This Element argues for a perspective on literary translation based around the idea of ludification, using concrete poetry as a test case. Unlike rational-scientific models of translating, ludic translation downplays the linear transmission of meaning from one language into another. It foregrounds instead the open-ended, ergodic nature of translation, where the translator engages with and responds to an original work in an experimental and experiential manner. Focusing on memes rather than signs, ludic translation challenges us to adopt an oblique lens on literary texts and deploy verbal as well as nonverbal resources to add value to an original work. Such an approach is especially amenable to negotiating apparently untranslatable writing like concrete poems across languages, modes, and media. This Element questions assumptions about translatability and opens the discursive space of literary writing to transgressive articulation and multimodal performance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book brings together selected revised papers representing a multidisciplinary approach to language, music, and gesture, as well as their interaction. Among the number of multidisciplinary and comparative studies of the structure and organization of language and music, the presented book broadens the scope with the inclusion of gesture problems in the analyzed spectrum. A unique feature of the presented collection is that the papers, compiled in one volume, allow readers to see similarities and differences in gesture as an element of non-verbal communication and gesture as the main element of dance. In addition to enhancing the analysis, the data on the perception and comprehension of speech, music, and dance in regard to both their functioning in a natural situation and their reflection in various forms of performing arts makes this collection extremely useful for those who are interested in human cognitive abilities and performing skills. The book begins with a philosophical overview of recent neurophysiological studies reflecting the complexity of higher cognitive functions, which references the idea of the baroque style in art being neither linear nor stable. The following papers are allocated into 5 sections. The papers of the section "Language-Music-Gesture As Semiotic Systems" discuss the issues of symbolic and semiotic aspects of language, music, and gesture, including from the perspective of their notation. This is followed by the issues of "Language-Music-Gesture Onstage" and interaction within the idea of the "World as a Text." The papers of "Teaching Language and Music" present new teaching methods that take into account the interaction of all the cognitive systems examined. The papers of the last two sections focus on issues related primarily to language: The section "Verbalization Of Music And Gesture" considers the problem of describing musical text and non-verbal behavior with language, and papers in the final section "Emotions In Linguistics And Ai-Communication Systems" analyze the ways of expressing emotions in speech and the problems of organizing emotional communication with computer agents.

This volume is based to a large extent on the understanding of biosemiotic literary criticism as a semiotic-model-making enterprise. For Jurij Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, "nature writing is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and nature" (Timo Maran); biosemiotic literary criticism, itself a form of nature writing and thus itself an ecological-niche-making enterprise, will be considered to be a model of modeling, a model of nature naturing. Modes and models of analysis drawn from Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi's Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis as well as from Timo Maran's work on "modeling the environment in literature," Edwina Taborsky's writing on Peircean semiosis, and, of course, Jesper Hoffmeyer's formative work in biosemiotics are among the most important organizing elements for this volume.

In each connection with new cultural contexts a new hybrid state of cultural adaptation is constructed enabling people to adjust to new conditions by creating innovative solutions for the self. This book aims to provide a brief presentation of innovative cultural psychological theory of proculturation reflecting and oriented on the understanding of semiotic and developmental dynamics of higher mental phenomena while engaging alien signs through intercultural communication. The exploration and theoretical understanding of developmental dynamics (such as self and identity construction) of people who live in immigration or multicultural, or even multi-ethnic societies, the research builds its new focus in contrasts with the acculturation theories currently present in social psychology. The theory of proculturation has been built in opposition to cross-cultural psychological theories as well as mainstream theories of acculturation research dominated by bidimensional theoretical models. Instead, this theory is constructed based on theoretical explorations which are rooted in cultural semiotics and developmental psychological paradigm on human psychology.

