Felicidad García-Sánchez

Designing and building systems and tools to analyze visual communications on social networks

This paper presents a work in progress project that implements a set of tools and systems to allow researchers performing qualitative and quantitative analysis about visual communication in social networks. This analysis is intended to discover learning by imitation patterns, the usage of visual language in non-formal contexts like social networks and to find real examples of visual conversations among users that are not related with the semantic, grammar and vocabulary of the visual language present in the images and visual expressions. In order to explain how researchers are developing these systems and tools, the paper explains an overall introduction to the problem, the aims and objectives for this work in progress, their approach to face the problems raised by this kind of analysis involving images and social networks, and explaining the core concepts related to the tools and systems that they are building to perform the analysis.

The relationships between visual communication and informal learning

The usage of visual communication is broadly extended nowadays; with the intensive usage of social networks based (partially or totally) in sharing images and visual representations, people has adopted this kind of communication as normal and develops new dimensions in the knowledge, understanding and communicating processes even without knowing clearly about this kind of communication. The usage of this visual signs and messages require in some way learning from the stakeholders involved in the communication or other information sources, and it has observed that visual communication users learn usually in a informal way and mostly by imitating the communication patterns used by influential people. This paper explains the relationships between the current usage of visual communication (and its learning) and the informal learning, explaining some examples about the relationship and main issues, and how this learning takes places in non formal and informal contexts.