Video Vortex reader : responses to Youtube

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives

Accurate and Low-Delay Seeking Within and Across Mash-Ups of Highly-Compressed Videos

In typical video mash-up systems, a group of source videos are compiled off-line into a single composite object. This improves rendering performance, but limits the possibilities for dynamic composition of personalized content. This paper discusses systems and network issues for enabling client-side dynamic composition of video mash-ups. In particular, this paper describes a novel algorithm to support accurate, low-delay seamless composition of independent clips. We report on an intelligent application-steered scheme that allows system layers to prefetch and discard predicted frames before the rendering moment of indexed content. This approach unifies application-level quality-of-experience specification with system layer quality-of-service processing. To evaluate our scheme, several experiments are conducted and substantial performance improvements are observed in terms of accuracy and low delay

Accurate and Low-Delay Seeking Within and Across Mash-Ups of Highly-Compressed Videos

In typical video mash-up systems, a group of source videos are compiled off-line into a single composite object. This improves rendering performance, but limits the possibilities for dynamic composition of personalized content. This paper discusses systems and network issues for enabling client-side dynamic composition of video mash-ups. In particular, this paper describes a novel algorithm to support accurate, low-delay seamless composition of independent clips. We report on an intelligent application-steered scheme that allows system layers to prefetch and discard predicted frames before the rendering moment of indexed content. This approach unifies application-level quality-of-experience specification with system layer quality-of-service processing. To evaluate our scheme, several experiments are conducted and substantial performance improvements are observed in terms of accuracy and low delay

Accurate and Low-Delay Seeking Within and Across Mash-Ups of Highly-Compressed Videos

In typical video mash-up systems, a group of source videos are compiled off-line into a single composite object. This improves rendering performance, but limits the possibilities for dynamic composition of personalized content. This paper discusses systems and network issues for enabling client-side dynamic composition of video mash-ups. In particular, this paper describes a novel algorithm to support accurate, low-delay seamless composition of independent clips. We report on an intelligent application-steered scheme that allows system layers to prefetch and discard predicted frames before the rendering moment of indexed content. This approach unifies application-level quality-of-experience specification with system layer quality-of-service processing. To evaluate our scheme, several experiments are conducted and substantial performance improvements are observed in terms of accuracy and low delay

A Usability Evaluation Framework for

Currently, more than two billions people access the Web for various purposes. The majority are people without programming or modelling background. Part of these people (called end-users) also likes to create their own Web applications to meet their daily needs. Mashup Makers are tools to create such end-user’s Web applications. As such, Mashup Makers could become the dominant environment for end-user development of Web applications. Existing Mashup Makers promise that creating a Web Mashup is very easy and just a matter of a few mouse clicks. However, there is no evidence that this is indeed the case. On the contrary, research has already revealed usability problems with Mashup Makers. Therefore, this thesis concentrates on the usability of Mashup Makers as development environments for Web applications for end-users. Usability is a key issue for the success of software artifacts, and especially if the artifacts are intended for non-technical users. Therefore, we target the achievement of a consolidated approach, model, and framework for the evaluation of the usability of Mashup Makers for end-users. Such a framework will not only allow evaluating the usability of existing Mashup Makers, but it will also provide key issues concerning usability (ie usability impact factors) that developers of Mashup Makers and of other future end-user development tools can take into consideration when developing new tools

Anti-Racist Video Activism: Framing and production of new knowledges that challenge the post-truth hegemonic project

In recent years, the rise of right-wing populism and post-truth politics has created a dangerous cocktail, enabling ‘immigration’ and ‘anti-racism’ to be framed within dominant political and media coverage in such a way that it stigmatises and marginalises foreign nationals migrating to the United Kingdom, replicating social injustice. Several activist groups within the broader anti-racist movement are engaging in contemporary forms of video activism alongside protest action to resist and challenge these frames and framing processes. This thesis makes the necessary four-way theoretical and methodological links between hegemony, qualitative frame analysis, video activism and knowledge production to explore the ways in which dominant framings of immigration are resisted by the broader anti-racist movement. Using a broad framework combining film theory/studies and cinematography, the analysis of the visual strategies employed by eight activist groups within this movement within video activist footage disseminated on YouTube and Facebook provides unique insights into the groups themselves, and the various stylistic, shot, angling, sound and editing strategies employed that open up opportunities for framing. A further qualitative, and discursive, frame analysis explores the various frames that are used by the groups through video activism itself; persecution, hardship, heroism, empowerment, incompetence and anti-racism; producing different new knowledges surrounding organisational knowledges of the movement (including collective identity), social injustice in general, dominant hegemonic narratives, and, most importantly, the struggles of migrants and refugees. In doing so, it makes significant contribution to knowledge by proposing three unique typologies to demonstrate how the contemporary hegemonic post-truth narratives surrounding immigration can be, and are being, resisted in order to reinforce social justice

Personalised service discovery in mobile environments

In recent years, some trends have emerged that pertain both to mobile devices and the Web. On one side, mobile devices have transitioned from being simple wireless phones to become ubiquitous Web-enabled users' companions. On the other side, the Web has evolved from an online one-size-fits-all collection of interlinked documents to become an open platform of personalised services and content. It will not be long before these trends will converge and create a Seamless Web: an integrated environment where, besides traditional services delivered by powerful server machines accessible via wide area networks, new services and content will be offered by users to users via their portable devices. As a result, mobile users will soon be exposed - in addition to traditional "on-line" Web services/content - to a parallel universe of pervasive "off-line" services provided by devices in their surroundings. Such circumstances will raise new challenges when it comes to selecting the services to rely on, that will require solutions grounded on the characteristics of mobile environments. Two aspects will require particular attention: first, users will have access to a countless multitude of services impossible to explore; they will need assistance to identify, among this multitude, those services they are most likely to enjoy. Secondly, if today's services (and their providers) are always-on, `static' and aiming at Five 9s availability, tomorrow's pervasive services will be mobile (as devices move), fine-grained, increasingly composite (to provide richer functionalities) and so more unreliable by nature. Our research tackles the problem of service discovery in pervasive environments in two ways: on one hand, we support personalised discovery by means of a mobile recommender system, easing the discovery of pervasive services appealing to end-users. On the other hand, we enable reliable discovery, by reasoning on the composite nature of pervasive services and the physical availability of their component providers. Overall, we provide a discovery method that enables 'better' pervasive services, where by 'better' we mean both `more interesting' to the user and 'more reliable'

The Aesthetics of Global Protest

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative