Corona Haikus @ Women's Stories Exhibition

The Corona Haikus transmedia project has been selected to be part of the Women's Stories Exhibition (Ekate, Cyprus, 13-20 October 2021

Corona Haikus: a case study of interactive factual narrative that uses reflexive and evolutive agency as a strategy for deep personal and community change

When I moved from linear documentary production to the newly emerging field of interactive storytelling in the early 2000, I was excited by the potentialities of the Web, especially the possibility of co-creation in factual storytelling. Looking back, I can clearly see that what attracted me was the exploration of how factual narratives could make use of two affordances that are unique to digital media: user agency and interactivity. More than twenty years later, I am still experimenting with ways to use interactivity to facilitate co-creation of reality and move away from simple representation in documentary making (Gaudenzi 2013). In this paper, I will use the Corona Haikus project (2020), to question the current understanding of user agency in participatory interactive narratives. I have chosen such project because I have personally been involved in it as a co-author, but also as a participant, and therefore I have both co-designed its user’s agency, and experienced it as a user. I will argue that agency in interactive documentary (i-doc) should be considered as a space of user empowerment that does not always have to affect the interactive narrative itself, because it can also be placed outside of the narrated story. The Corona Haikus example will be used to demonstrate that, in participatory narratives, deep individual and societal impact can be designed by mixing different types of mini-agencies and by orchestrating them as a journey of empowerment that is gradual and evolutive. Reflexive and evolutive agencies will be defined and presented as new ways to approach impact design in interactive narratives

The WHAT IF IT Process, Moving from Story-telling to Story-experiencing

The WHAT IF IT process is a unique concept development methodology that has been designed to facilitate the ideation of digital interactive narratives. While the production of narrative driven digital artefacts has been developing fast in the last fifteen years, very little research has been done on ideation processes, and no academic methodological evaluation has been shared to date. By sharing the results of a three years action research project where existing storytelling, design thinking and agile prototyping techniques have been mixed to create an innovative methodology, the aim of this paper is to formulate a framework for interactive narrative development

Corona Haikus

When I moved from linear documentary production to the newly emerging field of interactive storytelling in early 2000, I was excited by the potentialities of the Web, especially the possibility of co-creation in factual storytelling. Looking back, I can clearly see that what attracted me was the exploration of how factual narratives could make use of two unique affordances of digital media: user agency and interactivity. More than twenty years later, I am still experimenting with ways to use interactivity to facilitate co-creation of reality and move away from the representational tendency of linear documentaries (Gaudenzi 2013). In this paper, I will use the Corona Haikus project (2020) to question the current understanding of user agency in participatory interactive narratives. I have chosen such project because I have personally been involved in it as a co-author, but also as a participant, and therefore I have both co-designed its user’s agency, and experienced it as a user. I will argue that agency in interactive documentary (i-doc) should be considered as a space of user empowerment that does not always have to affect the interactive narrative itself, because it can also be placed outside of the narrated story. The Corona Haikus example will be used to demonstrate that, in participatory narratives, deep individual and societal impact can be designed by mixing different types of mini-agencies and by orchestrating them as a journey of empowerment that is gradual and evolutive. Reflexive and evolutive agencies will be defined and presented as new ways to approach impact design in interactive narratives

The role of magnetic field for quiescence-outburst models in CVs

In this paper we present the elementary assumptions of our research on the role of the magnetic field in modelling the quiescence-outbursts cycle in Cataclysmic Variables (CVs). The behaviour of the magnetic field is crucial not only to integrate the disk instability model (Osaki 1974), but also to determine the cause and effect nexus among parameters affecting the behavior of complex systems. On the ground of our interpretation of the results emerging from the literature, we suggest that in models describing DNe outbursts, such as the disk instability model, the secondary instability model (Bath 1973) and the thermonuclear runaway model (Mitrofanov 1978), the role of the magnetic field is at least twofold. On the one hand, it activates a specific dynamic pathway for the accreting matter by channelling it. On the other hand, it could be indirectly responsible for switching a particular outburst modality. In order to represent these two roles of the magnetic field, we need to integrate the disk instability model by looking at the global behaviour of the system under analysis. Stochastic resonance in dynamo models, we believe, is a suitable candidate for accomplishing this task. We shall present the MHD model including this mechanism elsewhere.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, CTU Proceedings, Acta Polytechnica (accepted

Detection of low-velocity impact-induced delaminations in composite laminates using Auto-Regressive models

In this paper, the detection of delaminations in carbon-fiber-reinforced-plastic (CFRP) laminate plates induced by low-velocity impacts (LVI) is investigated by means of Auto-Regressive (AR) models obtained from the time histories of the acquired responses of the composite specimens. A couple of piezoelectric patches for actuation and sensing purposes are employed. The proposed structural health monitoring (SHM) routine begins with the selection of the suitable locations of the piezoelectric transducers via the numerical analysis of the curvature mode shapes of the CFRP plates. The normalized data recorded for the undamaged plate configuration are then analyzed to obtain the most suitable AR model using five techniques based on the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), the Akaike Final Prediction Error (FPE), the Partial Autocorrelation Function (PAF), the Root Mean Squared (RMS) of the AR residuals for different order p, and the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is then applied on the AR model parameters to enhance the performance of the proposed delamination identification routine. Results show the effectiveness of the developed procedure when a reduced number of sensors is available

Contravariant Boussinesq equations for the simulation of wave transformation, breaking and run-up

We propose an integral form of the fully non-linear Boussinesq equations in contravariant formulation, in which Christoffel symbols are avoided, in order to simulate wave transformation phenomena, wave breaking and near shore currents in computational domains representing the complex morphology of real coastal regions. The motion equations retain the term related to the approximation to the second order of the vertical vorticity. A new Upwind Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory scheme for the solution of the fully non- linear Boussinesq equations on generalised curvilinear coordinate systems is proposed. The equations are rearranged in order to solve them by a high resolution hybrid finite volume–finite difference scheme. The conservative part of the above-mentioned equations, consisting of the convective terms and the terms related to the free surface elevation, is discretised by a high-order shock- capturing finite volume scheme; dispersive terms and the term related to the approximation to the second order of the vertical vorticity are discretised by a cell-centred finite difference scheme. The shock-capturing method makes it possible to intrinsically model the wave breaking, therefore no additional terms are needed to take into account the breaking related energy dissipation in the surf zone. The model is applied on a real case regarding the simulation of wave fields and nearshore currents in the coastal region opposite Pescara harbour (Italy)

The interactive documentary as a Living Documentary

Interactive documentaries are digital non-linear narratives that usenew media to relate and describe reality. Since this form of factual narrative has onlyestablished itself in the last ten years (we can track its emergence through the evolutionof Web 2.0), we can say that it is still in its infancy. As a result, a lack of terminology andunderstanding of the specificities of the form is flagrant. This article aims at positioninginteractive documentaries as a form of itself (and not as a continuation of lineardocumentaries). It also introduces the notion of “Living Documentary”, where interactivedocumentaries are seen as a “living forms”. Drawing on Maturana and Varela’s notion of“autopoiesis” and Deleuze’s assemblage theory the definition of “Living Documentary”wants to put the emphasis on the relational nature of interactive documentaries and ontheir capacity to engender change