Digital technology has changed the nature of how humans live as a society with lives orbiting a digital core of internet, smartphones, social media etc. There is now not only a physical world but a digital one too. This far-reaching transformation also applies to cultural institutions to digitize their activities, a result of responding to the expectations of a contemporary audience. The aim of this study is to examine the digitization of art- and cultural heritage in a digital world. The essay examines the digital activities of the Swedish National Museum of fine art that has developed before, during and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is done through visual analysis and the theoretic framework of postphenomenology and social semiotics. The study finds that cultural heritage can be digitized in many different ways but that the digitization can’t replace the physical encounter with an artwork. Yet it can constitute new ways and perspectives on how to experience, see and discuss traditional works of art. Digitization of cultural heritage can therefore work to enhance its general interest, disseminate and influence an increase in availability of knowledge about cultural heritage and art history.

Background Advances in technology resulted in a transition to mass production of goods. This signified an increase in packaging demands, as well as the need for packaging to stand out. The usage of graphic design can make a packaging sell a product and it is vital to a company. At the same time, demands for ecological skincare products have seen an increase in the past years. Aim The purpose of the study is determining the most prevalent design characteristics of ecological face creams on the Swedish market, as well as evaluating how a potential customer would perceive an average product with such characteristics. Method The study used the strategy design and creation to produce an artefact, as well as the survey strategy to evaluate the artefact. The data collection methods used within these strategies were documents and a questionnaire. The study used the website jordklok.se for its data collection, where 78 products with organic certifications were visually analysed in order to design an average ecological product. Results The data collection results established that most products studied were grouped into ranges. Characteristics of ecological face creams packaging could be summed up after the visual analysis in percentages. The range of face creams Ariory was the artefact produced by collecting data through the visual analysis, within the design and creation strategy. The survey strategy resulted in the majority of respondents assessing the designed range as ecological in appearance. Conclusions It has been concluded that packaging that is perceived as ecological by potential customers can be designed by using average design characteristics of existing products.

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of accounting firms’ visual portrayal.  Theoretical perspectives: Institutional theory, stereotype theory, legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory, and framing theory have, together with earlier literature, been applied to the empirical findings to fulfill the purpose of this thesis.  Methodology: Images in the annual reports of the Big 4 accounting firms in Sweden have been analyzed over a ten-year period. In total, 654 images have been coded and analyzed based on seven concepts. The first three concepts, namely gender, ethnicity, and age, are based on a visual content analysis. For the remaining concepts: professionalism, environmental sustainability, technology, and well-being, inspiration has been drawn from a visual grading analysis. In addition, secondary data concerning various events on a firm, institutional, and macro level that are related to the concepts of this thesis have, in essence, been collected from online news articles and annual reports of the Big 4 accounting firms in Sweden.  Findings: The findings show that the portrayal of professionalism is rather high but that a downward trend can be observed for most accounting firms. Instead, more room is given to the portrayal of other aspects which mainly revolves around environmental sustainability and well-being. The portrayal of ethnicity and young people show an upward trend for most accounting firms whereas there is a rather high portrayal of women in most years. Furthermore, the portrayal in accounting firms’ annual reports seem to be somewhat related to internal as well as external events.

This research focuses on the use of feminized virtual avatars (FVAs) in the fashion industry and explores the risk of using FVAs for the appropriation and exploitation of marginalized communities and identities. Through a critical visual analysis of the virtual avatars Shudu Gram and Miquela Sousa, this study analyzes how they are made to represent gendered and racialized women’s bodies. The research aims to understand how the representations of FVAs reflect and influence power dynamics and social inequalities. This thesis found that the representations of Shudu and Miquela reflect and reinforce racial stereotypes, perpetuate gender inequalities, and uphold unrealistic beauty standards. Moreover, their representations of a Black woman and a Latina reinforce the exotification and Othering of Black women and Latinas, reducing their identities to a commodified aesthetic. Furthermore, the sexualized representations of Shudu and Miquela reinforce gender stereotypes and power imbalances. Finally, the lack of agency and autonomy in FVAs further complicates objectifying and exotifying portrayals. This research's theoretical and practical implications emphasize the need for critical analysis, ethical considerations, and inclusive practices in using FVAs. The study highlights the importance of critically analyzing FVAs and their implications within the context of gendered colonial legacies and structural inequalities.

