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abstract: This study examines the representation of Asian online brides by studying the images and profiles that are advertised on Asianonlinebrides.com. To do so, I combined the history and growth of the Human Trafficking industry, the idea of the Asian “exotic OTHER,” the power and structured/constrained agency, and social construction of gender theories. In particular, I utilized a mixed methods approach for data collection. The content and visual analysis in this study provided the two sides of the analytic coin: the written and the visual. I am particularly interested in the narrative comments offered by the prospective brides, e.g., what they state to be their preferences in their dream man/husband, and the personality traits, and characteristics that they write about themselves. The following were examined: the gender displays, picture frames, feminine touch, and the ritualization of subordination. For example, body language, clothing, skin, hair color, and texture, bone structure, posture, etc. I argue that this data alerts us to the whole host of ideas, assumptions, social, cultural, and gender constructions. The power relations that exceeds the text and inform us of these online brides. The findings have indicated that these women are vulnerable and caught within oppressive social structures. They have nevertheless utilized those structures to their advantage. By doing so, the brides have acted as assertive agents in that they have looked out for the interests of both themselves and their families. Moreover, a significant body of data was provided first hand through the written and visual narratives of the online brides. These brides have offered valuable insight into the field of Asian online brides. Their stories have presented a unique perspective to the online brides’ process that can only be captured through the narratives provided in this research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2019

The presence of autonomous systems is becoming more and more common in today’s society.The contexts in which these kind of systems appear are numerous and the variations arelarge, from large and complex systems like autonomous mining platforms to smaller, moreeveryday useful systems like the self-guided vacuum cleaner. It is essential for a completelyself-supported mobile robot placed in unknown, dynamic or unstructured environments tobe able to localise itself and find its way through maps. This localisation problem is stillnot completely solved although the idea of completely autonomous systems arose in thehuman society centuries ago. Its complexity makes it a wide-spread field of reasearch evenin present days. In this work, the localisation problem is approached with an appearance based method forplace recognition. The objective is to develop an algorithm for fast pose hypotheses generationfrom a map. A database containing very low resolution images from urban environmentsis built and very short image retrieval times are made possible by application of imagedimension reduction. The evaluation of the database shows that it has real time potential becausea set of pose hypotheses can be generated in 3-25 hundreds of a second depending onthe tuning of the database. The probability of finding a correct pose suggestion among thegenerated hypotheses is as high as 87%, even when only a few hypotheses are retrieved fromthe database.

Communicating climate change and other long-term environmental issues to the wider public is a challenging process involving many barriers to action. Visualisations have the ability to overcome these barriers. Furthermore, the benefits of visual images over verbal information have been supported. However, there is a lack of research on how visual images can motivate behaviour. Based on Elaborated Intrusion theory, it is proposed that visual images can be internalised as mental images which can act as a ‘motivational bridge’ for pro-environmental behaviour. Six studies exposed participants to visual pro-environmental messages. Throughout all studies images were internalised as mental images, associated with intrusive thoughts. Consistently, mental images were strongly associated with pro-environmental goals and behaviour change (self-report and actual). Also, interfering with visual mental imagery, using cognitive tasks, reduced self-reported behaviour change (Study 6). Overall, two motivational roles of mental imagery emerged: mental images can trigger pro-environmental goals and can strengthen the relationship between pro-environmental goals and behaviour. The development, strength, and vividness of mental imagery depended on interacting individual and message characteristics. A vivid message was more effective when the message topic was relevant to the target individual (Study 2). Also, a message in line with existing values evoked more vivid mental imagery (Studies 2 to 6). A message could activate specific values as well if mental imagery was not interfered with (Study 5 and 6). And finally, positive and negative images were associated with different feelings, but could both be internalised and motivate behaviour (Study 3 and 6). A combined message could overcome the negative feelings associated with a fear appeal (Study 6). This thesis developed a theoretical framework, integrating approaches from social and cognitive psychology, which can help explain and predict responses to visual environmental messages. Six studies showed that the effect of a visual image on behaviour depends, among other factors, on its ability to trigger recurring mental imagery. Insights provide opportunities for designing evidence based visual pro-environmental messages. In turn this can maximise the impact visual messages have on changing people’s pro-environmental behaviour.

