CreaTable Content and Tangible Interaction in Aphasia

Multimedia digital content (combining pictures, text and music) is ubiquitous. The process of creating such content using existing tools typically requires complex, language-laden interactions which pose a challenge for users with aphasia (a language impairment following brain injury). Tangible interactions offer a potential means to address this challenge, however, there has been little work exploring their potential for this purpose. In this paper, we present CreaTable – a platform that enables us to explore tangible interaction as a means of supporting digital content creation for people with aphasia. We report details of the co-design of CreaTable and findings from a digital creativity workshop. Workshop findings indicated that CreaTable enabled people with aphasia to create something they would not otherwise have been able to. We report how users’ aphasia profiles affected their experience, describe tensions in collaborative content creation and provide insight into more accessible content creation using tangibles

Reconnecting Schools and Neighborhoods: A proposal for School Centered Community Revitalization in Baltimore Maryland

This project explores the concept of school-centered community as a key aspect in assisting urban renewal through architecture. It employs this concept through the architectural design of a middle school in Baltimore, Maryland that has a focus on music. The existing context of an urban site in the Oldtown area is analyzed to generate a solution to the area’s educational problems as well as to provide an urban renewal plan. In order to develop a project that has great potential to succeed, the projects site was specifically chosen based on its context

Multimedia Chinese Web Search Engines: A Survey

The objective of this paper is to explore the state of multimedia search functionality on major general and dedicated Web search engines in Chinese language. The authors studied: a) how many Chinese Web search engines presently make use of multimedia searching, and b) the type of multimedia search functionality available. Specifically, the following were examined: a) multimedia features - features allowing multimedia search; and b) extent of personalization - the extent to which a search engine Web site allows users to control multimedia search. Overall, Chinese Web search engines offer limited multimedia searching functionality. The significance of the study is based on two factors: a) little research has been conducted on Chinese Web search engines, and b) the instrument used in the study and the results obtained by this research could help users, Web designers, and Web search engine developers. By large, general Web search engines support more multimedia features than specialized one

Rapid prototyping and fast user trial of multimedia broadcast and cellular services

This paper presents the results of fast user trial of multimedia services that are enabled when a mobile terminal has access to converged services over digital broadcast and mobile telecommunications networks. It first describes the motivations behind developing this system and describes the service scenarios that benefit most from it. It then provides an overview of the service components of the test case scenario. Finally, it presents the results of fast user trials on end users of the services that were developed. This work was conducted as part of the EU-funded CISMUNDUS project

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

Planning Curricular Proposals on Sound and Music with Prospective Secondary-School Teachers

Sound is a preferred context to build foundations on wave phenomena, one of the most important disciplinary referents in physics. It is also one of the best-set frameworks to achieve transversality, overcoming scholastic level and activating emotional aspects which are naturally connected with every day life, as well as with music and perception. Looking at sound and music by a transversal perspective - a border-line approach between science and art, is the adopted statement for a teaching proposal using meta-cognition as a strategy in scientific education. This work analyzes curricular proposals on musical acoustics, planned by prospective secondary-school teachers in the framework of a Formative Intervention Module answering the expectation of making more effective teaching scientific subjects by improving creative capabilities, as well as leading to build logical and scientific categorizations able to consciously discipline artistic activity in music students. With this aim, a particular emphasis is given to those concepts - like sound parameters and structural elements of a musical piece, which are best fitted to be addressed on a transversal perspective, involving simultaneously physics, psychophysics and music.Comment: 12 pages with 5 figures. Submitted for publication in Physics Curriculum Design, Development and Validation - GIREP 2008 book of selected papers, 200