This thesis compares the visual representation of Syrian refugees during the 2015 refugee crisis and Ukrainian refugees during the Russian invasion 2022 in news outlets Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dabladet and Aftonbladet. The aim of the study is thus to investigate how ethnic groups are framed in a photojournalistic setting. The theoretical concept otherness is used to analyze the selected visual images and the concept of visualities highlight how photographs published in the media communicate political messages and how images reflect immigration discourse. Additionally, photojournalistic regimes of visibility and responsibility are used to illuminate similarities and dissimilarities in the material. In total, 200 images made up the sample for the performed qualitative visual analysis. The findings reveal that empathetic portrayals dominate the Swedish narrative. Syrian refugees were overrepresented in imagery alluding to otherness painting a picture of Syrians as ethnic, cultural and dangerous others. Photography triggering social and political engagement were crucial in the forming of visualities, relating visual images to the political and public arena. The sampled images did reflect immigration discourses of intimidation and humanity.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate and gain a better understanding of the consumer's point of view of visual sustainability communication with a primary focus on eco-labels on food products. The study will further look into if an environmentally conscious consumer has the ability to make sustainable choices with the guidance of food packaging information. The aim of this study was to answer the question through a questionnaire survey and in further in-depth interviews with comparative visual analysis material of food packaging: Does an environmentally conscious consumer have the ability to make sustainable choices with the support of food packaging information? Based on data collected from the survey and the interviews there are many pitfalls for the consumer when choosing sustainable products because of a number of heuristics that are taken into account. Price and brand still play a big role in purchasing decisions. However, this study showed that there is a desire to act more sustainably. It also showed that there is a need for a new perspective of sustainability and how it is presented on food products. Eco-labels are of great importance, but as for the conclusion: the consumer needs more information to know whether sustainability claims are true or not.

Data from present day scientific simulations and observations of physical processes often consist of multiple scalar fields. It is important to study the interactions between the fields to understand the underlying phenomena. A visual representation of these interactions would assist the scientist by providing quick insights into complex relationships that exist between the fields. We describe new techniques for visual analysis of multifield scalar data where the relationships can be quantified by the gradients of the individual scalar fields and their mutual alignment. Empirically, gradients along with their mutual alignment have been shown to be a good indicator of the relationships between the different scalar variables. The Jacobi set, defined as the set of points where the gradients are linearly dependent, describes the relationship between the gradient fields. The Jacobi set of two piecewise linear functions may contain several components indicative of noisy or a feature-rich dataset. For two dimensional domains, we pose the problem of simplification as the extraction of level sets and offset contours and describe a robust technique to simplify and create a multi-resolution representation of the Jacobi set. Existing isosurface-based techniques for scalar data exploration like Reeb graphs, contour spectra, isosurface statistics, etc., study a scalar field in isolation. We argue that the identification of interesting isovalues in a multifield data set should necessarily be based on the interaction between the different fields. We introduce a variation density function that profiles the relationship between multiple scalar fields over isosurfaces of a given scalar field. This profile serves as a valuable tool for multifield data exploration because it provides the user with cues to identify interesting isovalues of scalar fields. Finally, we introduce a new multifield comparison measure to capture relationships between scalar variables. We also show that our measure is insensitive to noise in the scalar fields and to noise in their gradients. Further, it can be computed robustly and efficiently. The comparison measure can be used to identify regions of interest in the domain where interactions between the scalar fields are significant. Subsequent visualization of the data focuses on these regions of interest leading to effective visual analysis. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques by applying them to real world data from different domains like combustion studies, climate sciences and computer graphics.

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High prevalence of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the legislation movement impacted the placement of students with ASD in general education settings. Hence, the increase raised the need to conduct research for ASD populations, and to examine the effectiveness of these interventions. With the increase of single case-design (SCD) studies, there is a demand to include SCD in the evaluation of evidence- based practices (EBPs), to analyze and interpret SCD results in meaningful ways beside visual analysis, and to generate effect size estimates. This dissertation contains four systematic literature reviews which examine single-case intervention research targeting academic, social communication, play, and functional life skills for children with ASD in school settings. 132 studies with 924 AB phase contrasts were analyzed using visual analysis and three non-overlap measures. Sensitivity and specificity of Tau-U, IRD, and Baseline Corrected Tau were tested on detecting intervention effects. Also, the three methods were examined in their agreement with interpretations based on the visual analysis and the effect of confounding factor on their scores. The analysis demonstrated that the three methods performed fairly well in distinguishing effective from non-effective interventions. The three non-overlap methods had a moderate to substantial level of agreement with visual analysis. The author recommended further research on the impact of confounding factors especially baseline trend and autocorrelation as well as the use of effect size methods with high sensitivity and visual aids to improve the reliability and accuracy of visual analysis.