Using visual aids to communicate public health orders and information on social media news channels can play a key role in conveying health-related messages to culturally and linguistically diverse communities, new research from the University of Sydney has found.
A study coauthored by Dr Benjamin Nickl in the School of Languages and Cultures and Dr Jordi Vidal-Robert in the School of Economics explored how images, including photographs, videos, charts, and infographics, can be organised into sets of unique ‘visual fingerprints’ to understand and improve health communication strategies for different cultures.
“Visual translation can be a key tool for governments and public organisations to make critical and rapidly changing information accessible, reliable and reputable, especially for culturally and linguistically diverse communities,” Dr Nickl said.
“This is crucial for future responses to public health crises and to restore trust in public health campaigns and emergency communications following the COVID-19 pandemic,” he added.
Health communication and culture
Published in Nature (Humanities and Social Sciences Communication), Dr Nickl and Dr Vidal-Robert’s comparative study examined thousands of images posted by news channels on Chinese and German social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The research explored how distinct variations in visual communication practices across countries are influenced by local health communication habits and cultural contexts.
COVID-19 visual fingerprints: who and what appears?
“Our research shows that images are not neutral,” Dr Nickl said. “Instead, the image datasets we studied on Chinese and German social media feeds clearly followed specific cultural conventions. Distinct national visual strategies employed by news media outlets in each country were revealed: when viewed together in a feed of hundreds, each country’s dataset of images lined up like words in a sentence, forming cultural grammars that people from a particular community read in a particular way.”
Dr Nickl and Dr Vidal-Robert analysed these image datasets to create the visual fingerprints, a visual map of image patterns and trends that can be used to understand how public opinion, perceptions, and attitudes toward health policies are shaped and influenced by communication strategies across languages and cultures.
Visual fingerprints offer a way to improve global health communication by creating health messages that can be understood by a broader range of people.
“As an example, certain digital apps have visual conventions in their feeds that Chinese visual users might not understand the same way as a German user and vice versa, and each culture would need the visual grammar translated into their conventional style to be able to better navigate it,” Dr Nickl said.
“This process could lead to less informed digital news media users when it comes to conveying public health measures. Visual fingerprints may allow us to improve health literacy in global contexts.”
Visual health literacy in public policy
Thanks to the digital age and 24/7 news cycle, contemporary public health communication strategies are adaptable as a health crisis such as a pandemic evolves, but there is an urgent need for further study to determine the efficacy of visual aids in shaping public health outcomes, the study argues.
“Digital news media is now one of the most important information resources,” Dr Nickl said.
“There is a greater embrace of health visuals and digital health applications that proved beneficial during the pandemic. But the lack of regulation makes is difficult for users to tell how good or accurate the information is.”
The research paper suggests a wider approach to visual communication in public policy would better prepare people for future pandemics and global health crises, particularly for culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
“What Australia and the rest of the world can learn from our study and our visual fingerprints is that we need to find out more about this visual grammar, because not everybody in one country will speak the same visual language, and how we're reading visuals online is highly unique and depends on our various cultural vantage points.”
Declaration
The University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is the primary affiliation for this publication and provided BN and JVR with Open Access Publishing Funding. Funding was provided by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Shanghai, CN), GRANT_NUMBER: C2021290, and was used by KQ to fund the data collection and analysis of the Chinese microblogs in this study.
Hero photo credit: Adobe Stock.
