Entertainment Domains Research Articles

Investigating the NBA Servicescape: Fan Involvement, Team Loyalty, Perceptions of Atmospheric Music and Emotional Responses

Within the domain of entertainment and leisure services, sport is a unique experiential service-product. Further, sport consumer behavior has changed dramatically, as advances in technology have decreased barriers to and increased the scope of sport consumption. Sport consumers can now watch live, delayed, or recorded sport events when and where they choose. Therefore, sport organizations must focus on sustainability through the creation of a competitive advantage in the staging of live sport events. Given that the NBA product is consumed within an increasingly stimulating consumptive landscape (Andrews, 2006), this study sought to examine the relationship between NBA fans’ involvement, home-team attitudinal loyalty, perceptions of atmospheric music, and emotional responses to the servicescape. Data were collected, utilizing a cluster sampling procedure, during the 2010-2011 NBA season. Eight hundred, 42-item questionnaires were distributed during two games, a 53% rate of response resulted in the final sample (N = 425). Oneway MANOVAs, with follow-up descriptive discriminant analysis, were conducted to analyze the relationship between levels of NBA involvement and attitudinal loyalty to the home team and reported emotional responses to the environment, as well as reported interpretation of the atmospheric music. Results revealed heightened emotional responses among direct consumers. Further, highly involved and loyal participants reported increasingly positive perceptions of atmospheric music. Results support the significant influence servicescape elements have on the live sport-consumption experience. INTRODUCTION

Corporate communication: Analysing Marvel and DC

Abstract US publishers of superhero comic books are large media entertainment companies that develop and license not only superhero comic books, but also superhero movies, video games and various merchandise. These superhero media entertainment companies use certain strategic corporate communication guidelines. Based on a structured quantitative analysis of 1000 superhero media entertainment company tweets and twenty superhero comic books, it appears that the corporate communication of modern superhero media entertainment companies focus, from a promotional strategic point of view, on the comic books they publish. In addition to strategic promotional attention to superhero comic books, every company decides how much strategic attention is received by other superhero media entertainment domains, such as superhero movies, superhero video games and all types of superhero merchandise. The findings also show that company logos, company brand names and certain fictional superheroes are salient to strategic corporate communication of the superhero media entertainment companies. And every company decides how much promotional advertising within the published comic books is given to their own developed and licensed superhero products or to products and merchandise of other companies.

Semantic Characterization of Tweets Using Topic Models

In the entertainment domain users tweet about their expectations and opinions regarding upcoming, current and past experiences, while companies advertise and promote the shows. This characterization, important for customers and companies, goes beyond traditional sentiment analysis where the polarity of the sentiments expressed in opinions is usually identified as positive, negative or neutral. The authors investigate different tweet representation models, including bags of words and probabilistic topic models, to shed light on the semantics of the messages. Their experiments show that topic-based models generated with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) yield, most of the times, better categorizations when compared to TF-IDF based features, particularly when these models are enriched with natural language features and specific Twitter slang.

High-level change detection in RDF(S) KBs

With the increasing use of Web 2.0 to create, disseminate, and consume large volumes of data, more and more information is published and becomes available for potential data consumers, that is, applications/services, individual users and communities, outside their production site. The most representative example of this trend is Linked Open Data (LOD), a set of interlinked data and knowledge bases. The main challenge in this context is data governance within loosely coordinated organizations that are publishing added-value interlinked data on the Web, bringing together issues related to data management and data quality, in order to support the full lifecycle of data production, consumption, and management. In this article, we are interested in curation issues for RDF(S) data, which is the default data model for LOD. In particular, we are addressing change management for RDF(S) data maintained by large communities (scientists, librarians, etc.) which act as curators to ensure high quality of data. Such curated Knowledge Bases (KBs) are constantly evolving for various reasons, such as the inclusion of new experimental evidence or observations, or the correction of erroneous conceptualizations. Managing such changes poses several research problems, including the problem of detecting the changes (delta) between versions of the same KB developed and maintained by different groups of curators, a crucial task for assisting them in understanding the involved changes. This becomes all the more important as curated KBs are interconnected (through copying or referencing) and thus changes need to be propagated from one KB to another either within or across communities. This article addresses this problem by proposing a change language which allows the formulation of concise and intuitive deltas. The language is expressive enough to describe unambiguously any possible change encountered in curated KBs expressed in RDF(S), and can be efficiently and deterministically detected in an automated way. Moreover, we devise a change detection algorithm which is sound and complete with respect to the aforementioned language, and study appropriate semantics for executing the deltas expressed in our language in order to move backwards and forwards in a multiversion repository, using only the corresponding deltas. Finally, we evaluate through experiments the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms using real ontologies from the cultural, bioinformatics, and entertainment domains.

