Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Authorial Agency in Utopias of Kaleidoscopic Perception and Sensory Estrangement

This dissertation theorizes the genre of the urban database documentary, a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems to uncover new perspectives on the lived experience of place. While particularly prominent in recent decades, I argue that the genre of the urban database documentary arises at the turn of the 20th century in response to the rise of the metropolis and the widespread adoption of new media technologies such as photography, cinema, and radio. This was a time when the modern city engendered significant disorientation in its inhabitants, dramatically expanding horizontally and vertically. The rampant pace of technological development at this time also spawned feelings of dehumanization and the loss of connection to embodied experience. The urban database documentary emerges as a symptomatic response to the period's new cultural conditions, meeting a collective need to create order from vast quantities of information and re-frame perception of daily experience. The design of structural systems became a creative method for simultaneously addressing these vast new quantities of information, while attending to the particularities of individual experience. For media artists, building a database into the aesthetic design of a work itself offers an avenue for creatively documenting the radical multiplicity of urbanized environments, preserving attention to the sensory experience of details while aspiring to a legible whole. Crucially, I argue that the design of these systems is a vital form of authorial agency. By reading these artists' work in relation to contemporary practice, I aim to make transparent the underlying, non-technical ambitions that fuel this distinctive mode of media art practice

Genre, Database, and the Anatomy of the Digital Archive

The purpose of this study was to define shared characteristics of literary digital archives, specifically to explore how conceptual and structural qualities of such archives express generic qualities. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars resort to metaphors, and this study offers the metaphor of anatomy as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. The definition of the anatomy genre draws from Northrop Frye\u27s in Anatomy of Criticism, in which Frye describes how anatomies are characterized by proliferating lists, the mixing of prose and non-prose forms, and self-reflexivity--under the guise of knowledge accrual, investigation, and discovery. Criticism from digital humanities, new media, historiography, literature, and archival studies informed this research, in particular critical theory on genre and epistemology, and research on physical and digital archives. Because the definitions we apply to our digital technologies are under development, this dissertation participates in the overall emergence of terms in digital humanities theory. Several case studies analyzed the interface and underlying structures of four literary digital archives to consider how they represent the material past, and how design of visual elements and functionality manifest characteristics of the anatomy genre. The case studies suggest that literary websites. exhibits, and archives participate in the anatomy genre. but that some sites are more anatomical than others, and some sites do not align with the genre at all. The ability to designate a digital project as an anatomy depends more on encyclopedism, detailism, and its continual updating, than on any other factors. In addition, my own experience constructing a literary digital archive from historical manuscripts informs this investigation of genre, in particular my role as the researcher-archivist and how identity affects my approach to the archive. Historically, metacommentary has always been part of the anatomy genre, and this study positions methodological criticism as an expression of metacommentary. The study concludes by considering the implications of literary digital archives for scholarship and research, including effects of power, institutional impact, and the profession of English itself, especially in light of the anatomy genre\u27s tendency towards proliferation and unfinishability

The Sound of Tomorrow: From Underground to Mainstream

This research project is intended to document the rise of an Underground Genre as it evolves and becomes a Mainstream attraction. The aim is to create a roadmap of the scene, and determine the underlying drivers of success (what factors are causing high levels of growth across the spectrum). The genre selected for this task is entitled “Future Bass”, a relatively new phenomenon that has become increasingly popular in America, Europe, and in the world of Electronic music. The sound is best described as a global melting pot of styles combining hip-hop, jazz & soul, and electronic music with signature EDM melodies, bass and synths. To provide a manuscript of its growth, a database was created measuring a multitude of social media metrics over a 6-month period (SoundCloud, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram Followers). Almost 200 artists/labels were selected from 6 regions including: UK, USA, France, Australia, Canada, and Holland. Due to the heavy quantitative nature of this research, I used a quantitative inductive approach (where data are used to develop theory) in order to comment on the growth of this evolving sound.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-global-entertainment-business/1028/thumbnail.jp

Sexual diversity on the small screen : mapping LGBT+ characters in Flemish television fiction (2001 – 2016)

Apart from figures on LGBT+ characters in television fiction produced by the American television industry, such as the ‘Where We Are On TV’ – reports by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), quantitative data on LGBT+ representation television fiction series remains scarce internationally. With this working paper, we aim to address this lack in the context of Flemish television fiction. To meet the challenges posed by a lack of centralized data on Flemish television fiction in general, and LGBT+ characters and storylines specifically, we constructed a three-tiered database. Comprising of all 156 domestic television fiction series between 2001 and 2016, the quantitative presence of LGBT+ characters in these series, and individual traits of the 117 collected LGBT+ characters respectively. In doing so, we provide an overview of Flemish television fiction in general, the distribution in these series of characters who identify as LGBT+ and the storylines that relate to sexual and gender diversity, and offer a tool to identify individual pertinent characters. Flanders presents itself as having a dynamic television fiction industry in the past fifteen years, with genre diversity and a sizeable output. In its general output, LGBT+ characters have had a significant habitual presence since 2001, with a noted correlation to specific ‘lowbrow’ genres, and a noted lack in ‘quality’ series. The collected characters display a severe lack of diversity, with most LGBT+ characters being gay male characters, a significant majority being middle class, and few non- white LGBT+ characters

Supporting collaborative information retrieval in the virtual library

The advent of the virtual library is usually presented as a welcome development for library users. Unfortunately, this tends to reinforce the perception of the use of information resources as a solitary activity. In fact, as many studies have emphasised, information retrieval (IR) in the conventional library is often a highly collaborative activity, involving users' peers and experts such as librarians. Failure to take this into account in the design of virtual library services may result in its users being disadvantaged and denied timely and effective access to sources of assistance. Our focus here is on collaboration between users and librarians. We report an investigation of collaboration issues as seen from the perspective of librarians' and users' contexts and encapsulated in the notion of genre. Finally, we describe the design of a pilot multimedia-based system intended to support collaboration between librarians and IR system users

Hobbes in Hollywood: Crime and Its Outcomes in the Natural State

This content analysis introduces a genre of film that paralleled the rise of conservatism in the United States (1979–1996). Based on the words of Hobbes, the films are perceived to represent the world in its natural state, absent the proper social and law enforcement authorities within existing civilized society. Prior literature on this topic and subject are examined, as are the real measures of criminal justice system breadth over this period, including crime, victimization, arrests, imprisonments, police staffing data, and information on dollars spent. The results of the content analysis reveal the cold, harsh, brutal, nasty, and short world of Hobbes, with murder the main method of conflict resolution and with police, courts, and prison systems noticeably absent. The crimes visualized in this sample are compared to the reality; the differences are as stark as the images of a Hobbesian world and leave the viewer thankful for the systems we do have after seeing what life would be like without them

Preview Cues: Enhancing Access to Multimedia Content

We describe preview cues, a lightweight mechanism to assist exploration of multimedia content. A preview cue provides a preview of the kind of content/information associated with an area (as opposed to an instance) of a domain. Preview cues associate media files and their meta data with the label of a topic in a domain. A lightweight gesture such as brushing a cursor over a label initiates playback of the preview cue file associated with that label. With these cues, users can preview the type of content associated with an area of a domain in order to decide whether or not that area is of interest for further exploration before having to select it. In this paper we describe the preview cues mechanism. We look at one case study of an implementation of preview cues in the audio domain, and we present the results of a user study of preview cue deployment. We conclude with a discussion of issues for future research

Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1