Até o final da década de 1960, o livro escolar brasileiro era em sua maioria produzido dentro dos padrões técnicos e visuais da indústria livreira tradicional em relação estreita e participando do que se conhece como cultura escolar, em que a linguagem visual como modo de conhecimento e construção de significados não era devidamente reconhecida e valorizada. Com raras exceções, a visualidade do livro didático não tinha como referência a produção gráfica de melhor qualidade que aparecia em livros de literatura e outras mídias e não era produto de método projetual mais rigoroso e qualificado. Na década de 1970, com a expansão da indústria cultural e dos meios audiovisuais e o surgimento de novas referências de gosto particularmente para a juventude, a visualidade do livro didático praticada ficou ainda mais distante de seu público. As editoras existentes e as novas que surgiram com a expansão do ensino em todos os níveis, mesmo quando percebiam as mudanças de gosto ocorridas, ou não davam importância para esse fato, ou não sabiam como atualizar as linguagens de sua produção, ambos os aspectos sendo decorrentes da pouca cultura visual de seus dirigentes e do não reconhecimento do modo visual como expressão válida de conhecimento e do design como recurso para despertar o interesse pelo aprendizado e ferramenta de promoção de vendas. Será a editora Ática, por seu projeto editorial de inserção na produção de cultura mais ampla e de resposta às demandas decorrentes da vida política e cultural do momento vivido pelo país, que trará para o livro didático as mesmas preocupações com visualidade que precisava ter com seus produtos destinados ao público mais amplo. Assim, a editora promove uma profissionalização na produção visual, com a contratação de designers e ilustradores experimentados em outras mídias impressas, estas já bastante profissionalizadas na produção de linguagens que atingiam diversos públicos. A importância dada às capas, como meio de sedução para obter adoção entre os professores e adesão entre os estudantes, pela identificação com o universo visual desses segmentos, vai gerar uma renovação sem precedentes na visualidade do livro escolar e vai impulsionar editoras concorrentes a fazê-lo. As soluções gráficas originais de Ary Normanha, com a participação de Mário Cafiero, vão oferecer ao público a experiência com os significados criados pela linguagem visual em diálogo com o modo verbal, como atividade própria de uma cultura e de um aprendizado integrais. A par da ampliação da cultura imagética e das referências de gosto, as capas documentadas e analisadas mostram um momento em que o design do livro didático se equiparou ao melhor design encontrado em outros veículos da cultura no Brasil. / Until the end of the 1960s, Brazilian schoolbooks were in its majority produced according to the technical and visual standards of the traditional publishing industry, in close relation to what is known as school culture, by which the visual language as a way of acquiring knowledge and creating meanings was not duly recognized and valued. With a few exceptions, the visual presentation of schoolbooks had no compare with better quality graphics that turned up in literature books and other media. Moreover, it was not the result of a more rigorous and qualified, thoughtful design. In the 70s, with the expansion of cultural industry and audiovisual media and the emergence of new taste trends particularly among the youth, the visual image of schoolbooks drifted apart from its public even more. The existing publishing houses and the ones founded during the spreading of education in all levels would either dismiss this fact or not know how to update the language of their books even if they have noticed that changes in taste had occurred. These issues were due to the scarce graphical knowledge of the publishers and their non-recognition of the visual aspect as a valid expression of knowledge and of the design as a means for arousing the interest in learning and as a sales promotion tool. Amongst the biggest publishing houses in Brazil, Ática was the one that treated textbooks with the same graphic concerns it has had for its products aimed to a broader public, once it had embarked on the project of participating in the wider cultural production, responding to the demands of cultural and political scenes in that particular period the country was living in. Thus, Ática promoted the professionalization of graphic design in the schoolbook area by hiring designers and illustrators experienced in other media that were already developing languages that reached a diverse public. Considered as a way to conquer teachers and its students through their identification with its visual image, the book cover gained a significance that would generate an unseen renewal in the graphic design of schoolbooks and impelled Áticas competitors to do the same. The original graphical solutions introduced by Ary Normanha, with the collaboration of Mário Cafiero, would make the public experience meanings provided by the dialogues between visual language and verbal language, an outcome of a more comprehensive culture and learning. Besides their enhanced appeal and the cultural imagery they bring about, the book covers registered and analyzed herein show a moment when the design of the schoolbooks was of the same quality as the design found in other cultural media in Brazil.

