Syftet med studien är att utföra en receptionsstudie där fem stycken kampanjbilder från utländska organdonationsorganisationer studeras från ett mottagarperspektiv, i den här studien syftar det till en svensk målgrupp. Studien är uppdelad i två huvudmoment, en semiotisk bildanalys och fokusgruppsintervjuer. Med hjälp av dessa insamlingsmetoder besvaras studiens frågeställningar”Hur är de utvalda kampanjbilderna komponerade ur ett semiotiskt perspektiv?” samt ”Hur uppfattas de utvalda bilderna av en svensk målgrupp?”. Socialpsykologi utgör det teoretiska ramverket i studien och används för att nå en högre förklaringskraft i analysdiskussionen. Den semiotiska bildanalysen genomförs med de semiotiska begreppen konnotation, denotation, ikon, index och symbol. Fokusgruppsintervjuerna analyseras med hjälp av McGuires påverkansmodell och kompletteras med en relevansformel, omnämnd av Bo Bergström. Studiens resultat visar att den sociala kontexten har en stor inverkan på hur kampanjbilden mottages av den svenska målgruppen. Resultatet visar att det är av stor vikt att text och bild samspelar för att budskapet ska kommuniceras till mottagaren, annars finns en risk att budskapet inte uppnår den relevans som krävs för att bilden ska ha effekt. / The aim of this study is to examine five campaign images from foreign organ donation organizations studied from a user’s perspective, in this study it refers to the Swedish audience. The study is a perception analysis that is viewed from a receiver’s point of view. It is divided into two main parts, a semiotic analysis and interviews with focus groups. Using these methods the questions of the study "How are the selected campaign images composed from a semiotic perspective?" and "How is the selected images of a Swedish audience?" were answered. Social Psychology is the theoretical framework used to achieve a higher explanatory power in analysing the discussion. The semiotic image analysis is based on the semiotic concepts of connotation, denotation, icon, index and symbol. The focus group interviews were analysed by McGuire ́s model of influence and were supplemented by the formula of relevance, mentioned by Bo Bergström. Our findings suggested that the social context has a large impact on how the images are being interpreted by the Swedish audience. The result shows that it is of great importance that text and visual image are integrated for the message to be communicated to the receiver, otherwise there is a risk that the message does not reach the relevance required for the image to be effective.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is frequently described as a chronic illness. It is also a life-threatening illness, although this is rarely discussed. When people with CKD face declining kidney function, they need technological assistance to extend life. Many people receiving treatment will also die within 5 years. The experience of living with CKD is often difficult to articulate, and little is known about the aspects of this illness that are often ineffable, difficult to discuss, or beyond words. The purpose of this dissertation is to present four papers in which I investigate the concept of the unsayable and illuminate how this concept may be helpful in exploring individuals’ stories of living with CKD. Located in social constructionism, this narrative research explores the unsayable aspects of experience for people living with CKD as portrayed through their stories and symbols. In the first paper, I present a concept analysis of the unsayable and I define the unsayable as that which is not expressed yet alluded to through language and may be conscious or unconscious. Although the unsayable is intertwined with language, it also transcends articulation. In the second paper, I offer a qualitative meta-synthesis and I show how people with kidney failure have experienced restricted freedom that brings about distant connection, dependent autonomy, abnormal normalcy, and uncertain hope. In the third paper, I present a narrative inquiry using secondary analysis of 46 interviews conducted over 3 years with 14 people living with CKD. Narrative expressions of the unsayable include the following: living with death, embodied experiences that were difficult to language, that which was unthinkable, unknowable mystery, and that which was untold / unheard. Lastly, I offer a narrative visual analysis of symbols that represent living with CKD for 13 participants. Descriptive themes of the symbols include hopes and inspirations, reflections on “who I am,” and confrontations of illness. Participants’ expressions through symbols are described through stories of memories, emotions, and poetic devices. Consideration of the unsayable may offer insights for nurses who work to support individuals and promote quality of life for those living with this chronic and life-threatening illness. / Graduate

