Enacting archetypes in movies: grounding the unconscious mind in emotion-driven media

Abstract

The concept of emotion-driven media integrates affective computing into developing new types of digital media by including the human spectator as an essential part of the whole system. Enactive media, as a landmark in this direction, provides a theoretical basis that is rooted in the enactivist approach in cognitive science. Based on this thesis, it is required to establish a practical procedure for developing the media content through integrating psychological approaches. We demonstrate a systematic approach for developing the content for emotion-driven media. The theory of archetypes, one of the psychoanalytical approaches, was applied for editing movie clips as the media content, and coupled the content with emotional responses by using experimental psychological methodologies. The results showed that it is promising to utilise archetypal movie clips as the content of emotion-driven media and archetypal symbolism can be a useful resource for developing the content of media systems.     

The development of a sound viewer for an open hypermedia system

Abstract

While rich support for a wide variety of media such as text, video and image is common among contemporary hypermedia systems, so too is the inadequate support for audio. The primary reason that audio has not attracted as much attention as other media can be attributed to its obvious lack of visual identity. The main focus of this work was to identify a generic and meaningful visual representation of audio within a hypermedia context, and significantly promote hypermedia support for audio through the provision of a sound viewer.

This paper describes the inherent difficulties in providing a consistent interface to audio, and discusses in some depth the issues raised during the development process. The sound viewer is then introduced and the associated concepts described. The creation and traversal of links to and from audio are facilitated by the sound viewer across formats including WAV (proprietary digital sound file format from Microsoft), CD (Compact Disc) Audio and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). The resultant viewer provides a unified and extensible framework for interacting with audio from within an open hypermedia environment. The open hypermedia system Microcosm was used as the development platform for this work. Microcosm can be augmented to supply a hypermedia link service to additional media with minimal overhead.     

Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)

Remediation refers to the re-presentation of old media in newmedia. This article studies remediation in electronic productsin library collections, especially the digital facsimile. EarlyEnglish Books Online (EEBO) is a particularly interesting example,not only because of its scholarly importance, but also becauseof its multi-layered genesis from printed work to microfilm(Early English Books (EEB)) to digital (EEBO) facsimile, andto the text encoding initiative EEBO-TCP, a joint ProQuest andText Creation Partnership (TCP) project. The article analysesthe impact of filters and limits of remediation in relationto EEBO and its predecessor EEB, such as the choice to duplicatea single copy of a work as bi-tonal black and white images,and to scholarly work.     

When media allow the user to interact,play and share: recent perspectives on interactive documentary

ABSTRACT

The evolution of digital media has inspired new narrative forms within the media context. In the last few years, interactive documentary has presented complex and alternative ways to access information. This article presents an analysis of this statement consisting of the case study of five international productions: Bear 71, A Short History of the Highrise, Pirate Fishing, Do Not Track and Párkinson, que tiemble el camino. The production of interactive documentary in online media as a journalistic format is tackled with a multidimensional approach which incorporates the product, the user’s perception and the author’s view. The exploration of new formats in online media is linked to innovation and a contemporary response to the audiences, who are now able to interact, play and share in an environment favoured by mobile communication and the skills of the current society.     

Moments With Jacques Rancière: Sketches From a Lived Pedagogical Experiment in an Elementary Science Classroom

Abstract:

The work of Jacques Rancière has become rather popular of late, with a series of high-profile advocates. In this article, we reflect on an elementary classroom and an experiment with pedagogy inspired by Rancière's (1991) text, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The authors discuss the text, outline a 20-lesson response that emerged from the study (focusing on reading-as-inquiry), and highlighting some of the possibilities, tensions, and ambiguities involved. The article concludes with discussion of how we sought to make sense of, and redistribute, our roles as science teacher-researchers by embracing teaching, will, and instability. We suggest becoming ignorant schoolmasters, wandering beyond the domain of the sensible, as we struggle to come to different terms with our political work.     

The questionable promise of social media for education: connective learning and the commercial imperative

Facebook and other social media have been hailed as delivering the promise of new, socially engaged educational experiences for students in undergraduate, self‐directed, and other educational sectors. A theoretical and historical analysis of these media in the light of earlier media transformations, however, helps to situate and qualify this promise. Specifically, the analysis of dominant social media presented here questions whether social media platforms satisfy a crucial component of learning – fostering the capacity for debate and disagreement. By using the analytical frame of media theorist Raymond Williams, with its emphasis on the influence of advertising in the content and form of television, we weigh the conditions of dominant social networking sites as constraints for debate and therefore learning. Accordingly, we propose an update to Williams' erudite work that is in keeping with our findings. Williams' critique focuses on the structural characteristics of sequence, rhythm, and flow of television as a cultural form. Our critique proposes the terms information design, architecture, and above all algorithm, as structural characteristics that similarly apply to the related but contemporary cultural form of social networking services. Illustrating the ongoing salience of media theory and history for research in e‐learning, the article updates Williams' work while leveraging it in a critical discussion of the suitability of commercial social media for education.     

