligning with the principles of visual semiotics. The framework analyzes images across three levels: the plastic level, encompassing fundamental visual features like lines and colors; the figurative level, representing specific entities or concepts; and the enunciation level, which focuses particularly on constructing the point of view of the spectator and observer. These levels are analyzed to discern deeper narrative layers within the imagery. Experimental validation confirms the reliability and utility of FRESCO, and we assess its consistency and precision across two public datasets. Subsequently, we introduce the FRESCO score, a metric derived from the framework’s output that serves as a reliable measure of similarity in image content.

Roots and Refuge: A Critical Exploration of Nature in Black Visual Narratives

This article examined the underrepresentation of Black characters in children’s picture books, particularly in natural settings, and its effect on Black children’s relationship with nature. Through an analysis of four contemporary picture books, the study revealed how visual depictions challenge these exclusions and expand narratives about Black engagement with the natural world. Utilizing visual semiotics and the theory of Black Aliveness, this research underscores the transformative power of illustrations by Black artists in enriching children’s literature and advancing joy.

Organizing Microbial Diversity and Interspecies Relations through Diagrams: Trees, Maps, and the Visual Semiotics of the Living

Organizing Microbial Diversity and Interspecies Relations through Diagrams: Trees, Maps, and the Visual Semiotics of the Living

Multimodal Discourse Features in Selected Nigerian Political Cartoons

Political cartoons in Nigerian society serve as tools for political commentary and social critique. This research investigates the socio-political impact of visual and linguistic strategies in selected Nigerian political cartoons, addressing a significant gap in the existing literature concerning the role of visual media in political discourse. Despite the prevalent use of political cartoons in Nigerian media, there has been limited scholarly attention to how these cartoons utilise visual and linguistic elements to critique socio-political disputes. This study aims to bridge this gap by employing Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design and Roland Barthes’ Semiotic Theory to analyse seven selected political cartoons. The study's primary aim is to explore how these cartoons communicate complex political realities and influence public perception. The objectives include identifying the visual and linguistic strategies used in the cartoons, examining the socio-political issues they address, and evaluating their impact on public discourse. The findings reveal that Nigerian political cartoons employ a sophisticated blend of visual and linguistic strategies to convey powerful socio-political messages. The analysis demonstrates that these cartoons effectively highlight issues such as corruption, economic hardship, political neglect, and the disparity between the ruling elites and the suffering masses. The study also found that these cartoons effectively depict the disparity between the ruling elites and the suffering masses, employing salience, framing, modality, denotation, connotation, and myth to engage and challenge public perception. The research underscores the significance of political cartoons as tools for socio-political engagement and discourse, demonstrating their role in reflecting and shaping public opinion on critical national issues. In conclusion, this study underscores the importance of political cartoons as a medium for socio-political engagement and discourse in Nigeria. It highlights the critical role of visual semiotics in political commentary and the necessity for further research into the impact of visual media on public opinion and political accountability.

Visual Representation of Selected Malaysian Political Trolling on Social Media: Disclose the Ideology and Power

The visual variety involving internet political trolling in Malaysia also adds to and impacts the audience's awareness of this resource. The existence of internet trolling encourages the audience's openness to give diverse responses and perceptions in politics in Malaysia. Thus, these responses and views will have a big impact on anything that is depicted visually, especially on social media. This study examines the ideology and power behind visual internet trolling on social media. For this purpose, the research methodology applies a qualitative approach based on visual content. Social media such as Twitter is used as the medium and unit of analysis of this study in visual sources. Adaptation of the theory uses Fairclough's (1995) critical discourse analysis and Visual Semiotics Theory by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) in studying selected visual trolling. By using a combination and adaptation of these theories, visual ideology, and power can be best unraveled. The results of the study found that the visual production of Malaysian politicians' trolling aims to have an impact on the audience's attitude through the ideology and power that is visualized in Malaysian politics. The visual ideological and power construction of trolling also successfully creates an alternative for the audience to express their perceptions and rights, namely the right of expression which underlies to support or criticize Malaysian politics. This study provides knowledge and understanding about the ideology and power behind visual trolling in the Malaysian political context.

Метафора света в сакральных образах орнаментов Востока и древнерусского искусства

The article presents a comparative analysis of the two phenomena of sacred and cult art that are empirically different in the method of execution, materials, style, and language: the ornaments of the Arab East and ancient Russian frescoes. Despite the differences in the external properties of these cultural objects, they express in their own language a single sacred image contained in the compositions in the domes of their temples, which allows us to complete the comparative analysis of the ‘different’ with the synthesis of the ‘similar’ hidden in the symbols of these cultures. The visual semiotics complements the research methods, revealing the levels of reading (interpretation) of the visual texts.

Analysis of Multimodal Metaphor and Values Representation in Children’s Picture Books

Children’s picture books, as a form of text interwoven with vision and language, carry rich cultural information and educational functions. The purpose of this article is to explore the phenomenon of multimodal metaphor in children’s picture books and reveal its influence on ideological construction. Firstly, the article compiles the research background and puts forward the research value of multimodal metaphors in children’s picture books. Then, it constructs an analytical framework for children’s picture books that integrates visual semiotics and metaphor theory, and analyzes the specific use of multimodal metaphors in children’s picture books through example analyses, including the interaction between images and words, the symbolism of colors and shapes, and the construction of metaphors in the narrative structure. These case studies reveal how children’s understanding of the world is shaped by multimodal metaphorical strategies in picture books, which in turn subconsciously convey specific values and ideologies. Future research should explore more deeply the differences of multimodal metaphors in different cultural contexts and their application strategies in children’s education, with a view to cultivating children’s critical thinking and promoting diversified development of children’s picture books.

Leveraging emojis as visual semiotics for enhanced engagement in destination marketing

While emojis serve as a proxy of emotion in digital environments and pave the way for new epistemological viewpoints in destination marketing, certain symbols fail to receive equal attention. This study explores the sentiment of emojis across social media posts featuring different destination characteristics and their impact on engagement. By employing topic modelling and permutation feature importance, the findings revealed 21 topics based on diverse tourism contexts and the relative importance of different emoji types in predicting engagement. Moreover, in addition to bridging semiotics, data science, and tourism, this research also provides a deeper understanding of leveraging visual semiotics through their embedded sentiment.

Gendered Deification: Women Leaders and Political Iconography in Bangladesh

This paper explores gendered political deification in Bangladesh with emphasis on the situation of women politicians in Bangladesh today. Using political deification tools developed by Sen and Nielsen with the help of the concept of political leadership feminism, we look at the interaction of gender with the construction of political imagery. In accomplishing this research, critical discourse analysis and visual semiotics are employed to establish an understanding of the representation and received portrayal of two key Bangladeshi ‘women of power’, namely, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia. These findings uncover a multi-layered duality based on the gender and dynastic-political relations in Bangladesh, along with the persona of the supreme leader of a country. We map out how the concept of mother and family relations is mobilized to build strong political discourses, even as the patriarchal framework is both affirmed and subverted. In trying to attain gender equality, female leaders obtain the most political power but are subject to gender roles and, at times, contribute to the perpetuation of those roles. By contextualizing this study in South Asian politics, we are indeed helping the existing scholarly discourse on gender and political iconography, women’s participation in democratization, and the dilemmas of female leadership in patriarchal societies. This study advances knowledge on gender, power, and political symbolism in SA with the potential for introducing similar phenomena in other cultural settings.

The Construction of Interpersonal Meanings in Jiaqi Li's E-Commerce Live Streams: Integrating Verbal and Visual Semiotics

This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers’ benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication.