Depuis les vingt dernières années, l'industrie a développé plusieurs produits commerciaux dotés de capacités auditives et visuelles. La grand majorité de ces produits est composée d'un caméscope et d'un microphone embarqué (téléphones portables, tablettes, etc). D'autres, comme la Kinect, sont équipés de capteurs de profondeur et/ou de petits réseaux de microphones. On trouve également des téléphones portables dotés d'un système de vision stéréo. En même temps, plusieurs systèmes orientés recherche sont apparus (par exemple, le robot humanoïde NAO). Du fait que ces systèmes sont compacts, leurs capteurs sont positionnés près les uns des autres. En conséquence, ils ne peuvent pas capturer la scène complète, mais qu'un point de vue très particulier de l'interaction sociale en cours. On appelle cela "Analyse Égocentrique de Scènes Audio-Visuelles''.Cette thèse contribue à cette thématique de plusieurs façons. D'abord, en fournissant une base de données publique qui cible des applications comme la reconnaissance d'actions et de gestes, localisation et suivi d'interlocuteurs, analyse du tour de parole, localisation de sources auditives, etc. Cette base a été utilisé en dedans et en dehors de cette thèse. Nous avons aussi travaillé le problème de la détection d'événements audio-visuels. Nous avons montré comme la confiance en une des modalités (issue de la vision en l'occurrence), peut être modélisée pour biaiser la méthode, en donnant lieu à un algorithme d'espérance-maximisation visuellement supervisé. Ensuite, nous avons modifié l'approche pour cibler la détection audio-visuelle d'interlocuteurs en utilisant le robot humanoïde NAO. En parallèle aux travaux en détection audio-visuelle d'interlocuteurs, nous avons développé une nouvelle approche pour la reconnaissance audio-visuelle de commandes. Nous avons évalué la qualité de plusieurs indices et classeurs, et confirmé que l'utilisation des données auditives et visuelles favorise la reconnaissance, en comparaison aux méthodes qui n'utilisent que l'audio ou que la vidéo. Plus tard, nous avons cherché la meilleure méthode pour des ensembles d'entraînement minuscules (5-10 observations par catégorie). Il s'agit d'un problème intéressant, car les systèmes réels ont besoin de s'adapter très rapidement et d'apprendre de nouvelles commandes. Ces systèmes doivent être opérationnels avec très peu d'échantillons pour l'usage publique. Pour finir, nous avons contribué au champ de la localisation de sources sonores, dans le cas particulier des réseaux coplanaires de microphones. C'est une problématique importante, car la géométrie du réseau est arbitraire et inconnue. En conséquence, cela ouvre la voie pour travailler avec des réseaux de microphones dynamiques, qui peuvent adapter leur géométrie pour mieux répondre à certaines tâches. De plus, la conception des produits commerciaux peut être contrainte de façon que les réseaux linéaires ou circulaires ne sont pas bien adaptés. / Along the past two decades, the industry has developed several commercial products with audio-visual sensing capabilities. Most of them consists on a videocamera with an embedded microphone (mobile phones, tablets, etc). Other, such as Kinect, include depth sensors and/or small microphone arrays. Also, there are some mobile phones equipped with a stereo camera pair. At the same time, many research-oriented systems became available (e.g., humanoid robots such as NAO). Since all these systems are small in volume, their sensors are close to each other. Therefore, they are not able to capture de global scene, but one point of view of the ongoing social interplay. We refer to this as "Egocentric Audio-Visual Scene Analysis''.This thesis contributes to this field in several aspects. Firstly, by providing a publicly available data set targeting applications such as action/gesture recognition, speaker localization, tracking and diarisation, sound source localization, dialogue modelling, etc. This work has been used later on inside and outside the thesis. We also investigated the problem of AV event detection. We showed how the trust on one of the modalities (visual to be precise) can be modeled and used to bias the method, leading to a visually-supervised EM algorithm (ViSEM). Afterwards we modified the approach to target audio-visual speaker detection yielding to an on-line method working in the humanoid robot NAO. In parallel to the work on audio-visual speaker detection, we developed a new approach for audio-visual command recognition. We explored different features and classifiers and confirmed that the use of audio-visual data increases the performance when compared to auditory-only and to video-only classifiers. Later, we sought for the best method using tiny training sets (5-10 samples per class). This is interesting because real systems need to adapt and learn new commands from the user. Such systems need to be operational with a few examples for the general public usage. Finally, we contributed to the field of sound source localization, in the particular case of non-coplanar microphone arrays. This is interesting because the geometry of the microphone can be any. Consequently, this opens the door to dynamic microphone arrays that would adapt their geometry to fit some particular tasks. Also, because the design of commercial systems may be subject to certain constraints for which circular or linear arrays are not suited.

