Le big data est un challenge majeur de la visualisation ; l'augmentation du nombre de données à visualiser augmente la densité et l'occultation des graphes et il devient difficile de distinguer les éléments qui le compose. Pour résoudre ce challenge, plusieurs techniques de visualisation se focalisent sur la simplification visuelle ; parmi elles, l'agrégation visuelle (bundling) permet l'agrégation des liens pour créer des zones de fortes densités au profit d'espaces plus clairsemés faisant ainsi émerger des structures visuelles. Cette thèse s'efforce à faire le trait d'union entre la complexité technique des algorithmes de bundling et les utilisateurs finaux. Dans un premier temps, nous avons formalisé l'espace de design des techniques de bundling afin d'améliorer la compréhension des chercheurs et des utilisateurs. Notre formalisation se fonde sur une taxonomie centrée utilisateur organisant l'ensemble des techniques d'agrégation en fonction des données d'entrée. Ensuite, à partir d'une définition formelle du bundling, nous proposons un modèle générique décrivant l'ensemble des étapes usuelles des algorithmes de bundling et montrons comment les techniques existantes implémentent chaque étape. Enfin, à travers une analyse des tâches, nous exposons des cas d'utilisation avérés. Notre analyse de l'espace des techniques de bundling nous a montré les limites actuelles du bundling quant au traitement de grande quantité de données tant en terme de rapidité de calcul qu'en terme de taille des jeux de données. Ainsi, nous avons résolu ces limites en introduisant une nouvelle technique plus rapide et sans limitation de taille : FFTEB (Fast Fourier Transform Edge Bundling Technique). Notre technique déplace le processus d'agrégation de l'espace pixelaire vers l'espace spectral. Enfin, grâce à un processus de transfert des données, FFTEB résout les problèmes de taille de jeux de données. En dernier lieu, dans le cadre d'une application à la maladie d'Alzheimer, cette thèse démontre l'efficacité des techniques de bundling comme outil d'exploration visuelle. Dans le contexte d'une étude nationale sur la maladie d'Alzheimer, nous avons focalisé notre recherche sur l'analyse de la représentation mentale de l'espace géographique chez les personnes âgées. Nous montrons que l'utilisation du bundling pour comparer les cartes mentales des populations démentes et non-démentes a permis à des neuropsychologues de formuler de nouvelles hypothèses sur l'évolution de la maladie d'Alzheimer. Ces nouvelles hypothèses nous ont permis de montrer l'émergence d'un potentiel marqueur de la maladie près de douze ans avant que les patients ne soient diagnostiqués comme atteints de cette maladie. / Dense and complex data visualizations suffer from occluded items, which hinders insight retrieval. This is especially the case for very large graph or trails set. To address cluttering issues, several techniques propose to visually simplify the representation, often meeting scalability and computational speed limits. Among them, bundling techniques provide a visual simplification of node-link diagrams by spatially grouping similar items. This thesis strives to bridge the gap between the technical complexity of bundling techniques and the end-point user. The first aim of this thesis was to improve the understanding of graph and trail bundling techniques as a clutter reduction method for node-link diagrams of large data-set. To do so, we created a data-based taxonomy that organizes bundling methods on the type of data they work on. From this thorough review and based on a formal definition of path bundling, we propose a unified framework that describes the typical steps of bundling algorithms in terms of high-level operations and show how existing methods classes implement these steps. In addition, we propose a description of tasks that bundling aims to address and demonstrate them through a wide set of applications. Although many techniques exist, handling large data-sets and selectively bundling paths based on attributes is still a challenge. To answer the scalability and computational speed issues of bundling techniques, we propose a new technique which improves both. For this, we shift the bundling process from the image to the spectral space, thereby increasing computational limits. We address the later by proposing a streaming scheme allowing bundling of extremely large data-sets. Finally, as an application domain, we studied how bundling can be used as an efficient visualization technique for societal health challenges. In the context of a national study on Alzheimer disease, we focused our research on the analysis of the mental representation of geographical space for elderly people. We show that using bundling to compare the cognitive maps of dement and non-dement subjects helped neuro-psychologist to formulate new hypotheses on the evolution of Alzheimer disease. These new hypotheses led us to discover a potential marker of the disease years before the actual diagnosis.

