CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Framing digital image credibility: image manipulation problems, perceptions and solutions

Image manipulation is subverting the credibility of photographs as a whole. Currently there is no practical solution for asserting the authenticity of a photograph. People express their concern about this when asked but continue to operate in a ‘business as usual’ fashion. While a range of digital forensic technologies has been developed to address falsification of digital photographs, such technologies begin with ‘sourceless’ images and conclude with results in equivocal terms of probability, while not addressing the meaning and content contained within the image. It is interesting that there is extensive research into computer-based image forgery detection, but very little research into how we as humans perceive, or fail to perceive, these forgeries when we view them. The survey, eye-gaze tracking experiments and neural network analysis undertaken in this research contribute to this limited pool of knowledge. The research described in this thesis investigates human perceptions of images that are manipulated and, by comparison, images that are not manipulated. The data collected, and their analyses, demonstrate that humans are poor at identifying that an image has been manipulated. I consider some of the implications of digital image manipulation, explore current approaches to image credibility, and present a potential digital image authentication framework that uses technology and tools that exploit social factors such as reputation and trust to create a framework for technologically packaging/wrapping images with social assertions of authenticity, and surfaced metadata information. The thesis is organised into 6 chapters. Chapter 1: Introduction I briefly introduce the history of photography, highlighting its importance as reportage, and discuss how it has changed from its introduction in the early 19th century to today. I discuss photo manipulation and consider how it has changed along with photography. I describe the relevant literature on the subject of image authentication and the use of eye gaze tracking and neural nets in identifying the role of human vision in image manipulation detection, and I describe my area of research within this context. Chapter 2: Literature review I describe the various types of image manipulation, giving examples, and then canvas the literature to describe the landscape of image manipulation problems and extant solutions, namely: • the nature of image manipulation, • investigations of human perceptions of image manipulation, • eye gaze tracking and manipulated images, • known efforts to create solutions to the problem of preserving unadulterated photographic representations and the meanings they hold. Finally, I position my research activities within the context of the literature. Chapter 3: The research I describe the survey and experiments I undertook to investigate attitudes toward image manipulation, research human perceptions of manipulated and unmanipulated images, and to trial elements of a new wrapper-style file format that I call .msci (mobile self-contained image), designed to address image authenticity issues. Methods, results and discussion for each element are presented in both explanatory text and by presentation of papers resulting from the experiments. Chapter 4: Analysis of eye gaze data using classification neural networks I describe pattern classifying neural network analysis applied to selected data obtained from the experiments and the insights this analysis provided into the opaque realm of cognitive perception as seen through the lens of eye gaze. Chapter 5: Discussion I synthesise and discuss the outcomes of the survey and experiments. I discuss the outcomes of this research, and consider the need for a distinction between photographs and photo art. I offer a theoretical formula within which the overall authenticity of an image can be assessed. In addition I present a potential image authentication framework built around the .msci file format, designed in consideration of my investigation of the requirements of the image manipulation problem space and the experimental work undertaken in this research. Chapter 6: Conclusions and future work This thesis concludes with a summary of the outcomes of my research, and I consider the need for future experimentation to expand on the insights gained to date. I also note some ways forward to develop an image authentication framework to address the ongoing problem of image authenticity

Power and Politics in the Media: The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 9

Power and Politics in the Media: The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 9 features articles from multiple disciplines that use the C-SPAN Video Library to explore recent controversies in American politics. Topics covered include Supreme Court nominations, Supreme Court oral arguments, rhetoric on disasters and COVID-19, and the effect of clothing on the approval of women in power. What unites these topics is the unique use of the video record of C-SPAN to explore the intersections of politics, power, rhetoric, and the media in the contemporary United States. Written in accessible prose, this volume showcases some of the most pressing issues today in a variety of political and communication issues while demonstrating video research methodologies

Assessment of plastics in the National Trust: a case study at Mr Straw's House

The National Trust is a charity that cares for over 300 publically accessible historic buildings and their contents across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. There have been few previous studies on preservation of plastics within National Trust collections, which form a significant part of the more modern collections of objects. This paper describes the design of an assessment system which was successfully trialled at Mr Straws House, a National Trust property in Worksop, UK. This system can now be used for future plastic surveys at other National Trust properties. In addition, the survey gave valuable information about the state of the collection, demonstrating that the plastics that are deteriorating are those that are known to be vulnerable, namely cellulose nitrate/acetate, PVC and rubber. Verifying this knowledge of the most vulnerable plastics enables us to recommend to properties across National Trust that these types should be seen as a priority for correct storage and in-depth recording

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking environmental narratives: towards understanding human environment interactions through computational text analysis

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Representing the MAJORITY WORLD famine, photojournalism and the Changing Visual Economy

Our knowledge of the world is mediated. This means knowledge depends on representations provided to us from a variety of sources. However, we should not limit representation to a concern with language, or suggest that representations produce fictions unconnected to the real world. To avoid these problems we need to understand mediated knowledge and representation in terms of discourse. This thesis examines aspects of a particular discourse, the visual discourse of photojournalism, and explores its role in constructing the imagined geography of Africa. This thesis investigates how photographic illustrations of Africa play a role in constructing knowledge of the continent for mainstream UK audiences. It undertakes this in terms of the ‘Minority World’ and the ‘Majority World’ in order to challenge the assumptions of superiority and inferiority associated with traditional representations of ‘First World/Third World’ or ‘developed/underdeveloped’. Central to the discussion is the notion of a specific photographic point of view based on the author’s background as a Minority World photographer who has undertaken extensive work in the Majority World. The thesis considers how historical photographic representations of African countries that are beyond the personal experience of UK mainstream audiences, and the formation of key compositions in a particular style to represent famine, were repeated through the last century and how these compositions relate to current public understandings of the Majority World as a particular place. Through this discussion the thesis critically analyses public consumption of such images and argues the construction of key events (disasters, famines, etc.) are central to the imaginary construction of the continent of Africa. It argues that colonial relations of power and knowledge, and the production of ‘otherness’ continue to influence contemporary images of the Majority World. Taking the1984-5 Ethiopian famine as a key event in the formation of geographic visualisations of the African continent, the thesis both considers this event in detail and traces its influence to the formation of contemporary photographic illustrations. Through critical discourse analysis, extensive interviews with photographers, fieldwork, and surveys the thesis examines contemporary photojournalistic coverage of a single event and how it affects UK public understandings of Africa. The photojournalistic representations of famine in Africa are then considered in terms of the rapidly changing global image economy (in which the move to digital production and distribution is transforming photographic practice), the rise of local photographers, and the influence of the visual discourses on economic stability and growth of the communities in which their subjects live. These arguments come together in the 2003 case of photographic reports from Bob Geldof’s return to Ethiopia during another purported food crisis. The thesis asks if the changes in the image economy and recent examples of new photographic practice, especially that which follows the codes of conduct for imagery put in place after the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5, demonstrate the potential for changing the way ‘Africa’ is constructed as an imagined geography for UK publics, and, if so, how? It grounds the argument in an extended conclusion, which examines the assignment the author carried out in Mali in November 2005 in conjunction with Oxfam GB. This photographic commission demonstrated the difficulty of finding an alternative visualisation of food insecurity (famine) that meets the demands of non-government organisations’ (NGOs) ethical picture policies yet satisfies the requirements of mainstream media in the UK

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities