10,575 research outputs found

    Playing with the dead:transmedia narratives and the Walking Dead games

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    This chapter discusses the theory and practice of transmedia narratives within the storyworld created by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard’s comics series The Walking Dead. It examines key aspects from the comics series and AMC’s adaptive television franchise to consider how both have been utilized and adapted for games. Particular focus will be paid to Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, Gamagio’s The Walking Dead Assault and Terminal Reality’s The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. The chapter explains the core concepts of transmedia narratives as they relate to The Walking Dead, places the games in the context of both the comics and television franchise, examines the significance of commercial and grassroot extensions and considers the role gaming and interactive narratives have within rich storyworlds. In examining The Walking Dead as a transmedia property, the authors demonstrate how vast narratives are adopted, modified and transformed in contemporary popular culture

    A survey of comics research in computer science

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    Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks

    TV 2.0: animation readership / authorship on the internet

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    Traditional platforms for animation, such as broadcast television or cinema, are rapidly becoming obsolete as a new type of spectator demands more choice, the ability to interact with animated content and access to global distribution for their own user-generated work. Audiences are no longer satisfied with receiving a top down distribution of content from traditional cinema or broadcasters. Internet technologies are emerging to address this demand for active spectatorship and enable communities of interest to evolve their own alternative distribution methods. Viewing animation online has become increasingly accessible with the mass adoption of broadband and the emergence of new file formats. TV 2.0 is an amalgamation of Internet technologies that combine video on demand with the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0. In the age of TV 2.0, the role of the viewer has increased in complexity with new possibilities for active interaction and intervention with the content displayed. This new audience seeks a form of spectatorship that can extend beyond the passive recipience of programming distributed by elite broadcasters. TV 2.0 on the Internet has changed both methods of distribution and traditional patterns for the viewing of animation. However, any potential for democratic participation in the visual culture of moving images that this could entail may be a brief historic moment before the assimilation and control of active readership by mainstream corporate culture

    Using EPUB 3 and the open web platform for enhanced presentation and machine-understandable metadata for digital comics

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    Various methods are needed to extract information from current (digital) comics. Furthermore, the use of different (proprietary) formats by comic distribution platforms causes an overhead for authors. To overcome these issues, we propose a solution that makes use of the EPUB 3 specification, additionally leveraging the Open Web Platform to support animations, reading assistance, audio and multiple languages in a single format, by using our JavaScript library comicreader.js. We also provide administrative and descriptive metadata in the same format by introducing a new ontology: Dicera. Our solution is complementary to the current extraction methods, on the one hand because they can help with metadata creation, and on the other hand because the machine-understandable metadata alleviates their use. While the reading system support for our solution is currently limited, it can offer all features needed by current comic distribution platforms. When comparing comics generated by our solution to EPUB 3 textbooks, we observed an increase in file size, mainly due to the use of images. In future work, our solution can be further improved by extending the presentation features, investigating different types of comics, studying the use of new EPUB 3 extensions, and by incorporating it in digital book authoring environments

    Collisions: drawing in the digital age

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    This research outlines the reconfiguration of the creative act of drawing through physical practice as a response to mass culture. This practice takes place in the context of developing digital technologies, culminating in metadrawing. Metadrawing is defined as the integration of the post-digital collapse of media specificity in the visual arts. This research posits metadrawing as a descriptor for the paradigm shift between the physical act of drawing in pre-digital mass culture and the principles of drawing incorporated into digital technologies. Through this shift, drawing has become an artistic act that is no longer working to collapse media divisions, and now operates within and without these divisions, destabilised by digital technologies. This research examines drawing as a history of innovations and responses to shifts in technologies and their applications. Questions of genre, form and medium are subsequently downplayed for an interdisciplinary approach. High and low are no longer distinct, as the internet search engine is adopted into the artist's toolbox, alongside the digital camera and animation software. The many accessible and disposable images are integrated as raw matter, to fossick and sift through. Accompanying studio research operates within the interdisciplinary freedoms of the metadrawing. Approaches to quotation, appropriation, pastiche, irony, detachment and sincerity are explored through a rigorous drawing practice, resulting in a vast, multilayered body of work. This self-reflexive and intuitive practice incorporates numerous ciphers into its many suspended, but interrelated narratives. Beyond the physical level, the work operates on an intertextual level, moving between the metaphysics of genre and previously separated art forms to create a reconfigured history, unhampered by previous distinctions and boundaries of media and form. This research posits the act of drawing as a reaction to, or divergence from, the dominant techno-capitalist status quo, treating the tactile experiences of studio practice as subversive, transgressive, and erotic. This research explores the subjectivity and the subjective agency of the artist. Drawing is therefore defined as a process of unrepeatability, a process that, while no longer necessary for picture making, still forms a crucial and engaging tier of the visual arts. Drawing’s divergence from the commercialised intangibility of the digital has revitalized its practitioners, demanding a reconsideration of what is means to draw today. This tension is explored through the different methods of studio practice, on the level of the personal-biological, the erotic, and in terms of collision and materiality. Specific images are selected through criteria directly linked with the subjective agency of the artist, and reconfigured through artistic practice, creating a new imbrication of the raw image matter

