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Copyright of Restaurator is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

In-service teacher development continues to be a challenge of curriculum reform in South Africa. In spite of previous interventions that have been used, visual literacy continues to challenge many in-service teachers. Visual literacy involves the development of competencies that a person needs in order to understand a combination of linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial design elements. This paper proposes that change laboratory workshop methodology can transform in-service teacher development of visual literacy. Change laboratory workshop methodology develops from Cultural Historical Activity Theory's principles of contradictions and expansive learning, and is used to implement change. This paper uses an illustrative example of a cartoon in English First Additional Language in Grade 11. Data were collected from a change laboratory workshop of nine participants who met for four sessions of two hours each. Lesson video clips and transcript and a cartoon were used for double stimulation and reflexivity. Insights from Cultural Historical Activity Theory and the Newfield Framework were used to analyse this data. The main finding of this intervention is opening of a dialogical space in which participants took initiatives to develop their visual literacy and reconfigure the multi-layers of interpreting cartoons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses editor Edward E. Cooper and periodical "Freeman". Topics discussed include African American visual art, African American artists and black periodicals. Other topics such as black caricatures, African American viewers of periodical cartoons and racial and intraracial relations of African Americans are also discussed.

In this paper, we propose the first sketching system for interactively personalized and photorealistic face caricaturing. Input an image of a human face, the users can create caricature photos by manipulating its facial feature curves. Our system first performs exaggeration on the recovered 3D face model, which is conducted by assigning the laplacian of each vertex a scaling factor according to the edited sketches. The mapping between 2D sketches and the vertex-wise scaling field is constructed by a novel deep learning architecture. Our approach allows outputting different exaggerations when applying the same sketching on different input figures in term of their different geometric characteristics, which makes the generated results “personalized”. With the obtained 3D caricature model, two images are generated, one obtained by applying 2D warping guided by the underlying 3D mesh deformation and the other obtained by re-rendering the deformed 3D textured model. These two images are then seamlessly integrated to produce our final output. Due to the severe stretching of meshes, the rendered texture is of blurry appearances. A deep learning approach is exploited to infer the missing details for enhancing these blurry regions. Moreover, a relighting operation is invented to further improve the photorealism of the result. These further make our results “photorealistic”. The qualitative experiment results validated the efficiency of our sketching system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the persistent use of a particular term, "Voodoo Doll," to classify certain artifacts and argues that it is both fundamentally misleading in its history of applications and especially egregious in the current debate over the openness of classics to people of color. Voodoo Doll not only exploits caricatures of Afro-Caribbean religion, it maintains a fundamental error in the interpretation of ancient ritual figurines: that is, the assumption of a primitive "law of sympathy." This paper reviews current scholarship on ancient ritual figurines and then discusses the category Voodoo Doll and its modern origins, with an argument for its abandonment. [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]