Sex, Sign, Subversion: Symbolist Art and Male Homosexuality in 19th-Century Europe

There is something queer about Symbolism. Art historians have long acknowledged the links between Symbolist aesthetics and contemporaneous ideas about human sexuality, and even a cursory examination of artworks by male Symbolist artists working across the continent reveals an eyebrow-raising number of muscled nudes, lithe ephebes, and intimate male couplings. The sensual male body could register the artist’s erotic desire, even as he put it forth as an idealized emblem of transcendental truth. But perhaps Symbolism’s queerness extended beyond subject matter. Scholars have argued that Symbolism was in part defined by a subversive approach to visual semiotics: a severing—we might say a queering—of the ties binding a sign to its established cultural meaning. Similarly, male homosexual subcultures were sustained by endowing established signs and pictures with a uniquely queer significance. This paper seeks to tease out the relationship between Symbolist aesthetics and male homosexuality in terms of a shared sensibility towards pictorial interpretation. Taking as a case study the work of the Swedish Symbolist artist Eugène Jansson, I argue that Symbolism held appeal for homosexual artists precisely because queer subcultures were primed to read subversive meaning into normative pictures. Offering a new reading of Symbolism’s sexual valences, I contextualize the movement’s attendant artworks within the broader cultural landscape of homosexual signs and symbols and articulate the parallels between Symbolist approaches to the image and queer modes of seeing in the late nineteenth century.

The significance of the cartographic sign: influences of symbol shape on intuitive judgments

ABSTRACT Some of the maps we encounter in our daily lives have become simpler and smaller, to the extent that they may employ only a single symbol to depict a particular incident. As maps and their symbols are never neutral, research on visual semiotics emphasizes the importance of exploring the implicit, connotative effects of signs on human responses. This study, therefore, aimed to assess the influence of simple monothematic web maps on map users’ judgments. It examined how the severity of negative geospatial events was perceived when represented by cartographic point symbols that varied in shape. In total, 72 maps (12 negative topics, each depicted by six map symbols) were rated by 82 participants. The results showed that asymmetric star symbols led to the highest estimates of the events’ perceived severity, followed by symmetric star symbols. Triangle and rhomb led to the lowest ratings. Circle and square showed the most variable results: they led to high and low ratings depending on the map topic. The findings demonstrate that map symbols influence how people imagine geospatial events. These findings call for a more vigorous focus on the connotative meanings of visual signs in cartographic research and practice.

The Kinetic-Vectorial Design of Internet-Mediated L2 Teaching Practices: The Case of BBC Learning English Website

This study offers new insights into the educational-linguistic visual semiotics of online teaching as a digital practice with kinetic-vectorial design. Towards this end, a twofold social semiotic approach is utilized as a synthetic methodology. First, Van Leeuwen’s (2016) kinetic design model is employed with a view to revealing the movement types of Internet-mediated L2 teaching practices. Second, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2021) model of ideational vector analysis is used in a way that uncovers the subtle pedagogical practices of the same type of teaching as directional and transactional acts addressed to educational-website networked L2 learners worldwide. The data sets targeted for analysis comprise screenshot-styled images from the BBC Learning English Website available for public purposes of L2 teaching. A total number of functionally related five images have been selected with an eye to the BBC’s pedagogic content online on the techno-semiotic levels of design kinetics and vectoriality. The current study has reached three findings (with emerging relevant implications). First, the synthetic kinetic-vectorial method of analysis has proved to be empirically effective in investigating the visual semiotics of design mediated by educational websites such as the BBC Website. Second, there emerged kinetically motivated ‘pedagogic’ and ‘digital’ vectors, respectively controlled by the BBC instructors and the design features of the website itself. Third, and last, the kinetic-vectorial analysis of the BBC Website revealed a sort of spatiotemporal compression of pedagogic content; further, the visual aspects of spatial and temporal movements (mobility and movability) appeared to have occurred across different semiotic modes, verbal and visual.

