Animated movie genre detection using symbolic fusion of text and image descriptors

International audienceThis paper addresses the automatic movie genre classification in the specific case of animated movies. Two types of information are used. The first one are movie synopsis. For each genre, a symbolic representation of a thematic intensity is extracted from synopsis. Addressed visually, movie content is described with symbolic representations of different mid-level color and activity features. A fusion between the text and image descriptions is performed using a set of symbolic rules conveying human expertise. The approach is tested on a set of 107 animated movies in order to estimate their "drama" character. It is observed that the text-image fusion achieves a precision up to 78% and a recall of 44%

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of filmic technology as a form of the proto-cinematic, a term I use as media scholars do—to describe devices integral to film history but that also each had a cultural impact in its own unique way. To demonstrate and support this argument, my project first introduces readers to a range of proto-cinematic technologies, toys that were important during the nineteenth century, and establishes these as a lens through which we might read Victorian narratives. The subsequent chapters offer close readings that delineate my proposed methodology; texts include Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s Sherlock Holmes stories

Tools for Stored Interactive Multimedia

Thesis submitted for the PhD degree

Where no fandom has gone before: Exploring the development of fandom through Star Trek fanzines

Where No Fandom Has Gone Before: Exploring the Development of Fandom Through Star Trek Fanzines is a digital archive and exhibit project centered around a collection of forty earlyStar Trek fanzines. The website serves two functions: primarily to archive these fanzines, and secondarily to showcase their viability as research tools which can provide valuable data. Through the use of several digital exhibits, this project supports the argument that fanzines had an integral role in the development of early Star Trek fandom and served as a primary means of communication between fans. The website project can be found at: https://guerrijd.wixsite.com/wherenofandomhasgon

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

Personalized Memory Transfer for Conversational Recommendation Systems

Dialogue systems are becoming an increasingly common part of many users\u27 daily routines. Natural language serves as a convenient interface to express our preferences with the underlying systems. In this work, we implement a full-fledged Conversational Recommendation System, mainly focusing on learning user preferences through online conversations. Compared to the traditional collaborative filtering setting where feedback is provided quantitatively, conversational users may only indicate their preferences at a high level with inexact item mentions in the form of natural language chit-chat. This makes it harder for the system to correctly interpret user intent and in turn provide useful recommendations to the user. To tackle the ambiguities in natural language conversations, we propose Personalized Memory Transfer (PMT) which learns a personalized model in an online manner by leveraging a key-value memory structure to distill user feedback directly from conversations. This memory structure enables the integration of prior knowledge to transfer existing item representations/preferences and natural language representations. We also implement a retrieval based response generation module, where the system in addition to recommending items to the user, also responds to the user, either to elicit more information regarding the user intent or just for a casual chit-chat. The experiments were conducted on two public datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach