News Video Clips Research Articles

Working in precarity: examining mainstream discourses about street hawking in Ghana

Abstract This study sought to analyze how the media and the general public position street hawking in an economic environment typically constrained by neoliberal orthodoxy. We conducted a critical textual analysis of news articles, op-eds, and video clips from some of the most popular news media sources in Ghana and found that while informal work is often done in turbulent material conditions, marginality and precarity of street hawking are exacerbated by media and popular discourses that are anchored by neoliberalism. We also found that such discourses are resisted by counter-discourses. The study challenges neoliberal analyses of work and labor by explicating the tensions between the attraction to neoliberalism and the reality of its failures for informal work.

Truths and Tales: Understanding Online Fake News Networks in South Korea

This study investigates the features of fake news networks and how they spread during the 2020 South Korean election. Using actor–network theory (ANT), we assessed the network’s central players and how they are connected. Results reveal the characteristics of the videoclips and channel networks responsible for the propagation of fake news. Analysis of the videoclip network reveals a high number of detected fake news videos and a high density of connections among users. Assessment of news videoclips on both actual and fake news networks reveals that the real news network is more concentrated. However, the scale of the network may play a role in these variations. Statistics for network centralization reveal that users are spread out over the network, pointing to its decentralized character. A closer look at the real and fake news networks inside videos and channels reveals similar trends. We find that the density of the real news videoclip network is higher than that of the fake news network, whereas the fake news channel networks are denser than their real news counterparts, which may indicate greater activity and interconnectedness in their transmission. We also found that fake news videoclips had more likes than real news videoclips, whereas real news videoclips had more dislikes than fake news videoclips. These findings strongly suggest that fake news videoclips are more accepted when people watch them on YouTube. In addition, we used semantic networks and automated content analysis to uncover common language patterns in fake news, which helps us better understand the structure and dynamics of the networks involved in the dissemination of fake news. The findings reported here provide important insights on how fake news spread via social networks during the South Korean election of 2020. The results of this study have important implications for the campaign against fake news and ensuring factual coverage.

Facts, opinions, and media spectacle: Exploring representations of business news on the internet

In the 21st century, the field of business and finance has become a media spectacle. Not only have advances in technology changed the ways in which audiences engage with business information, the pervasiveness of internet and cable television networks has led to the emergence of new hybrid forms of business news discourse, blending verbiage, images, graphics, audio, and video clips. Combining discourse analysis, social semiotic theory, and other interdisciplinary approaches, this article explores the multiple ways in which business news are mediated on the internet by continuous 24-hour business news networks such as Bloomberg, CNBC, FOXBusiness, and Reuters. In particular, this article is concerned with how events are contextualized, that is, how identities and social relationships are constructed and represented within and across different modes, media, and networks. The analysis focuses on what is foregrounded or backgrounded, what is thematized or unthematized in each mode and medium, and what process types and categories are drawn upon to represent events, social actors, and social (inter)actions. In this context, special interest is being paid to the semiotic shifts or transformations (and ensuing re-contextualizations) that multimodal representations undergo across modes, media, and news networks.

Watching TV news as a memory task – brain activation and age effects

BackgroundNeuroimaging studies which investigate brain activity underlying declarative memory processes typically use artificial, unimodal laboratory stimuli. In contrast, we developed a paradigm which much more closely approximates real-life situations of information encoding.MethodsIn this study, we tested whether ecologically valid stimuli - clips of a TV news show - are apt to assess memory-related fMRI activation in healthy participants across a wide age range (22-70 years). We contrasted brain responses during natural stimulation (TV news video clips) with a control condition (scrambled versions of the same clips with reversed audio tracks). After scanning, free recall performance was assessed.ResultsThe memory task evoked robust activation of a left-lateralized network, including primarily lateral temporal cortex, frontal cortex, as well as the left hippocampus. Further analyses revealed that - when controlling for performance effects - older age was associated with greater activation of left temporal and right frontal cortex.ConclusionWe demonstrate the feasibility of assessing brain activity underlying declarative memory using a natural stimulation paradigm with high ecological validity. The preliminary result of greater brain activation with increasing age might reflect an attempt to compensate for decreasing episodic memory capacity associated with aging.