Denna uppsats består av en bildanalys av en visuell kampanj bestående av fem bild-par med två bilder var, eller diptyker, skapad av Greenpeace. Genom att granska faktorer som visuellt arbetsminne, symbolisk interaktion, socialisering, retoriska tilltal samt bildspråk och applicera dessa på en visuell kommunikation kan en med större enkelhet se hur dessa arbetar och interagerar. På så sätt får vi veta hur avsändaren kan använda sig av olika kommunikationsmetoder för att förmedla ett budskap likväl som hur mottagaren kan tänkas ta emot och tolka detta. Greenpeace har använt sig av etos, logos och patos för att föra fram sitt budskap, samt en kunskap om sin målgrupps generella socialisering för att tilltala de konnotationer som målgruppen innehar gällande klimatkrisen och dess konsekvenser.Genom att inte inkludera någon text utan istället fokusera på dessa konnotationer och tala till betraktarens intellekt så uppmanar Greenpeace till personlig uppfattning och tolkning. De har även använt sig av starka färger, kontraster och intressanta kompositioner för att fånga åskådarens blick, uppmärksamhet och intresse. / This essay consists of a analysis of a visual campaign consisting of five pairs of images with two images each, so called diptychs, created by Greenpeace. By examining factors like visual working memories, symbolic interaction, socialization, communication methods and visual language and applying these onto a visual communication one could with more ease see how these work and interact. Like this we find out how the sender could make use of different methods of communication to mediate a message as well as how the recipient could come to receive and interpret this. Greenpeace has used ethos, logos and pathos to deliver their message, and a knowledge about their target audiences general socialization to appeal to those connotations that the audience have about the climate crisis and its consequences. By not including a text but instead focus on these connotations and speaking to the observers intellect, Greenpeace calls for personal perception and interpretation. They have also used bright colors, contrasts and interesting compositions to catch the observers eye, attention and interest.

The Swedish Armed Forces can be considered a hegemonic masculine organisation with deeply embedded patterns of patriarchy, as well as fratriarchy represented by notions of homogeneity and the male soldier. Women are highly underrepresented and face multiple double standards related to their performance of gender and more precisely performance of femininity. However, the Swedish Armed Forces claim to be an inclusive organisation and advertise this through different recruiting strategies, which display women in uniforms. This thesis uses the methodology of qualitative research by combining the methods of critical discourse analysis and critical visual analysis to analyse the representation and the performativity of gender in a recruiting advertisement for inclusivity by the Swedish Armed Forces. I argue that this advertisement led to a certain form of reproducing stereotypical notions of femininity by representing women who embody certain requirements connected to beauty standards. At the same time, notions of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy are challenged through the representation of women in military uniforms.

This thesis widens the application of intersectionality into the study of visual media. This study examines representational patterns on GQ magazine covers issued in the US with specific regards to gender-race-sexuality intersections. Also, this study seeks to grasp what meaning is conveyed via those representational patterns in conjunction with the visual and linguistic modes, and what social effect it imparts. The study employs a mixed-method approach combining the quantitative content analysis with the social semiotics, and the inter-categorical methodological approach to intersectionality. The findings show that GQ magazine employs the same representational patterns acknowledged in culture and the magazines’ market. Those patterns manifest in the sexual objectification of women, racial exclusion, and emphasis on white heterosexual maleness. Additionally, the intersectional analysis revealed that women of colour and sexual minorities are in the least favourable position regarding representational patterns on GQ magazine.

Finding bottlenecks and eliminating them to increase the overall flow of a network often appears in real world applications, such as production planning, factory layout, flow related physical approaches, and even cyber security. In many cases, several edges can form a bottleneck (cascaded bottlenecks). This work presents a visual analytics methodology to analyze these cascaded bottlenecks. The methodology consists of multiple steps: identification of bottlenecks, identification of potential improvements, communication of bottlenecks, interactive adaption of bottlenecks, and a feedback loop that allows users to adapt flow networks and their resulting bottlenecks until they are satisfied with the flow network configuration. To achieve this, the definition of a minimal cut is extended to identify network edges that form a (cascaded) bottleneck. To show the effectiveness of the presented approach, we applied the methodology to two flow network setups and show how the overall flow of these networks can be improved.

