A cognitive linguistic approach to describing the communication of mental illness in comics

This thesis examines the ways in which subjective experience is communicated through comics about mental illness and how such communication can be described and analysed. I chose to focus on comics about mental illness to draw on my own lived experience and because of their common thematic focus on subjectivity. I applied a mixed methods approach, using personal reflection, qualitative analysis of discussion group data and intuitive linguistic analysis. The central analysis focuses on three contemporary comics that tell stories about experiences of mental illness: Lighter than My Shadow by Katie Green, Tangles, by Sarah Leavitt, and The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon. I propose a means of describing comics based on aspects of cognitive linguistics, including Text World Theory and cognitive grammar. Given its grounding in aspects of cognitive psychology such as attention, focusing, scanning and construal, cognitive grammar provides a common rubric for engaging with the text, images, and composition of comics. I supplement this approach with aspects of Text World Theory, which provides a framework for describing the interface between the content of comics, the context of their production and reading, and how these two aspects of communication relate to one another. In carrying out this analysis, I used data from reading group discussions of the three comics to guide the focus of my analysis and to supplement my own interpretations with the more naturalistic reading experiences of reading group participants. This led me to focus on aspects of reading including discourse structure, agency, multimodal metaphor, archetypal roles, perspective, event structuring, and reality conceptions. As well providing developments to the application of cognitive linguistics to multimodal communication, my overall findings point to the importance of alternatives to verbal communication, such as comics, as means of differently framing the conceptualisation of experiences of mental illness

Towards an epistemology of medical imaging

Tese de doutoramento (co-tutela), História e Filosofia das Ciências (Filosofia), Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Università degli Studi di Milano, 201

Finding and labeling the subject of a captioned depictive natural photograph

This paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January/February 2002), pp. 202-207.We address the problem of finding the subject of a photographic image intended to illustrate some physical object or objects ("depictive") and taken by usual optical means without magnification ("natural"). This could help in developing digital image libraries since important image properties like subject size and color of a photograph are not usually mentioned in accompanying captions and can help rank the photograph retrievals for a user. We explore an approach that identifies "visual focus" of the image and "depicted concepts" in a caption and connects them. Visual focus is determined using eight domain-independent characteristics of regions in the segmented image, and caption depiction is identified by a set a rules applied to the parsed and interpreted caption. Visual-focus determination also does combinatorial optimization on sets of regions to find the set that best satisfies focus criteria. Experiments on 100 randomly selected image-caption pairs show significant improvement in precision of retrieval over simpler methods, and particularly emphasize the value of segmentation of the image.supported by the U.S. Army Artificial Intelligence Center, and by the U. S. Naval Postgraduate Schoolfunds provided by the Chief for Naval OperationsApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Dream work: the art and science of Fin de Siècle fantasy imagery

In this dissertation, I argue that the fantasy imagery of tum-of-the-century British illustrators Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sidney Sime, and French filmmakers Georges Méliès and Emile Cohl functions as visual rhetorical "texts" that explicate contemporaneous ideas about the self. At the fin de siecle, models of the self were shaped, in part, by scientific thought that interrogated themes of materiality and immateriality, visibility and invisibility, univalence and multivalence, permanence and impermanence. Dream Work grapples with these oppositions, the questions they brought up, and the provisional answers they elicited. I argue that both the science and the design considered in this study dealt with these oppositions, and the models of the self they elaborated, through a shared visual rhetoric of literal representation or hazy abstraction. I reveal this shared visual rhetoric through analysis of the form of the design considered in this study and its relationship to visual aspects of contemporaneous scientific discourse. I first show how Rackham's imagery, which echoes the visual vocabulary of physiognomical diagrams, deals with material aspects of self and mind. But Rackham's work likewise positions the mind as part of a grand continuum with the natural world. I describe the ways that Beardsley's imagery fluctuates between expression of material and ethereal elaborations of the self manifested in contemporaneous dream theory. And I show how Sime's imagery - which mirrors late nineteenth-century notions of the realms of other dimensions - probes abstract qualities of the self in strangely material forms. Finally, I discuss the ways that the mystifying abstraction that characterizes tum-of-the-century ideas about time, space, and motion marks the mutable selves expressed in Méliès and Cohl's work. In this dissertation, I likewise challenge the hegemony of the written word and of verbal analytical methods for interpreting visual entities. My goal, however, is not to dispense with the verbal analysis of visual artifacts. Rather, my intention is to foreground visual rhetorical analysis as a powerful method for understanding the visuality of both visual and verbal entities

Parting A Read Sea Of Images: An Exploration Of Field Dependent-Independent Responses To Minimalist, Pictographic And Infographic Data Displays

ABSTRACT Western society reflects an âeikoncentric eraâ when contemporary instruction has become image -centered. Textbooks, journals, popular media as well as computer-based and web- based instructional media are filled by pictures that are intended to accomplish learning. Imagery is widely believed to represent an efficient, understandable method for relaying information and clarifying instruction for nearly all learners. However, those who subscribe to the adage âa picture is worth a thousand wordsâ often fail to acknowledge individual differences in visual comprehension and cognition. The field dependent-independent (FDI) cognitive style describes individual learner differences that can thwart visual learning. Information graphics are among the frequently used types of imagery that portray data. There is little empirical evidence to guide their design, and their creation is often based on intuition or opinion. This study researched the ways FDI learners comprehend and aesthetically assess minimalist information graphics, pictograms and infographics. Those participants who represented the most extreme field-dependent or field-independent learners were invited to participate in a two-part study. An instrument named the Comparative Information Graphic Test (CIG-T) was developed for testing comprehension of and perceived aesthetic efficacy, value and preference for minimalist information graphics, pictograms and infographics by FDI learner

Finding and labeling the subject of a captioned depictive natural photograph

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Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline