Assessing creativity in TV studio production

This paper will seek to gauge how media production can be taught within Higher Educational Institutions to inspire the next generation of programme makers to create original student led productions, rather than replicating content. Brown and Duthie ask how media educators and teachers of film and television production courses assess creativity and discuss innovative approaches to learning, teaching and assessment in the academy and ask how we can encourage risk taking in a risk averse environment. This paper considers whether contemporary global TV formats can be the catalyst for new ideas and content and how to encourage students to be film and TV making pioneers

Undergraduate students' experiences with learning with digital multimodal texts.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.The study emerged from my interest in understanding the multimodal learning practices and multiliteracies of the current generation of students, especially with the increasingly new genres of texts finding their way into the education landscape. Designed as a pedagogical intervention, it sought to understand the different ways first year undergraduate students at the University of Mauritius experienced learning with and through varied forms of digital multimodal texts (DMTs) within the context of the module Mauritian History (HIST1002Y) included in their programme of studies. A phenomenographic approach was used to describe and interpret the qualitatively different ways participants experienced two learning situations (LS1 & LS2) involving the use and creation of DMTs. A purposeful sample of 19 participants was involved. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, participants’ written reflections, a focus group discussion and a consideration of the DMTs (a video assignment) they produced. The phenomenographic analysis produced two sets of categories of description, one for each learning situation, moving from least to more comprehensive ways of experiencing the phenomenon. As consumers of DMTs in LS1, participants expressed their experiences in five different ways. DMTs were seen as authentic sources of information; as a novelty to the learning approach; as an opportunity to break learning monotony; as emotionally engaging; and as effective and useful learning support. As for LS2 involving participants as authors or producers of their own DMT the findings revealed that such a task was conceived of in six different ways. Making a video was seen as an assessment to be completed for the purpose of grades; a new way of learning and assessment; a journey of ups and downs; an opportunity to widen one’s horizons; an opportunity for personal growth and development; and a process of multimodal orchestration. The categories were further analysed to highlight their logical relationship based on dimensions of variation in the way DMTs were experienced. The overall findings indicate that the implementation of pedagogical practices supported by DMTs could revitalise the teaching and learning of history despite some noted challenges. This calls for a reconceptualisation of higher education pedagogies in alignment with our students’ changing literacy practices so that from passive receivers of knowledge they become active knowledge producers

Interactive Documentary as a Means of Social Engagement and Affective Mobilization

UIDB/05021/2020 UIDP/05021/2020Stemming from a process of non-linear narratives in a digital convergence landscape, interactive documentary proposes an innovative change in the documentary realm by allowing the user to choose how to consume the contents and produce a universe of narrative possibilities where the stories begin and end by linking to each other. This paper examines to what extent interactive documentary may constitute a voice of process (Couldry 2), assuming to be a resource that may contribute to social change by seeking awareness of gender violence and justice for the victims. The empirical study focuses on two interactive documentaries approaching violence against women: Mujeres en Venta and The Quipu Project. The methodological approach draws upon a three-fold dimension: discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, and the interaction structure. Results show that both projects explore user’s interaction and participation to favor engagement and immersion with the narrated reality, aiming to promote social change. The empirical study has identified that the two documentary projects use narrative resources from traditional documentaries and simultaneously introduce relevant novelties to the perspective of user interaction and participation, aimed at favoring the engagement and immersion with the narrated reality. Mujeres en Venta and The Quipu Project propose a multilevel communicative flow, which encompasses three combined dimensions: aesthetic, narrative, and emotional (Mora-Fernández 198–200).publishersversionpublishe

Olfaction-enhanced multimedia: Perspectives and challenges

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagOlfaction—or smell—is one of the last challenges which multimedia and multimodal applications have to conquer. Enhancing such applications with olfactory stimuli has the potential to create a more complex—and richer—user multimedia experience, by heightening the sense of reality and diversifying user interaction modalities. Nonetheless, olfaction-enhanced multimedia still remains a challenging research area. More recently, however, there have been initial signs of olfactory-enhanced applications in multimedia, with olfaction being used towards a variety of goals, including notification alerts, enhancing the sense of reality in immersive applications, and branding, to name but a few. However, as the goal of a multimedia application is to inform and/or entertain users, achieving quality olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications from the users’ perspective is vital to the success and continuity of these applications. Accordingly, in this paper we have focused on investigating the user perceived experience of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications, with the aim of discovering the quality evaluation factors that are important from a user’s perspective of these applications, and consequently ensure the continued advancement and success of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications

Real time memories of a revolution: the '18 Days in Egypt' interactive platform as instant archive

As Manuel Castells observes, fifteen years into the communication revolution, the web has already started to produce new attitudes and behaviours which can find a correspondence in real life. The future implications of this new conceptual landscape are obviously quite unpredictable, but we might not be fully aware of how this new constellation is already influencing the way we interpret our own past, the way we are constructing our relationship to our present time, the way we read into our own history and in to our time perception. The main question of this essay is, in fact, whether this new universe we are surrounded by in our everyday life is influencing the narratives of the present time as well as the way in which we archive, organise, store, and explore information about our own current time. Non-professional documentary-making practices performed by individual users (prosumers), combined with massive messaging distribution strategies moving through social networks' highways are creating a hybrid narrative landscape, where real spaces and communication channels are proceeding in parallel, creating new forms of interaction between documentation, archiving and history narration practices. Though the analysis of the '18 Day in Egypt' interactive documentary platform, I will discuss how this new form of creation, production and dissemnation of information opens the way to a new problematisation of the concept of audience. It opens the discussion related to the roles of 'prosumers' in the circulation of information within a specific narrative ecosystems, where contents fruition is experienced in the context of a pervasive universe in which creation and experience are part of a self-contained media world. Moreover, this configuration expands itself to the investigation of the ways of the spreadability of the message in activists contexts. In the light of a new relationship between witnessing, recording, narrating and participating to collective historical storytelling events- and its actual translation into non-linear narrative features – a new model of messaging strategies is finding its way.

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Network Narrative: Prose Narrative Fiction and Participatory Cultural Production in Digital Information and Communication Networks

In this study of prose narrative created explicitly for participatory network communications environments I argue that network narratives constitute an important, born-networked form of literary and cultural expression. In the first half of the study I situate network narratives within a rich, dynamic process of reciprocity and codependence between the technological, material and formal properties of communication media on the one hand, and the uses of these media in cultural practices and forms of expression on the other. I point out how the medial and cultural flows that characterize contemporary network culture promote a codependent relation between narrative and information. This relation supports literary cultural expressions that invoke everyday communication practices increasingly shaped by mobile, networked computing devices. In the second half of this study, I extend theoretical work in the field of electronic literature and digital media to propose a set of four characteristics through which network narratives may be understood as distinct modes of networked, literary cultural expression. Network narratives, I suggest, are multimodal, distributed, participatory, and emergent. These attributes are present in distinct ways, within distinct topological layers of the narratives: in the story, discourse, and character networks of the narrative structure; in the formal and navigational structures; and in the participatory circuits of production, circulation and consumption. Attending to these topological layers and their interrelationships by using concepts derived from graph theory and network analysis offers a methodology that links the particular, closely read attributes and content of network narratives to a more distant understanding of changing patterns in broader, networked cultural production. Finally, I offer readings of five examples of network narratives. These include Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s Flight Paths, Penguin Books and De Montfort University’s collaborative project A Million Penguins, the Apple iOS application The Silent History, Tim Burton’s collaboration with TIFF, BurtonStory, and a project by NFB Interactive, Out My Window. Each of these works incorporates user participation into its production circuits using different strategies, each with different implications for narrative and navigational structures. I conclude by describing these distinct strategies as additive participation – participation that becomes embedded within the work itself – and delineating different approaches that are employed independently or in combination by the authors and producers

Cultural Heritage Storytelling, Engagement and Management in the Era of Big Data and the Semantic Web

The current Special Issue launched with the aim of further enlightening important CH areas, inviting researchers to submit original/featured multidisciplinary research works related to heritage crowdsourcing, documentation, management, authoring, storytelling, and dissemination. Audience engagement is considered very important at both sites of the CH production–consumption chain (i.e., push and pull ends). At the same time, sustainability factors are placed at the center of the envisioned analysis. A total of eleven (11) contributions were finally published within this Special Issue, enlightening various aspects of contemporary heritage strategies placed in today’s ubiquitous society. The finally published papers are related but not limited to the following multidisciplinary topics:Digital storytelling for cultural heritage;Audience engagement in cultural heritage;Sustainability impact indicators of cultural heritage;Cultural heritage digitization, organization, and management;Collaborative cultural heritage archiving, dissemination, and management;Cultural heritage communication and education for sustainable development;Semantic services of cultural heritage;Big data of cultural heritage;Smart systems for Historical cities – smart cities;Smart systems for cultural heritage sustainability