This paper used the three-dimensional discursive analysis of Fairclough as a premise on the political and power ideologies involved in the images and the visual grammar of Kress and Leeuwen to unveil ...the representational, interactive, and compositional choices undertaken to disseminate the notion of resistance against racial inequality and injustice through the interaction of multimodality and resemiotization. It sought to identify the visual meta-functions and sub-meta-functions in the selected images of anti-racist/-injustice rallies and which of these (sub-) meta-functions re-semiotize the anti-racial movement, Black Lives Matter, into its basic elements, namely, Black Men/Women/Futures Matter or other movements. It also attempted to document how social practices are disseminated and redefined using visual grammar features in the selected images. Three out of thirty-seven chosen news images from CNN world news coverage, ordered vertically, were discussed in the paper. Results showed that the images confirm the presence of four processes: action (highest), symbolic, reactional, and speech (lowest). It also illustrated that the hegemony of political symbolic representations is strengthened or recontextualized through religious, social (gender issues-LGBT), and ethnic (Australian aboriginal groups) orientations. Lastly, the images showed that the socio-anti-racist practice is legitimized through purging the racially discriminative symbolisms (Iconoclasm) of dominant ideology by an eligible participant. The study concluded that although the representational structures (action, reactional, and symbolic processes), interactive patterns, and compositional systems appeared to be utilized somewhat equally, the micro-meta-function subcategories (contact, vertical/horizontal angles, modality, informational value, and salience) were distinguishing factors in meaning making and resemiotization among the selected news images.
The majority of news items on sub-Saharan immigrants in the Spanish press refer to their arrival by jumping the fences of Ceuta or Melilla or landing in small boats at the Spanish coast. The data in ...this article consist of all the news items published on the arrival of sub-Saharan immigrants in Spain by jumping the fences of Ceuta and Melilla, items that appeared in the digital editions of the two most popular Spanish newspapers, El País and ABC, from 1 January 2012 to 1 January 2015. The principles of critical discourse analysis and visual grammar are used to deconstruct the linguistic and visual portrayal of sub-Saharan immigrants when they try to enter Spain by jumping the fence. This research reveals that the immigrants jumping the fence at Melilla are represented as wild and dangerous. There is no reference to their human rights. The study thus aims to provide a visual analysis of the way in which the arrival of these immigrants is represented visually in two serious newspapers. In this way, the study aims to unveil visual ways of negative representation of immigrants, who are portrayed as dangerous invaders.
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This paper focuses on the underlying mechanisms of women’s perceptions of persuasive visual health information.
In the image viewing process, a separation between the image producer and the image ...viewer occurs, and the connection between the two is fractured. This mixed method research included modal discourse analysis (coding based on visual grammar theory), an eye tracking experiment, a questionnaire survey, and in-depth semi-structured interviews. The interactive meanings of journalistic images related to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine were identified through four sets of codes. In addition, the perceptions of female viewers were analyzed.
In the first set of stimuli, i.e., the infographic, the female participants focused most of their attention on information about the nine-valent HPV vaccine. An analysis of the interactive meaning of two sets of journalistic pictures, i.e., fictional pictures and nonfictional pictures, indicated that the image producers did not implement useful viewer involvement strategies to persuade viewers. Furthermore, female viewers focused their attention on the “similar other” during the viewing process, gazing at the patient the longest as the primary area of interest (AOI).
The study indicates that the current persuasive visual information about the HPV vaccine needs further improvement due to the high demand for information about HPV from the Chinese female audience.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The main objective of this research is to analyse the main similarities and differences in the way the political leaders of the Irish political parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are portrayed in the ...political posters of the general election campaigns of 2016 and 2020 in Ireland. The analysis of the posters will shed light on how the visual and linguistic characteristics contribute to the portrayal of the politicians and to the way they are empowered as leaders. Therefore, this article highlights the importance of the poster in the creation of political power. The politicians in the posters will be approached as social actors and the political poster understood as a multimodal text. Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (2021) will be used to analyse the compositional design of the poster. Moreover, van Leeuwen’s model of visual social actors (2008) will be used to analyse how social distance, social relation and social interaction contribute to establishing a relationship between the politician represented and the audience. The results of the research will show the main strategies employed in order to persuade people to vote for one party instead of another, in the sample selected.
