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This paper presents a study of the drawing papers from Borko Lazeski's cartoons for a mural painting. The collection is comprised of more than 20 single pieces (170×500 cm) executed in charcoal, pencil, pastel, tempera and ink. The cartoons exhibit different types of damages, such as grease stains, moisture stains, cracks, flaking paint, areas of loss caused by insects and mould stains. The study included spot tests, ATR-FTIR and micro-Raman spectroscopy to characterise the artist's papers. They were found to be a type of paper composed of partly bleached, neutral sulphite semi-chemical (NSSC) wood pulp originating from coniferous trees (softwood) with the occasional use of abaca fibres. The laboratory tests revealed slightly acidic conditions (pH=5.01–6.52), high lignin content (>5 %) and alum-rosin sizing. Infrared spectroscopy confirmed all findings of the spot tests. Micro-Raman spectroscopy showed the presence of gypsum in the papers. The study addresses conservation issues arising from the chemical nature of the paper support and highlights the need for an extended study in order to be able to make informed treatment choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: While the ubiquity of social media as a mode of communication, collaboration, connection and creativity has been widely adopted in journalism, entertainment, healthcare and others, the field of education has been more reticent to integrate social media for teaching and learning purposes. This paper aims to summarize research on how social media may support educational aims with specific reference to large classrooms. In addition, the authors provide practical tips on using Twitter from the experience teaching in a typical higher education setting: a large, undergraduate course in a public university. Finally, the authors offer conclusions about how instructors can use social media to support increased engagement, professional development and digital literacy skills. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents a real-life "case study" of using Twitter in an educational context common to many in higher education: a large, undergraduate lecture class over the course of one semester. This course focused on the foundations of educational technology and was a requirement of receiving a teaching credential at a large public institution in the Midwest. As a required course, students from a number of different majors were enrolled in the course, including biology, chemistry, mathematics, English, history, world languages, physical education and many more. While these majors were grouped by content-area groups (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math; the humanities; and physical education), for this paper the authors will focus on the part of the course where students were all together in lecture format. Guided by the research above, and pedagogical practices discussed elsewhere (Greenhow and Gleason, 2012), it was decided to use Twitter for a number of different pedagogical purposes, including in-class discussion, increase student engagement with course material, expand student interaction and develop student presence. Findings: The use of Twitter was found to increase student participation, help facilitate conceptual understanding, to foster students' "social presence," and to increase interactions with "real world experts." Twitter provided a way, for example, for students in a large lecture course to participate, and roughly 90 per cent of students did so with Twitter. Likewise, instructors used Twitter as a way to bridge learning across different experiences (i.e. lab activities, lecture and online lesson), while also providing a way to support social presence (letting students share humorous pictures). Finally, Twitter facilitated interaction with content experts including historians, during a lesson on global collaboration. Research limitations/implications: Overall, integrating Twitter into a large, lecture course seemed to suggest a number of positive learning outcomes, including presenting opportunities for student voice and expression, visible participation, the development of social presence and tools to connect different course activities (e.g. lecture, in-class activities and lab activities). For example, much research in this field has begun to explore the educational outcomes associated with social media use, and this study contributes to this emerging field. Here, the authors advocate for using social media to support interactive, collaborative and social learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 captured the imagination of reading publics around the world and in Britain spawned a breadth of products aimed at a domestic audience, including cigarette cards, illustrated magazines and newspaper cartoons. This essay investigates the commentary on and interpretation of the war offered by cartoons appearing in the British Sunday paper the News of the World and the Welsh daily paper the Western Mail. Editorial cartoonist J. M. Staniforth drew over 70 cartoons documenting the war for both papers, and the degree to which these visual images complemented or diverged from the editorial line expressed in leader columns is considered. The importance of distinguishing between cartoons and editorials and of taking into account the identity and career of the cartoonist is stressed. The visual codes for communicating conflict are also