Sweden is a country with a lot of tourism that is dependent on nature as a touristic resource. Nature itself is a complex concept with different interpretations. In this thesis, the social construction of the Swedish nature as a touristic attraction is scrutinized. A total of 671 visual images with belonging descriptive texts has been collected from an online image bank where information about Sweden is available for foreign marketers. The material was analysed in order to answer questions about how the Swedish nature and the touristic approach to it are presented, how nature features are assigned to it and how the relationship between nature and humans is presented. The composition and portraiture of the images and prominent themes and patterns in the textual descriptions have been identified as well. The theoretical framework is based on discourse theory, while the methodological framework is based on inspiration from both discourse analysis and content analysis. The result revealed that Swedish nature is presented as part of the rural Sweden with mountains, forests and littoral areas as the main elements. Swedish nature is foremost portrayed as wild and authentic, but also as sublime and pristine to a lesser extent. It is also portrayed as a place for touristic activities with a focus on the outdoors and physical activity. The relation between nature and humans differ, but the Swedish people are portrayed as more connected to nature than tourists

This diploma thesis is devoted to documentary movies about contemporary Prague that were recorded between years 2006 to 2015. The aim of thesis was to use visual analysis to discover what images of contemporary Prague selected movies show and for what reasons these images differ. This analysis is then compared with the themes of human geography researches that focus on the topic of Prague. The thesis also represents the film geography as a relevant discipline that enables a deeper understanding of the geographic reality in its polysemy. Keywords: documentary movies, visual analysis, Prague, film geography, cultural geography, urban geography

Since the late nineteenth century, Switzerland, a self-professed “playground” and “classroom” of the world, has successfully promoted itself as a desirable destination for international study and tourism. The historically entangled private schooling and tourism industries have steadily communicated idealised images of educational tourism in Switzerland via advertising. Concentrating on the period 1890 -1945 – when promotional ties between tourism organisations and private schools solidified – this thesis investigates the social construction of educational tourist place in two different types of promotion aimed at English-speaking markets: private international school prospectuses and education-focused tourism brochures. An analysis of early prospectuses from three long-standing private international schools and of education-focused tourism guides written by municipal organisations, travel agencies, school boards and the Swiss government revealed highly visual, ideologically-charged textual representations of locations and markets simultaneously defined, idealised and commodified international education in Switzerland. Chapters provide close interpretation of documents and aim, through thick description, to understand specific place-making examples within a wider socio-historical context. Chapter One examines the earliest prospectuses of Le Rosey and Brillantmont, two of the world’s must exclusive Swiss schools (1890-1916). An examination of photo-essay style prospectuses reveals highly selective portrayals of “Château” architecture communicated capacity to deliver a “high-class” and gender appropriate Swiss finishing. Visual cues hallmarking literary and sporting preferences indicated texts catered to the gaze of social-climbing, Anglo-centric markets desirous a continental cosmopolitan education that was not overly “foreign.” Chapter Two analyses the social construction of towns in French-speaking Switzerland as attractive educational centres (1890-1914). It explores how guides promoting Geneva, Neuchâtel and Lausanne constructed an idealised study-abroad landscape through thematic testaments to the educative capacities of local human and natural landscapes. The remaining chapters explore interwar texts. Chapter Three examines a high-altitude institute’s use of the idealising skills of high-end tourism poster artists to manufacture a pleasant, school-like image for the mountain sanatoria-like campus of Beau Soleil. Chapter Four investigates two series of education-focused tourism guidebooks which promoted education in Switzerland. An examination of a Swiss National Tourist Office series reveals discourses of nationhood racialised the Swiss as natural-born pedagogues and constructed Switzerland as a safe, moral destination populated by cooperative, multi-lingual and foreign student-friendly folk. An analysis of R. Perrin Travel Agency’s series explores guidebooks which openly classified education as a tourism commodity. The final chapter examines Le Rosey and Brillantmont’s interwar prospectuses within the context of complex, transnational schooling and school advertising practices. An analysis of images of school sports at winter holiday resorts suggests prospectuses expressed the sense of freedom which accompanies upper-class identity more so than any sense of gender-driven restriction. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

Na maioria dos processos de análise de imagens há a necessidade de um pré-processamento, no qual são extraídos e calculados vetores de características que representem as imagens são utilizados no cálculo de similaridade. Uma dificuldade nessas tarefas é o grande número de características que definem um espaço de alta dimensionalidade, afetando fortemente o desempenho das tarefas que seguem, que podem envolver uma análise visual, um agrupamento ou uma classificação de dados, por exemplo. Lidar com esse problema normalmente exige técnicas de redução de dimensionalidade ou seleção de características. O presente trabalho dá sequência a trabalhos que utilizam técnicas de visualização como suporte para avaliar espaços de características gerados a partir de coleções de imagens. Nele, objetiva-se aprimorar um método baseado na análise visual de conjuntos de imagens empregando a árvore de similaridade Neighbor-Joining que apoia o usuário a selecionar um subespaço de características que mantenha ou melhore os resultados das visualizações do conjunto de imagens. A partir da metodologia proposta, a avaliação e a seleção de características representativas é realizada usando a visualização NJ. A maior parte dos experimentos responde positivamente para diferentes conjuntos de imagens representados por vários extratores, obtendo-se processos de seleção personalizados mais precisos e eficazes, em termos de agrupamento, do que abordagens automáticas reportadas na literatura / In the majority of the image analysis processes there is need for a pre-processing step, in which feature vectors representative of the images are extracted and similarity methods are calculates. A difficult step in the process is to choose amongst the large number of features available, that will define a feature space of high dimensionality, impacting the cost of the subsequent processing tasks, such as visual analysis, clustering and classification. This problem is usually handled by dimension reduction of feature selection techniques. This work extends and improves previous work that employs visualization and visual analysis techniques to support evaluation of feature spaces created from image collections. The goal is to improve a previous method of feature selection through visualization to employ similarity trees via the Neighbor Joining (NJ) algorithm as the basis for the visual layout, as well as to improve the choices of the analyst regarding tools for visual selection of features. The same process can be employed to support evaluation of feature spaces using the NJ visualization. The majorities of experiments results in improvement of spaces generated by various extractors, yielding personalized selection process that are more precisely related to user\'s perspective of the data set and are perform similarly or better than automatic approaches available in the literature. Keywords: information visualization, mining, visual images, visual analysis of the feature space, similarity trees

