Invisible Gorillas

Author(s):  
Joseph Mazur

This chapter explains how symbols, by providing a blank background on which we may contemplate unadulterated meaning, help us see and distinguish what is essential. It first considers the claim advanced by the German naturalist Gotthilf von Schubert in the nineteenth century that we dream in a traumbildsprache (“dream visual language”), “a higher kind of algebra,” not in a verbal language. It then discusses the study of dreams by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby; Christopher Chabris's and Daniel Simons's “Invisible Gorilla” experiment; and experiments undertaken by Stanislas Dehaene to investigate differences in brain activity between contemplations of numbers and words. It also revisits the study done by Anthony Jansen, Kim Marriott, and Greg Yelland of Monash University to find out how experienced users of mathematics comprehend algebraic expressions. Finally, it suggests how particular notational configurations may help us recognize structure in mathematical expressions and process equations.

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.


Author(s):  
Burhanuddin Arafah ◽  
Muhammad Hasyim

The very fast development of information technology which is characterized by an influx of industry 4.0 has changed the way of human and behavior in language. The grammar which is a phenomenon of interest to language is examined along with behavior change language in the internet world. A phenomenon in language online is the emergence of the use of visual language emoji in conducting conversations in social media. This paper aims to discuss the phenomenon of visual language emoji among internet users in social media (WhatsApp). The aspects that will be emphasized are language (grammar) of emoji. Research methods carried out is observation and descriptive. Method of data collection is the division of the questionnaire online, and communications in WA screenshot that uses emoji icons. The research result show that emoji is a language (grammar) used in communicating in social media. Emoji language has dominated the conversation or message written on the social media and emoji (WA) as a language (syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) is part of the sentence, punctuation, expression, expressing feelings and thoughts to the opponent talk. The language of emoji expression indicates that the emoji can represent the thoughts and feelings instead of using verbal language. Thus, emoji is composed of two directions, i.e. language and parole. The language of emoji is the social institution of emoji (grammar) in social media, and the individual is the parole act, an actualized manifestation of the function of the emoticons language in syntactic, semantic and pragmatic.


Virittäjä ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 125 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leena Immonen

