Visual Communication Division 2010 Abstracts
Strike a Pose: Comparing Associated Press and UNICEF Visual Representations • Sadaf Ali, Wayne State University; Debbie James, Wayne State University; Fred Vultee, Wayne State University • When images of children in conflict situations are selected and published for a Western audience, what roles do the images fulfill for the audience? A content analysis of photographs provided by the Associated Press and the United Nations Children’s Fund suggests that news agencies and aid agencies frame children of conflicts differently, as passive agents or success stories, in accordance with ideological and organizational guidelines.
You just have to be there: Video Journalism as a Social and Material Construction • Mary Bock, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania • News organizations are increasingly turning to video journalism as a strategy for survival in the era of convergence. Video journalism, or the process by which one person shoots, writes and edits video stories for exhibition on television or the internet, represents both a socially and materially constructed form of news. While photojournalism has long represented both material and social practice, the adoption of video journalism, particularly by formerly text-based journalists, presents a new dimension to daily work practices. This qualitative project examines the daily work practices of video journalists in a variety of organizational settings. Data was collected in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2007 and 2008 and includes a variety of site visits, participant observation opportunities, and more than 75 long-form interviews with video journalists, photojournalists, newsroom managers, and public relations representatives who work with video journalists as part of their organizational responsibilities. The project found that the material dimension of video journalism constricts the newsgathering process in ways that can alter not only the way stories are told but which stories are chosen to be told. The material requirements of video journalism have the potential to shift control of some aspects of news narrative away from journalists toward their supporting sources.
Remembering 9/11 through Photos in Anniversary Editions of Impact Site Newspapers • Bob Britten, West Virginia University • This research examines the memorialization of the September 11 attacks in newspaper photography. The cultural concepts of place and collective memory are employed in this analysis. Content analysis is conducted on photographs in the major newspapers serving each of the impact sites and in a neutral, non-site newspaper. The results suggest a journalism of we at play, with media tending to focus only on the memorialization activities of their own areas even in this example of a national catastrophe. The implication is that place limits, both individual and institutional, may keep journalists and audiences from understanding the parallel memorial work of others.
College Student Preferences for Trendy Versus Classic Typefaces: A Q-Study • Tara Buehner, University of Oklahoma • This study discerns groups of college students based on their opinions about the trendy typography in textbooks. Q methodology was used to collect and analyze the data about typeface preference. This methodology is especially suited to preliminary research used to obtain a deeper understanding about under-explored concepts like subjective typographic preference. The researcher was able to identify four distinct groups of students based upon individual subjective typeface visual preferences.
Do You See What I See?: A Comparative Content Analysis of Iraq War Photographs Published in The New York Times and the Tehran Times • Garen Cansler, University of South Carolina; Erik Collins, University of South Carolina; Cecile Holmes, University of South Carolina • In expansion of research analyzing framing of photographic content in national and international newspapers, the present study uses comparative content analysis to examine the similarities and differences in the framing of the 2003 Iraq War. The portrayal of Coalition forces, Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians were examined in 2003 editions of The New York Times and the Tehran Times. Overall, the depiction of these groups was strikingly similar, with a few notable differences. Recommendations for future research in this fertile area of visual communication studies includes the expanded analysis of newspaper photographs published in countries with varying cultural and geographic distances to the Iraq War.
Four years later: A longitudinal study of emerging visual icons of Hurricane Katrina • Andrea Miller, Louisiana State University; Nicole S Dahmen, Louisiana State University • Iconicity continues to be a topic of importance to visual communication scholars. This research uses longitudinal data from the same cohort—a cohort who experienced the storm firsthand—to study the iconicity of Hurricane Katrina images. Researchers found a striking similarity between recalled images from Time 1 to Time 2. These images represent the vastness of the disaster and have endured in our collective memory. The research also shows that emerging technologies have complicated the formation of a visual collective consciousness and thus the scholarly study of iconic images.
