Quiet Violence- The Deep Structure of Violence in the Graphic Arts of War Propaganda pt.2

Dr. Kenneth Johnson, Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at Florida International University will speak on the nature of violence in the imagery of World War II propaganda material found at the Wolfsonian FIU Museum Archives. Lecture held on March 20, 2013 at the Green Library, Maidique Campus, Florida International University.

The Use of a Computer Graphic Organizer for Persuasive Composition Writing by Hispanic Students with Specific Learning Disabilities

Many culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) struggle with the writing process. Particularly, they have difficulties developing and expanding ideas, organizing and elaborating sentences, and revising and editing their compositions (Graham, Harris, & Larsen, 2001; Myles, 2002). Computer graphic organizers offer a possible solution to assist them in their writing. This study investigated the effects of a computer graphic organizer on the persuasive writing compositions of Hispanic middle school students with SLD. A multiple baseline design across subjects was used to examine its effects on six dependent variables: number of arguments and supporting details, number and percentage of transferred arguments and supporting details, planning time, writing fluency, syntactical maturity (measured by T-units, the shortest grammatical sentence without fragments), and overall organization. Data were collected and analyzed throughout baseline and intervention. Participants were taught persuasive writing and the writing process prior to baseline. During baseline, participants were given a prompt and asked to use paper and pencil to plan their compositions. A computer was used for typing and editing. Intervention required participants to use a computer graphic organizer for planning and then a computer for typing and editing. The planning sheets and written composition were printed and analyzed daily along with the time each participant spent on planning. The use of computer graphic organizers had a positive effect on the planning and persuasive writing compositions. Increases were noted in the number of supporting details planned, percentage of supporting details transferred, planning time, writing fluency, syntactical maturity in number of T-units, and overall organization of the composition. Minimal to negligible increases were noted in the mean number of arguments planned and written. Varying effects were noted in the percent of transferred arguments and there was a decrease in the T-unit mean length. This study extends the limited literature on the effects of computer graphic organizers as a prewriting strategy for Hispanic students with SLD. In order to fully gauge the potential of this intervention, future research should investigate the use of different features of computer graphic organizer programs, its effects with other writing genres, and different populations.

Advertisement and society in graphic magazine: La Esfera (1920-1930)

In the first third of the 20th century, Spain entered into modernity thanks to the positive state of its economic, cultural and social domains after the First World War. The objective of this article is to understand the role of artistic advertisements in the transformation of Spanish society that occurred during the decade of the ‘20s. My study of the illustrated magazine La Esfera has revealed that illustrated advertisements spread fashion, fostered sports and outdoors life, created the habit of smoking among women and had an educational influence that was powerful enough to change hygienic practices among children.

Before the “Comics:” On the Seriality of Graphic Narratives during the Nineteenth Century

While the connection between seriality and comics in the twentieth century has frequently been a subject of study, far less attention has been paid to the role of serialisation in the previous century, when the language of comics gradually developed in the illustrated and satirical press. This article discusses a heterogeneous group of graphic narratives published in various European countries between the 1830s and the 1880s, before a new generation of comic magazines influenced by American newspaper strips transformed this emerging field into the autonomous medium of comics. Serial works flourished during this period and included diverse modes, such as series of “graphic novels,” the use of recurring characters, the serialisation of picture stories in humour periodicals, and the use of graphic narratives as a regular feature in the illustrated news magazines. By providing a panoramic survey of various types of serial texts, the article suggests that the hybrid nature of these graphic narratives and the publishing strategies applied to them can be better understood if considered in relation to the larger context of nineteenth-century print culture, rather than in comparison with the future of the medium.

Creating reusable well-structured pdf as a sequence of component object graphic (cog) elements

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a page-oriented, graphically rich format based on PostScript semantics and it is also the format interpreted by the Adobe Acrobat viewers. Although each of the pages in a PDF document is an independent graphic object this property does not necessarily extend to the components (headings, diagrams, paragraphs etc.) within a page. This, in turn, makes the manipulation and extraction of graphic objects on a PDF page into a very difficult and uncertain process. The work described here investigates the advantages of a model wherein PDF pages are created from assemblies of COGs (Component Object Graphics) each with a clearly defined graphic state. The relative positioning of COGs on a PDF page is determined by appropriate "spacer" objects and a traversal of the tree of COGs and spacers determines the rendering order. The enhanced revisability of PDF documents within the COG model is discussed, together with the application of the model in those contexts which require easy revisability coupled with the ability to maintain and amend PDF document structure.

