Itineraries of an Anthropologist. Studies in Honour of Massimo Raveri

This book is being dedicated to Massimo Raveri on the occasion of his retirement. It is designed to recreate the various thematic itineraries that he has traced and followed in his career. Each of the essays included represents a topic in which Prof. Raveri has shown great interest, paving the way for further studies. In offering these essays to him, his friends and colleagues are both bearing witness to his interest in such topics and contributing to their study. Contributions by former students of Prof. Raveri’s further show how these fields of study are being developed in his footsteps

Exploring visual representation of sound in computer music software through programming and composition

Presented through contextualisation of the portfolio works are developments of a practice in which the acts of programming and composition are intrinsically connected. This practice-based research (conducted 2009–2013) explores visual representation of sound in computer music software. Towards greater understanding of composing with the software medium, initial questions are taken as stimulus to explore the subject through artistic practice and critical thinking. The project begins by asking: How might the ways in which sound is visually represented influence the choices that are made while those representations are being manipulated and organised as music? Which aspects of sound are represented visually, and how are those aspects shown? Recognising sound as a psychophysical phenomenon, the physical and psychological aspects of aesthetic interest to my work are identified. Technological factors of mediating these aspects for the interactive visual-domain of software are considered, and a techno-aesthetic understanding developed. Through compositional studies of different approaches to the problem of looking at sound in software, on screen, a number of conceptual themes emerge in this work: the idea of software as substance, both as a malleable material (such as in live coding), and in terms of outcome artefacts; the direct mapping between audio data and screen pixels; the use of colour that maintains awareness of its discrete (as opposed to continuous) basis; the need for integrated display of parameter controls with their target data; and the tildegraph concept that began as a conceptual model of a gramophone and which is a spatio-visual sound synthesis technique related to wave terrain synthesis. The spiroid-frequency-space representation is introduced, contextualised, and combined both with those themes and a bespoke geometrical drawing system (named thisis), to create a new modular computer music software environment named sdfsys

Fusion of Remote Sensing Images and Social Media Text Messages for Building Function Classification

Genaue Daten über Gebäudefunktionen sind für lokale Regierungen wichtig, um Ressourcen planen zu können. Satellitenbilder könnten zur Bestimmung dieser Funktionen zu grob aufgelöst sein. Daher werden in dieser Arbeit individuelle Gebäude aus 42 Städten zusätzlich mit mehrsprachigen Tweets klassifiziert und mit hochauflösenden Luftbildern fusioniert. Dadurch wird eine Genauigkeit von 75% erreicht. Bild- und Textmerkmale scheinen komplementär. Deshalb kann die Fusion die Ergebnisse verbessern

DigiPal: Cross-Cultural & Interlingual Mobile Interaction for Children

This thesis contributes research and analysis towards, and the design and development of, a Digital Pen pal application (DigiPal) for children from two different countries and languages. Children from a developed and a developing country came together and participated in multiple studies for the design of the app with their ideas and input both matching and differing. Feedback and thoughts provided by them contributed to the design of the app and towards a generalised model for similar applications. DigiPal required a translation system to be integrated into the App so that the children could talk in their own language which not only makes sure they can talk confidently, but also contributes to preserve local languages. Google translate was the option which was used in this case following a study that assured its effectiveness. Accuracy was relatively low but higher levels of Understandability gave some hope to advocate the possibility of use of Google translate as a translator and most importantly as a facilitator of cross-cultural chat. A real time letter exchange activity, with children from Nepal and England was conducted. In a deep analysis of text entry errors and their impact on translation, and on other translation errors and their possible causes, findings show why and where Google translate struggled. However, children’s reaction to the translated letters, as well as analysis that shows how improving text entry correctness can support the translation software, shows that regardless of some error children could communicate and they enjoyed the activity overall. This work also contributes insights for design that are needed beyond translation to create an engaging and culturally level experience. Two separate studies were conducted to gather some culturally influenced attributes from the children. In one, children drew pictures to introduce themselves whereas in the second one they drew pictures of games they would like to have in an application like DigiPal. The thesis concludes with a generalisable model that can be used by other app developers to consider how to create culturally level products for children from different countries and with different languages

Texts of Discomfort: Interactive Storytelling Art

Can discomfort be blissful? This volume presents an in-depth reflection of the selected artworks for the Art Exhibition of the 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling - ICIDS 2020 - organized at Bournemouth University - UK, during the most memorable year of the XXI century (so far). The title of the book is the homonym of the curatorial theme of the exhibition Texts of Discomfort. In these pages, interactive storytellers explain their work and the ways discomfort - and bliss - is rooted in their art

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

Rendezvous: a collaboration between art, research and communities

The Remediating the social book includes full proceedings of the conference in Edinburgh, 2012, including full texts of essays and full colour artist's pages with documentation of works commissioned for the Remediating the social exhibitio

AIUCD 2021 - Book of Extended Abstracts

Il decimo convegno annuale dell'Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale ha nell’edizione 2021 un titolo peculiare e importante: "DH per la società: e-guaglianza, partecipazione, diritti e valori nell’era digitale". Questo volume raccoglie gli abstract estesi e sottoposti a review per la conferenza di AIUCD2021 tenutasi in forma virtuale a Pisa