This paper provides a semiotic analysis of political cartoons published in Jordan prior to and during the 2013 elections. It seeks to depict the sociopolitical context after the 2011 Arab Spring and focuses on the changes to people's practices and stances toward politics and politicians. The data consist of political cartoons by the Jordanian cartoonist Imad Hajjaj drawn during the parliamentary election campaigns in 2007, 2010, and 2013. This paper argues that the humor generated in cartoons conveys strong messages that require an analysis of the interaction between the different signs in cartoons and their social and ideological implications. A model of analysis derived from Barthes' perception of denotation and connotation theories is adopted. This model is comprised of three types of messages: linguistic, literal, and symbolic. The analysis identifies different messages in the cartoons before and after 2011. Unlike the cartoons from 2007 to 2010, the linguistic and denoted messages in the cartoons of 2013 connoted a sense of salvation, achievement, victory, freedom, dignity, and democracy, merits that had rarely been highlighted in previous cartoons. This attitude is reflected by themes such as the positive image of the young, public awareness of political and national issues, and resistance towards corruption. The study sheds light on this neglected area of visual communication in the Arab world and hopes to provide new insights into the fields of semiotics, pragmatics, multimodal analysis, and critical discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Librosdelacorte.es is the property of Instituto Universitario "La Corte en Europa" - IULCE and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Historia y Comunicación Social is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Extracting balloons has been a challenge in digital comics, in particular for complex comic books. In fact, current algorithms are seemingly adequate for simple comics, but not for complex ones. This paper proposes an algorithm based on the Sobel operator plus a modified flood fill operator to identify and extract balloons in comic book pages. Unlike other approaches, our algorithm applies to any sort of comics, no matter they are simple or complex comics, without making any assumptions regarding the line continuity of the image, color depth of the image, orientation of the text, and language. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly improves the rate of correctly detected balloons, and simultaneously decreases the number of false positives, when compared to other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cartoons Naji Al-Ali reveal the complexities of Palestinian identity in the period between the resignation following Palestinian defeats in 1948 and 1967 and the first Intifada in 1987. The present paper to add to the limited literature on Al-Ali's cartoons through examining a unique subset of them that join Christ with the artist's child-caricature Handhala. The image of Christ allowed Al-Ali to universalise his message, mapping the Palestinian experience onto a recognisable figure while strengthening an inchoate moral critique against Israeli occupation. Examining these illustrations provides us with a better understanding of this transitory period in Palestinian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firstly, this paper aims to analyze how verbal and visual modes contribute to build two basic components of cartoons: the referenced situation and the fictional situation. Secondly, it aims to unravel the semiotics of this discursive genre by offering a fine-grained picture of modal variations and continuities of the rhetorical resources deployed, by means of which the fictional situation is displayed. The corpus is composed of 50 multimodal cartoons chosen by cartoonists of 22 nationalities as the most representative of their work in the frame of a wide questionnaire. Category analysis and non-parametric statistics were applied. We identified and fleshed out four different types of modal functioning of resources: visual preference, verbal preference, modal flexibility, and genuine multimodal functioning. Even if visual and multimodal metaphor were often in charge of transferring meaning from fiction to the referenced situation, results show that other resources such as antithesis, irony, and syllepsis can become the key resources of cartoons. Findings highlight the multilayered functioning of cartoons, among which plastic features can play a significant role, and provide further evidence in favor of the hyperdetermination of humor hypothesis proposed by Attardo. [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]

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 production of caricatures is a particularly interesting field of art, because it aims to highlight the very essence of a given face. Caricature generation systems traditionally rely on two approaches: they either follow extracted rules through learning algorithms, or follow rules that were directly programmed by experts. This paper attempts to reduce the reliance on heuristic methods, by proposing a novel method that provides a set of well-defined rules, which can be put to use for the purpose of caricature generation. The method is based on the notion of anti-face in conjunction with unbiased distortions. In addition, we indicate the usefulness of the anti-face as a means to perceive, for our own sake, the degree to which our face seems peculiar to others. Finally, we deploy a reverse variant of the method in order to attain beautification. [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.

Water, being a part of the world cultural heritage is considered to be the main source of the formation of co-existence and living. As its role on the creation of the universe and mythological systems, water is the basic requirement of life. Life and nature is developing around water, and water as well as creating new habitats, it is a natural beauty of an area or location. In Turkish folk culture, water is holy and described as a panacea. Water is forming the cultural heritage of the world and also with its the economic value can be defined as one of the most demanded natural resource. Environmental problems and growing population of human being is indicating increasement on water pollution in the future centuries. With the discussions on water wars, the world is trying to take precautions against the incoming disaster. Water is gradually increasing its importance as a cultural heritage and economic value and water has been a source of inspiration for caricaturists of Turkey and the world to think and draw on water concept by organizing exhibitions. In this paper, caricaturists and illustrators' works on water concept will be tried to analyze on their own perspectives. Popular caricaturists and illustrators such as Ali Kashi, Kessusanto Liusvia, R.J. Matson will find place in this paper as well as the caricaturists of Turkey such as Burhanettin Ardagil, Nuri Bilgin with their works will be examined. Water's definition with drawings will be presented with different styles of different caricaturists. The relationship of art and water, water and humor will be underlined with caricatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a revolutionary Vienna in October 1848, several cartoons depicting in an unambiguous situation Archduchess Sophie, the wife of the heir apparent, Archduke Franz Karl, and Jelačić, the Ban of Croatia, were published. Even though the March revolution had eroded the prudish general taste of the Biedermeier period, the publication of these satirical drawings could still be considered unusual. What can explain the fact that the member of the ruling house so popular in the spring of 1848 became the target of such public hatred by October 1848 in the imperial city? How were these cartoons related to Jókai's hiding in 1849? The paper examines these questions. In the spring of 1848, Archduchess Sophie, the wife of the heir apparent, Archduke Franz Karl, was very popular in Hungary as she was reported to have played a part in overthrowing State Chancellor Metternich. However, this popularity quickly turned into unpopularity after June 1848. The reason was that, even though he had been dismissed by the Hungarian government, the Ban of Croatia, Josip Jelačić got an ostentatiously warm welcome from the archduchess in Innsbruck. At the end of September 1848, news was spreading that among Jelačić's intercepted letters there was one written to the archduchess. (At the current state of research this cannot be excluded.) All this led to the publication of the above-mentioned obscene cartoons. The story was even versified in a satirical epic poem by Mór Jókai. This may have been one of the reasons why, at the end of August 1849, he thought he had better go into hiding. He only returned to Budapest when the first waves of retaliation had abated. One of the most beautiful pieces of his self-created legends is related to his hiding. According to this, he could return to the capital city only because his wife, Róza Laborfalvy got him a travel warrant, a so called Geleitschein, issued to the members of the castle guard of Komárom. However, Jókai's description is so confused that we can be certain that he never possessed, probably never even seen, such a travel warrant. [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]