On behalf of Professor Hugh Brady, Director and Senior Fellow, The Flag Research Center at the University of Texas School of Law, "Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Springer 2021) has been selected as the recipient of our Gherardi Davis Prize is presented for a significant contribution to vexillological research for the year 2021. This work was selected because of its breadth and depth in examining flags as meaningful transmitters of significant symbolic information concerning the origins, culture, self-image, and values of a society. We believe it represents a signal achievement in the study of flags that sets a new standard for research in the field." The Flag Research Center, founded in 1962, is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the human need to create and use symbols to express political, cultural, and social ideals through flags and flag-related material culture. The book deals with the identification of "identity" based on culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. Flags narrate constructions of belonging that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people's history. Bennet (2005) defines identity as "the imagined sameness of a person or social group at all times and in all circumstances". While such likeness may be imagined or even perpetuated, the idea of sameness may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts and presents. Visually evocative and ideologically representative, flags are recognized symbols fusing color with meaning that prescribe a story of unity. Yet, through semiotic confrontation, there may be different paths leading to different truths and applications of significance. Knowing this and their function, the book investigates these transmitted values over time and space. Indeed, flags may have evolved in key historical periods, but contemporaneously transpire in a variety of ways. The book investigates these transmitted values: Which values are being transmitted? Have their colors evolved through space and time? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? What are their sources? What is the relationship between law and flags in their visual representations? What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory with flags, the book interrogates the complex color-coded sign system of particular flags and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time. Advance Praise for Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative "In an epoch of fragmentation, isolation and resurgent nationalism, the flag is waved but often forgotten. The flag, its colors, narratives, shape and denotations go without saying. The red flag over China, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Tricolore are instantly recognisable and over determined, representing a people, a nation, a culture, languages, legacies, leaders. In this fabulous volume flags are revealed as concentrated, complex, chromatic assemblages of people, place and power in and through time. It is in bringing a multifocal awareness of the modes and meanings of flag and color in public representations that is particular strength. Editors Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek have gathered critical thinkers from the North and South, East and West, to help know the essential and central - yet often forgotten and not seen - work of flags and color in narratives of nation, conflict, struggle and law. A kaleidoscopic contribution to the burgeoning field of visual jurisprudence, this volume is essential to comprehending the ocular machinery through which power makes, and is seen to make, the world."Kieran Tranter, Chair of Law, Technology and Future, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia "This comprehensive volume of essays could not be arriving at a more opportune time. The combined forces of climate change, inequality, and pandemic are causing instability and painful recognitions of our collective uncertainties about nationhood and globalism. In the United States, where I am writing these few lines, our traditional red/white/blue flag has been collapsed into two colors: Red and Blue. While these colors have semiotically deep texts, the division of the country into these two colors began with television stations designing how to report the vote count in the 2000 presidential election year creating "red" and "blue" parties and states. The colors stuck and have become customary. We Americans are told all the time by pundits that we are a deeply divided nation, as proven by unsubtle colored maps. To a statistician, we are a Purple America, though the color is unequally distributed. White, the color of negotiation and peace is rarely to be found. To begin to approach understanding the problems flagged in my brief account requires the insight of multiple disciplines. That is what Wagner and Marusek, wonderful scholars in their own work, have assembled as editors -- a conversation among scholars at the forefront of thinking about how flags and colors represent those who claim them thus exemplifying how to resist simple explanations and pat answers. The topic is just too important."Christina Spiesel, Senior Research Scholar in Law, Yale Law School; Adjunct Professsor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law, USA "Visuals, such as symbols and images, in addition to conventional textual forms, seem to have a unique potential for the study of a collective identity of a community and its traditions, as well as its narratives, and at the same time, in the expression of one's ideas, impressions, and ideologies in a specific socio-political space. Visual analysis thus has become a well-established domain of investigations focusing on how various forms of text-external semiotic resources, such as culturally specific symbols, including patterns and colors, make it possible for scholars to account for and thus demystify discursive symbols in a wider social and public space. Flags, Identity, Memory: Critiquing the Public Narrative through Colors, as an international and interdisciplinary volume, is a unique attempt to demystify the thinking, values, assumptions and ideologies of specific nations and their communities by analyzing their choice of specific patterns and colors represented in a national flag. It offers a comprehensive and insightful range of studies of visual and hidden discursive processes to understand social narratives through patterns of colours in the choice of national flags and in turn to understand their semiotic, philosophical, and legal cultures and traditions. Wagner and Marusek provide an exclusive opportunity to reflect on the functions, roles, and limits of visual and discursive representations. This volume will be a uniquely resourceful addition to the study of semiotics of colours and flags, in particular, how nations and communities represent their relationship between ideology and pragmatism in the repository of identity, knowledge and history."Vijay K Bhatia, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Full Professor, Hong Kong "In all societies, colors play a critical function in the realm of symbolism. Nation societies perceive great significance in the colors of flags and national emblems. Colors constitute, in other words, sign systems of national identity. The relation of color codes and their relation to concepts of nationhood and its related narratives is the theme of this marvelous and eye-opening collection of studies. Flags are mini-texts on the inherent values and core concepts that a nation espouses and for this reason the colors that they bear can be read at many levels, from the purely representational to the inherently cultural. Written by experts in various fields this interdisciplinary anthology will be of interest to anyone in the humanities, social sciences, jurisprudence, narratology, political science, and semiotics. It will show how a seemingly decorative aspect of nationhood-the colors on flags-tells a much deeper story about the human condition."Marcel Danesi, University of Toronto, Full Professor of Anthropology, Canada