investigated, revealing in the process something of the intellectual horizons of both cartoonist and audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Example-based caricature synthesis techniques have been attracting large attentions for being able to generate attractive caricatures of various styles. This paper proposes a new example-based caricature synthesis system using a feature deviation matching method as a cross-modal distance metric. It employs the deviation values from average features across different feature spaces rather than the values of features themselves to search for similar components from caricature examples directly. Compared with traditional example-based systems, the proposed system can generate various styles of caricatures without requiring paired photograph–caricature example databases. The newly designed features can effectively capture visual characteristics of the hairstyles and facial components in input portrait images. In addition, this system can control the exaggeration of individual facial components and provide several similarity-based candidates to satisfy users' different preferences. Experiments are conducted to prove the above ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses media representations of Joyce Banda, Malawi's first female president, by newspaper editorial cartoons. A total of 50 cartoons were collected, comprising Point of Order and Puludzu, from The Nation and The Daily Times newspapers, spanning the period 2012 to 2014. Using theories of feminism and representation, this paper reveals how the editorials, as unique visual forms of communication, offer an opportunity for deep reflection on attitudes concerning female, presidential leadership. The findings suggest that both cartoon series depict President Banda as an indecisive, inefficient, clueless and weak politician based on ingrained gender stereotypes of women, rather than on her actions as a president governing the country. This study regards cartoonists as social critics who have brandished Banda's motherhood characteristics at every occasion to represent female presidency as a failure in Malawi. It is shown that the graphic artists were largely absorbed in the ideologies that trivialise women as being only suitable for domestic roles. Their relentless scrutiny of "gender" eccentricities, infirmities and frailties regarding Banda effectively destroyed her power consciousness and fuelled misogynistic perceptions that, by extension, no woman can ever be suitable for electoral leadership positions, especially not as Malawi President. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, realistic image generation using deep neural networks has become a hot topic in machine learning and computer vision. Such an image can be generated at pixel level by learning from a large collection of images. Learning to generate colorful cartoon images from black-and-white sketches is not only an interesting research problem, but also a useful application in digital entertainment. In this paper, we investigate the sketch-to-image synthesis problem by using conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN). We propose a model called auto-painter which can automatically generate compatible colors given a sketch. Wasserstein distance is used in training cGAN to overcome model collapse and enable the model converged much better. The new model is not only capable of painting hand-draw sketch with compatible colors, but also allowing users to indicate preferred colors. Experimental results on different sketch datasets show that the auto-painter performs better than other existing image-to-image methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Henry Edward Doyle has published a popular series of satirical political drawings, including previously undescribed sketch of Charles and Catherine Dickens. It mentions Doyle collection at Carbondale comprises pen-and-ink portraits on 11 sheets of paper of irregular size used on both sides. It also mentions images of all of the identified subjects of the Carbondale sketches are present in the Dublin collection.

In the 1970s and 1980s, American mainstream comic-book publishers actively sought out new markets to exploit their content. This paper examines a pivotal series in this transition, Marvel Comics’ initial graphic novels, and demonstrates the many overlapping contexts that encouraged and enabled this particular move from newsprint pamphlet-bound monthlies to glossy, spine-bound original novels, a move that weighed heavy on the art and business of the comic-book industry. Borrowing from the production of culture approach, this paper holistically accounts for the many facets involved in the manufacturing of comic books and how they were altered in this important series, investigating the distribution system of the books; the organization of creative workers; the rights accorded to and esteem held for comic artists; the mechanical reproduction of printed colour; and the content norms for mainstream comic books. