Marion G. Müller

Dangerous Depictions: A Visual Case Study of Contemporary Cartoon Controversies

With their increasing global dissemination, visuals have assumed an important role in international political communication. The crisis sparked by Muhammad cartoons that swept the globe in early 2006, re-emerging two years later with the republication of the cartoons, testifies to the global conflict potential of visuals. Language barriers still set limits to global textual communication, yet visuals transgress those barriers and evoke different responses in different cultural contexts. In this paper we compare three connected cases of cartoon controversies in the year 2006: the cartoon conflict triggered by the publication of 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting Muslim prophet Muhammad; the follow-up event of a cartoon competition initiated by the Iranian government, ridiculing the Holocaust; and “free-riding” on the global impact of the Muhammad cartoons, and 12 cartoons published in Bulgaria, depicting Libyan leader Khadafi in the context of a trial of Bulgarian nurses, accused of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV 1 . 1Our thanks for alerting us to this cartoon conflict go to Deyan Vitanov, who participated in the first stage of research.

Visual competence: a new paradigm for studying visuals in the social sciences?1

This introductory article provides an overview and theoretical anchor for the following contributions in this special issue. The article discusses, first, the necessity for introducing a new research paradigm – ‘visual competence’ – in the social sciences (anthropology, communication science, media and social psychology, political science, sociology), arguing that the actual transformations of reality triggered by processes of globalisation and digitisation require a closer scrutiny of the visual. In a second step, the new paradigm ‘visual competence’ is introduced, focusing on four dimensions: visual production, perception, interpretation and reception competencies. A new model, the visual competence cycle, is suggested. The article concludes with a specific application example for studying visual interpretation competence in a case study of the humanising and de‐humanising effects of portraiture.

The Political Iconography of Muhammad Cartoons: Understanding Cultural Conflict and Political Action

The controversy over the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons that swept the globe at the beginning of 2006 was arguably the second major event after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that brought “Muslims” as a group of political actors to the forefront of international politics. The crisis was sparked in late September 2005, by the publication of political cartoons, depicting Islamic prophet Muhammad, in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten . While the original cause of controversy was limited to a small country in northern Europe, political actions spread worldwide, ranging from peaceful protests to diplomatic sanctions to consumer boycotts, and finally to open violence against anything symbolizing “the West.” The levels of political action were muddled, and responsibilities as well as the potential to act were confused. Almost all of the actors involved in the controversy were left without an appropriate counterpart to address. For example, the Arab League and Muslim organizations blamed the Danish government for the publication of the cartoons, and for not taking action against the independent publisher of Jyllands-Posten . Enraged Muslim citizens of countries as geographically distant as Lebanon, Sudan, and Indonesia attacked and ransacked Danish embassies, and threatened anyone coming from a country belonging to the European Union. The editors of several newspapers—e.g., in France and Jordan—who had decided to reprint the cartoons either in an act of journalistic solidarity with Jyllands-Posten or to inform their Muslim readership about the cartoons, were fired. And, terrorist group Al Qaeda put the editor and cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten , as well as all of Denmark, at the top of its target list. The diplomatic fallout from the cartoon publication was enormous and has severely shattered relations between European and Arab countries. Despite the enormity of the event, the question of how the publication of 12 cartoons in Denmark could lead to a global crisis that dominated the news and kept diplomats and politicians on alert for more than three months remains unanswered.

Perceiving press photography: a new integrative model, combining iconology with psychophysiological and eye-tracking methods

Any analysis of how mass-mediated visuals are perceived and interpreted in multimodal contexts should be informed by a scientific understanding of the biological constraints on visual processing, as well as a solid culturally aware visual communication approach. This article focuses on the interdisciplinary combination of three methods – iconology, a qualitative method of visual analysis targeted at the meanings of visuals and based in the humanities, and eye-tracking and psychophysiological reaction measurement, both based in experimental psychology. The authors propose a Visual Communication Process Model as an integrative means for connecting different facets of the communication processes involved in visual mass communication. The goal of this new model is to widen and sharpen the focus on explaining (a) meaning-attribution processes, (b) visual perception and attention processes, and (c) psychophysiological reactions to mass-mediated visuals, illustrated in this article with examples of press photography.

Segmentation-free detection of comic panels

The detection of comic panels is a crucial funcionality in assistance systems for iconotextual media analysis. Most systems use recursive cuts based on image projections or background segmentation to find comic panels. Usually this limits the applicability to comics with white background and free space between the panels. In this paper, we introduce a set of new features that allow for a detection of panels by their outline instead of the separating space. Our method is therefore more tolerant against structured backgrounds.

Towards next-generation visual archives: image, film and discourse

The digital turn in visual studies has played a major role in the terminological overlap between ‘archive’, ‘database’ and ‘corpus’, and it has brought about a number of positive developments such as improved accessibility and availability. At the same time, it has also raised important questions pertaining to the materiality, searchability, annotation and analysis of the data at hand. Through a series of theoretical constructs and empirical examples, this paper illustrates the necessity and benefits of interdisciplinary dialogue when tackling the multimodal corpus annotation challenge. The meaningful interrelations between semiotic modes, the combinations between manual and (semi)automated annotation, the seamless integration of coding and annotation schemes which share common logics and the contextual embedding of the presented analyses strongly suggest multimodal document analysis in all its forms will continuously benefit from a corpus-based approach.

Politologie und Ikonologie. Visuelle Interpretation als politologisches Verfahren

Das Politische und das Bildliche verbindet eine eigentumliche Logik. Beide Bereiche gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit funktionieren aufgrund eines nicht vollstandig rationalisierbaren Prozesses. Politik und Bilder sind kommunikative Produkte mit einer kulturellen Komponente, die nur schwer zu ermessen ist. Zu Unrecht werden Bilder bislang von der Politologie als politisches Quellenmaterial ignoriert, weil sie als irrationale und alogische Phanomene betrachtet werden, die im Widerspruch zum rationalen Anspruch politischer Willensbildung und Entscheidungsfindung stehen. Damit ist einer kulturwissenschaftlich orientierten Politologie ein wichtiges Analyseinstrumentarium verschlossen. Denn nicht nur die Unterhaltungskultur, auch die politische Kultur des 21. Jahrhunderts ist durch eine deutliche Zunahme visueller Kommunikationsformen gepragt, die der Politologie aufgrund ihrer weitgehenden Ignoranz gegenuber bildlichen Kommunikationsmustern unverstandlich sein mussen.

How Facebook Facilitated the Jasmine Revolution. Conceptualizing the Functions of Online Social Network Communication

This paper investigates the role that the social network platform Facebook played during the so-called Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia at the end of 2010, leading to the toppling of the Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali one month later. While in the past, the control of traditional mass media was a major factor for corrupt regimes to maintain their power, the Tunisian case is the first example in the Middle East of a successful revolution brought about by circumventing traditional mass media, transforming an online social media platform originally designed for private communication into a political communication tool. While the Tunisian mass media as well as most Internet sites were tightly controlled and censored by the Ben Ali regime, control over the social network site Facebook proved to be futile. The paper analyzes the case of the Jasmine revolution in order to explain the specific role that social network communication played in the sequence of political events. For this case study, a five-dimensional typology was developed to analyze the various functions the social network platform performed. A further aim of the study is to provide a first typological model of social media functions to be tested in future comparative studies of political and media systems in transition.

Das visuelle Votum

Wahlwerbung ist ein verpontes Massenmedium, zumal, wenn es sich des Bildes als Werbetrager bedient. Visuellen Wahlkampfstrategien haftet der Verdacht manipulativer Intentionen an, die dem Bildmedium bereitwilliger unterstellt werden als vergleichbaren schriftlichen Slogans, Programmen und Broschuren. Die gegen Wahlplakate1 und Werbespots2 vorgebrachten Kritikpunkte reichen von ihrer informativen Limitierung uber ihre Funktion als bloses „Hintergrundrauschen“ (Quere1991: 85) bis hin zum Vorwurf der suggestiven Steuerung des Wahlverhaltens (Abromeit 1972: 70; Stegner 1992: 462) mittels verfuhrerischer Videoreize.

vorBild Amerika? Tendenzen amerikanischer und deutscher Wahlkampfkommunikation

Vorbilder sind eine Erfindung der deutschen Sprache. Fur amerikanische Vorbilder gibt es sogar eine eigene Kategorie. Ist die Rede von der „Amerikanisierung“ in Deutschland weit verbreitet, so ist americanization als Wort in den USA zwar nicht unbekannt, zumindest aber ungebrauchlich.1 Im Amerikanischen wird die Ubertragung oder Kopie von Verhaltensweisen und Prozessen mit Begriffen wie model oder example umschrieben. Das Vor-Bild hat in der amerikanischen Sprache kein Pendant: „ante-images“ und „pre pictures“ existieren nicht.2