This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here provide diverse insights and arguments into the larger ecology of organisms' engagement with and transformation through taking in matter. Bodies interpret molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids they intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with according to their pre-existing receptors. But their receptors are also changed by the experience. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating semiotic sequences and negotiations that fulfill vital functions for the organism at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. Human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has yet to catch up with human inventions such as supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body's normal satiation mechanisms. This volume discusses how biosemioticians can come to terms with these networks of meaning, providing a valuable and provocative compendium for semioticians, medical researchers and practitioners, sociologists, cultural theorists, bioethicists and scholars investigating the interdisciplinary questions stemming from food and medicine.

The book is an in-depth presentation of the European branch of semiotic theory, originating in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It has four parts: a historical introduction, the analysis of langue, narrative theory and communication theory. Part I briefly presents all the semiotic schools and their main points of reference. Although this material is accessible in many other Anglophone publications, the presentation is marked by specific choices aiming to display similarities and differences. The analysis of langue in Part II is also available in Anglophone bibliography, but the book presents Saussurean theory according to a new theoretical rationale and enriched with later developments. In addition, it is orientated so as to offer the foundation for the part that follows. Part III is a presentation of Greimasian narrative theory, well documented in Francophone bibliography but poorly represented in Anglophone publications. The presentation extends the theory in both a qualitative and a new quantitative direction, and includes a great number of examples and two extended textual analyses to help the reader understand and apply it. Part IV, communication theory, combines an extension of Greimasian sociosemiotics with other schools of thought. This original theoretical section discusses fourteen consecutive communication models, the synthesis of which results in a holistic, social semiotic theory of communication.

This book traces the origins and evolution of cybersemiotics, beginning with the integration of semiotics into the theoretical framework of cybernetics and information theory. The book opens with chapters that situate the roots of cybersemiotics in Peircean semiotics, describe the advent of the Information Age and cybernetics, and lay out the proposition that notions of system, communication, self-reference, information, meaning, form, autopoiesis, and self-control are of equal topical interest to semiotics and systems theory. Subsequent chapters introduce a cybersemiotic viewpoint on the capacity of arts and other practices for knowing. This suggests pathways for developing Practice as Research and practice-led research, and prompts the reader to view this new configuration in cybersemiotic terms. Other contributors discuss cultural and perceptual shifts that lead to interaction with hybrid environments such as Alexa. The relationship of storytelling and cybersemiotics is covered at chapter length, and another chapter describes an individual-collectivity dialectics, in which the latter (Commind) constrains the former (interactants), but the former fuels the latter. The concluding chapter begins with the observation that digital technologies have infiltrated every corner of the metropolis - homes, workplaces, and places of leisure - to the extent that cities and bodies have transformed into interconnected interfaces. The book challenges the reader to participate in a broader discussion of the potential, limitations, alternatives, and criticisms of cybersemiotics.

This book deals with the fundamental semantics of images of Europe, which consist of valences, mirror beliefs and affectivities. This is why it relaunches the importance of the European discourse in its symbolic dimension. As such, it explores the many images of Europe, or rather the many images through which European discourse is actually constituted in daily life, in search of their enunciative responsibility in today's world for determining the current "State of the Union". The identity of the European continent is based on a millenary tension between universalism and particularism: images of Europe have in fact been alternately inspired, over the centuries, by a model of homogeneity - Roman and Carolingian imperial disposition - on the one hand, and by a model of fragmentation - a Europe of city-states, municipalities, regions and small fatherlands - on the other. In the European Union, a political and economic organism, this issue has recently been amplified to the point that it has reentered public debate, and political parties that are only recognizable for being Europeanists or anti-Europeanists are now ubiquitous. In this regard, one major bone of contention is how to portray the quintessential aspects of the European territory, which are either interpreted as "thresholds" to be overcome in the name of a model of United Europe - "integral totality" - or are instead regarded as insurmountable obstacles for a Europe that is irreparably and perhaps, according to anti-Europeanists, fortunately fragmented - "partitive totality". Further, this is to be done without excluding the possibility of contradictory and complementary solutions to these binary visions. In this context the book analyzes various texts in order to obtain a more precise picture of the clash, reveal its semiotic forms, and by doing so, identify a way out of the crisis.

