Extraction and Analysis of Dynamic Conversational Networks from TV Series

Identifying and characterizing the dynamics of modern tv series subplots is an open problem. One way is to study the underlying social network of interactions between the characters. Standard dynamic network extraction methods rely on temporal integration, either over the whole considered period, or as a sequence of several time-slices. However, they turn out to be inappropriate in the case of tv series, because the scenes shown onscreen alternatively focus on parallel storylines, and do not necessarily respect a traditional chronology. In this article, we introduce Narrative Smoothing, a novel network extraction method taking advantage of the plot properties to solve some of their limitations. We apply our method to a corpus of 3 popular series, and compare it to both standard approaches. Narrative smoothing leads to more relevant observations when it comes to the characterization of the protagonists and their relationships, confirming its appropriateness to model the intertwined storylines constituting the plots.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1602.0781

Exploring TV Seriality and Television Studies through Data-Driven Approaches

The chapter discusses the use of data-driven approaches in television studies, which has become possible due to the increasing availability of digital data. Computational techniques can be used to analyze cultural artifacts, gain insights into audience reactions to specific shows or episodes, and investigate patterns and trends in television programming over time. The chapter also highlights the challenges of analyzing television series, which are complex open systems that interact with external factors such as the production process, audience feedback, and cultural and social context. Content analysis, which involves qualitative and quantitative methods based on the coding process and data collection, can be used to analyze various elements of a TV series. Generative AI is also discussed, which refers to the use of deep multi-modal algorithms to generate new content such as images, speech, and text. Generative methods like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Stable Diffusion can create new content that is almost indistinguishable from real data. While generating videos is more challenging, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) like LSTMs can capture the temporal dynamics of the scenes to create interesting and promising applications for complex, but short-duration videos

Introduction: Popularizing Instability (Chapter 1), Introducing Narrative Instability (Chapter 2)

The following text is an excerpt from the book Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture, which was originally published in 2019 with Universitätsverlag Winter as part of the series American Studies – A Monograph Series. The book introduces the concept of ‘narrative instability’ in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend’s poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text’s plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans

Review of practice-led research in art, design & architecture

This review report sets out the outcomes of a 10 month investigation to describe the landscape of practice-led research in Art, Design and Architecture (ADA) in the UK and beyond. We were asked for a qualitative review but of course it has been important to gather some numbers to check and illustrate our observations. We have consulted widely, both face to face and in the virtual world, with experts and novices in the UK and around the world. We have tried to strike a balance between the natural desire of our colleagues to debate the more contentious aspects of this territory (they were never going to forgo that opportunity) and the equally strong wish of the AHRC that we should provide a clear description of what is happening. We have collected some diverse examples of research and subjected them to various examinations. We have also examined a selection of research projects funded by AHRC and other projects by creative practitioners, funded by a non-research organisation. From all this we have been able to describe the landscape in a straightforward sense: We have measures of the proportions of ADA academics involved in practice-led research. We have clarified differences in the ways that the different ADA disciplines engage with practice-led research and identified some problems that indicate possible future support strategies. We have discussed some problems with general definitions of research and identified issues that should be addressed to ensure that the AHRC definition can be applied to the full range of practice-led research. We have picked out some specific case examples that illustrate the range of contexts, methods and contributions made by practice-led researchers, and more are described in detail in Appendix F. We have also sought to assess how this research relates to the wider international picture in which the UK appears to have a strong position in both volume and development of research. We have also set out some issues that affect this community of researchers: What strengths and weaknesses have we observed and where is there a need to support development? Do the AHRC definition of research and guidance on practice-led research provide an effective framework? We have illustrated the state of development of research in ADA, and some reasons why it is less robust than might be expected from such long established disciplines. We recommend that the career path of researchers in ADA needs some attention and make some suggestions about how that could be achieved. We have also indicated some areas of inquiry that might be supported to advance the theory and methods of practice-led research. In particular we have come to the conclusion that conventional ideas of contribution to knowledge or understanding may not be serving us well. This is significant to fine artists but we believe that it relevant across ADA and a shared effort to develop appropriate new models would be a constructive development. The full set of recommendations can be found in chapter 5

Under construction: recollecting the museum of the moving image

On February 27, 2008 the Museum of the Moving Image launched its $65 million renovation and expansion with a digital groundbreaking. Since opening its doors in Astoria, New York in 1988, the museum, originally devoted to film and television, has embraced digital media. From its “Hollywood East” Astoria Studio historic landmark site to its popular website, the Museum of the Moving Image provides a unique setting for studying the museumification of moving image culture, particularly the production and consumption of moving images. In response to the Museum of the Moving Image’s domestication of moving image culture in its core exhibition, Behind the Screen, this study recollects the museum and in doing so performs an alternative domestication. The alternative domestication modeled by this study involves critically touring and detouring the core exhibition in an effort to reframe notions such as home, family, work, and play in relation to moving image culture in a manner that extends beyond the walls of the museum and problematizes particular practices of display. In response to specific instances of domestication in Behind the Screen, the major stops on the tour are: the interactive Video Flipbook experience; the movie palace installation Tut’s Fever, a commissioned art work by Red Grooms in collaboration with Lysiane Luong; and the artifact “Martin’s First Haircut,” a home movie produced in 1947 by Irving Shaw, the father of Rochelle Slovin, the museum’s founding director. Poised at a critical point in the museum’s development, this study is attentive to the transitory nature of museums, and it demonstrates ways in which we recollect our memories and ourselves through museum-going and technologies of reproduction

Sensing Sounding: Close Listening To Experimental Asian American Poetry

This dissertation examines a selection of Asian American experimental poetries from the 1960’s to the present day through the sensory paradigms of avant-garde aesthetic discourse. By approaching both the poem and racial formation in sonic terms, this dissertation project argues that rethinking the sensory as well as the political ramifications of sounding can help us recuperate Asian American poets’ often overlooked experimentation with poetic form. Specifically, I read the works of Marilyn Chin, Theresa Cha, John Yau, Cathy Park Hong, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Tan Lin. By tracing the historical conditions of Orientalist objectification and re-interrogating postmodern theories of sight, sound, and the body, I seek to show how these poets’ invocation of sonic paradigms reworks those theories and to broaden our critical vocabulary for writing about sound in poetry

Melaina Kole

Denne mastergradsavhandlingen er et kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid om melankoli og avhengighetssamfunnet gjennom autetnografi og fenomenologi, analysert opp i mot utvalgte teorier og empiri. Ved systematisk oppføring av teoretiske perspektiver, metoder og melankoli har jeg siktet mot å tilegne meg så mye data som mulig, for å øke sjangsen for suksess ved definering av melankoli, og å utforske begrepets bruk og verdi gjennom empiri, historiske perspektiver og vitenskapsteorier. I den kunstneriske utforskningen vil avhengighetssamfunnet være hoved-temaet, men forbindelsen mellom melankoli og avhengighetssamfunnet er målet for det kreative eksperimentet som er den performative medieproduksjonen