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1905, Gustav Klimt, one of the best-known Austrian Art Nouveau artists was commissioned to decorate the walls of the dining room of the Stoclet House in Brussels, which was being designed by Josef Hoffmann. Nine full-scale cartoons on paper - designed in 1910 / 1911 - are the result of Klimt's years of work on this project. He provided instructions for their transposition as a mosaic directly onto the paper. For the production of the frieze at the Wiener Werkstatte and at Leopold Forstner's Wiener Mosaikwerkstatte, Klimt gave numerous instructions regarding the materials to be used and the shades of color in the mosaic. He wrote these by hand directly onto the cartoons. The cartoons for the Stoclet Frieze, 1:1 in scale, have been the subject of extensive scholarly research and have been restored in the 1970ies. During the last eight years the cartoons were subjected to another invasive treatment. This second part deals with the 'de-restoration' of earlier interventions, the consolidation of media and paper carrier and the mounting on acid free honeycomb cardboard panels so that the individual cartoons can be displayed side by side without interruption of frames to form a frieze. Now they are exhibited in an eleven-meter long, climate-stabilized glass display case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political cartoonists challenge the government, question societal norms, and contribute to public discussion. They may show the public instances of injustice and help society to understand our own roles and responsibilities within the community. Yet, cartoonists are facing significant challenges in modern society. As the newspaper industry has struggled financially, fewer news organizations have continued to maintain a staff cartoonist. The shootings at France’s satirical newspaperCharlie Hebdoserved as a reminder of the dangers that cartoonists can face if they publish controversial cartoons. Through applications of John Rawls’ political liberalism and communitarianism, this paper examines what cartoonists contribute to societal justice and their role in the community. It argues that society owes cartoonists the liberties that they need to continue upholding justice, but that cartoonists have responsibilities to the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several Hollywood adaptations of comic books have attempted to emulate source comics very closely, with substantial portions of their dialogue and mise-en-scène transposed directly from the panels of the original comics. Directors such as Zack Snyder (300,Watchmen) and Robert Rodriguez with Frank Miller (Sin City) have, to a significant extent, utilised the panels of the source graphic novels as story boards for the film productions. These films raise a number of potential issues regarding intermedial adaptation, one of the most intriguing of which is the fundamental relationship between time, space and movement in cinema as opposed to within the sequential art characteristic of comic books. Using the film theory of Gilles Deleuze and the structural-semiotic analysis of comics by Thierry Groensteen, among other critical sources, this paper argues that one cannot conceptualise the cinematic frame in terms of the comics panel, or vice versa. Instead, one must attend to the divergent acts of framing constitutive of each medium, and the highly different manifestations of rhythm that are thereby produced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides high resolution, cross-sectional tomographic images of internal structures of specimens, with wide application in ophthalmology. OCT images, however, are usually degraded by significant speckle noise. Development of successful speckle noise reduction algorithms while preserving fine details of image for ophthalmic OCT is particularly challenging, because of the difficulty in separating the noise and the information parts of a speckle pattern. In this paper we presented a new speckle reduction and cartoon-texture decomposition method of ophthalmic OCT images by using variational image decomposition. Experimental results show that the proposed method could decompose the ophthalmic OCT images into cartoon part, texture part and speckle noise part. Further it is also shown the advantage of variational image decomposition in the speckle reduction of ophthalmic OCT images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the Senegalese national football team, Les Lions de la Teranga (Lions of Hospitality), and its successful participation at the 2002 African Cup of Nations in Mali and the FIFA World Cup in Korea/Japan. By analysing Senegalese newspaper cuttings, advertising and football comics and cartoons published before and during the international tournaments, it explores the visual worlds created around the national football team in 2002. The first part of the paper demonstrates how Senegalese cartoons, advertising and press covering constructed a ‘Senegalese football epic’ around the national team which was imbued with historical meaning. The second part reflects on how football comics and cartoons, in particular, commented on the political implications of the Senegalese football ‘success story’ on an international level (around the opening match against France) and in domestic politics (in relation to the Senegalese government which tried to take advantage of the public euphoria, but was criticized). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive graphics are commonly used in games and have been shown to be successful in attracting the general audience. Instead of computer games, animations, cartoons, and videos being used only for entertainment, there is now an interest in using interactive graphics for ‘innovative testing’. Rather than traditional pen-and-paper tests, audio, video and graphics are being conceived as alternative means for more effective testing in the future. In this paper, we review some examples of graphics item types for testing. As well, we outline how games can be used to interactively test concepts; discuss designing chemistry item types with interactive 3D graphics; suggest approaches for automatically adjusting difficulty level in interactive graphics based questions; and propose strategies for giving partial marks for incorrect answers. We study how to test different cognitive skills, such as music, using multimedia interfaces; and also evaluate the effectiveness of our model. Methods for estimating difficulty level of a mathematical item type using Item Response Theory (IRT) and a molecule construction item type using Graph Edit Distance are discussed. Evaluation of the graphics item types through extensive testing on some students is described. We also outline the application of using interactive graphics over cell phones. All of the graphics item types used in this paper are developed by members of our research group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a study assessing a new computer tool for cartoon storytelling, created by the authors for a target audience in the upper half of the English and Welsh Key Stage 2 (years 5 and 6, covering ages 9–11 years). The tool attempts to provide users with more opportunities for expressive visualisation than previous educational software; its design was motivated by earlier work connecting “moving image literacy” with print literacy, and it was used here in storywriting preparation work: users first visualised a known story, then wrote their versions of it based on the cartoons they had made. The stories produced are compared with stories written using two other preparation activities, one a pencil-and-paper cartooning exercise and the other a teacher’s normal planning session, which also resulted in a retelling of a known story. The study finds that no one preparation process had a noticeably different effect on the final written stories; however, the cartoons produced with the software are found to be quite different to their paper counterparts, showing a greater variety of character action, pose and interaction, slightly more variety of camera shot distance, and more pictures. Children’s and teachers’ reactions to the software tool are also discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although editorial cartoons occupy an integral place on the editorial pages of most newspapers, they have seldom been a topic of research, especially First Nations cartoons. Editorial cartoons offer readers clarity and humour and quickly present a point of view. Everett Soop, of the Blackfoot First Nation and contributor to the Kanai News, fits the description of Trickster through his often ironic and satirical politically charged editorial cartoons. This paper provides an introduction to issues surrounding Indigenous/Mainstream relations in Canada during 1969-70 by unpacking several of Soop's editorial cartoons. During this period in Canadian history Trudeau's Liberal government produced an assimilationist policy document levelled at Canada's First Nations and titled the White Paper, which sparked a united voice of resistance among Canada's Indigenous peoples and eventually led to the withdrawal of the proposed changes to the Indian Act. Everett Soop's cartoons from this period provide a discerning analysis of this affair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper aims to demonstrate how blog searching can be used as a retrospective source of public opinion. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper a variety of blog searching techniques are described and illustrated with a case study of the Danish cartoons affair. Findings - A time series analysis of related blog postings suggests that the Danish cartoons issue attracted little attention in the English-speaking world for four months after the initial publication of the cartoons, exploding only after the simultaneous start of diplomatic sanctions and a commercial boycott. Research limitations/implications - Blogs only reveal the opinions of bloggers, and blog analysis is language-specific. Sections of the world and the population of individual countries that do not have access to the internet will not be adequately represented in blogspace. Moreover, bloggers are self-selected and probably not representative of internet users. Originality/value - The existence of blog search engines now allows researchers to search blogspace for posts relating to any given debate, seeking either the opinions of blogging pundits or casual mentions in personal journals. It is possible to use blogs to examine topics before they first attract mass media attention, as well as to dissect ongoing discussions. This gives a retrospective source of public opinion that is unique to blog search engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The separation of image content into semantic parts plays a vital role in applications such as compression, enhancement, restoration, and more. In recent years, several pioneering works suggested such a separation be based on variational fore mutation and others using independent component analysis and sparsity. This paper presents a novel method for separating images into texture and piecewise smooth (cartoon) parts, exploiting both the variational and the sparsity mechanisms. The method combines the basis pursuit denoising (BPDN) algorithm and the total-variation (TV) regularization scheme. The basic idea presented in this paper is the use of two appropriate dictionaries, one for the representation of textures and the other for the natural scene parts assumed to be piecewise smooth. Both dictionaries are chosen such that they lead to sparse representations over one type of image-content (either texture or piecewise smooth). The use of the BPDN with the two amalgamed dictionaries leads to the desired separation, along with noise removal as a by-product. As the need to choose proper dictionaries is generally hard, a TV regularization is employed to better direct the separation process and reduce ringing artifacts. We present a highly efficient numerical scheme to solve the combined optimization problem posed by our model and to show several experimental results that validate the algorithm's performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's proposal that overt historical retouching that might better link cartoonist Ad Reinhardt's cartoons to the art world they addressed be stripped away and instead consider what sort of light the famous news pictures shed on the journalistic picture culture where they took root. It notes how Reinhardt's use of comic and cartoon forms pervades PM's pages in the years of his affiliation with the paper.

This paper is trans-cultural approach to the analysis of interjectional and translational issues. 'Interjection' is here intended as an umbrella term extended to a range of emotional utterances along a continuum of primary exclamatory remarks (oh, ah), expletives, greetings, and blessings Interjections, however, may feature either as culture-specific items or be universal and international. The present corpus includes a thematic-based selection including written literature, drama, film adaptation, cartoons and sacred texts. The framework of analysis is thematization within a cross-cultural interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the initial stages of research that is investigating the geographical content of cartoons from the First World War, and particularly those cartoons that relate to the Gallipoli campaign of April 1915 – January 1916. Cartoons from this period are being investigated to ascertain their potential value as alternative, more personal, sources of information about the perceptions of the geography of the Gallipoli Peninsula of soldiers in the field, their commanders, politicians and the media. The cartoon differs from the map in that it is a non-traditional representational artefact, which disassociates the source of information from the actual display of that information. On the other hand, the map benefits from a design, development, fabrication and consumption process that has enabled them to be used effectively and efficiently. In this way, maps have traditionally provided information about space but we can argue that with cartoons and other non-traditional artefacts, information about ‘PLACE’ as well as ‘SPACE’ can be visualised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of image retargeting is to automatically adapt a given image to fit the size of various displays without introducing severe visual distortions. The seam carving method can effectively achieve this task and it needs to define image importance to detect the salient context of images. In this paper we present a new image importance map and a new seam criterion for image retargeting. We first decompose an image into a cartoon and a texture part. The higher order statistics (HOS) on the cartoon part provide reliable salient edges. We construct a salient object window and a distance dependent weight to modify the HOS. The weighted HOS effectively protects salient objects from distortion by seam carving. We also propose a new seam criterion which tends to spread seam uniformly in nonsallient regions and helps to preserve large scale geometric structures. We call our method salient edge and region aware image retargeting (SERAR). We evaluate our method visually, and compare the results with related methods. Our method performs well in retargeting images with cluttered backgrounds and in preserving large scale structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Image fusion can produce a single image that describes the scene better than the individual source image. One of the keys to image fusion algorithm is how to effectively and completely represent the source images. Morphological component analysis (MCA) believes that an image contains structures with different spatial morphologies and can be accordingly modeled as a superposition of cartoon and texture components, and that the sparse representations of these components can be obtained by some specific decomposition algorithms which exploit the structured dictionary. Compared with the traditional multiscale decomposition, which has been successfully applied to pixel-level image fusion, MCA employs the morphological diversity of an image and provides more complete representation for an image. Taking advantage of this property, we propose a multi-component fusion method for multi-source images in this paper. In our method, source images are separated into cartoon and texture components, and essential fusion takes place on the representation coefficients of these two components. Our fusion scheme is verified on three kinds of images and compared with six single-component fusion methods. According to the visual perceptions and objective evaluations on the fused