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan verbaalisen ja visuaalisen kielen yhteistyötä audiovisuaalisessa multisemioottisessa tekstissä. Tarkastelun kohteena on 40 haastattelu-uutista, jotka on lähetetty Yleisradion puoli yhdeksän uutisissa. Haastattelu-uutisesta analysoidaan tarkemmin uutistoimittajan puhumaa selostusta ja sen oheista kuvaa – jaksoa, joka edeltää haastateltavan puhetta kuvatilassa. Aihetta lähestytään teoreettisesti ja metodologisesti systeemis-funktionaalisen (SF) kieliteorian ja siihen läheisesti liittyvän visuaalisen suunnittelun kieliopin keinoin. Artikkelissa keskitytään SF­teorian metafunktioista tekstuaalisuuteen ja vastaavasti visuaalisen suunnittelun kieliopin sommitteluun. Analyysi osoittaa, että televisiouutisten verbaalinen ja visuaalinen kieli toimivat saumattomassa yhteistyössä siten, että molemmilla on omat tehtävänsä. Verbaalinen kieli välittää pääosin informaation, mutta kohtauksen kuvalla on merkityksenannossa keskeinen asema. Informaationkulussa verbaalisen informaatioyksikön teema–reema-rakenteen vaihtelu lankeaa yksiin visuaalisen informaatioyksikön tutun ja uuden kanssa, kun kuvassa havainnollistetaan viestiä käyttämällä sommittelun rajausta. Jos selostuksen teema–reema-rakenteen aikana kuvassa esiintyy kohde, jolla on visuaalista huomioarvoa, kuvan elementit korostavat sitä toistamalla mainitun teeman aihetta, mutta reeman sanomaa ei erikseen visualisoida. Multisemioottisessa, audio­visuaalisessa tekstissä voidaan verbaalisen kielen leksikaalisen koheesion ohella puhua visuaalisesta koheesiosta. Kuvan sommittelussa käytetään toistoa fokusoimalla samoja kuvaelementtejä ja rajataan eri osia kokonaisuuksista. Yhdeksi haastattelu­uutisen erityispiirteeksi osoittautuu demonstratiivipronomini tämä, erityisesti paikallis­sijaiset muodot tässä ja tästä. Demonstratiivin korrelaatti voi audiovisuaalisen tekstin sisällä sijaita paitsi verbaalisessa selostuksessa myös suoraan kuvan elementissä tai toiminnossa, jota korostetaan rajauksella. Artikkeli osoittaa, että television haastattelu-uutinen on konventionaalinen ja professionaalinen teksti, joka on rakenteeltaan vakiintunut. Sen välttämättömiä rakenne­osia ovat uutistenlukijan ingressistä ja toimittajan puheen sanan ja liikkuvan kuvan yhteistyössä muodostuvat jaksot, jotka päättyvät studion ulkopuolisessa tilassa toteutettuun haastatteluun. Jaksot rakentuvat pienistä yksityiskohdista, joilla jokaisella on merkityksensä ja funktionsa uutiskokonaisuudessa.   Forming the structure of a multisemiotic text: analysis of televised news interviews This article deals with the fusion of verbal and visual language in audiovisual and multisemiotic texts. The analysis focuses on forty news interviews broadcast during the eight-thirty evening news on Yleisradio (the Finnish Broadcasting Company). The reporter’s speech and its enclosed frame, i.e. the sequence which precedes the interviewer’s speech, are here analysed in close detail. The subject is approached theoretically and methodically using the principles of of systemic-functional grammar (SF) and of the closely related theory of visual design grammar. This article focuses on the textuality of SF theory’s metafunctions and on the design of visual design grammar respectively. The analysis shows that both the verbal and visual language of a news broadcast function in collaboration, both having their own unique roles. The verbal language is mainly responsible for transmitting information, whereas the associated visual scenes also play a major part in providing meaning. Within the flow of information, the interplay of the theme and rheme is also manifested on screen, whereby new information presented verbally is subsequently represented visually as new elements that can be highlighted and topicalised through the judicious use of framing and cropping. If a visually noteworthy element appears during the theme-and-rheme structure of the narrative, the elements of the enclosed frame indicate the subject of a given theme by repeating it. The rheme message is not separately visualised. When discussing the audiovisual text, we can talk not only about the lexical cohesion of verbal language but also about visual cohesion. In composing enclosed frames, for instance, repetition can be used in focusing the same visual elements or cropping out certain parts of a wider picture. A specific characteristic of the verbal language in news interviews seems to be the use the demonstrative pronoun tämä (‘this’) and especially the use of its local cases tässä (‘here’) and tästä (‘from here/about this’). In an audiovisual text, the antecedent of the demonstrative pronoun can be located not only in the narrative but also directly within the elements of the enclosed frame or in functions highlighted in the enclosed frame by framing. The article shows that television news interviews form a conventional and professional text with an established structure. Their essential parts are the periods that consist of the newsreader’s introduction, the sequences consisting of the reporter’s words, and the moving images that end up in an interview outside the studio.


Author(s):  
Deborah Padfield

This article argues that visual images, particularly photographs, can provide an alternative visual language to communicate pain. It suggests that selected photographs of pain placed between clinician and patient can help trigger a more collaborative approach to dialogue within the consulting room. The participatory roles of artist and clinician as well as patient in the co-construction of meaning and narrative are acknowledged. Comparing images from two projects, Perceptions of Pain and face2face, the article uses Barthes’ distinction between a ‘denoted’ and ‘connoted’ message to suggest the possibility of an underlying generic iconography for pain. By drawing on selected images and audio recordings from both projects, the article demonstrates how visual images re-invigorate verbal language and vice versa. It highlights how, in placing a photograph between two people, meaning is created within a social context as much as via the configuration of signs within the photographic surface. It is suggested that a resource of pain images, such as that created in both the projects described here, could be a valuable communication tool for use in NHS pain clinics.


