Visual Communication 2018 Abstracts
From Reel Life to Real Change: The Role of Social-Issue Documentary in U.S. Public Policy • Caty Borum Chattoo, American University School of Communication and Center for Media & Social Impact; Will Jenkins • This study examines three digital-era U.S. documentary films – Sin by Silence (2009), Playground (2009), and Semper Fi (2011) – to reveal cultural and narrative elements of influence that underscored their successful U.S. policy engagement on federal and state levels. Expanding the coalition model of documentary’s political impact (Whiteman, 2004) through case studies constructed by interviews with the collaborating policymakers, policy advocates and film directors, this study finds that social-issue documentaries may be influential for policy engagement because their narratives are perceived as emotional, factual, and nonpartisan. Documentary narrative is positioned as “situated knowledge” (Epstein, Farina & Heidt, 2014), narrative that presents human implications and lived experiences within the policymaking context. Ultimately, the policy impact of these three social-issue documentary films can be attributed to the dual defining characteristics of documentary as a visual mediated storytelling genre: both creative artistic expression and reflection of truth.
Giving Guidance to Graphs: Evaluating Direct and Indirect Annotations of Data Visualizations for the News • Russell Chun, Hofstra University • This study quantifies the effectiveness of information recall with direct and indirect labeling of the annotation layer in a news data visualization. Three variations of a New York Times graphic were presented to participants in a crowd-sourced experiment to measure their story comprehension. Our results demonstrate that direct labeling offers no advantage over indirect labeling. More significantly, annotations on visualizations do no better to enhance comprehension than visualizations without them, contradicting data visualization orthodoxy.
“This is still their lives:” Photojournalists’ ethical approach to capturing and publishing graphic/shocking images • Kaitlin Bane, University of Oregon; Nicole Dahmen, University of Oregon • Graphic and gut-wrenching images of death, violence, and the aftermath of pain fill our news media. This paper uses in-depth interviews with photojournalists to explore fundamental ethical questions about the decision-making process and ethical considerations involved in photographing and publishing such images. Research found participants utilize an ethic of care and focus on subjects when taking pictures, and consider audience effects only tangentially. Additionally, they maintain that images can create positive change, but not always.
To tone or not to tone: A hierarchy of influences examination of photojournalistic image manipulation • Patrick Ferrucci, U of Colorado Boulder; Ross Taylor, U of Colorado-Boulder • This study investigates how professional photojournalists apply toning ethics in their news routines and whether those ethics vary by organization. Utilizing data collected from in-depth interviews with professional photojournalists and a hierarchy of influences framework, we found that while some ethical decisions are embedded in photojournalists’ news routines, these do vary greatly by organization. These findings illustrate how journalistic norms could be potentially changing and that individual news organizations are applying ethics differently.
Recoding Language with Fatty Memes: How Chinese Netizens Avoid Censorship When Referring to North Korea • Bingbing Zhang, Texas Tech University; Sherice Gearhart, Texas Tech University; David Perlmutter, Texas Tech University • Memes are humorous images, often featuring captions with superimposed text, that are shared online. In an effort to avoid censorship, Chinese netizens strategically use memes to discuss political issues. This study content analyzes memes that feature an image or likeness of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un posted by Chinese social media users on the Weibo platform. Results highlight how politically astute, tech-savvy publics can express political dissent, even in a high-censorship online environment.
Capturing the Crisis: A Content Analysis of News Photographs of the Syrian Refugee Crisis • Tamar Gregorian, The University of Southern Mississippi; Elizabeth Radley • The Syrian refugee crisis, the largest migration of displaced persons in recent history, has been widely documented through photographs. In an attempt to understand the media frames and tones that the media used in covering the crisis through photographs of the refugees, the researchers conducted a content analysis of 629 photographs and captions from The New York Times and The Washington Post from May 2014 – May 2016. Results indicate that the majority of the photographs containing Syrian refugees had a negative tone, a main message of migration, and stereotyped the refugees as victims.
Mobile Augmented Reality through the Lens of Eye Tracking • Sheree Josephson, Weber State University; Melina Myers, Weber State University • This eye-tracking study compared the usability of Yelp’s Augmented Reality app with its familiar map-based app. Results showed AR users could successfully find a destination using the location-based technology that augments a display of the physical landscape with digital information. However, AR users took longer to find the location. They also spent more time looking at the mobile screen and looked back and forth between the screen and the environment more often than map users.