results, our method can produce better fused images in our experiments, compared with other single-component fusion methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels are arguably the most canonical and widely studied publications in the field, attracting the attention of scholars working in literature, holocaust studies and psychoanalysis. Yet his work for children, which often straddles the line between comics and picture books, remains relatively underappreciated. This is remarkable since Spiegelman’s fascination with childhood and picture books forms a thread that connects his early creative works (as theGarbage Pail Kidsand theWacky Pages) to his later work as an editor of and contributor to theLittle LitandToon Bookseries, and his critical essays on classic picture-book artists, such as Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. While Spiegelman himself claims a didactic impulse behind these latter books (they aim to teach children literacy), this paper proposes the argument that there may be a more fundamental link between the theme of childhood and Spiegelman’s interest in visual storytelling. Analysing both Spiegelman’s creative work and his criticism (among which his book-length study of Jack Cole), I demonstrate how his work is engaged in an investigation into our emotional attachment to images from our childhood, and the specific role of the comics in the radical redefinition that the notion of childhood underwent in the second half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing methods of computer generated cartoons are mostly realized by high-level semantic analyze or template based way, those methods are more focus on exaggerated templates and proportion, but less form the essence of artist's paintings, which used the original lines to describe the art of exaggeration. This paper firstly used the parameterized method, from the essence line of artist's painting, constructed the lines of composition exaggeration, it transformed the exaggeration features by some controllable parameters and realized stylized caricature by adjusting parameters. The final result of caricatures generated by the proposed method restore the artist's exaggerate style in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Up to now, no extensive work has addressed the capacity and resiliency of pre-school children, nor the importance of extending disaster preparedness education to them. The purpose of this paper is to show that given the right learning tools to engage them, in this case a comic strip designed for this purpose by the first author, pre-school children are able to demonstrate the extent of their learning well. Design/methodology/approach – Comic strips have been used in a number of ways to enhance knowledge and education, including for disaster risk reduction (DRR). Their use as learning stimuli is outlined, showing their historical context as well as their potential for future use. The methodology used included classroom observations, coupled with interviews with some of the class. Findings – The research showed that pre-school children engaged with and responded to the comic strips in a positive manner while the blank comic strips allowed learners to make sense of the topic through the retelling of the story, allowing them to be placed within a schema of understanding deemed essential for deeper level learning. Originality/value – The research is significant because it shows that, even at a young age, complex cognitive process were engaged in order for learners to take their new knowledge, place it within the context of their own experience and re-tell it to others. This pattern of reflection, reasoning and testing is important for triple-loop learning, which may hold the key to truly resilient individuals and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-dimensional (3D) cartoon facial animation is one step further than the challenging 3D caricaturing which generates 3D still caricatures only. In this paper, a 3D cartoon facial animation system is developed for a subject given only a single frontal face image of a neutral expression. The system is composed of three steps consisting of 3D cartoon face exaggeration, texture processing, and 3D cartoon facial animation. By following caricaturing rules of artists, instead of mathematical formulations, 3D cartoon face exaggeration is accomplished at both global and local levels. As a result, the final exaggeration is capable of depicting the characteristics of an input face while achieving artistic deformations. In the texture processing step, texture coordinates of the vertices of the cartoon face model are obtained by mapping the parameterized grid of the standard face model to a cartoon face template and aligning the input face to the face template. Finally, 3D cartoon facial animation is implemented in the MPEG-4 animation framework. In order to avoid time-consuming construction of a face animation table, we propose to utilize the tables of existing models through model mapping. