23,903 research outputs found
The influence of the visual elements of cover design on the appeal of art and cultural magazines: case study is book fare in Oulu
Design of magazines - a complex and time-consuming process, often requiring custom solutions. Developers need to know what impact on the visual component of information influence on the audience. The purpose of this case is to gain an understanding of what kind of visual elements of paper media influence on the choice of viewer. As a particular type of magazine were chosen art and cultural magazine with a reason to narrow research and to get depth knowledge about this topic.
The study is structured that in the first chapter the information about purpose and research questions is provided. Second chapter describes research materials and methodology that were used to collect data. The third chapter gives the literature review that focus subjects of the study. In the chapters four, the results of the research is analysed and conclusions are made. After all chapters made generalised conclusion using data from the literature review and data collected from the interviews
Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing
This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system â Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today.
Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffmanâs understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhanâs way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility.
While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in peopleâs everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like
Flickr: A case study of Web2.0
The âphotosharingâ site Flickr is one of the most commonly cited examples used to define Web2.0. This paper explores where Flickrâs real novelty lies, examining its functionality and its place in the world of amateur photography. The paper draws on a wide range of sources including published interviews with its developers, user opinions expressed in forums, telephone interviews and content analysis of user profiles and activity. Flickrâs development path passes from an innovative social game to a relatively familiar model of a website, itself developed through intense user participation but later stabilising with the reassertion of a commercial relationship to the membership. The broader context of the impact of Flickr is examined by looking at the institutions of amateur photography and particularly the code of pictorialism promoted by the clubs and industry during the C20th. The nature of Flickr as a benign space is premised on the way the democratic potential of photography is controlled by such institutions. Several optimistic views of the impact of Flickr such as its facilitation of citizen journalism, âvernacular creativityâ and in learning as an âaffinity spaceâ are evaluated. The limits of these claims are identified in the way that the system is designed to satisfy commercial purposes, continuing digital divides in access and the low interactivity and criticality on Flickr. Flickr is an interesting source of change, but can only to be understood in the perspective of long term development of the hobby and wider social processes
DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Networks
Despite a rapid rise in the quality of built-in smartphone cameras, their
physical limitations - small sensor size, compact lenses and the lack of
specific hardware, - impede them to achieve the quality results of DSLR
cameras. In this work we present an end-to-end deep learning approach that
bridges this gap by translating ordinary photos into DSLR-quality images. We
propose learning the translation function using a residual convolutional neural
network that improves both color rendition and image sharpness. Since the
standard mean squared loss is not well suited for measuring perceptual image
quality, we introduce a composite perceptual error function that combines
content, color and texture losses. The first two losses are defined
analytically, while the texture loss is learned in an adversarial fashion. We
also present DPED, a large-scale dataset that consists of real photos captured
from three different phones and one high-end reflex camera. Our quantitative
and qualitative assessments reveal that the enhanced image quality is
comparable to that of DSLR-taken photos, while the methodology is generalized
to any type of digital camera
Flaunting it on Facebook: Young adults, drinking cultures and the cult of celebrity
Copyright © Antonia Lyons; Tim McCreanor; Fiona Hutton; Ian
Goodwin; Helen Moewaka Barnes; Christine Griffin; Kerryellen
Vroman; Acushla Dee OâCarroll; Patricia Niland; Lina Samu
Print publication available from: http://www.drinkingcultures.info/Young adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) regularly engage
in heavy drinking episodes with groups of friends within
a collective culture of intoxication to âhave funâ and âbe
sociableâ. This population has also rapidly increased their use
of new social networking technologies (e.g. mobile camera/
video phones; Facebook and YouTube) and are said to be
obsessed with identity, image and celebrity. This research
project explored the ways in which new technologies are
being used by a range of young people (and others, including
marketers) in drinking practices and drinking cultures in
Aotearoa/NZ. It also explored how these technologies
impact on young adultsâ behaviours and identities, and how
this varies across young adults of diverse ethnicities (Maori
[indigenous people of NZ], Pasifika [people descended
from the Pacific Islands] and Pakeha [people of European
descent]), social classes and genders.
We collected data from a large and diverse sample of young
adults aged 18-25 years employing novel and innovative
methodologies across three data collection stages. In total
141 participants took part in 34 friendship focus group
discussions (12 Pakeha, 12 Maori and 10 Pasifika groups)
while 23 young adults showed and discussed their Facebook
pages during an individual interview that involved screencapture
software and video recordings. Popular online
material regarding drinking alcohol was also collected (via
groups, interviews, and web searches), providing a database
of 487 links to relevant material (including websites, apps,
and games). Critical and in-depth qualitative analyses across
these multimodal datasets were undertaken.
