The Meaning of Movement: Using Motion Design to Enrich Words for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

This thesis aims to address challenging areas of vocabulary for deaf and hard of hearing children by developing an open resource for students, parents, teachers, and content creators that utilizes motion to enhance written words for deaf and hard of hearing children. This research seeks to study the means of nonverbal communication such as body language expression and paralinguistic prosody (i.e., tone, intonation, volume, and pitch) qualities within the framework of graphic design through motion design. Body movement and expression are essential during face-to-face communication, but written language lacks such context clues. Additionally, the hard of hearing may not fully detect prosody within their range of hearing. This lack of information gathered through body language and paralanguage can be replicated with animated movement, which adds greater context to otherwise static text, enhancing insight into the meaning or use of a word. Seeing how a word in written form correlates with enhanced meaning through movement provides greater understanding and retention. This enhancement promotes improved communication in the world through graphic design. Motion design, specifically kinetic typography, offers a promising tool to help aid with language learning for continued exploration and development

Toward A Theory of Media Reconciliation: An Exploratory Study of Closed Captioning

This project is an interdisciplinary empirical study that explores the emotional experiences resulting from the use of the assistive technology closed captioning. More specifically, this study focuses on documenting the user experiences of both the D/deaf and Hearing multimedia user in an effort to better identify and understand those variables and processes that are involved with facilitating and supporting connotative and emotional meaning making. There is an ever present gap that defines closed captioning studies thus far, and this gap is defined by the emphasis on understanding and measuring denotative meaning making behavior while largely ignoring connotative meaning making behavior that is necessarily an equal participant in a user\u27s viewing experience. This study explores connotative and emotional meaning making behaviors so as to better understand the behavior exhibited by users engaged with captioned multimedia. To that end, a mixed methods design was developed that utilizes qualitative methods from the field of User Experience (UX) to explore connotative equivalence between D/deaf and Hearing users and an augmented version of S. R. Gulliver and G. Ghinea\u27s (2003) quantitative measure Information Assimilation (IA) from the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to measure the denotative equivalence between the two user types. To measure denotative equivalence a quiz containing open-ended questions to measure IA was used. To measure connotative equivalence the following measures were used: 1) Likert scales to measure users\u27 confidence in answers to open-ended questions. 2) Likert scale to measure a users\u27 interest in the stimulus. 3) Open - ended questions to identify scenes that elicited the strongest emotional responses from users. 4) Four- level response questions with accompanying Likert scales to determine strength of emotional reaction to three select excerpts from the stimulus. 5) An interview consisting of three open- ended questions and one fixed - choice question. This study found that there were no major differences in the denotative equivalence between the D/deaf and Hearing groups; however, there were important differences in the emotional reactions to the stimulus that indicate there was not connotative equivalence between the groups in response to the emotional content. More importantly, this study found that the strategies used to understand the information users were presented with in order to create both denotative and connotative meaning differed between groups and individuals within groups. To explain such behaviors observed, this work offers a theory of Media Reconciliation based on Wolfgang Iser\u27s (1980) phenomenological theory about the \u27virtual text\u27

Emotive Captioning and Access to Television

Closed captioning has been enabling access to television for people who are deaf and hard of hearing since the early 1970s. Since that time, technology and people’s demands have been steadily improving and increasing. Closed captioning has not kept up with these changes. We present the results of a study that used graphics, colour, icons and animation as well as text, emotive captions, to capture more of the sound information contained in television content. deaf and hard of hearing participants compared emotive and conventional captions for two short video segments. The results showed that there was a significant difference between deaf and hard of hearing viewers in their reaction to the emotive captions. Hard of hearing viewers seemed to enjoy them and find them interesting. deaf viewers had a strong dislike for them although they did see some potential for intermittent use of emotive captions or for use with children’s programs

Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay

In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself

Into the Arcane: Pop Culture as a Representation of Language and Cross-Cutting Themes in EFL Teaching