Breaking the rules in interactive media design education

In today's interactive media design it is difficult for a designer to create aesthetic innovations and to break free from ordinariness. The most important factor limiting interactive media design aesthetics is that education seems to be more focused on following traditional rules of interaction design rather than innovative approaches. These rules limit creativity and often relegate design students to producing ordinary interface solutions. This is especially burdensome for us as teachers. In order to address this problem, we developed an education model inspired by Lars von Trier's film Five Obstructions. We call this model ‘breaking the rules’. In the ‘breaking the rules’ approach students produce, within a range of probabilities, design problem solutions in cases of total or partial visual/auditory/tactile obstructions. The most important outputs of the model are (1) to make design student think/look outside of the ordinary, (2) to produce unusual solutions, (3) to maximise design solutions with sound.     

Appropriating an architectural design tool for musical ends

NURBS (non-uniform rational b-spline) modelling has become a ubiquitous tool within architectural design praxis. In this article I examine three projects that utilise NURBS modelling as a means for which a musical system's inherent spatiality is visualised. There are numerous precedents for which architectural form is a derivation of a musical system, or a musical system is proportionally informed by architectonic gesture. I propose in this article three NURBS modelling methodologies: for the spatial analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen's sound projection geometries in Pole für 2; for a spatial realisation of John Cage's indeterminate work Variations III; and for the generation of a surface manifold informed by musically derived soundscape data from the Japanese garden Kyu Furukawa Teien. Rather than seeking to translate music into inhabitable architecture, or architectonic form into music, I highlight an approach that produces an interstitial territory between discourses on architecture and music analysis.     

Modeling user interest in social media using news media and wikipedia

Social media has become an important source of information and a medium for following and spreading trends, news, and ideas all over the world. Although determining the subjects of individual posts is important to extract users' interests from social media, this task is nontrivial because posts are highly contextualized and informal and have limited length. To address this problem, we propose a user modeling framework that maps the content of texts in social media to relevant categories in news media. In our framework, the semantic gaps between social media and news media are reduced by using Wikipedia as an external knowledge base. We map term-based features from a short text and a news category into Wikipedia-based features such as Wikipedia categories and article entities. A user's microposts are thus represented in a rich feature space of words. Experimental results show that our proposed method using Wikipedia-based features outperforms other existing methods of identifying users' interests from social media.     

Automated GUI performance testing

A significant body of prior work has devised approaches for automating the functional testing of interactive applications. However, little work exists for automatically testing their performance. Performance testing imposes additional requirements upon GUI test automation tools: the tools have to be able to replay complex interactive sessions, and they have to avoid perturbing the application’s performance. We study the feasibility of using five Java GUI capture and replay tools for GUI performance test automation. Besides confirming the severity of the previously known GUI element identification problem, we also describe a related problem, the temporal synchronization problem, which is of increasing importance for GUI applications that use timer-driven activity. We find that most of the tools we study have severe limitations when used for recording and replaying realistic sessions of real-world Java applications and that all of them suffer from the temporal synchronization problem. However, we find that the most reliable tool, Pounder, causes only limited perturbation and thus can be used to automate performance testing. Based on an investigation of Pounder’s approach, we further improve its robustness and reduce its perturbation. Finally, we demonstrate in a set of case studies that the conclusions about perceptible performance drawn from manual tests still hold when using automated tests driven by Pounder. Besides the significance of our findings to GUI performance testing, the results are also relevant to capture and replay-based functional GUI test automation approaches.     

An event‐flow model of GUI‐based applications for testing

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are by far the most popular means used to interact with today's software. The functional correctness of a GUI is required to ensure the safety, robustness and usability of an entire software system. GUI testing techniques used in practice are resource intensive; model‐based automated techniques are rarely employed. A key reason for the reluctance in the adoption of model‐based solutions proposed by researchers is their limited applicability; moreover, the models are expensive to create. Over the past few years, the present author has been developing different models for various aspects of GUI testing. This paper consolidates all of the models into one scalable event‐flow model and outlines algorithms to semi‐automatically reverse‐engineer the model from an implementation. Earlier work on model‐based test‐case generation, test‐oracle creation, coverage evaluation, and regression testing is recast in terms of this model by defining event‐space exploration strategies (ESESs) and creating an end‐to‐end GUI testing process. Three such ESESs are described: for checking the event‐flow model, test‐case generation, and test‐oracle creation. Two demonstrational scenarios show the application of the model and the three ESESs for experimentation and application in GUI testing. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sound,paper and memorabilia: resources for a simpler digital photography

In this paper we reflect on a body of work to develop a simpler form of digital photography. We give three examples of ‘Less is More’ thinking in this area which are directed and inspired by naturalistic user behaviours and reactions to design ideas. Each example happens to review the place of an old technology in the new scheme of things, and challenges a technological trend in the industry. Hence, we consider the role of sound in photography to recommend audiophotographs rather than short video clips as a new media form. We look again at the role of paper in photo sharing and recommend its support and augmentation against the trend towards screen-based viewing. Finally, we consider the role of physical souvenirs and memorabilia alongside photographs, to recommend their use as story triggers and containers, in contrast to explicit multimedia presentations. The implications for simple computing are discussed. This paper originated from the International Forum ‘Less is More—Simple computing in an age of complexity’, 27–28 April 2005, Cambridge UK.     

