Speaker-following Video Subtitles

We propose a new method for improving the presentation of subtitles in video (e.g. TV and movies). With conventional subtitles, the viewer has to constantly look away from the main viewing area to read the subtitles at the bottom of the screen, which disrupts the viewing experience and causes unnecessary eyestrain. Our method places on-screen subtitles next to the respective speakers to allow the viewer to follow the visual content while simultaneously reading the subtitles. We use novel identification algorithms to detect the speakers based on audio and visual information. Then the placement of the subtitles is determined using global optimization. A comprehensive usability study indicated that our subtitle placement method outperformed both conventional fixed-position subtitling and another previous dynamic subtitling method in terms of enhancing the overall viewing experience and reducing eyestrain

Learner-generated comic (lgc): a production model

Recent advancement of authoring tools has fostered widespread interest towards using comics as a Digital Storytelling medium. This technology integrated learning approach is known as Learner-Generated Comic (LGC) production; where learners' knowledge and ideas on various subjects are synthesized in a form of digital educational comic. Despite the prior evidences for the didactic values of LGC production, most scholars do not emphasise on a quality, theoretically supported, and strategic LGC production methodology that accommodate to interrelated key elements and production methods of LGC. As a result, there is a tendency to view LGC production as challenging and impractical. Essentially, there is a lack of conceptual models and methods that comprehensively tailor the crucial theories, elements, techniques, technological, and systematic processes of LGC production. Within this context, this study attempts to propose LGC production model that serves as systematic approach which includes the fundamental components for learners to produce digital educational comics. Therefore, in order to accomplish the main aim, a number of sub objectives are formed: (1) to determine the core components for LGC production model, (2) to construct a systematic LGC production model based on the identified components, (3) to evaluate the proposed LGC production model, and (4) to assess the LGC products developed by the proposed model users. This study adopts the Design Science Research methodology as the framework of the research process. Activities of LGC production model construction include literature review and comparative study, expert consultation, and user participation. The proposed model is evaluated through user experience testing and expert review. Results from hypothesis testing concludes that the proposed LGC production model is significantly perceived as having quality in serving as a guideline for learners to design and develop digital educational comics. It was also found that the proposed model has been well-accepted by local and international experts. In addition, assessment of LGC products developed from the user experience testing has implicated there are significance differences between LGC products developed by the proposed model users and non-users. In conclusion, adoption of a systematic, scholarly grounded, and authenticated LGC production model can contribute to the planning, implementation, and evaluation of Digital Storytelling session that enhance learning experience through LGC design and development

Segmentation et indexation d'objets complexes dans les images de bandes dessinées

In this thesis, we review, highlight and illustrate the challenges related to comic book image analysis in order to give to the reader a good overview about the last research progress in this field and the current issues. We propose three different approaches for comic book image analysis that are composed by several processing. The first approach is called "sequential'' because the image content is described in an intuitive way, from simple to complex elements using previously extracted elements to guide further processing. Simple elements such as panel text and balloon are extracted first, followed by the balloon tail and then the comic character position in the panel. The second approach addresses independent information extraction to recover the main drawback of the first approach : error propagation. This second method is called “independent” because it is composed by several specific extractors for each elements of the image without any dependence between them. Extra processing such as balloon type classification and text recognition are also covered. The third approach introduces a knowledge-driven and scalable system of comics image understanding. This system called “expert system” is composed by an inference engine and two models, one for comics domain and another one for image processing, stored in an ontology. This expert system combines the benefits of the two first approaches and enables high level semantic description such as the reading order of panels and text, the relations between the speech balloons and their speakers and the comic character identification.Dans ce manuscrit de thèse, nous détaillons et illustrons les différents défis scientifiques liés à l'analyse automatique d'images de bandes dessinées, de manière à donner au lecteur tous les éléments concernant les dernières avancées scientifiques en la matière ainsi que les verrous scientifiques actuels. Nous proposons trois approches pour l'analyse d'image de bandes dessinées. La première approche est dite "séquentielle'' car le contenu de l'image est décrit progressivement et de manière intuitive. Dans cette approche, les extractions se succèdent, en commençant par les plus simples comme les cases, le texte et les bulles qui servent ensuite à guider l'extraction d'éléments plus complexes tels que la queue des bulles et les personnages au sein des cases. La seconde approche propose des extractions indépendantes les unes des autres de manière à éviter la propagation d'erreur due aux traitements successifs. D'autres éléments tels que la classification du type de bulle et la reconnaissance de texte y sont aussi abordés. La troisième approche introduit un système fondé sur une base de connaissance a priori du contenu des images de bandes dessinées. Ce système permet de construire une description sémantique de l'image, dirigée par les modèles de connaissances. Il combine les avantages des deux approches précédentes et permet une description sémantique de haut niveau pouvant inclure des informations telles que l'ordre de lecture, la sémantique des bulles, les relations entre les bulles et leurs locuteurs ainsi que les interactions entre les personnages

Closer to home: a creative and critical autoethnographical analysis of the motivations and creative process behind writing violence

