Video Genre Research Articles

The Structure and Visual Rhetoric of the Martyrdom Video: An Enquiry into the Martyrdom Video Genre

Since its inception in the 1980s, the genre of vehicular martyrdom videos has served to promote radical Islam. Its history has been generally unsystematic but it has led to the development of several story elements and formal requirements whose occurrence in martyrdom videos has become a contingency. In going beyond the structure of the martyrdom attack genre, this article provides an exemplary analysis of the visual rhetoric of the martyrdom video based on an adapted reading of Roland Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image , adapted for the analysis of audiovisual content. The effectiveness of the genre in matters of recruitment is found in the genre’s use of pathos: the genre suggests that a martyr goes to the beyond and, from that place, sends a message to this world. This is most evident in the visual language of the genre which is ideologically informed on the level of connotation.

Video genre identification using clustering-based shot detection algorithm

Rapid growth in storage technology and data acquisition has significantly increased the volume of multimedia data online. A challenging problem is to analyze that multimedia data which are in massive quantity. In recent years, indexing of video files based on contents has gained increased popularity in research community. There are also attempts at identifying if a video clip is containing a specific genre of video, e.g., an sports video, movie, drama, animation or talk show. These proposed techniques, however, use a long list of audio visual features in achieving this classification task, which obviously decreases processing efficiency. Based on certain patterns in audio visual features and basic grammar of talk show, this research differentiates multimedia contents of talk shows from rest of the video genres. Our multimodal rule-based classification approach exploits shots and scenes in a video as classification features. The contents from popular multimedia databases like DailyMotion, YouTube and movies from Hollywood and Bollywood are used as dataset to test overall system of genre identification. The system achieves precision and recall of 98% and 100%, respectively, on 600 selected videos of more than 600 h of duration to classify multimedia content as either ‘TalkShow’ or ‘OtherVideo’ category.

Probabilistic Topic Model for Context-Driven Visual Attention Understanding

Modern computer vision techniques have to deal with vast amounts of visual data, which implies a computational effort that has often to be accomplished in broad and challenging scenarios. The interest in efficiently solving these image and video applications has led researchers to develop methods to expertly drive the corresponding processing to conspicuous regions that either depend on the context or are based on specific requirements. In this paper, we propose a general hierarchical probabilistic framework, independent of the application scenario, and relied on the most outstanding psychological studies about attention and eye movements which support that guidance is not based directly on the information provided by early visual processes but on a contextual representation that arose from them. The approach defines the task of context-driven visual attention as a mixture of latent sub-tasks, which are, in turn, modeled as a combination of specific distributions associated to low-, mid-, and high-level spatio-temporal features. Learning from fixations gathered from human observers, we incorporate an intermediate level between feature extraction and visual attention estimation that enables to obtain comprehensively guiding representations. The experiments show how our proposal successfully learns particularly adapted hierarchical explanations of visual attention in diverse video genres, outperforming several leading models in the literature.

Transgressing boundaries between film and music videos: Smarzowski, Kolski, and music videos in Poland

While the investigation of how directors utilise popular music in their films has enjoyed relative popularity among Polish scholars, the way in which contemporary filmmakers transgress boundaries between ‘film’ and ‘music video’ in order to manifest their authorial strategies in other screen genres has not entered academic debates yet. The aim of this article is twofold. First, I will provide an overview of the marginalised position that the music video genre occupies in Polish-language academic discourse and suggest a few reasons for this negligence. Secondly, I focus here in particular on a comparison of the visual approaches and strategies prevalent in music videos directed by two notable contemporary Polish filmmakers: Jan Jakub Kolski and Wojciech Smarzowski. I will position their music videos in the context of their film production, arguing that their work for the music industry is an extension of their distinctive cinematic worlds and that it affects both the film language and the aesthetics of the music video genre ingeneral.

Content-based Automatic Video Genre Identification

Video content is evolving enormously with the heavy usage of internet and social media websites. Proper searching and indexing of such video content is a major challenge. The existing video search potentially relies on the information provided by the user, such as video caption, description and subsequent comments on the video. In such case, if users provide insufficient or incorrect information about the video genre, the video may not be indexed correctly and ignored during search and retrieval. This paper proposes a mechanism to understand the contents of video and categorize it as Music Video, Talk Show, Movie/Drama, Animation and Sports. For video classification, the proposed system uses audio and visual features like audio signal energy, zero crossing rate, spectral flux from audio and shot boundary, scene count and actor motion from video. The system is tested on popular Hollywood, Bollywood and YouTube videos to give an accuracy of 96%.