Convergence of application services in next-generation networks [Guest Editorial

The next-generation network is based on an all-IP endto- end network-layer infrastructure that comprises access, backbone, and egress, using different underlying wired or wireless technologies, and is enabled with quality of service (QoS) capabilities. An ever expanding set of sophisticated application services will take advantage of the QoS-enabled connectivity infrastructure of next-generation networks. These application services, their variety, their ease of use through a large variety of intelligent enduser devices, and their convergence and interworking across multiple domains will constitute the hallmarks of success in the next-generation service universe. Rudimentary forms of some of these application services are already deployed over the Internet. They range from communication services (e.g., VoIP, video, IM, email), to entertainment services that involve content delivery (e.g., music on demand, low to medium quality video on demand, gaming), to a vast array of data and information services (browsing, searching, e-commerce, information retrieval, software distribution, etc.). Since the Internet currently is not QoS-enabled, these services are typically offered on a best effort basis, often with inconsistent or unpredictable quality and fragmented end-user experience. Furthermore, most applications today have a nature; that is, they are offered independent of one another, each typically with its own user interface and other ancillary features like authentication, charging, and session management. This paradigm will begin to change in next-generation networks, first by enabling the applications to use the QoS capabilities of the underlying connectivity infrastructure to provide a consistently high-quality user experience. More significantly, however, applications will progressively lose their stovepipe nature to become increasingly more intertwined and composite, thereby becoming far more attractive and useful to the end user. This convergence, mash-up, blending, composition, and brokering of application services, and the reusable components or enablers that form the foundational building blocks for their realization across the domains of communication (IMS), entertainment (IPTV), information (web), and others, will constitute a defining, as well as differentiating, attribute of service architecture in next-generation networks.

Emerging Technologies and Applications on Interactive Entertainments

With the substantial development of digital technologies in multimedia, network communication and user interfaces, we are seeing an increasing number of applications of these technologies, in particular in the entertainment domain. They include computer gaming, e-learning, high-definition and interactive TVs, and virtual environments. The development of these applications typically involves the integration of existing technologies as well as the development of new technologies. This Introduction summarizes latest interactive entertainment technologies and applications, and briefly highlights some potential research directions. It also introduces the seven papers that are accepted to the special issue. Hopefully, this will provide the readers some insights into future research topics in interactive entertainment technologies and applications.

OXML: an Object XML Database Supporting Rich Media Indexing and Retrieval

There are countless animation movies available nowadays throughout the Internet. Rich media (including Flash and PowerPoint) presentations are increasingly gaining widespread usage, particularly in the domains of e-learning and digital entertainment. In order to allow these animation movies to be queried efficiently, in this article we present OXML - an Object XML database for storing and retrieving animation movies. After converting the movies into XML format, OXML stores the resultant XML data into a native object-oriented database. To enhance the retrieval of such XML objects, an indexing technique known as Structural Join Index Hierarchy (SJIH) is then applied to the OXML database. A detailed cost model for query execution through SJIH is developed. Our experimental studies on accessing Flash movies using SJIH has demonstrated performance advantageous when compared with other indexing techniques.

Country of origin effect on services: an evaluation of entertainment

With globalization in its full toll, customers today have awareness about and access to various foreign entertainment forms such as movies, music and performing arts like theatre and circus. This has magnified the need and scope of the studies on country of origin (COO) effects with respect to entertainment. However, upon reviewing the literature, it is found that, though voluminous literature exists in product context, only few studies have addressed COO effects in service contexts with negligible contribution pertaining to the domain of entertainment. This article tries to address this gap by finding out whether consumers attribute COO effects to various entertainment forms emanating from abroad. This study undertaken in an Indian urban youth context proves the existence of COO effects in consumers' evaluation of various foreign entertainment forms.

Mature Students Using Mobile Devices in Life and Learning

The paper reports on research concerned with learners’ uses of mobile technologies based on an international survey that targeted students registered in selected master’s and doctoral programmes in Australia, Hong Kong, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The survey findings were enriched by local knowledge, as the authors administered questionnaires in their own countries. The research gives an account of uses of handheld devices by students from departments of education, educational technology, engineering, and information technology in the domains of learning, work, social interaction and entertainment. The paper illuminates learners’ choices in the midst of evolving social practices, and challenges the common preconception that mobile devices are not suitable for academic study. In today’s global education marketplace, educators must know the technology habits and expectations of their students, including those from other countries. Knowing about students’ previous practices and the techno-cultural setting they come from can help institutions determine what mobile applications are most appropriate to support learning.