This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field.

This book introduces the concept of Inquiry Graphics, which positions graphics as significant and integrated tools of inquiry in higher education teaching and research. Simply put, the book explores the nuances of thinking and learning with digital images as types of graphics. Although the amount of images in modern life is overwhelming, they have been scarcely explored and understood as integral to concept and knowledge development within higher education practice. This book reflects on why and how digital photographs can be adapted and used in teaching and research contexts. It provides practical examples and applications, as well as theoretical foundations, building on a range of perspectives, such as Peircean triadic sign and approaches to conceptual development. Ultimately, it builds on diverse approaches to make a case for exploring knowledge and analysing concepts and images in a non-dualist and pluralist manner. This unique book will appeal to scholars and students in education studies and educational research, media and communication, and anyone interested in applied semiotics, visual and multimodal pedagogy and learning.

This Pivot studies the influence of Julia Kristeva's work on American literary and film studies. Chapters consider this influence via such innovative approaches as Hortense Spillers's and Jack Halberstam's to Paule Marshall's fiction and Bram Stoker's Dracula, respectively. The book also considers how critics in the United States receive Kristeva's work on French feminism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic writing in complex, controversial ways, especially on the question of marginalized populations. Examples include Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo on Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil as well as Frances Restuccia on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Carol Mastrangelo Bove also examines Kristeva's take on the US in her essays and fiction, which provide a vital part of the dialogue with American critics. Like them, Bove incorporates Kristeva's thought in her own creative readings of little-known authors and directors including Christiane Rochefort, Nancy Savoca, and Frank Lentricchia.

This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Ellestroem's influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the first of two volumes. It contains Ellestroem's revised article and six other contributions focusing especially on media integration: how media products and media types are combined and merged in various ways.

This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Ellestroem's influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the second of two volumes. It contains a concluding article by Ellestroem and seven contributions concentrated on the issue of media transformations: how media characteristics are transferred and transfigured among various media products and media types.

Warning signs are all around us. In ancient Egypt, tombs were lavishly adorned with signs and symbols warning of the dire consequences that would befall any robbers and thieves. And yet these signs were often read as provocations and challenges. Why was this? And how could we more effectively communicate dangers from our world, such as toxic waste, to future civilizations? This book examines and evaluates the kinds of signs, symbols, narratives and other semiotic strategies humans have used across time to communicate the sense of danger. From paleolithic cave art and ancient monuments to the dangers of nuclear waste, carbon emissions and other pollution, Marcel Danesi explores how danger has been encoded in language, discourse, and symbolism. At the same time, the book puts forward a plan for a more effective 'semiotising' of risk and peril, calling on linguists, semioticians and agencies to face up our collective responsibilities, and work together to more clearly communicate vitally important warnings about the dangers we've left behind to civilizations beyond the semiotic gap.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of language and tourist mobility within an adventure tourism context. It uses a critical and ethnographic approach, contributing to poststructuralist perspectives of social life that are currently undergoing considerable changes on social, political, cultural and linguistic levels. Drawing upon an array of data sources collected over five years on two continents, it examines and compares the way language and communication (e.g. speech, written texts, visual resources) are used within the production of place-making practices in two of the world's top adventure tourism destinations: Interlaken, Switzerland and Queenstown, New Zealand. It centres on issues such as cross-cultural discourses, transcultural texts, and semiotic landscapes.

This book presents 18 highly influential essays on Chinese literature and semiotics by Professor Zhao Yiheng, including his analysis and discussions of the development of Chinese literature and its characteristics from traditional to modern times. It is divided into three parts: traditional Chinese literature, contemporary Chinese literature, and semiotics. In the first part, Professor Zhao summarizes the core elements of narrative cultural relations, ethical dilemmas, and narrative features. He also provides a comprehensive description of the formal structures in Chinese traditional literature. Taking the traditional Chinese play White Rabbit as a case, he discusses the connections between the narrative structure and the characteristics of Chinese novels and stratification of Chinese culture.