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Readers are increasingly exposed to text that includes both words and images through comics, graphic novels, online materials, and video games. In this study, we use the medium of the 4-panel comic ...strip to examine how readers make meaning of the word/image composite. We propose a cognitive interactive framework that incorporates both the bottom-up constraints of verbal and visual cues and top-down constraints imposed by global narrative structures to assess the contributions of each in the meaning-making process. Previous research has focused more on the qualitative and sociocultural approaches while this study uses cognitive and quantitative perspectives to explore the meaning making of text that includes both words and images. Results of our analyses show that both bottom-up and top-down constraints make significant and separable contributions to the variance in a comprehension task.
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In recent years, Nigeria’s image has always been negatively depicted in the global media, as the country’s name is associated with some of the world’s most sophisticated cybercriminals. The situation ...with the country’s perceived dented reputation, most especially in the Southeast Asia, Western Europe and the United States of America, is ripe for the anti-cybercrime discourse to take root, and subsequently, become a fertile ground for various parties to contribute to the grand discourse from different perspectives. This article highlights the way Nigerian government, through its revenues generating agency, the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS), utilizes a print media warning advertisement (WA) to discursively construct and showcase its efforts in combating cybercrimes. The study utilizes Fairclough’s three-layered model for approaching discourse to analyse the FIRS-sponsored WA, which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 2 May 2013. The study incorporates analytical tools from the visual grammar (VG) and the multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to examine the visual dimensions constituting the frame of the WA. The study revealed how the Nigerian government, through the FIRS sponsored WA, has attempted to discursively draw the attention of the general public to the potential dangers associated with the cybercriminals and their activities as well as suggesting the best ways to escape falling into their traps. The study recommends that governments and other civil societies should explore other means of creating more awareness to the general public, given the speed at which cyber-related crimes upsurge globally at the present time.
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This study applies the visual grammar theory to the multimodal ecological discourse analysis of the students’ presentation PPT slides in business English class. It investigates the process of meaning ...construction through a quantitative analysis of 160 images and a thorough qualitative analysis of 2 specific images. The results reveal that students’ ecological values embedded in PPT design are delivered via intersemiotic play of multimodal semiotic resources. And it is found that students’ ecological values are in accordance with the ecosophy of “Diversity and Harmony, Interaction and Co-existence”, which highlights the harmonious coexistence between man, society and nature.
A challenging problem in image content extraction and classification is building a system that automatically learns high-level semantic interpretations of images. We describe a Bayesian framework for ...a visual grammar that aims to reduce the gap between low-level features and high-level user semantics. Our approach includes modeling image pixels using automatic fusion of their spectral, textural, and other ancillary attributes; segmentation of image regions using an iterative split-and-merge algorithm; and representing scenes by decomposing them into prototype regions and modeling the interactions between these regions in terms of their spatial relationships. Naive Bayes classifiers are used in the learning of models for region segmentation and classification using positive and negative examples for user-defined semantic land cover labels. The system also automatically learns representative region groups that can distinguish different scenes and builds visual grammar models. Experiments using Landsat scenes show that the visual grammar enables creation of high-level classes that cannot be modeled by individual pixels or regions. Furthermore, learning of the classifiers requires only a few training examples.
The power of texts and visuals in the repertoire of protests – in both its production and consumption – allows protest movements to not only spread their message faster and mobilise support, but also ...promote active engagement in the public sphere. The present study examined multimodal discourse of protest by analysing textual and visual resources in protest signs used to express and negotiate feminist ideology at the 2019 Women’s March MY in Kuala Lumpur. Following Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (2006) and van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network (2008), three themes of the march were selected for multimodal analysis. Findings of the study show that multimodal representations through verbal and visual resources vary in its salience across different themes – where some protest signs lean more towards texts in conveying its messages with minimal visuals, others show a higher reliance on textual and visual convergence to convey meaning as well as to bait the attention of readers. Weighing in on the Malaysian feminist discourse, this study puts forth the potential of multimodal strategies through verbal and visual resources in conveying feminist messages and negotiating social change through the act of protest.
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