A multimodalidade na escola: análise do videoclipe “Aos olhos de uma criança”, de Emicida

Considerando-se a indicação da Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), para se trabalhar com a cultura digital, objetiva-se, neste artigo, proceder à análise do videoclipe “Aos olhos de uma criança”, do rapper Emicida, a fim de se investigar os diferentes modos de significação que compõem o texto multimodal. Para tanto, recorre-se à pesquisa qualitativa, com abordagem descritiva e analítica. O construto epistemológico versa sobre a teoria do gênero videoclipe e da multimodalidade. A análise indicou a proficuidade do trabalho com a multimodalidade, visto permitir ao professor abordar aspectos relacionados ao gênero. Ademais, o videoclipe faz parte da prática social do educando, logo, justifica-se o estudo desse gênero.

“Fake Vets” and Viral Lies: Personal Narrative in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract “Stolen valor” confrontations calling out “fake vets” have generated a popular genre of viral video, a highly concentrated and visible expression of contemporary anxieties over the commodification of identity online. The boom in first-person stories, particularly traumatic ones, has oversaturated the attention economy of the internet, creating a market for fakes that real veterans can’t criticize without challenging the authenticity of their own stories.

Approach to the new videographies analysis: Case study of immigrant representations in the Social Innovation Laboratory videos (SIL UBIQA)

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a methodology of analysis for new videographies based on an analytical grid. We base our epistemological starting point on various critical cultural study authors, a semiotic analysis, and a critical discourse analysis. We apply the grid to a case study composed of a series of videos titled Identibuzz: Hybrid identities, which was created within UBIQA, a Basque social innovation laboratory. In order to fully grasp the results of the analysis, we briefly outline some data referring to transnational migrations in Spain as well as the representation of immigrants in Spanish mainstream media. We then compare the representations of immigrants in the videos to that in mainstream media to analyze the dissection between new videographies and more traditional video genres.

Mimetic Production in YouTube Toy Unboxing Videos

This article contributes to research on children’s participation on social media by analyzing “toy unboxing” videos. Toy unboxing videos are a popular genre on the video-sharing platform YouTube, in which children and adults record themselves unpacking and reviewing various commercial toys. Emerging research in this area has focused on case studies of how these videos are consumed within the home as a means of augmenting offline toys and play practices, or, more commonly, on case studies of how these videos fit within YouTube’s broader economies of play and performance. Drawing on data produced through a content analysis of 100 recent toy unboxing videos, this article analyzes the place of children in the YouTube genre’s “affinity space.” The toy unboxing videos are coded across five key categories—genre, product, narration, production, and branding—to analyze variations of expertise, professionalism, and promotion across the genre. The findings indicate that children’s modes of production as amateur content producers both shape and are shaped by the shared and standardized conventions of this video genre. That is, while well-known “professional” channels such as EvanTube often seek to produce a semblance of playful amateur authenticity, the ostensibly “amateur” child unboxers mimic the production and branding strategies of the “professional” channels. We argue that this reciprocal relationship between professional and amateur content production can be best understood through the concept of “mimesis,” which characterizes the qualities of play and commercialization within the toy unboxing genre.

Slow motion in films and video clips: Music influences perceived duration and emotion, autonomic physiological activation and pupillary responses.

Slow motion scenes are ubiquitous in screen-based audiovisual media and are typically accompanied by emotional music. The strong effects of slow motion on observers are hypothetically related to heightened emotional states in which time seems to pass more slowly. These states are simulated in films and video clips, and seem to resemble such experiences in daily life. The current study investigated time perception and emotional response to media clips containing decelerated human motion, with or without music using psychometric and psychophysiological testing methods. Participants were presented with slow-motion scenes taken from commercial films, ballet and sports footage, as well as the same scenes converted to real-time. Results reveal that slow-motion scenes, compared to adapted real-time scenes, led to systematic underestimations of duration, lower perceived arousal but higher valence, lower respiration rates and smaller pupillary diameters. The presence of music compared to visual-only presentations strongly affected results in terms of higher accuracy in duration estimates, higher perceived arousal and valence, higher physiological activation and larger pupillary diameters, indicating higher arousal. Video genre affected responses in addition. These findings suggest that perceiving slow motion is not related to states of high arousal, but rather affects cognitive dimensions of perceived time and valence. Music influences these experiences profoundly, thus strengthening the impact of stretched time in audiovisual media.