SentiVerb system: classification of social media text using sentiment analysis

This article proposes novel frameworks of SentiVerb and Spell Checker system, which extracts the reaction, mood, and opinion of users from social media text (SMT). The opinion of users is extracted from their written text on social media such as comments, tweets, blogs, feedbacks etc. and are classified as positive or negative opinion based on sentiment score of SMT using dictionary-based approach and a binary classifier. The dictionary-based approach uses opinion verb dictionary (OVD) to extract the sentiment of opinion verbs present in SMT. This OVD contain only opinion verbs along with their sentiment score. The various steps of the framework such as lower-case conversion, tokenization, spell checker, Part-of-Speech tagging, stop word elimination, stemming, sentiment score calculation, and classification of SMT has been discussed. A new concept of threshold negative parameter is first time introduced in this article. In the experiment, the proposed SentiVerb system’s performance is evaluated on three datasets such as Facebook comments on goods and services tax (GST) implementation in India, tweets on the debate between former president of USA Mr. Barack Obama and Mr. John McCain, and the movie reviews. Consequently, the implementation of the proposed SentiVerb system using rule-based classifier (RBC) gives the best performance result in term of accuracy with 82.5% on GST comments and 79.18% on Obama-McCain debate, which is better than the existing algorithms on the social issues related domain dataset(s). Also, system performance (accuracy of 71.3%) is better than others results on standard movie dataset.

     

Reflections on sonic digital unreality

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the possibility of constructing an unreal environment through sound, particularly through the use of contemporary digital tools. The idea of the unreal is approached as a not being-in-the-world experience. That is, an experience which expands the natural embodied physicality. And yet, sound propagation through a physical space, which led to the study of reverberation and spatialization as the main subjects of interest. Consequently, reverb became the main tool to explore the subject in practice. Due to the project’s multidisciplinarity, the subject had different approaches: from the possibility of reverb as a tool for fiction-making, to listener's comprehensibility and readability of the events; exploring spatialization techniques and multichannel reproduction systems to finally conclude with the idea that, in the end, sound relies on the listener’s actual physical experience of the space.     

PeerStreaming: design and implementation of an on-demand distributed streaming system with digital rights management capabilities

We have developed PeerStreaming, an on-demand peer-to-peer (P2P) media streaming system. The behavior of a PeerStreaming client is very much like an ordinary media player: it streams and plays whatever media the user desires, starting at whatever point he/she desires. Under the hood, however, the media is delivered from multiple peers to the client. The serving peers can be the media server, but more commonly they are the clients that have received the media in a previous streaming session. Leveraging the network and storage resources of the P2P network and retrieving a major part of the media from nearby peers, PeerStreaming greatly improves streaming media quality, reduces server load, and eases traffic on the network. We describe the design and implementation of the PeerStreaming system in this paper, with a focus on a number of key components. They include: (1) peer discovery and content location, (2) scalable coded and randomly accessible media format, (3) receiver-driven streaming, (4) digital rights management, and (5) architecture for the media rendering, caching and serving system.     

Sexual intensity of adolescents' online self-presentations: Joint contribution of identity,media consumption,and extraversion

Adolescents produce and distribute a vast quantity of digital media content. A growing literature examines the sexually explicit (i.e., nude) content that adolescents share online. Because adolescents' sexual content need not be sexually explicit, however, this study examined the sexual intensity with which adolescents choose to present themselves in the context of a social media platform. Exemplifying the variability of adolescents' online sexual self-presentations, survey participants (N = 265; age range: 13–15 years) constructed social media profiles using components (e.g., photos, fashion brands) that varied in sexual intensity. In accord with predictions drawn from the Media Practice Model, the study found that the sexual intensity of adolescents' online self-presentations is a product of the sexual self-concept, a relationship that is partially mediated by sexual media diet and moderated by extraversion. This study bridges emerging research on sexual self-presentation with established literature on adolescents' sexual media uses and effects.     

An ODA-like Multimedia Document System

A multimedia document is composed of different media objects. ISO's Open Document Architecture (ODA) proposes a standard multimedia document model. However, the current ODA profile only includes static media, e.g. text, geometric graphics and images. Because the future multimedia documents not only include static media but also continuous media, e.g. video and audio, continuous media document parts should be added to have a complete multimedia document model. In this paper, we propose a multimedia document model, which is derived from ODA's concept. The proposed model is based on the object-oriented approach. Objects in the proposed document model are divided into two types: data objects and pseudo objects. Data objects are data structures of a document; pseudo objects are used to manage data objects. Based on the proposed model, a multimedia document authoring and presenting system (MMDS) is also developed on SUN SPARC workstations using the Solaris 2.X operating system