Re-viewing history: antiquaries, the graphic arts and Scotland's lost geographies, c.1660-1820

This thesis examines topographical art depicting Scotland’s natural scenery and built environments, architecture, antiquities and signs of modern improvement, made during the period 1660 to 1820. It sets out to demonstrate that topography and topographical art was not exclusively antiquarian in nature, but ranged across various fields of learning and practice. It included the work of artists, geographers, cartographers, travel writers, poets, landscape gardeners, military surveyors, naturalists and historians who were concerned with representing the country’s varied, and often contentious, histories within an increasingly modernising present. The visual images that are considered here were forms of knowledge that found expression in drawings, paintings and engravings, elevations, views and plans. They were made on military surveys and picturesque tours, and were often intended to be included alongside written texts, both published and unpublished, frequently connecting with travels, tours, memoirs, essays and correspondence. It will also be argued that topography was a social practice, involving networks of artists, collectors, publishers and writers, who exchanged information in drawings and letters in a nationwide, and often increasingly commercial enterprise. This thesis will explore some of the strands of such a vast network of picture-making that existed in Scotland, and Britain, between 1660 and 1820, as visual images were circulated, copied, recycled and adapted, and topographical and antiquarian visual culture emerges as a complex, synoptic form of inquiry.

Graphic satire and the rise and fall of the First British Empire: political prints from the Seven Years' War to the Treaty of Paris, c. 1756-1783

This thesis examines the early stages of the transformation of emblematic political prints into political caricature from the beginning of the Seven Years' War (1756) to the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War (1783). Both contextual and iconographical issues are investigated in relation to the debates occasioned by Britain's imperial project, which marked a period of dramatic expansion during the Seven Years' War, and ended with the loss of the American colonies, consequently framing this thesis as a study of political prints during the rise and fall of the so-called 'First British Empire'. Previous studies of eighteenth-century political prints have largely ignored the complex and lengthy evolutionary process by which the emblematic mode amalgamated with caricatural representation, and have consequently concluded that political prints excluded emblems entirely by the end of the 1770s. However, this study emphasizes the significance of the Wilkite movement for the promotion and preservation of emblems, and investigates how pictorial political argument was perceived and received in eighteenth-century British society, arguing that wider tastes and opinions regarding the utilization of political prints gradually shifted to accept both modes of representation. Moreover, the marketplace, legal status, topicality, and manufacturing methods of political prints are analyzed in terms of understanding the precarious nature of their consumption and those that endeavoured to engage in political printmaking. The evolution, establishment, and subsequent appropriation of pictorial tropes is discussed from the early modern period to the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of caricature, while tracing the adaptation of representational models in American colonial prints that employed emblems already entrenched in British pictorial political debate. Political prints from the two largest print collections, the British Museum and the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale are consulted, along with a number of eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, to develop the earlier research by M. Dorothy George, Charles Press, Herbert Atherton, Diana Donald, Amelia Rauser, and Eirwen Nicholson.

Criteria for graphic representation in musical scores: Visual elements in musical scores

A interdisciplinaridade entre a música e as artes visuais tem sido explorado por conceituados teóricos e filósofos, embora não exista muito na área da interpretação visual do grafismo de partituras musicais. Este estudo investiga como os grafismos na notação e símbolos musicais afectam o intérprete na sua transformação em som, com referência especial a partituras contemporâneas, que utilizam notação menos convencional para a criação de uma interpretação por sugestão. Outras relações entre o som e o visual são exploradas, incluindo a sinestesia, a temporalidade e a relação entre obra de arte e público. O objectivo desta dissertação é a de constituir um estudo inovativo sobre partituras musicais contemporâneas, simultaneamente do ponto de vista musical e visual. Finalmente, também vai mais longe, incluindo desenhos da própria autora inspirados e motivados pela música. Estes já não cumprem uma função de notação convencional para o músico, embora existe uma constante possibilidade de uma reinterpretação. ABSTRACT; The inter-disciplinarity between music and visual art has been explored by leading theorists and philosophers, though very little exists in the area of the visual interpretation of graphic musical scores. This study looks at how the graphics of musical notation and symbols affect the performer in transforming them into sound, with particular reference to contemporary scores that use non¬conventional notation to create an interpretation through suggestion. Other sound-visual relationships are explored, including synaesthesia, temporality and the interconnection between work of art and audience or public. This dissertation aims to be an innovative study of contemporary musical scores, from a musical as well as visual perspective. Finally, it takes a step further with drawings of my own, directly inspired and motivated by the music. These no longer fulfil a conventionally notational function for the musician, yet the potential for a re-interpretation is ever-present.

