Graffiti, as a social phenomenon, has been with us since people first began painting on cave walls. Our responses to graffiti range from recognition of artistry, to interpreting it as a sign of urban decay and disorder. Major cities respond to tax-payers with this latter response by providing graffiti abatement programs, often at substantial cost; thus, understanding and mitigating the causes o...

Graffiti tagging, the inscription of an individual graffiti writer’s unique mark in public space, is considered to be an antisocial behaviour and is a criminal offense. Due to the costs involved in the removal of graffiti tags it would be desirable to deter tagging. A searchable database of graffiti images could be an integral part of the policing system aimed at deterring graffiti vandalism. I...

This thesis will argue that graffiti and street art increase the democratic self-expression values that Christian Welzel’s (2008) democratization theory argues are integral to the process of democratization. In countries where a repressive authoritarian regime allows little room for the population to express themselves, graffiti and street art offer a venue for the voicing of selfexpression val...

Graffiti and vandalism are everywhere in the modern city; they seem to be part of the typical urban background. While graffiti are usually associated with concrete walls, bridges and train cars, one particular area of focus of vandalistic writing is the walls and stalls of public bathrooms. This area, for both obvious, and sometimes unclear reasons, is a popular forum for anyone wanting to writ...

Speech-based interfaces have great potential but are hampered by problems related to spoken language such as variability, noise and ambiguity. Speech Graffiti was designed to address these issues via a structured, universal interface protocol for interacting with simple machines. Since Speech Graffiti requires that users speak to the system in a certain way, we were interested in how users migh...

Graffiti in Latin America is often political. This thesis considers the political graffiti found at la Universidad Nacional (UNAL) in Bogotá, Colombia. Unlike many other nations in the region, Colombia has not experienced the same political history of repressive dictatorships. As a result, the current literature on political graffiti does not cover the outlier case of Colombia. This research us...

This paper looks at the discursive and interactional structures to be found in male toilet graffiti at a British university. Traditionally, toilet graffiti has been discussed in terms of thematic content and the possible psychological and socioanthropological impacts on it. By contrast, this study draws on work in conversation analysis and discourse studies to investigate patterns of interactio...

Graffiti on facades often has a heavy impact in social and economic terms, particularly when historical and artistic artefacts are affected. To limit the damages to the surfaces, preventive plans are implemented and anti-graffiti coatings are used as a protective measure. In this study, the distribution of a spray paint inside a highly porous stone, with and without anti-graffiti protection, wa...

The effectiveness of socio-technical approaches, such as the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), to structure problematic situations is dependent on the candid communication of participants. This paper reports a pilot study using SSM to explore the challenges of establishing the Ideal Speech Situation in order to gain an understanding of the contradictory perceptions of graffiti. Through exploring ...

graffiti as one of the social phenomenon has a very long record. however, the graffiti in modern civilization has been put forth as a media. in this article, efforts have been made to study the graffiti from the linguistic perspective. in this research, 2929 graffiti from different districts in the north, south, east, west and center of tehran have been registered and then extracted and analyze...