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

Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας ήταν να μελετήσουμε τις εικόνες στα βιβλία των Φυσικών Επιστημών της ΣΤ΄ Δημοτικού που αναφέρονται σε έννοιες Βιολογίας ως ένα κοινωνικο – εποικοδομιστικό εργαλείο μάθησης. Η μελέτη προσανατολίστηκε σε δύο κατευθύνσεις. Αφενός μεν πώς οι εικόνες παρουσιάζονται στα βιβλία έχοντας κοινωνικά προσδιορισμένη λειτουργία (Σημειωτική προσέγγιση) και αφετέρου πώς τις κατανοούν οι μαθητές και αν μπορούν να λειτουργήσουν ως μέσο μάθησης και οικοδόμησης της γνώσης (Εποικοδομιστική προσέγγιση). Αρχικά οι εικόνες σε όλες τις θεματικές ενότητες της βιολογίας ταξινομήθηκαν ανάλογα με το είδος και τη λειτουργία. Στη συνέχεια επιλέχτηκαν κάποιες εικόνες που αφορούσαν το Αναπνευστικό και Κυκλοφορικό Σύστημα του ανθρώπου οι οποίες παρουσιάστηκαν με το συνοδεύον γραπτό κείμενο στους μαθητές για να δούμε πώς τις διαχειρίζονται, αν τις κατανοούν και τι δυσκολίες αντιμετωπίζουν. Τα αποτελέσματα έδειξαν ότι, (α) Οι εικόνες στα βιβλία ανάλογα με το περιεχόμενο (είδος και λειτουργία) είναι ρεαλιστικές παρά συμβατικές έχοντας ένα παιδαγωγικό ρόλο που συνάδει με την ηλικία των μαθητών και (β) οι μαθητές στις επιλεγμένες εικόνες αντιμετωπίζουν προβλήματα τόσο στη διαχείριση όσο και στην κατανόηση των εικόνων που οφείλονται όχι μόνο στις αδυναμίες που έχουν στην περιοχή της βιολογίας αλλά επιπλέον στην απουσία ικανοτήτων οπτικού γραμματισμού. / The present study aims at analyzing visual images, included in the sixth grade’s Natural Science textbooks, referring in biology concepts as a socio-constructivist learning tool. The analysis took two different approaches; on the one hand, researching how these images are presented in the textbooks while having a social pre-identified function (Semiotics approach) and on the other hand, researching how sixth grade students can understand these images and if they can serve as means of learning and constructing knowledge (Constructivist approach). Initially, the images in all biological topics were classified in relation with their type and function. The research then proceeded by selecting certain images concerning the human Respiratory and Circulatory System, which were presented with accompanying written text to the students in order to determine how they can handle them, if they understand them and what difficulties they face during this process. The results of this research showed that (i) the images in the books depending on their content (type and function) are naturalistic rather than abstract while having a pedagogical function consistent with the age of the students and (ii) the students in selected images encounter problems both in handling and understanding not only due to knowledge deficit in the area of biology but due to the absence of visual literacy skills as well.

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803-1863) set out on his only trip to Greece and Turkey in 1828 to return to France and produce visual images of the Orient at a time when no major European artist had traveled to the Near East and at a time when the Orient had yet to be experienced, understood, and interpreted. Decamps’ highly original and personal interpretation of the Orient in painting has been studied by present-day scholars exclusively within the context of Romantic Orientalist genre painting. Studying criticism written on his work throughout the 19th century and working closely with his paintings, certain issues in his Orientalist paintings question the longstanding categorization of his work as solely Romantic Orientalist genre paintings. The fact that the artist never returned to the Orient; the fact that he invested his Orientalist landscapes with a Rembrandesque rather than Oriental light; his constant inclusion of contrasting opposites in the ostensibly subdued compositions he produced; the striking differences between his Oriental visual expressions and those of his Romantic contemporaries; and his own sentiment of being a failed artist, reveal alternative, less settled, readings of his work. Studying Decamps’ Orientalist oeuvre in its social and political contexts and taking into account the artist’s personal ambitions demonstrates the lasting resonance of this work, of the artist’s highly original working methods, and of his innovative technique. This study provides an assessment of Decamps’ Oriental work; it also delineates its relevance and influence in movements beyond Romanticism and into trends that developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2008-12-11 20:43:05.08