Visual analysis is the primary method of analyzing data in single-subject methodology, which is the predominant research method used in the fields of applied behavior analysis and special education. Previous research on the reliability of visual analysis suggests that judges often disagree about what constitutes an intervention effect. Considering that visual analysis involves a complex set of discriminations and sometimes produces disagreement among experts, it is particularly important to examine methods to train individuals to visually analyze data. Only a handful of studies have investigated the effectiveness of trainings on visual analysis. Most have relied on mechanical methods and/or evaluated the effectiveness of the procedure using a narrow set of graphs (e.g., graphs without slope). The purpose of this study was to evaluate two training methods using graphs with various combinations of effect types. The computer-based training, which includes high rates of practice with feedback, was compared to a lecture condition and a control condition. Results indicate that both training methods (i.e., the computer-based training and the lecture) were more effective than a control condition, but were not substantially different from one another. We discuss the implications of these results for training individuals in visual analysis as well as directions for future research.

Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion have no problem destroying the male gaze to empower women through the female gaze within the WAP music video. They both empower women by creating a whorehouse for women by women as Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion both play the role as the entertainer and the entertained therefore forcing the viewer into a trance. Feeding into the Jezebel trope, Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion play with the idea of stereotypes, by embellishing some aspects of the stereotype such as animalistic and negating others attributes of the stereotype such as slut shaming. Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion deny respectability politics and create a discussion about ratchet respectability including anti-respectability as they are both icons in discussions about these socio-political subjects. Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion empower women by unapologetically exploring their own sexuality and promoting sex positivity throughout various rooms of the whorehouse from the aspect of the viewer and the viewed. Confusion and trickery are employed through a trance which can be witnessed from a visual perspective throughout the whorehouse as Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion rap their lyrics.Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion both create power dynamics of dominance and submission within their dynamic together and with the viewer and the viewed based on the camera angle, time, and space created. Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion create a trance as the viewer is sucked into a dystopian/utopian setting warping a sense of time and space. While the lyrics paint a picture of emasculating men, the visuals completely leave men out of the picture and focus only on the women through the female gaze. The aim of the analysis of this music video is to critically examine how WAP empowers women to explore their sexual identity in relation to other women by denying the male gaze. Furthermore, this paper will illustrate how this music video acts as a political tool for social justice advocacy and equality within Hip-Hop feminism and trap feminism and overall patriarchal Hip-Hop culture. For research purposes, the WAP music video makes for a unique case study to visually analyze through Hip-Hop feminist theory and the female gaze, from an intersectional perspective.

This thesis investigates the Slow Food movement which started in Italy in the late80’s and today is an internationally spread organization with around 100 000 participants in 160 countries. The core aim within the Slow Food movement is combining everyone’s “right to pleasure” with social responsibility, summed up in their motto: “Good, Clean and Fair”. The movement is interesting from a global development perspective, since it looks at food in relation to the cultural, physical, social, environmental and political aspects of our lives, and relates to sustainability in a wide sense. In 2003, UNESCO started acknowledging so called ”Intangible cultural heritage” as a part of the common heritage of humanity, and a few years later some culinary traditions were inserted to the list. Departing from a social constructivist approach in how knowledge is constructed, combined with Pieterse’s ideas of the relation between culture and power, the key research question for the thesis is: How is the concept of Food as cultural heritage being expressed within the external communication channels of the Slow Food movement? Followed by the sub-question: How do these expressions relate to power dynamicsand to socially constructed assumptions of reality? Through a semiotic analysis, visual and textual material from Slow Food’s official websites have been analysed, using the UNESCO definition of Intangible cultural heritage as an analytical tool. The findings are that many fundamental ideas within the UNESCO definition are expressed in Slow Food’s external communication, but at the same time, that some aspects could be more highlighted in order to put a higher emphasis on the producer and the community. It is evident that Slow Food need to continuously address the critique directed towards them regarding issues of privilege and elitism, and keep a self-reflexive approach in their communication work.