Visual Representation of Malaysian Candidates in General Election in Selected Coalition Parties: A Visual Survey on Social Media

The 15th General Election was held on November 19, 2022. The warmth of the previous GE-15 (General Election 15) is still being talked about by many today. In the context of elections in Malaysia, the main factors that influence selected coalition parties based on communication strategy involving the manifesto agenda besides its effective visual strategy. The use of visuals is seen as a practical, easy, and fast medium of dissemination to influence audiences within the political party. This study aims to examine the meaning and ideology behind the visual representation of candidates involving Pakatan Harapan (PH), Barisan Nasional (BN), and Perikatan Nasional (PN). Visual Semiotics Theory by Kress and van Leuween (1996) was adapted to study visual characteristics and ideology. The results found PH, BN, and PN attach great importance to the implementation of the principle slogan and positive visual elements in the agenda of their party. As a result, PH emphasizes the principles of progress and integrity, BN emphasizes progress and well-being while PN is seen to emphasize the combination of the principles of PH and BN in their party, which are well-being, integrity, and progress. In this case, PN is seen as more critical and transparent based on a combination of slogan principles compared to PH and BN. Positive visual representations and interesting slogan principles are seen as effective alternatives for ideology dissemination to audiences throughout the election season.

К вопросу о семиотической интерпретации пространства неопротестантского богослужения

The article attempts to conduct a semiotic analysis of the space of neo-Protestant worship. For this purpose, as a methodological tool, general cultural spatial codes were used. The danger of semiotic error in determining the hierarchy of levels of expression and content is noted. The object of research is considered – the space of neo-Protestant worship. A semiotic comparative analysis of this space and the traditional Christian temple is made. Groups of spatial codes are considered in detail, their denotative and connotative interpretation is carried out. The emphasis is placed on the elements of visual semiotics of the space of neo-Protestant worship. The semiotic transformation of the hierophanic code is noted. The problem of aesthetics of neo-Protestant worship is posed.

Francophone literature in the digital age: Language and style

The article is centered on the digital methods of representing a literary text. The aim of this article is to pinpoint the stylistic characteristics of new forms of narrative organization in the French-speaking sector of the Internet. The general scientific methodology of the research was formed by works on narratology (R. Barthes, M. Bakhtin, Y. Lotman) and text digitalization (S. Bouchardon), studies in the field of visual semiotics and polycode (U. Eco, J.-M. Klinkenberg, V.E. Chernyavskaya, etc.), as well as in the field of punctuation and graphic organization of visual prose (T.F. Semyan). This article analyses the stylistic features of a new model of writing by Francophone authors - online literary blogs and novels. This research contributes to the academic field of literature and digital technologies, broadening our comprehension of the stylistic aspects of new forms of narrative. The originality of the work lies in the fact that it examines the impact of the Internet on culture exclusively through the prism of literature and analyses new forms of text organization in the context of digital space. It was found that online writing not only creates new modes of expression, but also brings about changes in existing genres. Contemporary digital literature exists in the form of interactive and generative texts, visual poetry, online literary blogs and novels. The analysis showed that literary blogging promotes hybridization by intertwining genres inherited from print and digital formats. The analyzed online blogs and novels are characterized by fragmentation, non-linearity, hybridity, incompleteness, lack of a unified plot and visualization.

Photographs and Cartoons: Differences in Interpretation of the Visual Semiotics

Photographs and Cartoons: Differences in Interpretation of the Visual Semiotics

A Visual Semiotic Analysis of Schoolbooks in the Tuvan Language

Abstract The Tuvan language is a South Siberian Turkic language spoken by the Tuvan people who live in the Republic of Tyva, an autonomous republic in the South Siberian region of Russia. The Republic of Tyva is a bilingual region where both Russian and Tuvan are spoken. However, Russian is the dominant language, and therefore Tuvan has fallen to the status of a second language for the Tuvan people. In such an environment, the teaching of Tuvan as a native language is of great importance. In this article, two primary schoolbooks used in the teaching of Tuvan have been considered from the aspect of visual semiotics. Through this article, I aim to show the effects of visual semiotics on native language education.