An open source integrated framework for rapid prototyping of multimodal affective applications in digital entertainment

Multimodal interfaces are becoming more and more an emerging leading-edge area of interest in the Digital Art and Entertainment Domain. This paper aims at proposing a new approach to develop applications relying on integration of multimodal modules which can capture and collect the emotional states of the audience, process them and provide a final emotional output. A concrete framework has been designed and is being developed to provide application designers with a powerful and easy-to-use set of tools for building up multimodal affective interfaces. The proposed approach has been conceived inside the FP6 EU co-funded CALLAS (Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems) Project.

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Advances in Interactive Digital Entertainment Technologies

With the significant development of digital technologies in recent years, we are seeing an increasing number of applications of these technologies, in particular in the entertainment domain. They may include computer games, e-learning, high- definition and interactive TVs, and virtual environments. The development of these applications typically involves the integration of existing technologies as well as the development of new technologies. The first International Workshop on Digital Entertainment Technologies 2008 (IDET’08) was held at Lanzhou University, China, in July 2008, in conjunction with the first IEEE International Conference on Ubi-media Computing (U-Media’08). This workshop was an initial effort to review various technological issues and challenges in digital entertainments. A special emphasis was on issues that are relevant to or supporting the dynamic interactions between users and applications. This special issue collects the extended version of some of the best papers presented in IDET’08 and relevant keynote papers presented in U-Media’08. This special issue includes six papers covering some of the recent technological advances in digital entertainments. These papers can be roughly divided into three groups. The first group of two papers addresses networking issues of digital entertainments. The article by Wah and Sat (of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.) describes the authors’ work on real-time VoIP (voice over-IP) systems that can achieve high perceptual conversational quality. It focuses on the fundamental understanding of conversational quality and its trade-offs among the design of speech codecs and strategies for network control, playout scheduling, and loss concealments. The article by Ye, Li, and Chen (of City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) presents an adaptive algorithm called “SPF-A*” for searching multimedia files in heterogeneous mobile P2P network environments in order for these multimedia resources to be transmitted more effectively. The second group of two papers addresses content analysis issues of digital entertainments. The article by Xu, Cheng, Zhang, Zhang, and Lu (of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) presents a generic multi-layer and multi-modal framework for sports video analysis. It first introduces mid-level audio/visual features that are able to bridge the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level understanding and then discusses emerging applications on editorial content creation and content enhancement/adaptation in sports video analysis, including event detection, sports MTV generation, automatic broadcast video generation, tactic analysis, player action recognition, virtual content insertion, and mobile sports video adaptation. The article by Don and Ivrissimtzis (of University of Durham, United Kingdom) describes the use of multiple pens to resolve ambiguity and improve usability in a sketch recognition environment. User experiments in representing drawing modes using separate colored pens demonstrate greater user understanding and less recognition errors than in a system using textual descriptions with a single pen. The last group of two papers addresses issues that are related to computer gaming in digital entertainments. The article by Cao, Glukhova, Klamma, and Renzel (of RWTH Aachen University, Germany) presents a community success model (CSM) based on the DeLone & McLean IS Success Model to measure community satisfaction. CSM combines quantitative data collected through automatic monitoring of service usage with qualitative data extracted from automatically generated questionnaires, and CSM is applied to measure the results of a regular lab course as a proof of concept. The article by Li, Zhao, Lam, and Lau (of University of Durham, United Kingdom, and City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) presents an interactive method for simulating flexible connectors by combining dynamic constraints and impulse-based simulation. This method can be used to support interactive gaming or animation. We would like to thank a lot of people who worked behind the scene to make this special issue possible. First, we would like to thank George Sun, the Chief Executive Editor of the Journal of Multimedia, for his kind support of this special issue. Second, we would like to thank all the reviewers, including the workshop program committee members and those who helped select the papers for this special issue, for their professional reviews. Finally, we would like to thank all the authors who contributed their work to IDET 2008 and to this special issue.