    Web-based Software Integration for Dissemination of Archival Images: the Frontiers of Science Website

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    The Frontiers of Science illustrated comic strip of 'science fact' ran from 1961 to 1982, syndicated worldwide through over 600 newspapers. The Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the University of Sydney in association with Sydney eScholarship, digitized all 939 strips. We aimed to create a website that could disseminate these comic strips to scholars, enthusiasts and the general public. We wanted to enable users to search and browse through the images simply and effectively, with an intuitive and novel viewing platform. Time and resource constraints dictated the use of (mostly open source) code modules wherever possible and the integration and customisation of a range of web-based applications, code snippets and technologies (DSpace, eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), OmniFormat, JQuery Tools, Thickbox and Zoomify), stylistically pulled together using CSS. This approach allowed for a rapid development cycle (6 weeks) to deliver the site on time as well as provide us with a framework for similar projects

    Diagrammatics and the Proactive Visualization of Legal Information

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    This article performs an analysis of one mode of visual legal communication: diagrammatics and the visualization of legal data and other information in legal instruments and communications. The Proactive Law movement and the Legal Design movement each seek to transform legal instruments and documents to improve access to and comprehension of the communication of law to all persons. “All persons” includes both law-trained and non-law-trained persons and extends from the literate and educated all the way to disadvantaged, illiterate, and less-thanfully literate persons. The overall goal of the Proactive Law movement and a primary goal of Legal Design is to improve the understanding of legal rights, relationships, and obligations expressed in legal products, instruments, services, processes, and systems through illustration, simplification, engagement, and inclusiveness in the text and visual components of these instruments and communications

    Cartoon Contracts and the Proactive Visualization of Law

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    Contracts have always relied on text first, foremost, and usually exclusively. Yet, this approach leaves many users of contracts in the dark as to the actual meaning of the transactional documents and instruments they enter into. The average contract routinely uses language that only lawyers, law-trained readers, and highly literate persons can truly understand. There is a movement in the law in the United States and many other nations called the visualization of law movement that attempts to bridge these gaps in contractual communication by using highly visual instruments. In appropriate circumstances, even cartoons and comic book forms of sequential narrative have been used to communicate contract terms to all parties, but particularly to contractors who are illiterate or lessthan-fully literate in the language of the instrument. The goal of this Article is to apply the lens of visual legal rhetoric and visual literacy to the current visualization movement in Proactive Law and Legal Design in their efforts to promote visual, non-verbal communication in contracts through cartoon, comic book, and highly pictorial legal instruments. The lens will be applied to evaluate and critique five aspects of proactive visual legal instruments: • Immediate Visual Context • Immediate Verbal Context • Visual Cultural Context • Mise en Scène and Arrangement • Visual Rhetoric, Ethics and Professionalism This Article analyzes whether highly visual contracts and legal instruments fulfill the potential for greater access to and understanding of contract terms particularly with audiences whose language skills and cultural experience might make the comprehension and acceptance of purely verbal contracts more difficult. When visuals can overcome barriers in communication that words alone cannot, contracts and other legal instruments can be made more universal in their application, interpretation, performance, and enforcement

    Cartoon Contracts and the Proactive Visualization of Law

    Get PDF
    Contracts have always relied on text first, foremost, and usually exclusively. Yet, this approach leaves many users of contracts in the dark as to the actual meaning of the transactional documents and instruments they enter into. The average contract routinely uses language that only lawyers, law-trained readers, and highly literate persons can truly understand. There is a movement in the law in the United States and many other nations called the visualization of law movement that attempts to bridge these gaps in contractual communication by using highly visual instruments. In appropriate circumstances, even cartoons and comic book forms of sequential narrative have been used to communicate contract terms to all parties, but particularly to contractors who are illiterate or less-than-fully literate in the language of the instrument. The goal of this Article is to apply the lens of visual legal rhetoric and visual literacy to the current visualization movement in Proactive Law and Legal Design in their efforts to promote visual, non-verbal communication in contracts through cartoon, comic book, and highly pictorial legal instruments. The lens will be applied to evaluate and critique five aspects of proactive visual legal instruments: • Immediate Visual Context • Immediate Verbal Context • Visual Cultural Context • Mise en Scène and Arrangement • Visual Rhetoric, Ethics and Professionalism This Article analyzes whether highly visual contracts and legal instruments fulfill the potential for greater access to and understanding of contract terms particularly with audiences whose language skills and cultural experience might make the comprehension and acceptance of purely verbal contracts more difficult. When visuals can overcome barriers in communication that words alone cannot, contracts and other legal instruments can be made more universal in their application, interpretation, performance, and enforcement
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