Key findings demonstrated that social technologies play a
crucial role in young adultsâ drinking cultures and processes
of identity construction. Consuming alcohol to a point of
intoxication was a commonplace leisure-time activity for
most of the young adult participants, and social network
technologies were fully integrated into their drinking cultures.
Facebook was employed by all participants and was used
before, during and following drinking episodes. Uploading
and sharing photos on Facebook was particularly central to
young peopleâs drinking cultures and the ongoing creation of
their identities. This involved a great deal of Facebook âworkâ
to ensure appropriate identity displays such as tagging (the
addition of explanatory or identifying labels) and untagging
photos.
Being visible online was crucial for many young adults,
and they put significant amounts of time and energy into
updating and maintaining Facebook pages, particularly with
material regarding drinking practices and events. However
this was not consistent across the sample, and our findings
revealed nuanced and complex ways in which people from
different ethnicities, genders and social classes engaged
with drinking cultures and new technologies in different
ways, reflecting their positioning within the social structure.
Pakeha shared their drinking practices online with relatively
little reflection, while Pasifika and Maori participants were
more likely to discuss avoiding online displays of drinking
and demonstrated greater reflexive self-surveillance. Females
spoke of being more aware of normative expectations around
gender than males, and described particular forms of online
identity displays (e.g. moderated intake, controlled selfdetermination).
Participants from upper socio-economic
groups expressed less concern than others about both
drinking and posting material online. Celebrity culture
was actively engaged with, in part at least, as a means of
expressing what it is to be a young adult in contemporary
society, and reinforcing the need for young people to engage
in their own everyday practices of âcelebritisingâ themselves
through drinking cultures online.
Alcohol companies employed social media to market
their products to young people in sophisticated ways that
meant the campaigns and actions were rarely perceived as
marketing. Online alcohol marketing initiatives were actively
appropriated by young people and reproduced within their
Facebook pages to present tastes and preferences, facilitate
social interaction, construct identities, and more generally
develop cultural capital. These commercial activities
within the commercial platforms that constitute social
networking systems contribute heavily to a general âculture
of intoxicationâ while simultaneously allowing young people
to âcreateâ and âproduceâ themselves online via the sharing of
consumption âchoicesâ, online interactions and activities
WESPE: Weakly Supervised Photo Enhancer for Digital Cameras
Low-end and compact mobile cameras demonstrate limited photo quality mainly
due to space, hardware and budget constraints. In this work, we propose a deep
learning solution that translates photos taken by cameras with limited
capabilities into DSLR-quality photos automatically. We tackle this problem by
introducing a weakly supervised photo enhancer (WESPE) - a novel image-to-image
Generative Adversarial Network-based architecture. The proposed model is
trained by under weak supervision: unlike previous works, there is no need for
strong supervision in the form of a large annotated dataset of aligned
original/enhanced photo pairs. The sole requirement is two distinct datasets:
one from the source camera, and one composed of arbitrary high-quality images
that can be generally crawled from the Internet - the visual content they
exhibit may be unrelated. Hence, our solution is repeatable for any camera:
collecting the data and training can be achieved in a couple of hours. In this
work, we emphasize on extensive evaluation of obtained results. Besides
standard objective metrics and subjective user study, we train a virtual rater
in the form of a separate CNN that mimics human raters on Flickr data and use
this network to get reference scores for both original and enhanced photos. Our
experiments on the DPED, KITTI and Cityscapes datasets as well as pictures from
several generations of smartphones demonstrate that WESPE produces comparable
or improved qualitative results with state-of-the-art strongly supervised
methods
Media aesthetics based multimedia storytelling.
Since the earliest of times, humans have been interested in recording their life experiences, for future reference and for storytelling purposes. This task of recording experiences --i.e., both image and video capture-- has never before in history been as easy as it is today. This is creating a digital information overload that is becoming a great concern for the people that are trying to preserve their life experiences.
As high-resolution digital still and video cameras become increasingly pervasive, unprecedented amounts of multimedia, are being downloaded to personal hard drives, and also uploaded to online social networks on a daily basis. The work presented in this dissertation is a contribution in the area of multimedia organization, as well as automatic selection of media for storytelling purposes, which eases the human task of summarizing a collection of images or videos in order to be shared with other people.
