An audience perspective on the second screen phenomenon

Second screen applications are among the latest of the TV industry’s innovations to retain the TV viewer’s attention in a challenging multi-screen environment. These applications can be regarded as an extension of TV content consumed on a TV set towards lightweight portable devices such as tablets. While numerous commercial instances are available internationally and the existing literature on the topic from a technical perspective is extensive, the audience side of this phenomenon has been paid far less attention to. Moreover, in the case of Flanders, the successful commercial implementation of second screen applications remains limited. In this research, we aim to elicit what TV viewers’ expectations and preferences are regarding second screen functionalities. By applying means-end theory and a laddering approach we were able to discern how these preferences subsequently relate to the TV show itself, the consequences for the viewing experience, as well as how second screen applications and usages are expected to fit in the viewer’s everyday life

Exile, return, record : exploring historical narratives and community resistance through participatory filmmaking in 'post-conflict’ Guatemala

Following previous experiences of violence and forced displacement, ‘the returnees’ from the Guatemalan campesino community ‘Copal AA la Esperanza’ are now defending their territory against the construction of a hydroelectric dam. The returnees unexpectedly mobilized me as a Belgian historian to ‘make’ their ‘shared history’ and produce a documentary about their past and present struggle. The aim of this article is to reflect on how and why I developed a participatory, filmmaking-based methodology to tackle this challenge. I focus on filmmaking, participation and knowledge production to demonstrate the epistemological and ethical benefits of a dialogue between disciplines and methodologies as much as between academic and community practices and concepts. As such, I exemplify my visual participatory approach through its engagement with post-colonial histories and the co-creation of shared knowledge at the intersection of community and research interests. Moreover, I demonstrate how filmmaking can be developed as a grounded, visual, and narrative approach connecting media activism with ‘performative ethnography’. Combining insights from participatory action research (PAR) with Johannes Fabian’s notion of ‘performance’, I argue for ‘nonextractivist methodologies’; ‘knowing with’ instead of ‘knowing-about’. From being a side project and a matter of research ethics, participatory filmmaking turned for me into an investigative tool to explore the collective production and mobilization of historical narratives. I argue that participatory research should not be limited to communities participating in research projects; researchers can equally participate in community projects without this obstructing scientific research. In sum, participatory visual methods challenge us to reconsider the role of academics in (post-conflict) settings

Health system design and performance: what can other countries learn from the Nordic experience?

<p class="Abstract"><span lang="EN-GB">Nordic health systems are amongst the strongest in the developed world. This paper discusses their strengths and lessons for other health systems under five headings: sources of finance, provider payment, organization, regulation, and persuasion. It attributes the good performance of Nordic systems to good governance of the institutions of health care, the behaviour and attitude of citizens, and high levels of cooperation in Nordic countries. The paper notes that there is only modest use of competition or payment incentives in the provider market. It suggests that improving information on the performance of providers and other institutions is an important priority for the future.</span></p

Media Innovation in a Strange Place : Newspaper Differentiation on Åland

Peer reviewe

Carnal hermeneutics and the digital game

Carnal hermeneutics claims that the body makes sense of the world by making distinctions and evaluating those distinctions in a non-predicative mode. This article makes the case that ludohermeneutics can be enriched by attending to the way in which the body makes sense of digital games and advances carnal hermeneutics as a way of theorising this process. The article introduces carnal hermeneutics, argues for its relevance to ludo-hermeneutics, and outlines three examples of how carnal hermeneutics can be used to theorise sense-making in digital games. The first example demonstrates the capacity for touch-screen games to put us in a new relationship with the image. The second example shows how generic control schemas can take on new meanings in different games. The third example shows how marketing of game controllers draws on conventional attitudes to touch to make digital game touch meaningful