Interactive Graphics Development (IDG): A framework for studying innovative visual story forms • Jennifer George-Palilonis, Ball State University; Mary Spillman, Ball State University • There is considerable scholarship defining unique features of digital storytelling and on interactive content for online newspapers. However, little scholarship exists that provides theoretical and practical analysis of the creation of interactive graphics. This paper establishes the Interactive Graphics Development framework, a theoretical model for researchers studying the effectiveness of interactive graphics and their potential in storytelling. The IGD also standardizes definitions for interactive graphics and provides a touch point for journalists refining nonlinear storytelling.
How a multimedia course design affects differing learning styles in the visual communication classroom • Jennifer George-Palilonis, Ball State University; Vincent Filak, UW-Oshkosh • A study of 117 students enrolled in a visual communication course that employs a multimedia course design revealed students gravitated toward tools that accentuated their learning needs. Students reported strong levels of agreement with statements regarding their overall sense of learning, enjoyment of the course and overall effort. Additionally, no significant differences existed among the four learning styles identified here, indicating the course satisfied all four groups equally. Implications for pedagogy and theory are discussed.
Why We Travel: Enduring and Emergent Representations in a New York Times Travel Text • Katherine Good, Northwestern University • Travel journalism draws upon socially-constructed ideas of the foreign, making it a unique window for observing the formation and circulation of global discourses. This paper analyzes an unorthodox The New York Times online travel feature called Why We Travel, a collection of over 2,000 reader-submitted photos and captions describing personal travel experiences. To make sense of this polysemic, multi-authored text, I refer to the theories of tourism scholars MacCannell (1976) and Urry (2002) to locate within the images a series of enduring and emergent travel representations. The former include an unequal distribution of certain subject matter across regions, emphasis on authentic touristic experiences, and methods for minimizing signs of Western culture through visual representation. Within the same collection, however, emergent representations feature new tourisms and itineraries, highly reflexive or ironic portraits of tourists, and conscious confrontation of interconnectivity. In conclusion, I consider the cultural functions that Why We Travel performs as it coheres under the Timesʼ authoritative presentational aesthetic. More than a travel feature, it may be considered a prominent part of the Timesʼ multifaceted coverage on the globalization of American middlebrow culture.
The visual rhetoric of consumer journalism • Grant Hannis, Massey University • Supra-textual design theory is used to identify the visual rhetoric of leading magazine Consumer Reports. Various visual devices help convince the reader that Consumer Reports indeed is a magazine and can be read and enjoyed as such. But its visual emphasis on products and product testing, frequent use of technical tables, and recurrent image of the wise, fatherly figure seek to convince the reader Consumer Reports is more trustworthy and reliable than its competitors.
Consuming the West: A Semiotic Analysis of Western Models and Symbols in Chinese Magazine Advertising • Ying Huang, Southern Illinois University Carbondale • Using semiotic analysis, this study examines the representations of Western models, landmarks, architecture, and other Western symbols in ten Chinese magazine advertisements. It shows Western models are integrated into both erotic/sex appeal and status appeal. Though sometimes objectified, the West is still constructed as superior and more advanced ‘other’ in relation to China, which is a reflection of China’s economic relationship with the West and the official discourse for economic development.
A critical look at the Internet’s influence on logo design • Debra Kelley, University of Minnesota • The advent of digital media has prompted a change in the design of logos. Clear, simple lines and solid colors have morphed into an array of squiggles, swirls, 3D and transparent images, drop-shadows, manipulated photos, illustrations and cut up letter forms. Computer-mediated logo design opened a floodgate of graphic possibilities to designers; however, the availability of increased technical capabilities has not necessarily brought about better designed logos. Before the idea of creating eye candy on the computer screen became possible, technical limitations had a positive influence on the aesthetic look, memorability and functionality of logo designs. A brief look at the history of trends in graphic design and a comparative study of logos, suggests how technical advances influence design trends. Many logos produced today don’t meet classic principles of design, nor fulfill all the requirements of a complete corporate identity system.