A collaborative digestion and design game for community and technology exploration

In this paper, we present interim results from the Communities and Place project, which is exploring methods for understanding communities in a variety of contexts, and how to inform the design of technology to support them. We report on our experience with adapting an existing game-based approach for working with video as a resource in participatory design processes. Our adaptations allow the approach to be used with diverse data arising out of the different communities we are engaged with, and different design traditions we approach the problem from, leading to the formation of common design themes to inform our future work on this project.

Gender effects in orientation on primary students’ performance on items rich in graphics

This study investigated the longitudinal performance of 378 students who completed mathematics items rich in graphics. Specifically, this study explored student performance across axis (e.g., numbers lines), opposed-position (e.g., line and column graphs) and circular (e.g., pie charts) items over a three-year period (ages 9-11 years). The results of the study revealed significant performance differences in the favour of boys on graphics items that were represented in horizontal and vertical displays. There were no gender differences on items that were represented in a circular manner.

LCADesign : an integrated approach to automatic eco-efficiency assessment of commercial buildings

Buildings consume resources and energy, contribute to pollution of our air, water and soil, impact the health and well-being of populations and constitute an important part of the built environment in which we live. The ability to assess their design with a view to reducing that impact automatically from their 3D CAD representations enables building design professionals to make informed decisions on the environmental impact of building structures. Contemporary 3D object-oriented CAD files contain a wealth of building information. LCADesign has been designed as a fully integrated approach for automated eco-efficiency assessment of commercial buildings direct from 3D CAD. LCADesign accesses the 3D CAD detail through Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) - the international standard file format for defining architectural and constructional CAD graphic data as 3D real-world objects - to permit construction professionals to interrogate these intelligent drawing objects for analysis of the performance of a design. The automated take-off provides quantities of all building components whose specific production processes, logistics and raw material inputs, where necessary, are identified to calculate a complete list of quantities for all products such as concrete, steel, timber, plastic etc and combines this information with the life cycle inventory database, to estimate key internationally recognised environmental indicators such as CML, EPS and Eco-indicator 99. This paper outlines the key modules of LCADesign and their role in delivering an automated eco-efficiency assessment for commercial buildings.

Cipher cities

Cipher Cities was a practice-led research project developed in 3 stages between 2005 and 2007 resulting in the creation of a unique online community, ‘Cipher Cities’, that provides simple authoring tools and processes for individuals and groups to create their own mobile events and event journals, build community profile and participate in other online community activities. Cipher Cities was created to revitalise peoples relationship to everyday places by giving them the opportunity and motivation to create and share complex digital stories in simple and engaging ways. To do so we developed new design processes and methods for both the research team and the end user to appropriate web and mobile technologies. To do so we collaborated with ethnographers, designers and ICT researchers and developers. In teams we ran a series of workshops in a wide variety of cities in Australia to refine an engagement process and to test a series of iteratively developed prototypes to refine the systems that supported community motivation and collaboration. The result of the research is 2 fold: 1. a sophisticated prototype for researchers and designers to further experiment with community engagement methodologies using existing and emerging communications technologies. 2. A ‘human dimensions matrix’. This matrix assists in the identification and modification of place based interventions in the social, technical, spatial, cultural, pedagogical conditions of any given community. This matrix has now become an essential part of a number of subsequent projects and assists design collaborators to successfully conceptualise, generate and evaluate interactive experiences. the research team employed practice-led action research methodologies that involved a collaborative effort across the fields of interaction design and social science, in particular ethnography, in order to: 1. seek, contest, refine a design methodology that would maximise the successful application of a dynamic system to create new kinds of interactions between people, places and artefacts’. 2. To design and deploy an application that intervenes in place-based and mobile technologies and offers people simple interfaces to create and share digital stories. Cipher Cities was awarded 3 separate CRC competitive grants (over $270,000 in total) to assist 3 stages of research covering the development of the Ethnographic Design Methodologies, the development of the tools, and the testing and refinement of both the engagement models and technologies. The resulting methodologies and tools are in the process of being commercialised by the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design.