Social media have become increasingly visually focused with the rise of visual-centric

platforms like Instagram and TikTok, reshaping aesthetics and user experience. In

these mobile-first spaces, vertical short videos redefined digital storytelling, content

creation, and engagement. Although their relevance has fostered a rich and expanding

body of research, a conceptualization of “short videos” remains elusive, with varying

terminology across studies. Moreover, research on visual communication has

extensively focused on static images, while missing conceptual work with respect to

moving images designed for mobile consumption. Developing a conceptual framework

is therefore essential, providing the foundation for systematically analyzing these

audiovisual artifacts.

Drawing from format theory, social media studies, multimodality and visual

communication, this work introduces a conceptualization of short videos as a distinctive

media format, defined by structural characteristics that allow to distinguish and analyze

them across platforms. This work outlines the technical infrastructure and audiovisual

features of the format, discussing how the interplay of diverse modes of communication

fosters both collective and individual experiences, thereby shaping meaning making.

This conceptual framework expands research on moving images in mobile

environments, offering a comprehensive understanding of the role of short videos within visual and social media culture and supporting methodologies to examine their

multimodal components.

The advent of short video platforms in China has heralded a new chapter for Neo-folk art—a contemporary aesthetic that melds folk utopia, pop culture, and propaganda. This paper explores Neo-folk art as a self-sustained system within the digital age, where it thrives independently thanks to the internet's pervasive influence. Neo-folk art remains a testament to the creative spirit originating from everyday life and transcending it.

This paper argues that the proliferation of short videos has brought rural and urban cultures into the wild limelight, showcasing a raw and untamed creativity. Traditional folk customs, beliefs, and arts, once confined to specific localities, are now experiencing a form of dissemination and transformation that molds them to fit new media formats. With examples ranging from Fujian's "You Shen" rituals evolving new deities, this study highlights the metamorphosis of folk artistry.

Moreover, local cultural and tourism bureaus have begun to adapt content for short video dissemination, emphasizing the adaptability of folk expressions to modern-day communication channels. However, internet-born subcultures like "Smart （Sha Ma Te）" confront the dichotomy of being both celebrated and regulated, revealing the complexities of the digital realm.

This study seeks to delineate how Neo-folk art, through the medium of short videos, represents a dynamic intersection of traditional ethos and digital modernity, crafting a new narrative for Chinese folk culture in the global artistic and social landscape.

While extensive research has explored the role of images in war, studies on peace imagery remain limited. This gap is significant given images’ ability to shape public perception, evoke emotions, and convey immediacy, which is often absent in text. Moreover, dominant visual narratives tend to frame peace within a binary war-peace paradigm, overlooking the diverse, coexisting forms of peace emphasized in contemporary peace research.

This study addresses these gaps by examining peace imagery through a dual approach: analyzing images selected by over 200 peacebuilding experts and conducting a systematic Google Images search using 15 peace-related keywords, thereby employing various VPNs.

Using image-type analysis, the study categorizes and interprets recurring motifs, revealing distinct differences between participant-selected images and those retrieved from online searches. While dominant online peace imagery often features symbols, text-based visuals, and staged representations, expert-selected images highlight more nuanced portrayals of everyday peace, emphasizing local, lived experiences. These findings underscore the need to move beyond simplistic peace symbols and incorporate diverse, grassroots-driven visual narratives.

By bridging participatory research with digital methodologies, this study enhances our understanding of peace representation and its implications for global peace communication. The results highlight the role of the Internet in shaping dominant peace imagery while advocating for a more inclusive, locally grounded visual discourse. This research ultimately contributes to expanding visual peace studies and integrating diverse perspectives into broader peacebuilding efforts.

Social media have gone through an overall visual turn. From the text-first nature of former Twitter or the first era of Facebook, we now face platforms that are visual first (if not visual only) both in terms of design and usage. This poses new challenges for researchers that aim at understanding this growing amount of data from a computational or quantitative perspective. Methods developed within the domain of computer vision were developed for tasks (e.g., object recognition, image segmentation), that are of not always of immediate use in research dealing with users or social practices and have thus proved to be of little use. To address the limitations shown by current CNN-based approaches, we propose and evaluate a Visual LLM-based semantic clustering methodology that can capture subtle social and cultural meanings within images, going beyond mere visual or spatial similarities.