How Is Marijuana Vaping Portrayed on YouTube? Content, Features, Popularity and Retransmission of Vaping Marijuana YouTube Videos

The purpose of the study is to investigate how vaping marijuana, a novel but emerging risky health behavior, is portrayed on YouTube, and how the content and features of these YouTube videos influence their popularity and retransmission. A content analysis of vaping marijuana YouTube videos published between July 2014 to June 2015 (n = 214) was conducted. Video genre, valence, promotional and warning arguments, emotional appeals, message sensation value, presence of misinformation and misleading information, and user-generated statistics, including number of views, comments, shares, likes and dislikes, were coded. The results showed that these videos were predominantly pro-marijuana-vaping, with the most frequent videos being user-sharing. The genre and message features influenced the popularity, evaluations, and retransmission of vaping marijuana YouTube videos. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

YouTube channels, uploads and views

To this date, it is difficult to find high-level statistics on YouTube that paint a fair picture of the platform in its entirety. This study attempts to provide an overall characterization of YouTube, based on a random sample of channel and video data, by showing how video provision and consumption evolved over the course of the past 10 years. It demonstrates stark contrasts between video genres in terms of channels, uploads and views, and that a vast majority of on average 85% of all views goes to a small minority of 3% of all channels. The analytical results give evidence that older channels have a significantly higher probability to garner a large viewership, but also show that there has always been a small chance for young channels to become successful quickly, depending on whether they choose their genre wisely.

The YouTube makeup tutorial Video. A preliminary linguistic analysis of the language of “makeup gurus”

Abstract – Due to its video sharing policy which freely allows users to communicate all over the world, YouTube has become one of the preferred Web platforms used by the digital community of makeup lovers. As a matter of fact, YouTube seems particularly suited to host announcements of new makeup collections, products’ reviews as well as video tutorials. Both cosmetic brands and single users have opened channels on the platform, but makeup discourse on YouTube is arguably dominated by the latter. Differentiating between unaffiliated amateurs and YouTubers who more or less openly work for makeup companies as digital influencers is difficult. Recent studies on communicative practices on YouTube, however, stress that in order to understand the complex nature of the famous video sharing website, the professional/non-professional dichotomy is not particularly relevant, whereas other dynamics are more research worthy. One of them is the “guru” phenomenon. “Gurus” are content creators who are particularly authoritative in a specific field, have a considerable follower base thanks to their expertise and are often paid by brands in order to promote their products. The makeup domain too has witnessed the emergence of a group of popular and influential users who are typically referred to as “makeup gurus”. Their ability to stand out from the multiplicity of similar channels arguably depends not only on their knowledge of the field, but also on their communication skills and specifically on their successful use of the makeup video genre. Against this backdrop, this study sets out to codify the relatively new genre of the makeup tutorial providing it with adequate categories which at the moment appear to be lacking. Adopting the analytical framework provided by discourse analysis, it examines the generic, rhetorical and linguistic practices of makeup gurus and sheds light on the ways gurus discursively construct their identity as well as represent the idea of beauty and makeup.

New(s) Readers: Multimodal Meaning-Making in AJ+ Captioned Video

New(s) Readers: Multimodal Meaning-Making in AJ+ Captioned Video

Climate Change and YouTube: Deliberation Potential in Post-video Discussions

ABSTRACTYouTube videos are a ubiquitous source of information but also a venue for users to comment on discussion boards that addend videos. There are no moderators of these discussions, and thus there is a possibility for self-appointed leaders to emerge, responding incessantly and across a genre of videos. These “elites,” as they are labelled here, use the discussion as a personal campaign tool, diminishing the deliberative potential of provocative topics. To determine whether this is happening and to complement existing research analyzing the content of comments, this paper focuses on the structure of the discussions that follow the most popular climate change-related videos. Network analysis confirms that discussions can be elite-driven, appearing in two different network structure types. Among the core group of elite commenters, most are either climate change activists or sceptics, and the most prolific commenters among this core group are activists.