The Stylisation of Internet Life?: Predictors of Internet Leisure Patterns Using Digital Inequality and Status Group Perspectives

This research addresses the question: What are the predictors of internet leisure patterns? With the barriers to internet access receding the question can be asked: Whether or not social groups are beginning to distinguish themselves through different types of internet activities? This research will focus on the domain of internet leisure and entertainment within the United States population. Internet leisure is measured in this study by playing games, doing hobbies, reading, watching videos and listening to music. Predictors are drawn from a digital inequality and a Weberian status group perspective. Binary logistic regression models are run on a nationally representative survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project (N = 2013). This research suggests that: (1) both digital inequality and status group perspectives tend to work together to explain all internet activities, but a status group perspective provides more explanation for leisure patterns, (2) internet leisure is best conceptualised as a form of popular culture with minorities and people of low socioeconomic status consuming leisure at higher rates.

Childhood Giftedness and Adulthood Genius

Although the association between giftedness and genius has been the subject of several retrospective, longitudinal, and historiometric studies, this research concentrated on majority-culture samples. In the current study, Cox's (1926) findings regarding 301 geniuses were replicated on a sample of 291 eminent African Americans. Relative genius was measured by two archival eminence measures (majority White and minority Black culture) and by scores on the Creative Achievement Scale (Ludwig, 1992). Giftedness was assessed by raters blind to the identity of the individuals being evaluated. Control variables were defined for gender, year of birth, status as a living contemporary, and 18 domains of achievement. Multiple regression analyses indicated that adulthood eminence and creative achievement are positively correlated with early giftedness, with an effect size comparable to that found in the Cox study. Furthermore, this association was not moderated by gender, birth year, or most of the remaining variables. Putting Research to Use: The study provides support for a basic tenet of most gifted and talented programs, namely, that exceptional giftedness in childhood and adolescence is associated with adulthood achievements. Accordingly, education programs designed for these select populations can be legitimately viewed as an investment in the nation's future. The young talents of today are indeed likely to become the high achievers of tomorrow. Furthermore, this developmental continuity is found not just for youths who come from majority-culture backgrounds; the same forecast holds for those who come from minority-culture environments—African Americans in the case of the present study. Moreover, the degree to which childhood giftedness predicts adulthood success is the same for both majority and minority cultures. The longitudinal correspondence also stays the same for both males and females and for the diverse domains of achievement, whether creativity, leadership, entertainment, or sports. However, the long-term connection between early gifts and later achievements presumes a distinct manner of identifying and assessing giftedness. In particular, giftedness must not be evaluated according to a “one-size-fits-all” procedure. On the contrary, the magnitude of giftedness should be assessed according to the occurrence of precocious behaviors that are to a certain extent specific to a given culture and achievement domain. It is for this reason that the 291 African Americans in this study could attain distinction in a remarkable diversity of domains, including domains more characteristic of the minority culture—from gospel and soul musicians to civil rights activists and Black nationalists. This heterogeneity stands in stark contrast to what would have happened if giftedness had been defined in terms of performance on a standard intelligence test.

Why broadband? The meaning of broadband for residential users

In the society we live in today, access to information is crucial. But because of the increased amount of data as well as the nature of the content, a simple Internet connection is no longer sufficient. The EU government, which has followed an Internet access policy for many years (see eEurope programme), has shifted the focus to broadband Internet. Yet, despite these efforts, the uptake of broadband Internet is still quite low. And the situation in developing countries is even more critical. But is access to information the only enabler for users to switch to a broadband connection? With the wide range of Internet services and applications in the domains of entertainment, communication, commerce etc, now more than ever the Internet is a part of people's everyday life. In this article we will not only look at the benefits and motivations for people to subscribe to a broadband Internet connection, but also at the different barriers to the uptake and usage of such a connection.

Multimedia interconnection using service gateways

Service gateways are key for the integration of different technologies on smart environments. In the home entertainment domain, a challenging field is the creation of media data flows among heterogeneous devices. This kind of technology could support a broad range of services. The proposed approach introduces a middleware layer built around a service gateway. The gateway stores information and capabilities of each multimedia source or target in a directory which can be browsed. A seamless connection is performed through translation services for media data and events. Finally, the admission service dynamically controls the available bandwidths and computing power consumption.