As opposed to some prior art in this area, we have taken an approach in which neither user generated tags nor comments --that describe the photographs, either in their local or on-line repositories-- are taken into account, and also no user interaction with the algorithms is expected. We take an image analysis approach where both the context images --e.g. images from online social networks to which the image stories are going to be uploaded--, and the collection images --i.e., the collection of images or videos that needs to be summarized into a story--, are analyzed using image processing algorithms. This allows us to extract relevant metadata that can be used in the summarization process.
Multimedia-storytellers usually follow three main steps when preparing their stories: first they choose the main story characters, the main events to describe, and finally from these media sub-groups, they choose the media based on their relevance to the story as well as based on their aesthetic value. Therefore, one of the main contributions of our work has been the design of computational models --both regression based, as well as classification based-- that correlate well with human perception of the aesthetic value of images and videos. These computational aesthetics models have been integrated into automatic selection algorithms for multimedia storytelling, which are another important contribution of our work. A human centric approach has been used in all experiments where it was feasible, and also in order to assess the final summarization results, i.e., humans are always the final judges of our algorithms, either by inspecting the aesthetic quality of the media, or by inspecting the final story generated by our algorithms.
We are aware that a perfect automatically generated story summary is very hard to obtain, given the many subjective factors that play a role in such a creative process; rather, the presented approach should be seen as a first step in the storytelling creative process which removes some of the ground work that would be tedious and time consuming for the user. Overall, the main contributions of this work can be capitalized in three:
(1) new media aesthetics models for both images and videos that correlate with human perception,
(2) new scalable multimedia collection structures that ease the process of media summarization, and finally,
(3) new media selection algorithms that are optimized for multimedia storytelling purposes.Postprint (published version
Your Photo, My Destination! A qualitative semiotic analysis of tourist user-generated content from the west of Norway on Instagram.
Instagram er en populÊr plattform for deling av visuelt innhold. Instagram-brukere deler innhold om ulike emner som dagligliv, mat, deres interesser og ferieturer. Brukere fÞlger vanligvis estetiske normer som er definert av Instagram-brukere i fellesskap som kan referere til som Instagramisme. Brukernes praksis og aktiviteter pÄ sosiale medier, inkludert Instagram, endres konstant og raskt, og derfor er det et konstant behov for forskning pÄ dette feltet. Denne oppgaven undersÞker turistbilder publisert fra tre spesifikke turistmÄl pÄ Vestlandet av brukere pÄ den sosiale medieplattformen Instagram. Denne masteroppgaven hjelper oss Ä forstÄ hvordan turistbilder fra Vestlandet som deles pÄ Instagram pÄvirker andre Instagram-brukeres praksis og ogsÄ hvorfor. Denne forskningen er basert pÄ en kvalitativ innholdsanalysemetode og gjenomfÞres ved Ä gjÞre en semiotisk analyse av 120 turistbilder pÄ Instagram. Analysen er basert pÄ Barthes sin semiotikkteori og dobbeltbegrepet studium og punctum. NÞkkelfunnene i denne forskningen er at elementer av virale bilder gradvis kommer inn i kommunikasjonssprÄket som praktiseres i UGC knyttet til disse steder. Dessuten skaper brukere som besÞker omrÄdet en lignende presentasjon av stedet og seg selv slik dette forventes av dem, og dette hjelper dem med Ä fÄ og opprettholde sosial og kulturell kapital. Videre fremhever brukerne sin norske identitet i disse bildene.Instagram is a popular platform for sharing visual content. Instagram users share content about various topics such as daily life, food, their interests, and their vacation. Users usually follow aesthetic norms which are defined by their community which can refer to as Instagramism. Users' practices and activities on social media, including Instagram, changes constantly and rapidly, and therefore there is a constant need for research in this field. This thesis investigates the tourist photographs published from three specific tourist destinations in the western part of Norway by users on the social media platform Instagram. This thesis helps us understand how tourist photographs from the western part of Norway shared on Instagram influence other Instagram users' practices and also why. This research is based on a qualitative content analysis method and is done by doing a semiotic analysis of 120 tourist photographs on Instagram. The analysis is based on Barthes's theory of semiotics and the dual concept of studium and punctum. The key findings of this research are that elements of photos that receive attention gradually enter the communication language that is practiced in UGC tied to these destinations. Moreover, users who visit the area create a similar presentation of the location and themselves as this is expected and helps them gain and maintain social and cultural capital. Furthermore, users emphasize their Norwegian identity in these photos
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