コミュニケーションロボットのための自律神経活動の推定

The purpose of this study is to enable a communication robot to estimate emotion state of a person based on autonomic nervous activity for human-robot ‘emotional’ interaction. In this paper, a microwave Doppler sensor is used as a non-contact technique to measure heart rate variability related to autonomic nervous activity. The experiment was conducted to confirm whether our proposed method can precisely estimate heart rate variability of subjects during watching different genre of videos or speaking. The results showed that the proposed method can estimate variability of autonomic nervous activity based on the analysis of heartbeat interval (R-R interval) and has a potential to be applicable in human-robot interaction.

Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements by Jun Okada

Reviewed by: Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements by Jun Okada Kent A. Ono (bio) Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements by Jun Okada. Rutgers University Press. 2015. $80.05 hardcover; $26.95 paper; $15.98 e-book. 180 pages. In Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements, Jun Okada both surveys Asian American independent films and videos from 1970 to the present and carefully examines key representative works from this genre. Ultimately, she asks for more: more Asian American films and videos, more diversity of production, more political effectivity, more complexity, and more awareness of the political, cultural, economic, and social stakes involved in film and video production. The key contribution to scholarship of her book is its focus on Asian American documentary, avant-garde, and fictional films and videos in terms of their institutional production. Noteworthy in her study is the simultaneous emergence of a platform for diversifying public television and the birth of Asian American film and video. In the introduction, she locates her study within the scholarship on Asian American film and video published before her book and then briefly tells the history of the "Task Force on Minorities in Public Broadcasting." The task force produced a report, titled "A Formula for Change," which ultimately led to the creation of consortia responsible for encouraging the production of minority media. One consortium founded because of that report was the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA, later the Center for Asian American Media, or CAAM), which eventually became the largest distributor of Asian American films and videos, as well as home to the largest and most successful Asian American international film festival, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF). Chapter 1, "Noble and Uplifting and Boring as Hell," details the history of Asian American film and video from 1971 to 1982. [End Page 164] Here, Okada explores numerous organizations, such as Visual Communications, EthnoCommunications, and Asian CineVision. Each played formative roles in the institutionalization of Asian American film and video. In this early period, films and videos made by California film students "had risen out of political necessity to fight institutional racism and invisibility within Hollywood and dominant media."1 Okada goes on to provide extended reviews of early representative films, such as Manzanar (Robert A. Nakamura, 1971), Wong Sinsaang (Eddie Wong, 1971), Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982), Wataridori: Birds of Passage (Robert A. Nakamura, 1974), and Cruisin' J-Town (Duane Kubo, 1974). Although there was a strong ideological bent in films developing out of West Coast institutions, as well as an emphasis on collaborative and community authorship, at least one key Asian American film critic on the East Coast argued for a different foundation for Asian American film and video. Daryl Chin, programmer of the Asian American International Film Festival, argued for the need for experimental and avant-garde productions, including work not specifically affirming an Asian American identity. Okada offers a thoughtful consideration of filmmakers in this more formalist vein, such as Janice Tanaka and Bruce Yonemoto and Norman Yonemoto. Their aesthetically challenging works, which resist standard formal and ideological conventions of the genre of Asian American film and video to this point, deviated from previously institutionalized films, providing an important counterpoint. Chapter 2 tells two stories: one about the relationship that developed between NAATA and PBS, and the other about the SFIAAFF, which Okada understands to be representative of a counterpublic sphere. In the first story, she suggests that (at least on paper) NAATA's goals were incompatible with those of PBS. Whereas NAATA was committed to funding "a broad spectrum of films that 'present stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian Pacific American experience,'" NAATA's agreement with PBS required NAATA to provide films "the Asian American community [could] embrace, but appeal to a larger mainstream audience, as well."2 These two goals were at odds, and this sometimes led NAATA to fund and promote films that had the potential to be legible to a broad audience but that did not "convey the richness and diversity of Asian Pacific American experience."3 Moreover, Okada observes a common dimension in her study...