As crônicas de Millôr Fernandes apresentam uma característica peculiar que é a de conjugar a linguagem verbal e visual, constituindo por isso um material de interesse para pesquisadores da linguagem. O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a linguagem verbo-visual, bem como as imbricações linguísticas constitutivas do discurso milloriano. Tem como apoio teórico a análise dialógica do discurso na perspectiva bakhtiniana. Assim, para cumprir essa proposta, utilizaram-se as obras de Bakhtin e do Círculo, tais como: Estética da criação verbal (2011, 2003), Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem (2010) e Questões de Literatura e Estética: a teoria do romance (2010), bem como seus críticos intérpretes, a saber: Brait (2010; 2012), Melo (2010), Miottelo (2012), entre outros. Como objetos de pesquisa foram selecionadas 2 crônicas de Millôr Fernandes publicadas na revista Veja, edição n 1871, de 15/09/2004, que marca o retorno do escritor como cronista da revista e a edição n 2130, datada de 16/09/2009, que encerra seu período de contribuição para a mesma. As crônicas foram analisadas em seus elementos essenciais que caracterizam o gênero na perspectiva dialógica bakhtiniana, ou seja, elementos como o tema, a forma composicional e o estilo, foram vistos, observando as relações dialógicas entre autor, leitor presumido e contexto. Também é discutida a linguagem verbo-visual que as constitui, composta por outros signos, além dos verbais, tais como imagens, cores, tipos de letras, que compõem o conjunto enunciativo. Foram imprescindíveis as teorias de base que estudam a linguagem verbo-visual (Dondis, 1991) as cores, (Guimarães, 2000, 2003) e suas contribuições para um entendimento mais acurado dos efeitos de sentido dessas crônicas. Observa-se ainda a forma inusitada de elaboração da crônica de Millôr Fernandes, modificando o formato genérico e o estilo característico das crônicas jornalísticas. As análises revelaram que, por meio da arquitetura linguístico-discursiva, as crônicas são demonstrações particulares da visão do autor e que por isso a organização textual é marcada pelo seu tom humorístico valorativo, expressando seu ponto de vista frente aos acontecimentos do contexto imediato, respondendo assim ao leitor presumido, de acordo com a concepção bakhtiniana de enunciado. Espera-se com esse trabalho colaborar com as pesquisas em Linguística Aplicada no que diz respeito à leitura da linguagem verbo-visual do gênero crônica. / This research is executed in a declarative- discursive perspective, essentially defined the dialogic language theory of Bakhtin and his circle. This research presents a proposal for analysis of verb-visual language of chronic, exploring them as concrete statements that perspective. The chronicles of Millôr Fernandes exhibit a peculiar feature which is to combine verbal and visual languages and is therefore a material of interest to researches of language. To comply with this proposed analysis of two chronic by Millôr Fernandes, written in a period of six years, the first one, the edition n 1871, of 15/09/2004 and the last one n 2130, of 16/09/2009, respectively, published in Veja magazine. The objective is to observe the dialogical relationship between compositional form and style, considering the theme, the compositional form and the style. The verb-visual language that is composed of other signs is also discussed, in addition to verbal, such as images, colors, fonts, which together comprise the enunciation. The theories studying the colors and its contributions to a more accurate understanding of the sense effects of these utterances chronic. Also it is necessary to consider the uncommon development of Millôr Fernandes chronic, modifying the generic format and style journalistic chronicles. Analyses revealed that, through linguistic- discursive architecture, chronic statements are particular vision of the writer and therefore the textual organization is marked by subjectivity and evaluative tone and writer marked by authors subjectivity and evaluative tone. So he expresses his strandpoint about social events in a humorous way. This work is a suggestion of critical verb-visual reading and expecting to contribute to Applied Linguistic.