Between 1889 and 1922, John Møller (1867–1935), the first professional Greenlandic photographer, produced more than 3000 glass plate negatives documenting life in Western Greenland around the turn of the twentieth century. Rooted in an internal understanding of self, Møller’s photographs played an important part in the formation of a contemporary image of Greenlandic indigenous identity. At the same time, Møller’s photographic practice was arguably entangled in and delimited by a historical reality that was structured by colonial relations of power. This paper examines the social and art-historical contexts of Møller’s work, focusing in particular on a selection of his formal studio portraits. My reading of these portraits suggests a case in which conflicting impulses coincide. On the one hand, Møller produced images that played out the “ethnographic convention”, a European form of representation dating back to the sixteenth century used for the documentation of non-Western indigenous peoples as specimens. However, in acting out that convention, Møller’s photographs hint at a subtle, progressive building-up of identity that reclaimed images of Greenlanders for themselves, and turned an originally negative, external image of indigeneity into a positive sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Restaurator is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

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 article analyses wartime images created by civilian internees during their incarceration in 1914/1915. Their paintings, sketches and photographs are used to create a sense of a civil community and challenge stories about relentless hostility. As the juxtaposed images from the Ruhleben Camp near Berlin and the Rottnest Island Internment Camp in Australia show, cross-cultural encounters between Germans and Australians were experienced and depicted with striking similarities. Generally, descriptions and discussions of civilian and POW internment were over-determined by propaganda and censorship, but this paper seeks to highlight a more private and humane side of internment, as captured by pen, paint and camera. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Journal of Linguistic Research / Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of Bogazici University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper examines whether, how, and why the theme of translation can be used as a device to produce nonsense. Starting from the more conventional problem of translating nonsense, I introduce the opposite notion of nonsensing translation and present different possible expressions of this practice with the help of examples drawn from Morgenstern, Taylor, du Maurier, van Rooten, and the French cartoon Les Shadoks. I conclude by suggesting that the reason why translation lends itself so fruitfully to nonsense manipulations is that it itself relies on rather counterintuitive premises, such as pretending to carry concepts across linguistically incompatible universes or to be two texts at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the origins and development of the Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon, begun by Erwin D. Swann in 1966, and currently held by the Library of Congress in Washington, dc. One of the world’s few collections dedicated to the preservation of original comic art by caricaturists and cartoonists from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Swann’s collection also transcends national boundaries, and embraces comic art as one of the ‘universal folk expressions’. An established art collector, Swann sought to give caricature and cartoon the same status as ‘high’ art, and worked hard to achieve this prior to his death in 1973. His work has been continued, and his collection maintained, in subsequent years. A closer investigation of the collection’s genesis, and the intentions of Swann himself, sheds light on the significance of this unique archive, and its utility for the continuing, ‘serious’ scholarship of comic art worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses a challenging single-view modeling and animation problem with cartoon images. Our goal is to model the hairs in a given cartoon image with consistent layering and occlusion, so that we can produce various visual effects from just a single image. We propose a novel 2.5D modeling approach to deal with this problem. Given an input image, we first segment the hairs of the cartoon character into regions of hair strands. Then, we apply our novel layering metric, which is derived from the Gestalt psychology, to automatically optimize the depth ordering among the hair strands. After that, we employ our hair completion method to fill the occluded part of each hair strand, and create a 2.5D model of the cartoon hair. By using this model, we can produce various visual effects, e.g., we develop a simplified fluid simulation model to produce wind blowing animations with the 2.5D hairs. To further demonstrate the applicability and versatility of our method, we compare our results with real cartoon hair animations, and also apply our model to produce a wide variety of hair manipulation effects, including hair editing and hair braiding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations (= Soph. el.) seeks to uncover the workings of apparent deductive reasoning, and is thereby largely devoted to the caricature of dialectic that the ancients called eristic (ἐριστική), the art of quarrelling. Unlike antilogy (ἀντιλογία), which refers to a type of argumentation where two arguments are pitted against each other in a contradictory manner, eristic takes on in Aristotle an exclusively pejorative meaning, as is made clear, for example, by this passage from Soph. el.: 'For just as unfairness in a contest is a definite type of fault, and is a kind of foul fighting, so the art of contentious reasoning is foul fighting in disputation.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In this paper, we study the original Meyer model of cartoon and texture decomposition in image processing. The model, which is a minimization problem, contains an l1‐based TV‐norm and an l∞‐based G‐norm. The main idea of this paper is to use the dual formulation to represent both TV‐norm and G‐norm. The resulting minimization problem of the Meyer model can be given as a minimax problem. A first‐order primal‐dual algorithm can be developed to compute the saddle point of the minimax problem. The convergence of the proposed algorithm is theoretically shown. Numerical results are presented to show that the original Meyer model can decompose better cartoon and texture components than the other testing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong is the property of Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