Effects of Playfulness on SNS Emoji Uses • Yeon Joo Kim; Jaehee Park; Jong Woo Jun, Dankook University • This research tries to verify, from a marketing strategy perspective, various purchasing motivations and factors affecting the purchase of special emoji graphics and explore the relationship between these purchase motivations and psychological factors, including playfulness that contribute to emoji purchases. For this study, Kakao which is the number one SNS service in Korea was selected as a research target and examined relationships among four latent constructs: Self-presentation, symbolic values, playfulness, and purchase intentions. The results illustrated that self-presentation influenced symbolic values, and self-presentation is positively related with playfulness. Symbolic values influenced playfulness, which in turn lead to purchase intentions of the characters. Direct relationships between symbolic values and purchase intentions were also found.
All About the Visuals: Image Framing, Emoticons and Sharing Intention for Health News Posts on Facebook • Yen-I Lee, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia; Bartosz Wojdynski, University of Georiga; Katherine Keib, Oglethorpe University; Brittany Jefferson, University of Georgia; Jennifer Malson, University of Georgia; Hyoyeun Jun, University of Georgia • Responding to calls for research on effects of visual communication in the cognitive processing of health information, a 2 (visual framing: gain/loss) x 2 (personal relevance of topic: high/low) x 2 (emoticon valence: positive/negative) mixed-factorial eye-tracking experiment tested effects of photographic images (gain-or-loss framed) and visual sentiment displays (emoticons) on sharing of health news posts. Negative emoticons led to greater sharing intent, while image framing shaped perceptions of disease severity and susceptibility.
Who Can Be Put at Risk by “Virtual Makeovers”?: Self-Photo Editing, Disordered Eating, and the Role of Mindset among Adult Female Instagram Users • Roselyn Lee-Won, The Ohio State University; Dingyu Hu, The Ohio State University; Yeon Kyoung Joo, Myongji University; Sung Gwan Park, Seoul National University • We investigated the relationship between self-photo editing on Instagram and disordered eating among adult females. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted with U.S. female Instagram users (N = 382). Results showed that more frequent self-photo editing was associated with greater rumination about eating, weight, and shape, which in turn was associated with disordered eating. Furthermore, a moderated mediation analysis revealed that the mediation was significant among those with moderate and high levels of fixed mindset.
Social beautifying: How personality traits and social comparison affect selfie-editing behavior • Yu Liu, Florida International University; Weirui Wang • Individual users worldwide purposefully and selectively edit their selfies and post their photos on social networking sites. Based on social comparison framework, this study examines how personality traits affect individuals’ selfie-editing behavior through social comparison process: downward identification, downward contrast, upward identification, and upward contrast. The findings suggest individuals with high public self-consciousness, low self-esteem, and high neuroticism tend to engage in different types of social comparison, which are associated with their selfie-editing behavior.
Two days, twenty outfits: Coachella attendees’ visual presentation of self and experience on Instagram • Kyser Lough, The University of Texas at Austin • This study uses visual discourse analysis to study how people utilize social media and photography at events such as a music festival, theoretically guided by how technological affordances allow for a new way of presentation of self. Analysis of 200 Instagram posts from attendees at the 2017 Coachella music festival reveals they care less about sharing photos of the concerts and more about curating a sense of taste, sense of embrace and sense of place.
Celebrating Life or Adversity? The Redefinition of Features in the Pictures of the Year International Contest • Jennifer Midberry; Ryan N. Comfort, Indiana University Bloomington; Joseph Roskos, Indiana University-Bloomington • “Photojournalism contests have been criticized for continually awarding top prizes in hard news categories to images that depict conflict, disaster, poverty, and other problems. Pictures like these, which have a social issues visual frame, usually focus on people from countries other than the United States and on minorities. Some photojournalism contests, like Pictures of the Year International (POYi), include a features category. Traditionally, feature photos capture
humorous, tender, or picturesque moments of everyday life, and their purpose is to celebrate the human condition. The feature photo category should theoretically be an area in photojournalism contests that breaks from the pattern of emphasizing social issues. However, in recent years of POYi the features category appears to also be dominated by images that stress hardship. To investigate whether this represents an increasing trend in POYi of awarding prizes to pictures that focus on social issues, a content analysis of the winning photographs from the past twenty years was conducted. Understanding whether the feature category in POYi has evolved is important because when it comes to shaping discourses about social issues, national identities, ethnicity and race, feature photos have the potential for emphasizing commonality. If the newsworthiness of feature photos starts to become tied to similar criteria as hard news photos, that potential will be diminished.”
Internet memes and copyright law: The transformativeness of memes as tools of visual communication in remix culture • Natalia Mielczarek; W. Wat Hopkins • Internet memes have become popular artifacts of visual communication in digital culture. They are, by definition, reiterative as they remix already existing content to produce new rhetorical statements. This interdisciplinary study explores the legal implications of such “produsage” vis-à-vis the U.S. copyright law. With the help of legal research and theoretical framework of remix culture and memetics, the study shows how and why memes deserve legal protection as transformative work.