Le but du présent travail de thèse était d’examiner dans quelle mesure les programmes moteurs graphiques acquis au cours de l’apprentissage par écriture manuscrite contribuent au processus de reconnaissance. Précédemment, l’avantage de l’écriture manuscrite sur la dactylographie a été attribué à la contribution des programmes moteurs graphiques (Longcamp et al. 2010). Toutefois, les données recueillies dans le présent travail suggèrent que l’analyse visuelle détaillée requise par l’écriture manuscrite explique une grande partie de cet avantage. En effet, lorsque le symbole à reconnaître est présenté dans des conditions visuelles optimales, les apprentissages par écriture manuscrite et par composition – nécessitant tous les deux une analyse visuelle détaillée – aboutissent à un niveau de reconnaissance similaire et supérieur à celui faisant suite à la dactylographie. Ces résultats sont en accord avec la conception visuelle de la reconnaissance des lettres. Dans cette perspective, l’association entre la perception des lettres et l’activation motrice peut être interprétée comme la conséquence de l’apprentissage conjoint de la lecture et de l’écriture et non comme une condition nécessaire à l’encodage et à la reconnaissance.Toutefois, lorsque les conditions visuelles de présentation sont altérées, l’apprentissage par écriture manuscrite tend à aboutir à une meilleure reconnaissance que les apprentissages par composition et par dactylographie. Ces données suggèrent que les programmes moteurs graphiques pourraient contribuer à la reconnaissance lorsque les informations visuelles sont limitées et que la mémoire visuelle ne peut être utilisée de façon optimale. Notons que cette hypothèse mériterait d’être examinée de façon plus directe.Même si les résultats montrent une contribution importante de l’analyse visuelle détaillée dans l’avantage de l’écriture manuscrite sur la dactylographie, il convient de souligner que dans des conditions d’apprentissage naturelles, l’écriture manuscrite constitue le moyen le plus évident et spontané de promouvoir une telle analyse détaillée. Par ailleurs, pour que l’écriture manuscrite puisse aboutir à un encodage optimal, il est important que l’automaticité des mouvements d’écriture soit préservée. En effet, rompre l’automaticité de l’écriture par une perturbation de l’activité graphomotrice durant l’apprentissage affecte les performances ultérieures en reconnaissance. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Diploma thesis "Woman in Comics: Comparison of Woman Visual Depictions and Her Function and Role in Comics" is internally divided into two parts: a theoretical and a research part. The theoretical part introduces a history of comics, from the beginning of this medium till present and focuses on woman comics characters and their typologies. The analytical part of the diploma work presents own research which deals with visual depiction of women in comics: examines their functions and roles in comics and bindings to the depictions. A part of the research section of this work is also comics codes analysis (genre, modality, visual codes, nonverbal and language codes), summary of quantitative researches of female characters in comics and basic information about analysed comics (author of the comics, category etc.). The researched sample is composed of three comics: Li'l Abner (author: Al Capp), Wonder Woman (author: Charles Moulton), Strangers in Paradise (author: Terry Moore). Outcome of this research is a survey of analysed female and male characters, a summary of the visual analysis and implying results.

(in English): This diploma thesis focus of portrayal of man and woman in lifestyle magazines on the Internet and on the social network Instagram. The theoretical part describes history and a role of the image, respectively photography, in the Western world and its development. It also deals with the theme of stereotypes and changes of representation of man and woman in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. The next part discusses types of visual analyzes concentrating on qualitative semiotic analysis. This analysis is used for the selected images in the practical part. The practical part analyzes 400 images from selected Czech and American women's and men's lifestyle magazines and their accounts on the social network Instagram. The analysis reveals differences between contributions to Instagram and magazine pages and in the each media itself. It also identifies how women and men are portrayed in the selected media and if the stereotypes described in the practical part have disappeared in the context of the ongoing transformation of the position and roles of men and women in society, especially if the emancipation of women has had any effect.

Over the last two years the number of refugees and asylum seekers in European countries dramatically increased, with asylum claims mostly originating from countries affected by war and poverty, especially in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. The rapid increase of the mobility of migrants raises contradictory reactions in society and individual countries can not agree on an acceptable solution. Against the background, Western European countries usually approach the immigrants more openly than Eastern European countries. A big role in the question of acceptance of migrants in different countries is played by the media. In contemporary society, the media constitute the main source of information about what is happening in the world and intermediate events in which the public cannot participate directly. Therefore it is important to examine how mass media in Eastern and Western European countries present the issues of solidarity, human rights, and the right to asylum. The aim of this master thesis is to find out what the main differences are in the case of printed mass media and whether the western newspapers create a better image of refugees than eastern media. As a representation of an Eastern European medium one Czech daily newspaper was chosen and from Western newspapers one German medium...