In the last decade, the spread of popular culture has undergone a genuine revolution in terms of format, content, and consumption habits offering new opportunities for teachers to incorporate popular culture into the EFL classroom to make the learning and teaching more interesting and meaningful. Even though popular culture reflects the society and the culture of the target language, the use of these kind of materials in the EFL classroom has been regarded as a mere passive activity, a form of entertainment, or a reward for the students rather than as a tool that enhances learning. Thus, the main aim of this dissertation is to vindicate the use of pop culture in the EFL classroom by analyzing the possibilities that pop culture can offer in EFL teaching and providing a teaching proposal based on Arcane.En la última década, la difusión de la cultura popular ha experimentado una auténtica revolución en términos de formato, contenido y hábitos de consumo, ofreciendo nuevas oportunidades al profesorado para incorporar la cultura popular en el aula de inglés como lengua extranjera, con el fin de conseguir que el aprendizaje y la enseñanza sean más interesantes y significativos. A pesar de que la cultura popular refleja la sociedad y la cultura de la lengua meta, el uso de este tipo de materiales en el aula de inglés se ha considerado como una mera actividad pasiva, una forma de entretenimiento o una recompensa para los estudiantes, en vez de como una herramienta que mejora el aprendizaje. Por consiguiente, el objetivo principal de este Trabajo de Fin de Máster es reivindicar el uso de la cultura pop en el aula de inglés como lengua extranjera, analizando las posibilidades que la cultura pop puede ofrecer en la enseñanza de inglés como lengua extranjera y aportando una propuesta didáctica basada en Arcane.Departamento de Filología InglesaMáster en Profesor de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato, Formación Profesional y Enseñanzas de Idioma

Puns in Internet Memes : A Study of 9GAG

Memes, defined as units of cultural transmission on the Internet, play an important part in delivering humour in online communities where they bring people and ideas together. The primary aim of this paper is to observe the various ways a pun, wordplay in which multiple ideas are combined within one word or expression, is used in memes and online communication. To achieve this, I have collected posts and comments from 9GAG, a platform for sharing humorous content, during a 24-hour period. While it is impossible to know the reasoning behind every pun posted to the site, three theories of humour — superiority, relief and incongruity theories — offer some explanation. Given its stable user base, history, self-awareness and traditions, 9GAG can be defined as a community of practice brought together by humour. From the research material that included 564 posts and 100.794 comments, several points became apparent —some topics simply attracted more attention, some had wordplay more easily available, and some did both. It should be noted that the highest ratio of puns to comments appeared in posts whose main focus was a pun. This results in a snowball effect where users participate in inventing more puns and remixing or recontextualizing the original image of a scene in the comments, creating new utterances. This is an exchange not necessarily between the commenters themselves, but between the author of the post and the user who posted the pun, thereby building a community of practice

Learning Grimaces by Watching TV

Differently from computer vision systems which require explicit supervision, humans can learn facial expressions by observing people in their environment. In this paper, we look at how similar capabilities could be developed in machine vision. As a starting point, we consider the problem of relating facial expressions to objectively measurable events occurring in videos. In particular, we consider a gameshow in which contestants play to win significant sums of money. We extract events affecting the game and corresponding facial expressions objectively and automatically from the videos, obtaining large quantities of labelled data for our study. We also develop, using benchmarks such as FER and SFEW 2.0, state-of-the-art deep neural networks for facial expression recognition, showing that pre-training on face verification data can be highly beneficial for this task. Then, we extend these models to use facial expressions to predict events in videos and learn nameable expressions from them. The dataset and emotion recognition models are available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/facevalueComment: British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 201

The Lost Taste

The Lost Taste is a film about a young chef named Ueda who is running a noodle bar that was passed down from his deceased father. Ueda is an excellent cook who always satisfies his customers with his secret family recipe. However, in recent years he has been having a hard time running his business, since fast-food chain restaurants are booming and one across the street is stealing his customers. Recently, only a few old loyal customers have come to visit. Worst of all, he has completely forgotten that this very day is the deadline to pay off his debt to a group of fearsome loan sharks. As soon as the mobsters learn that he is unable to pay off his debt, they immediately subdue Ueda and plan to brand him (literally) as a slave to pay his debt. Things are about to get ugly when the boss of the group suddenly feels hungry. Realizing he cannot work without lunch, the mob boss decides to command Ueda to cook for him since he has a distaste for those overselling chain restaurants that don’t put any effort into quality of service. Unfortunately, the immense pressure weighs too heavily on Ueda, and he is too nervous to perform even the simplest ingredient preparation. On the verge of utter failure, his eyes just so happen to glance upon the photo of his father on the cooking table. At that moment, he feels like his soul goes back to the time of his childhood, when his father was still in charge. In the memory, Ueda looks on as his father prepares the family’s soup recipe with incredible grace. When Ueda snaps back to reality, the famous chef’s special Udon soup has already been made by his hand. Though not outwardly very impressive to look at, the boss is still enticed to sample the bowl, and is shocked by its heavenly taste. The noodles are so good that it feels as though his soul ascends into outer space, filled with joy. Gratified by such an excellent dining experience—like he had never had before—the boss decides to spare Ueda from being enslaved. Unfortunately, the matter of repaying his debt is more complicated. No matter how unwilling he is, Ueda has no choice but to give up the real estate of the restaurant to the mob boss as payment. Afterward, Ueda gets a job as an entry-level employee in one of the fast-food chain restaurants. Ueda is free from all his past problems, but what had remained of his chef spirit slowly dies inside him as he’s forced into assembly-line food preparation