Multimedia Information Retrieval

At its very core multimedia information retrieval means the process of searching for and finding multimedia documents; the corresponding research field is concerned with building the best possible multimedia search engines. The intriguing bit here is that the query itself can be a multimedia excerpt: For example, when you walk around in an unknown place and stumble across an interesting landmark, would it not be great if you could just take a picture with your mobile phone and send it to a service that finds a similar picture in a database and tells you more about the building -- and about its significance, for that matter? This book goes further by examining the full matrix of a variety of query modes versus document types. How do you retrieve a music piece by humming? What if you want to find news video clips on forest fires using a still image? The text discusses underlying techniques and common approaches to facilitate multimedia search engines from metadata driven retrieval, via piggy-back text retrieval where automated processes create text surrogates for multimedia, automated image annotation and content-based retrieval. The latter is studied in great depth looking at features and distances, and how to effectively combine them for efficient retrieval, to a point where the readers have the ingredients and recipe in their hands for building their own multimedia search engines.

Efficient Segmentation and Camera Motion Indexing of Compressed Video

In order to provide sophisticated access methods to the contents of video servers, it is necessary to automatically process and represent each video through a number of visual indexes. We focus on two tasks, namely the hierarchical representation of a video as a sequence of uniform segments (shots), and the characterization of each shot by a vector describing the camera motion parameters. For the first task we use a Bayesian classification approach to detecting scene cuts by analysing motion vectors. Adaptability to different compression qualities is achieved by learning different classification masks. For the second task, the optical flow is processed in order to distinguish between stationary and moving shots. A least-squares fitting procedure determines the pan/tilt/zoom camera parameters within shots that present regular motion. Each shot is then indexed by a vector representing the dominant motion components and the type of motion. In order to maximize processing speed, all techniques directly process and analyse MPEG-1 motion vectors, without the need for video decompression. An overall processing rate of 59 frames/s is achieved on software. The successful classification performance, evaluated on various news video clips for a total of 61 023 frames, attains 97.7% for the shot segmentation, 88.4% for the stationary vs. moving shot classification, and 94.7% for the detailed camera motion characterization.

A Rotation, Translation, and Scale-Invariant Approach to Content-Based Image Retrieval

We describe a method for computing an image signature, suitable for content-based retrieval from image databases. The signature is extracted from the Fourier power spectrum by performing a mapping from cartesian to logarithmic-polar coordinates, projecting this mapping onto two 1D signature vectors, and computing their power spectra coefficients. Similar to wavelet-based approaches, this representation isholisticand, thus, provides a compact description of all image aspects, including shape, texture, and color. Furthermore, it has the advantage of being invariant to 2D rigid transformations, such as any combination of rotation, scaling, and translation. Experiments have been conducted on a database of 2082 images extracted from various news video clips. Results confirm invariance to 2D rigid transformations, as well as high resilience to more general affine and projective transformations. Moreover, the signature appears to capture perceptually relevant image features, in that it allows successful database querying using example images which have been subject to arbitrary camera and subject motion.

Electronic news delivery project

News is information about recent events of general interest, especially as currently reported by newspapers, periodicals, radio, or television. News is the quintessential multimedia data. While newspaper editors (human and/ or algorithmic) may still define the core content of electronic news, new communication technologies will enable the integration of news from a wide variety of sources and provide access to supplemental material from enormous archives of electronic news data (text, photos, and video) in digital libraries as well as the continual streams of newly created data. The goal of electronic news delivery within this context is, however, distinguishable from both news groups and document retrieval. Electronic news promises to deliver to the reader an edited collage of recent events from wide domains in a manner that is both comprehensive and personalized. As part of a long-term research project into the design of future news delivery systems, we have developed an overall architecture and several prototypes. These prototypes are presented in the article, along with a discussion of issues related to the presentation metaphor and to the functionality of electronic news delivery services. A prototype was demonstrated at the 1995 G-7 Economic Summit in Halifax, Canada, integrating newspaper text and photographs with television news video clips across an ATM network.

Automatic association of news items

A new media for news delivery has emerged in which print, photographs, video, and audio can be integrated into personalized multimedia news presentations. An electronic news delivery system produces personal ‘editions’ by selecting news items from various sources in a variety of media types and ordering and/or grouping these items for presentation. Clearly, if personalized and dynamic ‘editions’ of news are to be a reality then algorithms are needed that select and group items with minimal human intervention. In this paper we will examine only one of the problems involved in the automatic generation of electronic editions: the association of related items of different media type, specifically photos and stories. The goal of this research is to be able to determine to what degree any two news items refer to the same news event. This metric has several uses. First, it can be used to link multimedia items that can be shown together, such as a video, photo, and text story related to a shipwreck or state visit. Second, it can be used to form clusters of very similar items from a variety of sources so that one or two can be chosen to represent that event in an edition. In this paper we discuss the specific association of text and photo news items although our approach to the problem of defining relationships between photos and stories applies to a larger domain of news items including scripted news video clips and scripted radio broadcasts.