Até o final da década de 1960, o livro escolar brasileiro era em sua maioria produzido dentro dos padrões técnicos e visuais da indústria livreira tradicional em relação estreita e participando do que se conhece como cultura escolar, em que a linguagem visual como modo de conhecimento e construção de significados não era devidamente reconhecida e valorizada. Com raras exceções, a visualidade do livro didático não tinha como referência a produção gráfica de melhor qualidade que aparecia em livros de literatura e outras mídias e não era produto de método projetual mais rigoroso e qualificado. Na década de 1970, com a expansão da indústria cultural e dos meios audiovisuais e o surgimento de novas referências de gosto particularmente para a juventude, a visualidade do livro didático praticada ficou ainda mais distante de seu público. As editoras existentes e as novas que surgiram com a expansão do ensino em todos os níveis, mesmo quando percebiam as mudanças de gosto ocorridas, ou não davam importância para esse fato, ou não sabiam como atualizar as linguagens de sua produção, ambos os aspectos sendo decorrentes da pouca cultura visual de seus dirigentes e do não reconhecimento do modo visual como expressão válida de conhecimento e do design como recurso para despertar o interesse pelo aprendizado e ferramenta de promoção de vendas. Será a editora Ática, por seu projeto editorial de inserção na produção de cultura mais ampla e de resposta às demandas decorrentes da vida política e cultural do momento vivido pelo país, que trará para o livro didático as mesmas preocupações com visualidade que precisava ter com seus produtos destinados ao público mais amplo. Assim, a editora promove uma profissionalização na produção visual, com a contratação de designers e ilustradores experimentados em outras mídias impressas, estas já bastante profissionalizadas na produção de linguagens que atingiam diversos públicos. A importância dada às capas, como meio de sedução para obter adoção entre os professores e adesão entre os estudantes, pela identificação com o universo visual desses segmentos, vai gerar uma renovação sem precedentes na visualidade do livro escolar e vai impulsionar editoras concorrentes a fazê-lo. As soluções gráficas originais de Ary Normanha, com a participação de Mário Cafiero, vão oferecer ao público a experiência com os significados criados pela linguagem visual em diálogo com o modo verbal, como atividade própria de uma cultura e de um aprendizado integrais. A par da ampliação da cultura imagética e das referências de gosto, as capas documentadas e analisadas mostram um momento em que o design do livro didático se equiparou ao melhor design encontrado em outros veículos da cultura no Brasil. / Until the end of the 1960s, Brazilian schoolbooks were in its majority produced according to the technical and visual standards of the traditional publishing industry, in close relation to what is known as school culture, by which the visual language as a way of acquiring knowledge and creating meanings was not duly recognized and valued. With a few exceptions, the visual presentation of schoolbooks had no compare with better quality graphics that turned up in literature books and other media. Moreover, it was not the result of a more rigorous and qualified, thoughtful design. In the 70s, with the expansion of cultural industry and audiovisual media and the emergence of new taste trends particularly among the youth, the visual image of schoolbooks drifted apart from its public even more. The existing publishing houses and the ones founded during the spreading of education in all levels would either dismiss this fact or not know how to update the language of their books even if they have noticed that changes in taste had occurred. These issues were due to the scarce graphical knowledge of the publishers and their non-recognition of the visual aspect as a valid expression of knowledge and of the design as a means for arousing the interest in learning and as a sales promotion tool. Amongst the biggest publishing houses in Brazil, Ática was the one that treated textbooks with the same graphic concerns it has had for its products aimed to a broader public, once it had embarked on the project of participating in the wider cultural production, responding to the demands of cultural and political scenes in that particular period the country was living in. Thus, Ática promoted the professionalization of graphic design in the schoolbook area by hiring designers and illustrators experienced in other media that were already developing languages that reached a diverse public. Considered as a way to conquer teachers and its students through their identification with its visual image, the book cover gained a significance that would generate an unseen renewal in the graphic design of schoolbooks and impelled Áticas competitors to do the same. The original graphical solutions introduced by Ary Normanha, with the collaboration of Mário Cafiero, would make the public experience meanings provided by the dialogues between visual language and verbal language, an outcome of a more comprehensive culture and learning. Besides their enhanced appeal and the cultural imagery they bring about, the book covers registered and analyzed herein show a moment when the design of the schoolbooks was of the same quality as the design found in other cultural media in Brazil.

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