Reinvestigating the Beauty Match Up in Food Ads • Juan Mundel, DePaul University; Patricia Huddleston, Michigan State University • In two studies, we explore how males evaluate models of different body sizes in snack and fast food ads, and the effects of the pairing of different models with products perceived to be healthy (vs. unhealthy) on participants’ evaluations of the the product, the ad, and purchase intentions. Overall, participants had better evaluations of the ads when presented with unhealthy foods and models with idealized bodies.
The Visual Framing of Immigrants and Refugees in U.S. News: Content and Effects • Scott Parrott, The University of Alabama; Jennifer Hoewe, Purdue University; Minghui Fan, The University of Alabama; Keith Huffman, The University of Alabama • This research examines the visual framing of immigrants and refugees by U.S. news outlets and its effects on news consumers. In Study 1, coders examined the photographs used in stories about immigrants and refugees that were shared on Twitter by regional news outlets in each of the 50 states. Stories most often contained one of two visual foci: a human interest frame, featuring immigrants and refugees as everyday people; or a political frame, showcasing politicians. In an experiment, Study 2 determined the equivalency framing effects of these visuals on participants’ emotions and, in turn, their attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. Exposure to a human interest visual frame predicted more positive emotional responses, leading to greater support for immigrants and refugees. Conversely, exposure to a political visual frame predicted more negative emotional responses and then less support for immigrants and refugees.
Profile Pictures Across Platforms: How identity visually manifests itself among social media communities • T.J. Thomson, Missouri School of Journalism; Keith Greenwood, University of Missouri • A profile picture is a ubiquitous and salient part of almost any online account and provides a window not only into the individual user but also to the larger online community’s culture. Profile pictures have been called “one of the most telling pieces of self-disclosure or image construction” in online communities and users face dizzying freedom when deciding on their selection. Such choices have been studied in discrete contexts, such as how personality type affects profile picture selection on Twitter, but they have not yet been studied across platforms to see whether the same photo is used across multiple sites or whether users select different photos for different communities and what such differences or similarities reveal both about the users and about the communities from which they originate. Informed by literature in social psychology and self-representation, this study offers a seminal look into how profile pictures differ across platforms and how user personality and perceived audience affect such decisions. It does so through a three-pronged approach of personality assessment, textual analysis, and in-depth interview. The findings reveal that the younger users sampled in this study overwhelmingly prefer polychromatic images and a majority preferred to have a unique picture on each platform. These same users are comfortable having their identifiable features in their profile pictures and those who are more extroverted preferred to share the frame with someone else. In many ways, the users in the sample rejected artifice for authenticity in terms of their profile pictures’ form, content, and the the way they were processed, if at all, in post-production.
Analysis of Photographic Representation of Refugees in France • Anna Warner, Biola University; Tamara Welter, Biola university; Jason Brunt, Biola University • This research investigates the photographic representation by the Agence France-Presse (AFP) of Middle Eastern refugees seeking asylum in France. The objective is to determine how refugees were represented to audiences and whether that depiction changed in the wake of the November 2015 Paris Suicide Attacks. Analysis shows that refugees were represented differently after the attacks, in a way that aligned more closely with French collectivism than before.
Feminine, Competent, Submissive: A Multimodal Analysis of Depictions of Women in U.S. Wartime Persuasive Messages • Easton Wollney, University of Florida; Miglena Sternadori, Texas Tech University College of Media and Communication • This analysis used Peirce’s triadic approach to interpret 58 public depictions of wartime women from 1914 to 1918 and from 1941 to 1946. The images appeared in government posters or as ads and illustrations in U.S. magazines and newspapers. Aligned in five thematic clusters, many invited polysemy through discrepant visual and verbal cues aimed at different audiences. Women as viewers and as objects of representation were addressed in the context of both citizenship and consumption.
It Costs a Lot to Look This Cheap: Preference for Low Quality Graphic Design • Shannon Zenner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Some 1000 surveys were conducted on Amazon’s MTurk, asking respondents to rate a high and low-quality visual design, in this case, a billboard ad. While most respondents preferred the high-quality ad, over a third opted for the low-quality design. The qualities they described liking in the ad differed from those respondents who preferred the high-quality design. Age also played a role in preference. Implications for many different types of visual communication are discussed.
Effects of Visual Theme and View Perspective on Visual Attention and Brand Constructions: An Eye-Tracking Study on Instagram Posts • Lijie Zhou, Southern Utah University; Fei Xue, The University of Southern Miss • This eye-tracking study examined the effects of visual theme and view perspective on Instagram users’ visual attention. It also explored whether visual attention influenced brand attitude and recognition. Results showed that participants spent the longest time viewing and paid the most attention to customer-centric images with a first-person view perspective. When in a third-person view, product-centric images received the longest fixation duration and most fixation frequency. It was also found that brand recognition was positively influenced by fixation frequency but not by fixation duration.
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