The non-fiction hides, while the fiction seeks: Waltz with Bashir and the truth of animated documentary • Robert Peaslee, Texas Tech University • Waltz with Bashir (WWB), Israel’s first animated feature film, premiered at Cannes in May of 2008 and became Israel’s official entry for consideration for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for which it was eventually nominated. It was the first animated film in history to be so appointed by the Academy. Awarded prizes at several festivals, WWB was described in critical circles with the unlikely moniker of animated documentary (Ansen, 2008) or documentary cartoon (Corliss, 2008). Traditionally, these constructions are seen as contradictory. The goal of this paper is to show the ways in which the formal choices made by director Ari Folman and his team have perhaps precipitated the creation of a truer document – have sought rather than hidden. Moreover, I suggest that while Folman’s public statements about the film suggest that his goal was to interrogate the nature of memory via his own reflexive journey, the film simultaneously delivers a convincing critique of the photographic image in the context of 21st-century information production and consumption.
Doing more with less: How the jobs of newspaper photojournalists have changed • Arthur Santana, University of Oregon; John Russial, University of Oregon • The era of the interactive newsroom has required that journalists learn a host of new technical skills at newspapers across the country. A national survey shows how photojournalists have taken on much of the new responsibilities at newspapers while continuing to fulfill their old ones as well. Results show that workload is high and job satisfaction is somewhat low and that satisfaction is related to a number of intrinsic aspects of the job.
Online Communities’ Impact on the Profession of Newspaper Design • Steve Urbanski, West Virginia University; Amanda Miller • The importance of the Internet to visual journalism is increasing with every technological progression. Within the past several years, online communities have formed and flourished, creating a cyber design haven for creative professionals to meet and share their visual work. This paper focuses on the possible impact of these emerging online communities on the profession of newspaper design as a whole. Qualitative interviews of newspaper designers who participate in online communities specifically focused on the profession unveil current and important transformations occurring within the newspaper design profession. Additionally, this paper expands on both offline and online community theory, offering qualitative insight into future studies that may focus on the Internet’s effects on various professions.
Graphical Depictions of Quantitative Data: Can Interactivity Affect Recall and Attitudes? • Bartosz Wojdynski, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Quantitative information is often an important element of mediated messages, used to convey financial information, risk likelihoods of various hazards, and to express changes over time in social factors ranging from unemployment to cell-phone use. This between-subjects experiment (n=72) examined the effects of three levels of interactivity (low, medium, and high) on subjects ability to recall quantitative information from a news story containing graphics. The results suggest that allowing users to interact with information displayed in graphics may have beneficial effects on how they view the information. No support is found here for a relationship between interactivity and recall of numerical information in graphs. However, there is evidence that interactivity in information presentation leads to more positive attitudes toward the content for users who were not highly involved with the content.
Show Me a Story: The Synergy of Photo Stories and Words • Carolyn Yaschur, University of Texas • An experiment comparing three journalistic stories by format – photos only, words only, and a combination of the two – found text and photos together were preferred with regard to three criteria. The text-photo combination resulted in improved recall, enhanced assessment of credibility and greater enjoyment of stories. Based on the mental model theory and dual coding hypothesis, the study extends the literature to include photo stories, which is relevant given the current emphasis on multimedia storytelling.
Photojournalists’ Job Responsibilities and Satisfaction: The Impact of Range of Affect and Changes in Contract • Carolyn Yaschur, University of Texas • A nationwide survey was conducted among daily newspaper photojournalists and photo editors about their evolving roles and job satisfaction. Staff decreases and workload shifts were found, resulting in alternate sources and variance in quality of photographs. Enjoyment of traditional job facets, such as shooting still photos, creativity, and autonomy, were related to job satisfaction, but newer responsibilities, like producing videos and audio slideshows, which constitute a change of psychological contract, were not.
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