Viral journalism: The rise of a new form

Current technological and communicational changes introduced with the rise of social media have changed the way the news is created. By using interesting, creative and shareable content in news reporting, such as infographics, polls, videos and memes, the primary goal in news reporting has become the attracting of the user’s attention, and then informing the user. The trend in journalism has become the initiation of the user toward sharing the content – this is why we have introduced a new form of news called viral news. The best example of this kind of journalism is BuzzFeed, a website that has gained huge audience attention and is one of the most popular news sites in the world. In viral news the focus is not on the news narrative, but in the news presentation and distribution. The aim of this paper is to give an insight into this new form of journalism: one that is created to attract attention, that is spreadable via social media and that requires user interaction to fulfi l the news distribution process. This new form of news embraces the dynamics and popularisation of the social media and user’s role in sharing and distributing the content (making it viral), but also creates the interactive, interconnected, emotional, interesting, and immediate content that can gain viral effect. In order to explain and distinguish this form of journalism, the purpose of this paper is to examine “a four quadrant map,” introduced by Boczkowski and Siles, as a life cycle of media technologies. Through four relatively distinct quadrants: production/content, consumption/content, production/ materiality, consumption/materiality, the changes brought by social media and new technologies called ‘viral journalism’ are explained in this article

A Web-Based Collaborative Multimedia Presentation Document System

With the distributed and rapidly increasing volume of data and expeditious development of modern web browsers, web browsers have become a possible legitimate vehicle for remote interactive multimedia presentation and collaboration, especially for geographically dispersed teams. To our knowledge, although there are a large number of applications developed for these purposes, there are some drawbacks in prior work including the lack of interactive controls of presentation flows, general-purpose collaboration support on multimedia, and efficient and precise replay of presentations. To fill the research gaps in prior work, in this dissertation, we propose a web-based multimedia collaborative presentation document system, which models a presentation as media resources together with a stream of media events, attached to associated media objects. It represents presentation flows and collaboration actions in events, implements temporal and spatial scheduling on multimedia objects, and supports real-time interactive control of the predefined schedules. As all events are represented by simple messages with an object-prioritized approach, our platform can also support fine-grained precise replay of presentations. Hundreds of kilobytes could be enough to store the events in a collaborative presentation session for accurate replays, compared with hundreds of megabytes in screen recording tools with a pixel-based replay mechanism

Example Based Caricature Synthesis

The likeness of a caricature to the original face image is an essential and often overlooked part of caricature production. In this paper we present an example based caricature synthesis technique, consisting of shape exaggeration, relationship exaggeration, and optimization for likeness. Rather than relying on a large training set of caricature face pairs, our shape exaggeration step is based on only one or a small number of examples of facial features. The relationship exaggeration step introduces two definitions which facilitate global facial feature synthesis. The first is the T-Shape rule, which describes the relative relationship between the facial elements in an intuitive manner. The second is the so called proportions, which characterizes the facial features in a proportion form. Finally we introduce a similarity metric as the likeness metric based on the Modified Hausdorff Distance (MHD) which allows us to optimize the configuration of facial elements, maximizing likeness while satisfying a number of constraints. The effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated with experimental results

Computer-Assisted Interactive Documentary and Performance Arts in Illimitable Space

This major component of the research described in this thesis is 3D computer graphics, specifically the realistic physics-based softbody simulation and haptic responsive environments. Minor components include advanced human-computer interaction environments, non-linear documentary storytelling, and theatre performance. The journey of this research has been unusual because it requires a researcher with solid knowledge and background in multiple disciplines; who also has to be creative and sensitive in order to combine the possible areas into a new research direction. [...] It focuses on the advanced computer graphics and emerges from experimental cinematic works and theatrical artistic practices. Some development content and installations are completed to prove and evaluate the described concepts and to be convincing. [...] To summarize, the resulting work involves not only artistic creativity, but solving or combining technological hurdles in motion tracking, pattern recognition, force feedback control, etc., with the available documentary footage on film, video, or images, and text via a variety of devices [....] and programming, and installing all the needed interfaces such that it all works in real-time. Thus, the contribution to the knowledge advancement is in solving these interfacing problems and the real-time aspects of the interaction that have uses in film industry, fashion industry, new age interactive theatre, computer games, and web-based technologies and services for entertainment and education. It also includes building up on this experience to integrate Kinect- and haptic-based interaction, artistic scenery rendering, and other forms of control. This research work connects all the research disciplines, seemingly disjoint fields of research, such as computer graphics, documentary film, interactive media, and theatre performance together.Comment: PhD thesis copy; 272 pages, 83 figures, 6 algorithm

Teacher professional knowledge and development for reflective and inclusive practices

This book brings together the practice of reflective teaching and the knowledge of inclusive practices in the context of teacher education and continuing professional development. It is a call to leverage reflective teaching for inclusive practices. The first part of the book provides an overview of what constitutes reflective practice in the 21st century and how teachers can become reflective practitioners. It also discusses how teacher professional development can be enhanced for reflective teaching practice. The second part of the book deals with teachers' knowledge development in order to create inclusive teaching and learning environments. It highlights the need for a responsive teaching climate, intercultural competency, pedagogical change and professional literacy. A reflective inclusive teacher is likely to anticipate the multiple needs of diverse learners in pluralistic settings, thus ensuring student success. This book will enhance the efforts of teacher educators and teaching professionals in building a culture of reflective and inclusive teaching practice in the classroom

Media viability in Kenya

The media in Kenya mirrors the social, political and legal transformation that has taken place in the last half a century. Since independence, the media have been affected by the government’s oscillation between more authoritarian and more liberal regimes. Over the past two decades, however, the arc has been towards enhancements of freedom of expression, access to information, and economic growth that has supported the nation’s technological development and the viability of national and local news media. The media landscape is diverse and, with one news producing company for every 320,500 people, very competitive. Ownership of the nation’s news media is, however, highly concentrated, with six major media corporations controlling 95 percent of both the audience and advertising market share. As of the beginning of 2021, there were approximately 173 radio stations, 72 TV channels and 19 newspapers and 13 online news sites serving Kenya

Multimodal Content Delivery for Geo-services

This thesis describes a body of work carried out over several research projects in the area of multimodal interaction for location-based services. Research in this area has progressed from using simulated mobile environments to demonstrate the visual modality, to the ubiquitous delivery of rich media using multimodal interfaces (geo- services). To effectively deliver these services, research focused on innovative solutions to real-world problems in a number of disciplines including geo-location, mobile spatial interaction, location-based services, rich media interfaces and auditory user interfaces. My original contributions to knowledge are made in the areas of multimodal interaction underpinned by advances in geo-location technology and supported by the proliferation of mobile device technology into modern life. Accurate positioning is a known problem for location-based services, contributions in the area of mobile positioning demonstrate a hybrid positioning technology for mobile devices that uses terrestrial beacons to trilaterate position. Information overload is an active concern for location-based applications that struggle to manage large amounts of data, contributions in the area of egocentric visibility that filter data based on field-of-view demonstrate novel forms of multimodal input. One of the more pertinent characteristics of these applications is the delivery or output modality employed (auditory, visual or tactile). Further contributions in the area of multimodal content delivery are made, where multiple modalities are used to deliver information using graphical user interfaces, tactile interfaces and more notably auditory user interfaces. It is demonstrated how a combination of these interfaces can be used to synergistically deliver context sensitive rich media to users - in a responsive way - based on usage scenarios that consider the affordance of the device, the geographical position and bearing of the device and also the location of the device