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television is a powerful vehicle of mass communication and several cartoons, specifically made for children and adolescents, have 'scientific' themes. Preteens and teens devote many hours in front of TV, attracted by cartoons, some of which portray, in a caricature manner, scientists at work. Current paper investigates the effect the concepts of science transmitted by the cartoon 'Jimmy Neutron' have on adolescents. A group of 31 adolescents of the 9th grade of the junior school were invited to watch three episodes of the 'Jimmy Neutron' cartoon. After the sessions, they answered a questionnaire and were interviewed on their perceptions of Science and scientists. Their answers were analyzed by Discourse Textual Analysis. Results show that they most have misconceptions on Science and on scientists and they presume that scientists have a very solitary and uninterested life solely dedicated in investing new devises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In image processing, cartoon character classification, retrieval, and synthesis are critical, so that cartoonists can effectively and efficiently make cartoons by reusing existing cartoon data. To successfully achieve these tasks, it is essential to extract visual features that comprehensively represent cartoon characters and to construct an accurate distance metric to precisely measure the dissimilarities between cartoon characters. In this paper, we introduce three visual features, color histogram, shape context, and skeleton, to characterize the color, shape, and action, respectively, of a cartoon character. These three features are complementary to each other, and each feature set is regarded as a single view. However, it is improper to concatenate these three features into a long vector, because they have different physical properties, and simply concatenating them into a high-dimensional feature vector will suffer from the so-called curse of dimensionality. Hence, we propose a semisupervised multiview distance metric learning (SSM-DML). SSM-DML learns the multiview distance metrics from multiple feature sets and from the labels of unlabeled cartoon characters simultaneously, under the umbrella of graph-based semisupervised learning. SSM-DML discovers complementary characteristics of different feature sets through an alternating optimization-based iterative algorithm. Therefore, SSM-DML can simultaneously accomplish cartoon character classification and dissimilarity measurement. On the basis of SSM-DML, we develop a novel system that composes the modules of multiview cartoon character classification, multiview graph-based cartoon synthesis, and multiview retrieval-based cartoon synthesis. Experimental evaluations based on the three modules suggest the effectiveness of SSM-DML in cartoon applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is included analyzes of caricature crisis news in Turkish press On 30-9-2006, Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammed (pbuh). The repercussions of these offensive caricatures are big in the Muslim world and people. Because of insulting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed and their subsequent republication by some other European newspapers and at the violent acts that have occurred in reaction to them. Turkey expresses yourself is a bridge in West and East. It is also secular and modern but in the same manner a traditional Muslim country. In this frame how have Turkish press approached caricature crisis? In these studies Turkish newspapers Vakit which is known as Radical Islamic Daily, Posta, which is the bestseller daily, and Cumhuriyet which is known secular standpoint are sample. The news included caricature crisis in these newspapers published between 30th September 2006 and 30 March 2007 is analyzed. Results are commented in the view of Mohammed Arkouns perspective to Islam: radical, traditional and reformist [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new decomposition method is introduced that splits the image into geometric (or cartoon) and texture parts. Following a total variation based preprocesssing, the core of the proposed method is an anisotropic diffusion with an orthogonality-based parameter estimation and stopping condition. The quality criterion is defined by the theoretical assumption that the cartoon and the texture components of an image are orthogonal to each other. The presented method has been compared with other decomposition algorithms through visual and numerical evaluation to prove its superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper presents a study which aimed to structure a system of categories for observation and description of violent behavior within an audiovisual children program, specifically in cartoons. A chapter of an audiovisual cartoon was chosen as an example. This chapter presented three main female characters in a random fashion in order to be observed by the children. Categories were established using the taxonomic criteria proposed by Anguera (2001) and were made up of various typed behaviors according to levels of response. To identify a stable behavioral pattern, some events were taken as a sample, taking into account one or several behavior registered in the observed sessions. The episode was analyzed by two observers who appreciated the material simultaneously, making two observations, registering the relevant data and contrasting opinions. The researchers determined a set of categories which expressed violent behavior such as: Nonverbal behavior, special behavior, and vocal/verbal behavior. It was concluded that there was a pattern of predominant and stable violent behavior in the cartoon observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our understanding of how and why young people consume, and thus how easy it might be to encourage more sustainable modes of consumption