Humanist evaluation methods in locative media design

Media design can be used for research purposes if it includes a clearly defined research question, and clear evaluation to see whether an answer to the research question has been found. Using a project with locative media for classical music communication as our example, we discuss common evaluation methods from the User Experience field, observing that they all tend to test “interface” and not “content.” Instead we propose three other methods of evaluation, that have a basis in humanist theories, such as textual analysis and genre studies: (1) Qualitative interviews with evaluators after the evaluation, asking them to describe the service in their own words, followed by a semantic analysis to get at how they have understood the service. (2) Within-subject A/B tests with alternative versions that are different in key aspects. (3) Peer review by experienced design researchers, who are likely to have a more fine-tuned vocabulary to express their opinions

As Wordnets do Português

Series: "Oslo Studies in Language". ISSN 1890-9639. 7(1), 2015.Not many years ago it was usual to comment on the lack of an open lexical- semantic knowledge base, following the lines of Princeton WordNet, but for Portuguese. Today, the landscape has changed significantly, and re- searchers that need access to this specific kind of resource have not one, but several alternatives to choose from. The present article describes the wordnet-like resources currently available for Portuguese. It provides some context on their origin, creation approach, size and license for utilization. Apart from being an obvious starting point for those looking for a computational resource with information on the meaning of Portuguese words, this article describes the resources available, compares them and lists some plans for future work, sketching ideas for potential collaboration between the projects described.CLUPFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

La Retórica cultural en el contexto de la Neorretórica

En este trabajo analizamos los presupuestos de la Retórica cultural concebida y desarrollada por Tomás Albaladejo en los últimos años. Este análisis nos permite considerarla, junto a otras Retóricas –como la Retórica general propuesta por Antonio García Berrio treinta años antes– como una de las orientaciones más importantes en el contexto de la Neorretórica actual. La Retórica cultural se revela como uno de los instrumentos teórico-metodológicos fundamentales para la definitiva recuperación de la ciencia clásica del discurso persuasivo de su paulatino empobrecimiento y reducción a lo largo de la historia.In this paper we analyse the foundations of the cultural Rhetoric conceived and developed by Tomás Albaladejo in recent years. This analysis allows us to consider it, along with other Rhetorics –such as the general Rhetoric proposed by Antonio García Berrio thirty years before– as one of the most important trends in the framework of current Neorhetoric. The cultural Rhetoric is revealed as one of the fundamental theoretical and methodological tools for the definitive recovery of the classical science of persuasive discourse from its gradual impoverishment and reduction throughout history.Este trabajo es resultado de la investigación realizada en el proyecto de investigación METAPHORA, de Referencia FFI2014-53391-P, financiado por la Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación

Stagger Lee : how violent nostalgia created an American folk song standard

“Stagger” Lee Shelton (1865-1912) was an African-American carriage driver and sometime-pimp from Missouri. He became immortalized in song as a folklore antihero after murdering a drinking partner following a political argument gone bad in a St Louis saloon on Christmas day, 1895. Sentenced to 25 years in prison, Shelton died in Missouri State Penitentiary after violating his parole with a subsequent conviction for assault and robbery. The song, Stack-a-Lee was first documented in 1897, becoming well known in African American communities along the lower Mississippi River over the following decade as Stagolee, Stagger Lee, Stack OLee and other variants. Two versions were published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1911, with notable recordings entering the charts in the 1920s and beyond. Stagger Lee embodies the archetype of a violent and dangerous antihero as his story is retold, and reimagined or referenced in film, becoming a potent symbol of racial conflict in the United States.In both music and cinematic reincarnations, Stagger Lee seems to have an enduring popularity, partly due to the changing nature of his story, which ensures his tale remains up-to-date (it was most recently adapted to a musical in 2015). This article considers how and why this paean to violence, with its fetishistic vision of extreme masculinity, has become something of a standard in the American folk canon

Designing Communication Design

Innovating in the field of new media genres requires methods for producing designs that can succeed in being disseminated and used outside of design research labs. This article uses the author's experiences with the development of university courses in communication design to address the research question: How can we design courses to give students the competencies they need to work as designers of new media? Based on existing approaches from UX design and other fields, I present a model that has demonstrated its usefulness in the development of commercial products and services. The model emphasises rapid techniques for user research and ideation; genre analysis; use of pitching and storytelling as a form of prototyping; and humanist methods for evaluation and critique