A Reading of Alexander Motyl’s Fall River Through the Lenses of Bordermemories

This paper examines the concepts of borderlands, borderscapes, and bordermemories as cultural discursive practices that have been extensively presented and analyzed in an increasing number of theoretical works in Border Studies. Contemporary American Ukrainian writers have made attempts to introduce their hybrid experience and include it into American culture. One of them is Alexander J. Motyl, whose novel Fall River (2014) is analyzed as an example of border writing. The novel is based on the author’s narrative memory, rooted in his mother’s stories about Ukraine and their family members’ crossings of borders in the interwar period and belonging to two cultures, Ukrainian and American, that shaped their identities

Indirect Match Highlights Detection with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Highlights in a sport video are usually referred as actions that stimulate excitement or attract attention of the audience. A big effort is spent in designing techniques which find automatically highlights, in order to automatize the otherwise manual editing process. Most of the state-of-the-art approaches try to solve the problem by training a classifier using the information extracted on the tv-like framing of players playing on the game pitch, learning to detect game actions which are labeled by human observers according to their perception of highlight. Obviously, this is a long and expensive work. In this paper, we reverse the paradigm: instead of looking at the gameplay, inferring what could be exciting for the audience, we directly analyze the audience behavior, which we assume is triggered by events happening during the game. We apply deep 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) to extract visual features from cropped video recordings of the supporters that are attending the event. Outputs of the crops belonging to the same frame are then accumulated to produce a value indicating the Highlight Likelihood (HL) which is then used to discriminate between positive (i.e. when a highlight occurs) and negative samples (i.e. standard play or time-outs). Experimental results on a public dataset of ice-hockey matches demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and promote further research in this new exciting direction.Comment: "Social Signal Processing and Beyond" workshop, in conjunction with ICIAP 201

Movie Description

Audio Description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. In total the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) contains a parallel corpus of 118,114 sentences and video clips from 202 movies. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are indeed more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in a challenge organized in the context of the workshop "Describing and Understanding Video & The Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC)", at ICCV 2015

Unpacking young people’s national identities: The role of ethno-cultural and religious allegiances, history and ‘Others’

The article examines the intricacies implicated in the narration of young people’s national identities by shedding light on intersecting allegiances and on the role that perceived ‘others’ play in their accounts of nationhood. Based upon a qualitative study of youth narratives of identity in the context of Greek society, the article unpacks how participants make sense and narrate their nationhood via utilizing discursive resources, whilst dialogically conversing with the gaze of ‘other’. The narrative–discursive analysis of the in-depth interview material illustrates the interweavement of ethnicity with religion, along with the use of historical imagery and cultural signals of alleged similarity and difference. What becomes evident is the salience of ethno-cultural and religious identifications, operating as potent resources for self-making but also as vehicles for categorization and the potential exclusion of ‘others’. The article concludes by underlining the importance of empirically substantiating and theorizing the configurations of young people’s collective identities

The Neurocognitive Process of Digital Radicalization: A Theoretical Model and Analytical Framework

Recent studies suggest that empathy induced by narrative messages can effectively facilitate persuasion and reduce psychological reactance. Although limited, emerging research on the etiology of radical political behavior has begun to explore the role of narratives in shaping an individual’s beliefs, attitudes, and intentions that culminate in radicalization. The existing studies focus exclusively on the influence of narrative persuasion on an individual, but they overlook the necessity of empathy and that in the absence of empathy, persuasion is not salient. We argue that terrorist organizations are strategic in cultivating empathetic-persuasive messages using audiovisual materials, and disseminating their message within the digital medium. Therefore, in this paper we propose a theoretical model and analytical framework capable of helping us better understand the neurocognitive process of digital radicalization

Spatial poetics: control of time and space in graphic narratives

Deceptively simple on the surface, under close analysis the comic strip page is something of a paradox, a complex and multi-layered structure. For the artist, the formative layout of a graphic narrative is both a conceptual and spatial activity, involving a high degree of reasoning in the selection and placement of any textual and visual elements. In reception, the effectiveness of any narrative depends on the readiness of the reader to recognize, synthesize and decode the linguistic and visual information at hand, in short: to navigate spatial relationships and make meaningful connections between one panel and the next in the strip sequence. For this reason, graphic narratives offer up tremendous potential for textual analysis: for studying at close quarters issues pertaining to spatial design, visual literacy and the breach between expression and readership. This paper will address the formal and spatial apparatus of the printed comic book from a predominately western perspective, with reference to selected American and European theorists and practitioners, focusing on i) page composition and spatial orientation, ii) the dynamic between text and image, iii) the utilization of panels as temporal markers and iv) connoting a sense of socio-geographical setting

Emotion Recognition by Video: A review

Video emotion recognition is an important branch of affective computing, and its solutions can be applied in different fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and intelligent medical treatment. Although the number of papers published in the field of emotion recognition is increasing, there are few comprehensive literature reviews covering related research on video emotion recognition. Therefore, this paper selects articles published from 2015 to 2023 to systematize the existing trends in video emotion recognition in related studies. In this paper, we first talk about two typical emotion models, then we talk about databases that are frequently utilized for video emotion recognition, including unimodal databases and multimodal databases. Next, we look at and classify the specific structure and performance of modern unimodal and multimodal video emotion recognition methods, talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each, and then we compare them in detail in the tables. Further, we sum up the primary difficulties right now looked by video emotion recognition undertakings and point out probably the most encouraging future headings, such as establishing an open benchmark database and better multimodal fusion strategys. The essential objective of this paper is to assist scholarly and modern scientists with keeping up to date with the most recent advances and new improvements in this speedy, high-influence field of video emotion recognition

What a thirst it was: longing, excess and the genre-bending essay

Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes that the essay is restless, always a little too hungry, a little too thirsty (2006). Implicit in this statement is the fact that a good essay is full of desire and creates this response in readers too – building a thirst for more knowledge, for more emotion, for stimuli, satisfaction. Here the essay is unquenchable, undefinable and unsummarizable. This experimental essay talks about the practice and application of writing experimental essays and their capacity to be genre-bending, form-curious texts. Considering specific texts that explore artistic practice and/or, in their hybridity, bring image and text together in essential ways, the hybrid essay will emerge as a way of making, seeing, reading, interpreting and acquiring knowledge. By discussing intentional ambiguity, the unfamiliar familiar, knowledge in context, and the role of language and structure in the creation of presence, silence and absence in texts, this essay draws attention to the complications (and possibilities) of essays and their forms. The best essays create subtle, lively interactions between and within subjects, forms and languages that can howl and shape-shift in the final essay itself. These genre-bending essays can deepen and complicate the knowledge we make for ourselves – as we experience reverberations of meaning in the multiple readings each specific open text encourages. Included here is the writing and thinking of Anne Carson, Gertrude Stein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lyn Hejinian and others