A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection

Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos

Materiality and Montage: Film Studies, Digital Humanities and the Visualization of Moving Images

In this paper, I will highlight some recent initiatives in the study of film within the digital humanities, in which context I will also present some of my own endeavors, specifically visualizations created in collaboration with the pioneering new media theorist Lev Manovich from films made by the Soviet avant-garde director Dziga Vertov (1896-1954). Following this, I will discuss some of the issues related to the use of visualizations as an aid to scholarly research. Finally, I will address a number of possible research questions in film and media studies, answers to which may benefit significantly from the collaboration between film/media scholars and computer scientists on the one hand, and (moving image) archivists on the other

Summarizing text to embed qualitative data into visualizations

Qualitative data can be conveyed with strings of text. Fitting longer text into visualizations requires a) space to place the text inside the visualization; and b) appropriate text to fit the space available. For quantitative visualizations, space is available in area marks; or within visualization layouts where the marks have an implied space (e.g. bar charts). For qualitative visualizations, space is defined in common text layouts such as prose paragraphs. To fit text within these layouts is a function for emerging NLP capabilities such as summarization.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, accepted at NLVIZ 2022: Exploring Research Opportunities for Natural Language, Text, and Data Visualizatio

The Aesthetics and Perception of Documentary Film: A mixed methods approach and Its implications for Artistic Research

The ongoing research project Gadgets, Phones and Drones at the Zurich University of the Arts investigates how innovations in camera technology have affected the visual aesthetics of documentary films since the 1990s. With specially produced variants of short films, historical paradigm shifts are being subjected to contemporary comparative analyses. Major aspects of the aesthetic change, as for instance the tendency towards a shallow depth of field, are linked to the concept of authenticity or perceived realism. The project’s use of interdisciplinary research is oriented towards artistic research, or more precisely, towards a practice-based approach and is combined with empirical audience experiments. The dialogue between qualitative and quantitative research, also known as mixed methods, has enabled surprising new insights. However, the comparability of quantitative methods risks narrowing down the aesthetic potential of the filmic products that are used to conduct the research. In order to maintain a discriminating discourse within the practice-based approach, it is therefore advantageous to extend the study’s framework beyond a quantitative and comparative research set-up and provide specific fields for artistic investigations

Digital tools in media studies: analysis and research. An overview

Digital tools are increasingly used in media studies, opening up new perspectives for research and analysis, while creating new problems at the same time. In this volume, international media scholars and computer scientists present their projects, varying from powerful film-historical databases to automatic video analysis software, discussing their application of digital tools and reporting on their results. This book is the first publication of its kind and a helpful guide to both media scholars and computer scientists who intend to use digital tools in their research, providing information on applications, standards, and problems