The novel presents itself as a creative critical artefact, simultaneously fictitious and autoethnographic, borrowing from the disciplines of Fine Art and Film Studies to convey its troubling narrative. England has been torn apart in a civil war over immigration and ethnic minorities, the fighting long over but terrorists persisting in the knowledge that they are right. The Dogs, led by a disillusioned soldier from the traumatising conflict, recruit aimless adolescent boys wanting to be “men”, desensitising them to violence through film and ritualistic savagery. Lee struggles with the ease with which he excels in this world, far removed from his mother and young sister, Cissy, and it is only when he discovers that Muma is regularly prostituting the nine-year-old that his new aptitudes spill into his home. Lee and Cissy escape to the Dog’s base - a House that writes on its own walls, sitting close to the Wall bisecting the country, and it is here that Lee discovers the immolating roots of the faction, and the destructive impetus behind their acts. The artefact is sentient. It obfuscates its own text to protect Cissy, steals the words of other texts amidst scenes of torture to explain itself as it squirms and morphs within the reader’s hands, wrestles with its own abject content and sends endless warnings for the reader to stop and look away. This continues a theme of magical realism that sees animal totems as guardians and a landscape as emotionally scarred as any person by conflict and suffering. Reality is unstable, as are facile presumptions about justice and truth. Closer to Home is an example of practice-led research, wherein the text illuminates and examines the creative process behind writing physical violence, child sexual violence and simulacra violence, finding the domestic and familial roots of abject fiction writing

Gaming The Comic Book: Turning The Page on How Comics and Videogames Intersect as Interactive, Digital Experiences

Little attention has been given to how digital technologies have impacted the comic medium. Despite the astronomical impact this shift has had on all sorts of traditional media, it is common to believe that digital comics are simply electronic versions of print comics, but the implementation of audio, animation, three-dimensional effects, and interactivity with other kinds of digital comics reveal that they are hardly so simple. Analyzing and classifying them is essential for English studies, comics studies, and even game studies. Digital comics are a hybridized medium that challenge the essence and existing definitions of comics with disparate instances and inclusions of multimedia and interactivity. Digital comics also complicate how the comic medium is remediated with three remediation types (retro remediation, stylistic remediation, and adaptation) that favor or balance out desires for immediacy and hypermediacy between old and new media. Digital comics can also converge with the logic and design of videogames in the digital space, presenting opportunities to question the nature of interactivity between comics and videogames and how these two mediums can be combined with “interactive, digital comics.” This paper creates a refined genre list for digital comics by separating them in terms of how much multimedia and/or interactivity they contain with an extensive analysis of nine digital comics. Their individual incorporations (or lack thereof) of multimedia and/or interactivity unveil innovative possibilities that the digital space affords for the comic medium with new methods of spatial, sequential, and temporal storytelling. In addition, this paper explores how digital comics are socially constructed and viewed as a genre by audiences with nine interviewees that glean further insight into the current perception and future potential of not only digital comics, but also the promising genre of interactive, digital comics

Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940: Operational Detection

Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialised films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition and that they adapt the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serialised visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces how film serials brought the broadcast model of radio and television to the big screen and thereby introduced models of serial storytelling that informed popular culture even beyond the serial's demise

The Tiger Vol. 73 Issue 9 1979-10-19

https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/tiger_newspaper/3438/thumbnail.jp

Cinema and commercial space tourism:The politics of escapism

Space tourism has been one of the most enduring tropes in the cinema from the early 1900s until the present day, yet there exists no systematic, comprehensive investigation situating these widely diversified depictions of space tourism within a broader historical context of technological innovation and associated social transformation. The contemporary social climate, whereby commercial space tourism is an emergent possibility, calls for the decolonisation of the term ‘tourism’ and its categorical associations, in order to assess how visions of space tourism within cinematic, science-fiction futures project the history of tourism and its detrimental environmental, commercial, and colonial implications. The written portion of the dissertation uses close-textual-analysis and discursive transcoding as the primary methodologies to identify and investigate five unique trends in the thematic representation of cinematic space tourism, each linked to a distinct ‘moment’ of widespread crisis and transformation. Ultimately, this will contribute to a broader understanding concerning how science-fiction explores social constructions of race, class, and gender. As a practice-based accompaniment to these critical discussions, I relay my findings in a space film which compiles knowledge drawn from film and literature scholarship, as well as from the analysis of the selected case studie

Mediating Vulnerability

Mediating Vulnerability examines vulnerability from a range of connected perspectives. It responds to the vulnerability of species, their extinction but also their transformation. This tension between extreme danger and creativity is played out in literary studies through the pressures the discipline brings to bear on its own categories, particularly those of genre. Extinction and preservation on the one hand, transformation, adaptation and (re)mediation on the other. These two poles inform our comparative and interdisciplinary project. The volume is situated within the particular intercultural and intermedial context of contemporary cultural representation. Vulnerability is explored as a site of potential destruction, human as well as animal, but also as a site of potential openness. This is the first book to bring vulnerability studies into dialogue with media and genre studies. It is organised in four sections: ‘Human/Animal’; Violence/Resistance’; ‘Image/Narrative’; and ‘Medium/Genre’. Each chapter considers the intersection of vulnerability and genre from a comparative perspective, bringing together a team of international contributors and editors. The book is in dialogue with the reflections of Judith Butler and others on vulnerability, and it questions categories of genre through an interdisciplinary engagement with different representational forms, including digital culture, graphic novels, video games, photography and TV series, in addition to novels and short stories. It offers new readings of high-profile contemporary authors of fiction including Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, as well as bringing lesser-known figures to the fore