The Language of League: Making Sense of Multimodal Meaning in Twitch Live Streams

Though there has been a good deal of research on digital discourse and online gaming, there has been relatively little research on 1) the social structure of specific groups within the large online gaming community, 2) the multimodal structure of the online gaming live stream, and 3) the impact that these structures have on the final communicative event. One noteworthy component of the social characteristics of online streams is the streamer gender and size of the stream’s audience. In addition, one difference that sets the live stream apart from other online communications is its intense technological complexity. This study then, will examine both of these social and technological characteristics, in an effort to understand how the participants themselves influence language use and how that language use is further impacted by the availability of multiple mediums, each of which houses multiple modes for communication. The data for this study consists of a corpus of 32,397 messages posted in the public chat area of 12 League of Legends live streamers, collected between July and September of 2019. Once collected, however, there was no prior convention in place for organizing and transcribed the data for analytical purposes. Therefore, this study also examines multiple transcription vi protocols and outlines the model developed by Graham and Arendall for an online gaming digital corpus. For this study, I take an interactional approach to explore the communicative strategies employed by participants in a complex multimedium-based multimodal event. Using quantitative analysis, I examine patterns of communicative strategies as related to streamer gender and stream size (participant population). In addition, I examine the qualitative characteristics of those patterns, as well as the influences that multiple available mediums and modes have on those patterns. The results of this analysis indicate that both social and technological characteristics of the live stream heavily impact the communicative strategies employed by participants and is often tailored to the specific needs of each community, especially where the use of graphic images is concerned. These results have implications for the further study of online gaming, live streams, and visual communications within multimediumbased multimodal events

First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

‘I could eat a horse’: The Impact of Hyperbole on Product Sales on Short Video Platforms

How to design video content to promote sales remains unclear, despite the fact that short video has become a popular tool for brand advertising. This study proposes a novel content strategy of utilizing hyperbole in short videos and investigates its potential for driving product sales. Hyperbole, which involves exaggerating text, audio, and video features, can stimulate interest and catch audience\u27s attention, but may also hurt credibility if perceived as misleading. This study employs machine learning algorithms to measure multimodal hyperbole, and assesses its impact on actual sales from short videos. Our findings indicate that hyperbole has a positive and significant impact on product sales. However, the effect of hyperbole is weaker for products and influencers with higher reputation. This study contributes to the literature on advertising content and video marketing by providing insights for effective content design strategies to promote purchase behaviors in the short video context

Fully Immersed, Fully Present: Examining the User Experience Through the Multimodal Presence Scale and Virtual Reality Gaming Variables

Over the past few years, video games have served as a catalyst for virtual reality (VR) technology to become more accessible to the average consumer, resulting in an increased interest in VR’s potential applications across several disciplines. To best capitalize on these applications, however, researchers require a thorough understanding of the user’s experience in virtual environments. And while many studies on VR experiences tend to focus on presence, video games offer another angle of approach: immersion. This study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the relationships between the VR experience of presence and the gaming experience of immersion. First, a focus group of individuals with VR gaming experience explored variables impacting presence. Then a survey questionnaire consisting of items from the multimodal presence scale (MPS), Jennett et al.’s (2008) immersion questionnaire, and the focus group was distributed online. Finally, the collected data was analyzed using factor analysis and linear regression to explore the relationships between presence and immersion. Results of the analysis identified involvement to be an important factor impacting a user’s perceived presence in a VR gaming experience

Student experiences with instructional videos in online learning environments

Drawing upon qualitative methods of semi-structured interviews and observational talk-through interviews, this qualitative dissertation investigates the ways in which graduate students in an online course context experience online instructional videos. A conceptual framework of user experience and multimodality, as well as the framework of sense-making developed by McCarthy and Wright (2004) guided this study and data analysis. The findings of this dissertation have implications for how students are participating in, interacting with, and making sense of online learning environments. Some of the findings of this research include: (a) students do not necessarily experience course videos as discrete elements (or differentiate them with other aspects of the course); (b) the times and contexts in which students view instructional videos shifts (e.g., between home and commuting); (c) student motivations and expectations shape how they approach and orient themselves towards watching online course videos; and (d) multimodal design elements influence students’ meaning-making of online instructional videos. These data findings are all in support of the overarching conclusion of this dissertation, which is that students have significant agency in these online environments, and their meaning-making of online videos may not align with designers’ intentions. This conclusion argues against deterministic views of design. The emerging findings have design implications related to the creation of learning environments in online spaces, such as: (a) fully integrating videos within the broader instructional design of a course; (b) foregrounding the embedded context of instructional videos; and (c) accounting for the shifting times, places, and contexts in which viewers watch instructional videos. This dissertation is situated in the growing field of online education, in particular higher education, where significant money and resources are increasingly dedicated towards the development of online spaces while still much is unknown in relation to the design, experiences, and impact of these online learning environments

Soccer on Social Media

In the era of digitalization, social media has become an integral part of our lives, serving as a significant hub for individuals and businesses to share information, communicate, and engage. This is also the case for professional sports, where leagues, clubs and players are using social media to reach out to their fans. In this respect, a huge amount of time is spent curating multimedia content for various social media platforms and their target users. With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI-based tools for automating content generation and enhancing user experiences on social media have become widely popular. However, to effectively utilize such tools, it is imperative to comprehend the demographics and preferences of users on different platforms, understand how content providers post information in these channels, and how different types of multimedia are consumed by audiences. This report presents an analysis of social media platforms, in terms of demographics, supported multimedia modalities, and distinct features and specifications for different modalities, followed by a comparative case study of select European soccer leagues and teams, in terms of their social media practices. Through this analysis, we demonstrate that social media, while being very important for and widely used by supporters from all ages, also requires a fine-tuned effort on the part of soccer professionals, in order to elevate fan experiences and foster engagement