Two cases were submitted for questioned document examination involving human figure drawings. As there was little information on 'artist' identification in the questioned document examination literature, a sample of 107 individuals was selected to participate in a study. The respondents were requested to draw two cartoons, one naturally and one disguised, in order to determine if standard questioned document examination methods could be employed to identify the 'artists'. The findings indicated that 'artists' of human figure drawings could be identified using standard handwriting identification techniques.

Previous studies on humor in education have focused on the use of humor embedded in the presentation of content material. Some research, however, suggests that humor is an effective tool for increasing divergent thinking and information acquisition if the humor is given prior to the presentation of content material. This study used an experimental design to test if humor given prior to content presentation was more effective in helping students understand and remember information and enjoy the presentation than a control group treatment. Statistical tests did not support either hypothesis. / Ph. D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Kathleen Burnett, Florida State University, School of Information Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 3, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

The mass media have been widely studied because of their pervasiveness and effect on society. The comic strips, as part of the newspaper, are widely read. By their very existence and pervasiveness they mold our culture. The purpose of this study was to examine marriage and the family and how it is portrayed in the comic strips. A historical overview of significant family comic strips was done using comic strip texts. A content analysis of contemporary family strips was also done. The strips were analyzed to determine how often demonstrated affection and/or abuse occurred. In addition, the strips were analyzed to determine the quality and quantity of parent-child, sibling, and husband-wife relationships. Two month samples of 15 different comic strips were analyzed. The comic strip family emerged as a stereotyped group that was white, lower-middle class, with a father who worked at a white collar job and a mother who was a housewife. The family included several school-aged or teen-aged children. Neither demonstrated affection nor abuse was found to occur often in comic strip families. Parent-child interactions and interactions among siblings were judged to be more positive than negative. Husband-wife interactions were more often negative than positive, although there was a wide variance among individual strips. Interactions about leisure time and its use occurred more often than any other category. Household tasks, food, finances, in-laws or parents, dress and health comprised the other major categories of interactions. / Master of Science

In the last decade of apartheid (1985-1994), South African cartoonists demonstrated a range of responses to the political imperatives of the day. While some worked in support of the status quo, the cartoonists who are the subject of this study opposed it. Like practitioners in other areas of cultural activity during this period, oppositional cartoonists were passionately engaged with the political process and participated in the articulation and dissemination of discourses of resistance. This study situates South African cartooning both in the context of South African resistance discourse, and in the historical and discursive context of cartooning as a form of international popular culture. It presents an argument as to how cartooning should be defined and studied - as a cluster of signifying practices that produce a range of forms in a variety of media. In terms of this definition, anti-apartheid cartooning in South Africa is identified as a specific historical category, within which distinct streams of cartooning are identified. The study locates the various activities of South African cartooning within these streams, and examines the ideological and educational functions they performed during the 1985-1994 period. The study positions cartooning within the broad theoretical field of cultural and media studies, and examines some theoretical problems that are specific to the analysis of visual culture. A language of exposition appropriate to the study of cartooning is developed, borrowing terms from the sometimes widely variant traditions of art history, literary criticism and cultural studies. A methodology for the interpretation of symbolic forms is derived from the work of British cultural theorist, John B. Thompson (1990), whereby selected cartooning texts are subjected to a combination of textual interpretation, socio-historical analysis and discursive analysis, reinforced by insights derived from conversations with 15 selected South African cartoonists. Textual analysis of selected cartooning texts from the 1985-1994 period clearly demonstrates that oppositional cartoonists gave visual expression to discourses of resistance that existed in the anti-apartheid movement, and amongst the broader public, at that time. In so doing, they contributed to the disruption of the hegemony of the apartheid state, to the legitimation of the anti-apartheid struggle and to the provision of symbols and icons that ordinary South Africans were able to utilise in 'rethinking' their own lives in relation to the demands of a rapidly transforming society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Recent reports on the media saturation experienced by the twenty-first century student have brought about an increased interest in focusing attention on the issue of visual literacy in today's schools. Concepts such as instructional personalization, where approaches to curriculum design and instruction are created to concentrate on the individual strengths of the learner, have been promoted by some as a path to improving overall student performance. Many believe that the content of the Social Studies classroom easily lends itself to a visually stimulating approach and as such is an ideal laboratory to test hypotheses on such an approach. This study examines the use of one such visual tool in the Social Studies content arena, the political cartoon. Political cartoons are believed to be ideally suited to appeal to the visually oriented characteristics of the millennial student in the form of a potentially content rich primary source document. Described within the pages of this paper are the unique experiences with using political cartoons from the perspective of both middle school American History students and their teacher. The qualitative data uncovered through the collection of these experiences clearly illustrates a noticeable disparity between teacher and student experiences with cartoons from the present and their counterparts from the past. While present day cartoons covering various recent events in the news elicited an impressive level of informational recall and personal connections to the topics covered, the results were considerably less spectacular when political cartoons from the distant past were utilized. Those older images were more difficult for the students to grasp the artist's intent and failed as an opportunity for the students to demonstrate their mastery of content knowledge. It was concluded through an examination of interviews from both teacher and student that the differences observed between the older and newer images may be a function of several factors. Chief among these possible explanations from the point of view of the student was the lifelong collection of experiences that each child brought with them to the process of analyzing a political cartoon. The unique cultural capital possessed by each student as a result of their daily, almost nonstop exposure to all forms of media created a personal connection to the modern material that could not be matched by the content from the past. It was also revealed to be possible that a portion of the blame for the difficulties experienced with the materials from the past could be the result of the day to day decisions made by this one particular classroom teacher. The time and dedication to the mastery of the content knowledge and procedural skills necessary to decipher political cartoons from the past may have been insufficient to the task at hand. Conclusions drawn from the information collected in these interviews focus on decreasing the discrepancy between the two forms of visual material by taking steps that include considerable work on the part of the teacher and student to improve upon the background content knowledge and processing skills necessary to consistently decipher the information contained within the political cartoons. Such steps may prove to be impractical given the nature of the already jam-packed curriculums and time-strapped teachers that populate today's Social Studies classrooms. Additional studies would be necessary to determine if the experiences viewed here are common to those encountered in other parts of the nation or if they are indeed uniquely characteristic of this one situation. Accordingly, the results of those additional studies would possibly initiate a reevaluation of the conclusions drawn here.