This book is a theoretical account for general psychology of how human beings meaningfully relate with their bodies-- from the basic physiological processes upwards to the highest psychological functions of religiosity, ethical reasoning, and devotional practices. It unites art and science into a new theory of affective synthesis that human minds are constantly involved in their everyday life worlds. Provides a new theory of aesthetic synthesis; Demonstrates the links between art and science; Provides a new understanding of the role of affect in human cognition.

This book develops Gregory Bateson's ideas regarding "communication about relationship" in animals and human beings, and even nations. It bases itself on Bateson's theory of relational communication, as he described it in the zoosemiotics of octopus, mammals, birds, and human beings. This theory includes, for example, the roles of metaphor, play, analog and digital communication, metacommunication, and Laws of Form. It is organized around a letter from Gregory Bateson to his fellow cybernetic thinker Warren McCulloch at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this letter Bateson argued that what we would today call zoosemiotics, including Bateson's own (previously unpublished) octopus research, should be made a basis for understanding the relationship between the two blocs of the Cold War. Accordingly the book shows how Bateson understood interactive processes in the biosemiotics of conflict and peacemaking, which are analyzed using examples from recent animal studies, from primate studies, and from cultural anthropology. The Missile Crisis itself is described in terms of Bateson's critique of game theory which he felt should be modified by an understanding of the zoosemiotics of relational communication. The book also includes a previously unpublished piece by Gregory Bateson on wolf behavior and metaphor/ abduction.

Signs and symbols represent abstract ideas and concrete objects, providingn a sense of number, danger, value, distances in time and space, and even love. Over time, these marks and gestures have multiplied into an immernse and complex network of images, pictures and emblems - pictographs and logographs, maps and charts, letterforms, colours and patterns. How does a sign represent something other than itself? How do we come to understand the maning of a written symbol? What happens when a sign crosses international borders of language and culture? Can clothes constitute a sign? Can colours? Can sounds? This work takes the reader on a journey of discovery through the world of symbols.

This book introduces relational thinking to political analysis. Instead of merely providing an overview of possible trajectories for articulating a relational political analysis, Peeter Selg and Andreas Ventsel put forth a concrete relational theory of the political, which has implications for research methodology, culminating in a concrete method they call political form analysis. In addition, they sketch out several applications of this theory, methodology and method. They call their approach "political semiotics" and argue that it is a fruitful way of conducting research on power, governance and democracy - the core dimensions of the political - in a manner that is envisioned in numerous discussions of the "relational turn" in the social sciences. It is the first monograph that attempts to outline an approach to the political that would be relational throughout, from its meta theoretical and theoretical premises through to its methodological implications, methods and empirical applications.

Dating back to antiquity, semiotics is both a "technique" and a "science" that aims to understand the nature of meaning. An academic discipline in its own right, semiotics uses signs, such as words and symbols, to think, communicate, reflect, transmit, and preserve knowledge. Since the initial publication of The Quest for Meaning in 2007, the world has changed dramatically with the advent of online culture, new technologies, and new ways of making signs and symbols. Updated to reflect these many changes, the second edition includes a comprehensive chapter on the use of semiotics in the Internet age. Written in a student-friendly style, featuring examples from everyday life, the book explains what semiotics is all about and why it is so important for gaining insights into our elusive and mysterious human nature.

This book analyses the Youth Justice Conferencing Program in New South Wales, Australia. Exploring this form of diversionary justice from the perspectives of functional linguistics and performance studies, the authors combine close textual analysis with ethnographic research methodologies. They examine how participants use the discourse semantic resources available to them to achieve such outcomes as reparation for the victim, reintegration of the offender into the community, and reconciliation between the various parties. This uniquely-researched work is sure to be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

This book introduces researchers, students and the general public to an intriguing phenomenon at the intersection of diverse fields: national branding. In particular, it uses representative cases particularly to show how China responded to major challenges, not only in the distant past, but also especially in our hectic age of national image construction. By pursuing an interdisciplinary, socio-historical approach, the book sheds new light on the role of cultural symbols in national image building. As such, readers will learn how China has exploited its "black-and-white" tradition - calligraphy and painting - in the construction of a national image.