amongst this group, is currently patchy and somewhat hampered by the preoccupations of those who have concerned themselves with this subject so far. This paper substantiates this claim by presenting two caricatures of how youth consumption has previously been framed. We suggest geographical studies are well placed to establish the degree to which each holds true in specific spatial and material contexts and thereby demonstrate how such studies could usefully contribute to wider scholarship on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 1921, J.H. Thomas, the Labour Party MP and National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) leader, initiated libel proceedings against the Communist—journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He cited defamation in the form of cartoons and words depicting the events of ‘Black Friday’—when he allegedly betrayed the locked-out Miners' Federation by leading the withdrawal of NUR solidarity. To Thomas, the framing of his image by indigenous Bolsheviks threatened to fatally define his character and career within popular imagination, and undermine Labour's rise. In this paper, I argue that during the domestic and international crises surrounding the First World War, innovative left-wing editors and cartoonists tested the boundaries of newspaper cartooning, and gave dissident cartoons renewed menace before the Law. The case was the first for over a century in which graphic satires of a national political figure were successfully prosecuted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Cartoon-like images, i.e., functions which are smooth apart from a discontinuity curve, have by now become a standard model for measuring sparse (nonlinear) approximation properties of directional representation systems. It was already shown that curvelets, contourlets, as well as shearlets do exhibit sparse approximations within this model, which are optimal up to a log-factor. However, all those results are only applicable to band-limited generators, whereas, in particular, spatially compactly supported generators are of uttermost importance for applications. In this paper, we present the first complete proof of optimally sparse approximations of cartoon-like images by using a particular class of directional representation systems, which indeed consists of compactly supported elements. This class will be chosen as a subset of (non-tight) shearlet frames with shearlet generators having compact support and satisfying some weak directional vanishing moment conditions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

To reduce tedious work in cartoon animation, some computer-assisted systems including automatic Inbetweening and cartoon reusing systems have been proposed. In existing automatic Inbetweening systems, accurate correspondence construction, which is a prerequisite for Inbetweening, cannot be achieved. For cartoon reusing systems, the lack of efficient similarity estimation method and reusing mechanism makes it impractical for the users. The semi-supervised graph-based cartoon reusing approach proposed in this paper aims at generating smooth cartoons from the existing data. In this approach, the similarity between cartoon frames can be accurately evaluated by calculating the distance based on local shape context, which is expected to be rotation and scaling invariant. By the semi-supervised algorithm, given an initial frame, the most similar cartoon frames in the cartoon library are selected as candidates of the next frame. The smooth cartoons can be generated by carrying out the algorithm repeatedly to select new cartoon frames after the cartoonists specifying the motion path in a background image. Experimental results of the candidate frame selection in our cartoon dataset suggest the effectiveness of the proposed local shape context for similarity evaluation. The other experiments show the excellent performance on cartoon generation of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an analysis of interpretations of a cartoon, made by fist year university students in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The analysis is based on theories of conceptual integration (FAUCONNIER and TURNER, 2002) and conceptual metaphor (LAKOFF and JOHNSON, 1980). The cartoon depicts a medical consultation in which the patient is shown with a knife in his back as he gets his doctor's diagnosis: "it is just a metaphor". Although most of students have related this scenario to the metaphorical sense of betrayal, some of them did not mention the familar idiomatic metaphor "backstabbing" connected to such a scene, which led to speculation that there must have been different processes of conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discursive workings of two cartoons by Angeli -- originally published by Folha de São Paulo from 2007 through 2009 -- that have Brazilian carnival for its theme. Especial attention is given to how the discursive memory, the senses and the subject's position are worked. Such analysis is based on the French Discourse Analysis by Michel Pêcheux and Jean Dubois in 1969 and on Mikhail Bakhtin's studies on dialogism and carnivalization, concepts that are the basis of this work. The preliminary analysis of the data suggests the emergence of a space for rupture of the dominant sense about what is considered obvious and natural in Brazil when the theme is carnival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]