Copyright of Collegium Antropologicum is the property of Croatian Anthropological Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Face modeling has been paid much attention in the field of visual computing. There exist many scenarios, including cartoon characters, avatars for social media, 3D face caricatures as well as face-related art and design, where low-cost interactive face modeling is a popular approach especially among amateur users. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based sketching system for 3D face and caricature modeling. This system has a labor-efficient sketching interface, that allows the user to draw freehand imprecise yet expressive 2D lines representing the contours of facial features. A novel CNN based deep regression network is designed for inferring 3D face models from 2D sketches. Our network fuses both CNN and shape based features of the input sketch, and has two independent branches of fully connected layers generating independent subsets of coefficients for a bilinear face representation. Our system also supports gesture based interactions for users to further manipulate initial face models. Both user studies and numerical results indicate that our sketching system can help users create face models quickly and effectively. A significantly expanded face database with diverse identities, expressions and levels of exaggeration is constructed to promote further research and evaluation of face modeling techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on mood related to subsequent creativity is sparse for samples of children. The current study was conducted to determine the effects of positive mood induction through upbeat music and simulated laughter on creativity. Fourteen gifted third grade students (9 female, 5 male; 10 White, 3 African American, 1 Native American; aged 8–9 years) from a low-socio-economic urban public school in the Midwest participated in the repeated-measures study with two trials in the control and two trials in the experimental conditions. Each lesson began with wordplay work in making a layout of word cards, definition cards, and objects to show homophone or words with multiple meanings concepts. Students analyzed humorous cartoons related to leadership that the researchers had made. Finally, students used paper images and wrote in speech bubbles to create their own leadership cartoons. During the experimental condition, two mood-lifting activities were added: students listened to a couple of minutes of upbeat instrumental music as they gathered for the class and later, before cartoon production occurred, they participated in simulated laughter for thirty seconds. Results showed that cartoons produced during the experimental condition contained more humor, were more original, and had greater fluency of speech or thought bubbles with very large, large, and medium effect sizes respectively. Greater creativity is attributed to positive mood allowing more working memory for complex synthesis of ideas, recognition of more diverse ideas, and a safe environment for taking creative risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with marketer Ben Hudson at Taylor & Francis Group (T&F). Topics discussed include how he how you got the idea for Cartoon Abstracts and being received at T&F, his work with the cartoonist and author to create the Cartoon Abstracts, and his favorite Cartoon Abstract. It also mentions him winning the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing.

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 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]

Press cartoons with the essential purpose of deconstruction and destruction of the sacred aura of a person, a thing, or an event, use a number of stereotypes and symbols to be readable and comprehensible for readers. In war-time, satirical images in the press are often involved in politics, they gather momentum and follow the events of the war. Beside the people, they deride the enemy, reveal the problems of society, sometimes border on propaganda - serving the governments - and try to give courage to soldiers at the front. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]