Research on visual media representation of climate change has largely examined Western nations and paid less attention to the national media landscape in the Global South. As a highly vulnerable country to climate change and an emerging economy, Vietnam offers a critical case for exploring how visual framing intersects with institutional, cultural and geographical contexts. This study examines longitudinal trends in visual portrayals of climate change and the strategic selection of imagery through framing by Vietnamese national media. First, a content analysis was conducted on images accompanying Vietnam News Agency’s articles on climate change from 2020 to 2023 ( N = 4284). Second, a frame analysis examined the connotative and ideological representations of the most prevalent visuals to generate hypotheses about the relationship between issue attention and particular frame dominance. It was found that Vietnamese visual coverage of climate change followed a cyclical attention cycle and contributed to the prominence of the ‘government, politics and negotiation’ frame. The finding suggests relative homogeneity with global climate change coverage, except for the latent meaning in frames related to climate impacts and affected people.
This study examines the visual construction of judicial authority on the websites of the Supreme People’s Court of China, the UK Supreme Court and the French Court of Cassation. Drawing on De Groot et al.’s visual metadiscourse framework (De Groot et al., ‘Picture This: Developing a Model for the Analysis of Visual Metadiscourse’, 2016), Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and content analysis ( Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design , 2021[1996]), the authors develop an integrated approach to analyse how visual elements reinforce judicial authority. Additionally, Scott’s institutional legitimacy theory ( Institutions and Organizations , 1995) is employed to identify the underlying authority model of each court. Findings reveal distinct configurations shaped by divergent legal cultures: the Chinese court website reflects a state-oriented, tradition-modernity coupled model, integrating national symbols, cultural heritage and modern legal norms; the French court website presents a normative–institutional model, grounded in republican values and historical continuity; and the British court website exemplifies an historical–continuity model, rooted in tradition and the constitutional monarchy.
Photo quality on social media has received little published research attention, despite the critical role that images play in social media. While photo quality is an inherently subjective evaluation, it is also based upon standards that are widely shared by professionals. This study builds upon professional standards of photo quality to analyze images on Twitter, a popular social media app. Since the COVID-19 pandemic placed increased demands on political social media to inform the public, this study focused on the use of images on Twitter from political leaders in the US during 2020. This study created a reliable rubric to evaluate photo quality, confirmed through intercoder reliability testing. Of 471 tweets from US governors that included photographs, 34 percent were of professional quality. Quantitative analysis linked high-quality photos to larger states, images including the governor’s face and images with patriotic themes. Qualitative analysis described how photographs utilized color, lighting, and angles to enhance messages.
This study explores how two mega-crises - the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war - are portrayed in photographic performances of resilience in crowdfunding campaign calls of small companies. These companies, aside from being commercial actors, are organizations consisting of individual crisis experiencers and eyewitnesses. The authors examine 234 photographic visuals (168 photographs, 43 photo collages, 21 GIFs and 2 GIF collages) in 53 crisis-related crowdfunding campaign calls (19 Finnish, 18 North American, and 16 Ukrainian) on three different platforms. The data are analysed with a focus on visual rhetoric. The study contributes to previous visual analyses by finding five visually performed connotations of resilience: suffering, endurance, resistance, peer support and hope. The article concludes that, in the era of mega-crises, crowdfunding has become a merged discursive site for both promotional and testimonial performances, varying from a private to communal focus and thereby involving both business-related and societal functions.
The study presents a corpus-based analysis of the role of music and non-verbal sound in multimodal metaphors in iPhone commercials (2016–2025). In a corpus of 100 commercials, 15 metaphorical ads were identified for detailed analysis. Combining Conceptual Metaphor Theory with social-semiotic sound studies and Aristotelian rhetoric, the study develops a functional approach for classifying and interpreting sonic material. The analysis shows that music and non-verbal sound can contribute to metaphor construction by cueing source and target domains or by specifying mappable features. Their contribution is shaped by properties specific to sonic material, especially its affective, temporal and immersive dimensions. The findings suggest that music and non-verbal sound are crucial to metaphor design and integral to the cognitive and rhetorical force of iPhone’s deliberately verbal-claim-minimalist advertising.