A Decade of Research on Health Content in the Media: The Focus on Health Challenges and Sociocultural Context and Attendant Informational and Ideological Problems

There is a burgeoning interest in the health and illness content of popular media in the domains of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. This article reviews the past 10 years of this research, describing the relationship between the health topics addressed in the research, the shifting focus of concerns about the media, and, ultimately, the variation in problems for health promotion. I suggest that research attending to topics related to bodily health challenges focused on whether popular media accurately or appropriately represented health challenges. The implication was that there is some consensus about more right or wrong, complete or incomplete ways of representing an issue; the problem was that the media are generally wrong. Alternatively, research addressing topics related to sociocultural context issues focused on how certain interests are privileged in the media. The implication was that competing groups are making claims on the system, but the problem was that popular media marginalizes certain interests. In short, popular media is not likely to facilitate understandings helpful to individuals coping with health challenges and is likely to perpetuate social and political power differentials with regard to health-related issues. I conclude by offering some possibilities for future health media content research.

Rose Marie Beck and Frank Wittmann, eds. African Media Cultures: Transdisciplinary Perspectives/Cultures de médias en Afrique: Perspectives transdisciplinaires. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2004. Topics in African Studies, vol. 2. 320 pp. Tables. Photographs. Graphics. Notes. Index. 34.00. Paper.

Rose Marie Beck and Frank Wittmann, eds. African Media Cultures: Transdisciplinary Perspectives/Cultures de médias en Afrique: Perspectives transdisciplinaires. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2004. Topics in African Studies, vol. 2. 320 pp. Tables. Photographs. Graphics. Notes. Index. 34.00. Paper. - Volume 48 Issue 3

Profiling sport role models to enhance initiatives for adolescent girls in physical education and sport

This study involved the investigation of sport role models for adolescent girls in Australia. Initially, a theoretical perspective is presented based on social learning and gender theory. Then, using quantitative and qualitative data obtained through two focus group interviews and a survey (n = 357) conducted at two Sydney high schools, the authors establish a profile of a sport role model for adolescent girls. Results showed that a relatively small percentage of girls (8.4 percent) perceived a sports person to be their role model, with a large percentage of girls nominating a role model from the family (mother), peer or entertainment domains. The majority of girls with a sport role model described the model as female, under 40 years of age with a similar sporting background to themselves who display essential masculine and feminine qualities. Using the profile of a sport role model, several suggestions are made which could enhance initiatives and programs for adolescent girls in physical education and sport.

BerlinTainment: an agent-based context-aware entertainment planning system

Service providers, especially in the mobile entertainment domain, are facing increasing competition. The ability to design, develop, and deploy unique context-aware entertainment services fast and easily as well as the capability to provide intuitive user interfaces becomes essential for market players. Furthermore, today's mobile world is made up of heterogeneous networks accessible via various devices with different characteristics. Progressive users have the desire to utilize the same services and access the same information content on all available devices. At the same time, service providers have to diversify their services in order to remain competitive and attract the various customer segments making up the mass market. We introduce an agent-based serviceware framework to assist service providers in developing innovative services, thus reducing the time to market of the respective applications. The realized serviceware framework offers personalization, location awareness, and the multi-access service platform, a flexible solution for ubiquitous service access. Thus, our solution allows a heterogeneous landscape of end devices to access an application server's mobile services in a multimodal, multilingual, and multimedia-based manner. We describe the utilization of the different modules of the service framework as well as the BerlinTainment application, an entertainment planning system based on the framework.

If Art Has No History, What Implications Flow For The Art Museum?

I have recently argued in various places that each kind (as the word is defined in the paper) has a history, and only kinds have histories. Because ‘art’ is shown not to be the name of a kind it does not name a kind with a history. This conclusion relies upon a meme-driven account of cultural evolution, providing historical studies in general with a rationale running intellectually parallel to that which sustains objective accounts of biological evolution. I propose that the word ‘art’ should not be used in the conventional way but as a name for the general category of memetic innovation, and the phrase ‘work of art’ as a name for the items of the class of entities inspected by an unprompted eye in search of memetic innovation. These arguments are recapitulated in a form encouraging speculation about their consequences for the art museum and gallery. One effect of a conceptual revision would be to widen the scope of the art museum: on the face of it, without restriction. In order to impose a practical constraint it is suggested that an institutional criterion might be applied to acquisitions and display policies, simultaneously and consistently with a rejection of the Institutional Theory of Art that is currently influential in the art world. It is further argued that the art gallery should be conceived primarily as a domain of entertainment with the underlying function of encouraging creative discovery by the unprompted eye, and not as an art-historically instructive domain. The art museum's collection will inevitably lend itself to study and presentation in various intellectually coherent patterns by cultural historians, but—if the thesis is correct—not by those ‘art historians’ who mistakenly suppose that a bogus ‘history of art’ provides an appropriate structure for the understanding of works of art.