Performance Comparison of Various Decision Tree Algorithms for Classification of Advertisement and Non Advertisement Videos

Background/Objectives: The main objective of the present study is to do the prerequisite process to develop a viewerfriendly electronic embedded system and business beneficial system to promote their products. This can be achieved by classifying the extracted Advertisement (ADD) videos from the Non-Advertisement (NADD) videos which consists of more visual information. Methods/ Statistical Analysis: The proposed frame work facilitates to identify the advertisement and non advertisement videos from the live stream television videos are discussed. The Block Intensity Comparison Code (BICC) technique is applied to extract the essential features from the ADD and NADD video frames. The frames are divided into various block sizes to select the best performing block size of the frame. The 8x8 frame size has been chosen as the promising block size to conduct the experiments. An extensive experimental analysis has been demonstrated with different classifier and a comparative study also reported. Findings: Decision tree algorithm (C4.5) has been employed to identify the vibrant features and these features are taken as the input to the various decision tree algorithms, namely J48, J48graft, LM tree, Random tree, BF tree, REP tree and NB tree to classify the video genre. A broad investigation has been made by a random tree algorithm which produced better predictive performance than the other algorithms. The training and the optimization of random tree model with their essential parametric measures are reported. Based on the overall study, random tree with BICC feature was found as the most preferred classification algorithm that achieved the 92.08% than the other algorithms. The classification capability and the performance evaluation of random tree algorithm with block intensity comparison code is reported and discussed for further study. Application/Improvements: The performance of the classifier can also be improved with other novel features.

Creating a ground truth multilingual dataset of news and talk show transcriptions through crowdsourcing

This paper describes the development of a multilingual and multigenre manually annotated speech dataset, freely available to the research community as ground truth for the evaluation of automatic transcription systems and spoken language translation systems. The dataset includes two video genres--television broadcast news and talk-shows--and covers Flemish, English, German, and Italian, for a total of about 35 h of television speech. Besides segmentation and orthographic transcription, we added a very rich annotation on the audio signal, both at the linguistic level (e.g. filled pauses, pronunciation errors, disfluencies, speech in a foreign language) and at the acoustic level (e.g. background noise and different types of non-speech events). Furthermore, a subset of the transcriptions is translated in four directions, namely Flemish to English, German to English, German to Italian and English to Italian. The development of this dataset was organized in several phases, relying on expert transcribers as well as involving non-expert contributors through crowdsourcing. We first conducted a feasibility study to test and compare two methods for crowdsourcing speech transcription on broadcast news data. These methods are based on different transcription processes (i.e. parallel vs. iterative) and incorporate two different quality control mechanisms. With both methods, we achieved near-expert transcription quality--in terms of word error rate--for English, German and Italian data. Instead, for Flemish data we were not able to get a sufficient response from the crowd to complete the offered transcription tasks. The results obtained demonstrate that the viability of methods for crowdsourcing speech transcription significantly depends on the target language. This paper provides a detailed comparison of the results obtained with the two crowdsourcing methods tested, describes the main characteristics of the final ground truth resource created as well as the methodology adopted, and the guidelines prepared for its development.

Female corporeality in the Thirdspace music videos of FKA twigs

Abstract As a technology of gender, the music video genre has consistently acted to represent women as sexually available. Patriarchal discourses have been inscribed onto the bodies of women, in an industry predominantly controlled by white, male record executives. Gendered representations are constructed by the music video technology, but are also absorbed by viewers. British singer, songwriter and dancer FKA twigs’ self-directed music videos challenge the sexualization of women. The artist offers viewers an intense bodily experience of femininity, devoid of Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’. This article argues the complex representation of the artist’s body using corporeal feminist theory and posthuman notions of the cyborg. FKA twigs’ representations of female sexuality and the cyborg are considered in three music videos. The article explores the texts as a Thirdspace, resisting and encompassing dichotomized discourses such as masculine–feminine, inside–outside, intellect–emotion, organic– artificial. The strong, permeable, cyborg body of FKA twigs occupies a Thirdspace of corporeal subjectivity resisting patriarchal discourses that suggest the female body exists to be looked at.