This dissertation begins with the observation that discursive and visual representations of women in politics have direct consequences on the actual participation of women in politics (Beail & Goren, 2009; Bimey, 2010). For this reason I analyze current visual representations of female politicians in editorial cartoons. This work focuses on political cartoons because these artifacts provide information about cultural assumptions regarding gender roles and can bring insight about the cultural barriers that women still face when they become political actors. For this project I asked the following questions: How are female politicians represented visually? And how does the existing visual rhetoric enable, debilitate or restrain their political participation? This is also a comparative study of political cartoons that portray women in Mexico and the United States. To answer these questions, I analyze cartoons within a feminist framework, using literature on patriarchy, postfeminism, and the notion of the double binds faced by women in power. To examine portrayals of female politicians I developed a methodological approach that consists in identifying cartoons that rely on gender in order to construct their political commentary. Gendered cartoons are then classified using archetypes —specifically the Great Mother archetype— and stereotypes. For the analysis, I connect Kenneth Burke’s notion of perspective by incongruity with the feminist framework I previously constructed. The cartoons analyzed in this project comprise one decade, from 2002 to 2012, and four newspapers: La Jornada and Reforma (from Mexico), and The New York Times and The Washington Post (from the U.S.). I conclude that the argument that a patriarchal system no longer exists is not valid when we analyze cartoons that clearly resent women’s participation in the public political sphere. In these gendered cartoons women continue to be the symbol of the private sphere of the home. Their presence in the political space is portrayed as incongruous and cartoonists seek to restore the patriarchal order by visually taking women back to their traditional domestic space, depicting them as housewives and mothers. In these instances cartoons become powerful tools for reinforcing the traditional hierarchy of the private and public spheres. / text

No description available.

無 / Walls provide not only physical but also ideological boundaries between neighbors. They can be seen as a symbol of protection or segregation. Using as stimulus the security fence between Mexico and the United States, this study aims to identify the main frames in American and Mexican political cartoons to decode the different messages and symbolism towards the border wall through which one can understand the U.S.-Mexico border issue as seen in the newspapers from the two countries. Using a qualitative analysis, the thesis studies 34 American and 69 Mexican cartoons from dailies that are representative of the press in the two countries. The cartoons evidence the use of six frames and symbolism: Death of migrants and the renegotiation of NAFTA were exclusively used by the Mexican papers. The freedom issue and the divisive nature of the wall balanced in both countries’ cartoons and the main preoccupations of the United States cartoons concerned the country’s double standard of hiring illegal migrant laborers while at the same rejecting an immigration agreement with Mexico. This study’s original contribution serves as a small step in the long road of empirical database expansion in framing political cartoons and the symbolism behind the portrayal of barriers.