2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Cohn

One of the most recognizable graphic components of the visual language of “comics” is the “panel,” a demarcated frame of image content put into discrete sequences, thereby seeming to be the primary unit of expression. However, meaningful visual elements do exist that are both smaller and larger than this encapsulation of image and text. Spoken languages also have variation in sizes of lexical items above and below their primary sequential unit of the “word.” This paper will address these varying levels of representation in visual language in comparison to the structural make-up of verbal language, to aim toward at what it means to have “visual lexical items.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 73-112
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Schaefer

Chapter 2 examines the Doré Bible illustrations through the lens of the illustrated periodical press. Having begun his career as a newspaper illustrator, Doré approached the Bible with the same aim toward comprehensiveness and compositional variety that one finds in the illustrated press of the time. At the same time, Doré’s images are rooted in the history of biblical representation and are thus dialectically situated in the discourses of contemporaneity and tradition. This chapter also takes into account the role that wood engraving played in the realm of illustration and in Doré’s practice specifically. Used primarily for book and periodical illustration, wood engraving became the most ubiquitous printed form in nineteenth-century Europe. Doré’s aim to elevate the medium to a higher status resulted in a set of illustrations that simultaneously derive from the visual language of journalistic imagery and depart from it in significant ways.


Nuncius ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 412-439
Author(s):  
Flora Lysen

This article traces attempts in the 1930s to create a spatio-temporal model of the active, living brain. Images and models of electric, illuminated displays – derived from electro-technology and engineering – allowed for a changing imaginary of a brain that was immediately accessible. The example of the Luminous Brain Model, a three-dimensional science education model, demonstrates how the visual language of illumination could serve as a flexible rhetorical tool that offered sensations of liveliness to modern viewers and promised to show a transparent view of a dynamic brain. Alternatively, various scientists in the 1930s used the analogy of the brain as an illuminated electric news ticker to conceptualize temporal patterns of changing brain activity, thus drawing the brain into a new metropolitan sphere of material surfaces with real-time mediation. These two historical imaginaries of blinking brains reveal new trajectories of the ‘metaphorical circuits’ through which technology and cerebral biology are mutually articulated.


1970 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Anders Ekström

Different types of statistical representations were among the most prolific visual media in late nineteenth century museums and temporary exhibitions. From the 1890s to the 1930s, several ”social” or ”statistical museums” were founded in Europe and North America, the most famously of which were established by the sociologist Patric Geddes in Glasgow, and by the philosopher Otto Neurath in Vienna. The first part of this paper gives a survey of the development of graphic representations in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the visual pedagogics involved in statistical display. The second part of the paper is dedicated to two statistical displays developed by the Swedish architect Ferdinand Boberg at exhibitions in Helsingborg in 1903 and Stockholm in 1909. In particular, the analysis is focused on the ways in which Boberg’s ”machinery of statistics” – a series of moving, figurative and three-dimensional representations of statistics – related to other media presented at the exhibitions, and to the ways in which the audience was invited to interact with the displays. In the conclusion, the development and use of statistical media in early twentieth century museums are discussed in relation to an intermedial discourse on visual realism and the utopian idea of a universal visual language. 


The chapter is devoted to symbolic calculations in which the variables and commands operate on mathematical expressions containing symbolic variables. The representation of a symbolic expression, its simplification, the solution of algebraic expressions, symbolic differentiation and integration, and conversion of the symbolic numbers to their decimal form are described. ODEs solutions are also presented. The final sections of the chapter give examples of the symbolic calculation implementation for some mechanical and tribological problems that were solved numerically in previous chapters, namely lengthening a two-spring scale, shear stress in a lubrication film, a centroid of a certain plate, and two-way solutions of the ODE describing the second order dynamical system – traditional and using the Laplace transform.


Author(s):  
Alex Dika Seggerman

This chapter argues that late nineteenth-century satirical cartoons and portrait photography in Egypt created a public conversant in a shared visual language of art and politics, and thus laid the groundwork for a modern art movement. The increased availability of mechanical image reproduction technology in Egypt, in addition to the country’s strategic position in international politics, fostered a visual system for identifying and critiquing late nineteenth-century Cairene politics among a transnational elite. This public included Ottoman, French, Italian, Syrian Christian, and Jewish individuals in addition to “local” Egyptians. The shared visual language spoke to all these diverse groups. I trace the visual history of caricature embedded in the satirical, illustrated Arabic- and French-language lithographic journal Abou Naddara Zarqaʾ, published by Yaʿqub (James) Sanua (1839–1912), and the significations of the cross-dressing by Princess Nazli Fazil (1853–1913) in photographic portraits. Both interpellate a public by means of images that reference a wide network of histories. Through visual analysis, I plot a constellation of complex visual and textual connections that, I argue, forms the “future public” of Egyptian modernism.


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