Collage is a formal art genre, a medium of expression and communication, and a teaching tool. But what is the potential of collage as a methodological process in visual design scholarship? This article provides theoretical and practical frameworks for ‘design scholarship through collage’ and ‘collage as design scholarship’ through historical precedent, heuristic practice and examples of four collage projects by two practitioners of the medium. The works demonstrate a hybrid form of visual design scholarship.

Danmu-mediated communication reveals the intricate process of audience participation and preference. Such intricacy of communication includes danmu subtitling as a translation, danmu commentary as a multimodal text as opposed to the original, subtitled video clip, which consists of audiences’ insights into their heads-on experience, and familiarity with the audiovisual subject matter, all as a reception-side paratext (Freeth, 2021: 130–131). Reception-side paratexts provide an invaluable platform for capturing readers’ critical understandings of original texts (ibid.: 118). Among these paratexts, this article argues that danmu functions significantly and cumulatively to transform humour in the digital mediascape. The authors aim to measure participants’ reception of danmu-enabled humour in thematically heterogeneous films, fantastic animation and romcom-themed films. To gauge the impact of danmu-enabled humour on viewers, this paper conducted a survey and interview-based reception study with 30 participants who watched danmu and non-danmu-loaded videos from different film topics. The results suggest that, while danmu videos do not significantly differ from non-danmu videos in terms of evaluations of humour, participants prefer the animation themed without danmu and the romcom themed with danmu. This suggests that the consumption of danmu-loaded videos is film-topic specific and humour-feature diverse. This study points to insightful relations between audience reception and the production of digitally-born multimodal texts, which could provide evidence to improve online participatory and interactive experience, and build customizable and accompanying user experience.

Audiovisual narratives are widely adopted as a resource for promoting children’s learning and critical multimodal literacy, which involves considering the social themes presented in multimodal texts. Previous research reveals that storytelling that employs achronological sequencing challenges children’s temporal cognition and narrative comprehension. Little is known, however, about how children’s comprehension of events relates to their interpretation of higher-level meanings, such as event causality and character development, which children’s films often convey through complex narrative strategies. To address this gap, this article proposes an empirical multimodal discourse–semantic approach to children’s reception of narrative complexity in film. The approach incorporates a social semiotic framework for analysing temporal relations in children’s narrative and a model of the relationship between children’s comprehension and their interpretation of film. The authors illustrate this approach through an exploratory investigation of 28 (7 to 10-year-old) children’s responses to two flashback scenes from popular Disney films. The results indicate that children’s comprehension of temporal relations supports their interpretation of event causality and character development. The investigation highlights the value of their approach for predicting and empirically testing the effect of complex narrative strategies on children’s film reception.

This study uses a multimodal approach, combining visual content analysis and textual analysis of tweet content to explore the virality of climate imagery on Twitter. Employing a combination of methods, including content analysis, latent class analysis, and automated text and sentiment analysis, the research the visuals, user information and public engagement of climate change related tweets shared between 2019 and 2022. The findings reveal a diverse array of viral visual content characterized by various formats, subjects and settings, identifying five frames related to celebrities, protests, politics and the visualizations and effects of climate change. These frames differ in terms of public engagement and sentiment expressed in user comments. Despite the democratic potential of online discourses, the study finds parallels with traditional media, including the underrepresentation of marginalized groups and themes such as adaptation and mitigation strategies. A lack of diversity is also evident in the users shaping viral visual climate change discourses on Twitter. Despite the platform’s potential for diverse contributions, accounts from the US dominate, along with accounts by media and political entities with above-average followers.

The article is dedicated to memetic practices of symbolic protest images in online activism, focusing on net memes and net icons of protest. Considering the particular affordances in the creation, distribution and reception of memetic imagery in online activism, key research questions are: (1) what are distinctive memetic practices in online activism of iconizing images on social media platforms? (2) what are specific differences between net memes and iconic imagery of protest in social media environments? and (3) how do emblematic image events on the street and iconic imagery on the internet interact in visual practices of online activists? After a theoretical discussion, these questions will be addressed by means of a qualitative analysis of a small sample of social media postings around civil rights activism (Black Lives Matter and the Belarussian Democracy Movement). Starting from a classic news icon originating from the protests against the Vietnam War (‘Ultimate Confrontation’ by press photographer, Marc Riboud, in 1967), this article analyses its recent memetic appropriations on digital platforms and in performative protest actions on the street.

This visual essay curates an exhibition of photographic data from a project with children about Landcare, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to managing environmental issues in local communities across Australia. The project sought to empower children to engage with Landcare Reserves through participatory arts-based research to map their awareness of and participation in local Landcare Reserve sites. This visual essay recognizes the images as agentic entities, with the power to activate the gaze beyond the boundaries of this project as embedded yet transcendent from it whilst simultaneously acknowledging the ‘failing’ agency of the sensing body of the camera.

This visual essay makes use of sketches and watercolour drawings in order to present an observational study of a hunger strike conducted by undocumented immigrants in a Brussels church in 2021. The study aimed to explore the lived experience of the hunger strikers, focusing on the physical consequences, emotional states and process of the strike. The essay highlights the importance of visibility in gaining public support for a hunger strike. The study adds to existing scholarship on the use of visual methods in social research and highlights the potential of observational drawings as a tool for understanding the experiential aspects of social movements.

This article critically explores the concept of ‘adoption’ via the semiotic analysis of the picture book A Mama for Owen (Bauer and Butler, 2007), which stands here as a testimony of adoption narratives and the ways in which they are creatively re-addressed in the context of children’s literature – as children’s books challenge traditional stories, establishing a contrastive dialogue, they are able ‘to sow and nurture the seeds of social change’ (see Reynolds, Children’s Literature , 2011: 5). The study proposes the application of textual tools of analysis developed in the area of stylistics (see Short, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays, and Prose , 1996; Simpson, Stylistics: a Resource Book for Students , 2004; Toolan, Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics , 1998) to the examination of the visual mode. In particular, it suggests (partial) visual repetition and visual parallelism as creative tools that are essential here in the process of meaning-making and re-assessment of adoption. The analysis of the visual mode is completed drawing on visual grammar (see Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design , 2006[1996] and Painter, Children’s Picture Book Narratives: Reading Sequences of Images , 2009) and pictorial metaphors ( see Forceville, Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising ,1996, and Non-Verbal and Multimodal Metaphor in a Cognitivist Framework: Agendas for Research , 2006). The investigation identifies the semiotic choices at play and their multimodal display in terms of storytelling and narrative progression (see Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular , 1972) in an accordion-like structure that results in the cognitive power of a work of art. The article ultimately embraces picture books as enriching multimodal narratives that can build more inclusive communities, in this case celebrating the family unit beyond the genetic bond or gender roles.

This article examines augmented reality filters applied to users’ faces, or ARFaces, a visual technology that has spread with increasing success since 2015, mainly through social media. In the first part, the article highlights four significant issues that have emerged about ARFaces: the risks of Body Dysmorphic Disorders linked to beautification filters; the new personal and immediate relationships with brands linked to branded ARFaces; the adoption of filters by a new generation of artists and creatives; and the risks of surveillance related to the face recognition technology on which they are based. The second part of the article argues that ARFaces represent a symptomatic example of ‘algorithmic images’. This type of image modifies the logic of ‘technical images’ that characterised previous media as it shifts the centre of gravity of the processes of the visual constitution from the remote transfer of information to the automated extraction and processing of data. In its conclusions, the article outlines some conceptual tools for dealing with algorithmic images: the author proposes developing a political economy of light and analysing its transformation from a support infrastructure for a political economy of the visual to a supply structure for a data economy.