New Media Production Research Articles

Development of automatic audio panning system for immersive sound through stage size-aware model and object-tracking

We investigated a novel AI-assisted automated 'immersive' audio panning system designed to track audio-related objects within a video clip. This system comprises four sequential steps: Object-Tracking, Stage dimension Estimation, XY-Coordinate Calculation, and Object Audio Rendering. The system is designed to overcome existing challenges arising from the rapid and frequent movement of target objects by employing a pre-trained object-tracking model and integrating depth information to ensure stability in subsequent tasks. Additionally, we introduce a stage size-aware model to extrapolate stage dimension using our manually collected dataset, formatted as (Image, Width, Depth), which facilitates model training. Consequently, the system calculates XY-Coordinate pairs, serving as panning values for conventional audio mixers or decoders to enable immersive audio reproduction. We anticipate that this video- and space-aware automatic panning system will be valuable for the rapid production of new media.

Formula One on social networks: a successful strategy

This research, aims to analyze the dynamics of engagement rate of F1 through the social networks of the car teams participating in the FIA championship. Classical media are now incorporated and integrated by the production of new media: publications that invite supporters to interacting, thus recreating a virtual agora, a community federated by online exchange, around real-time multimedia productions. A communication mix that allows an international championship to be within the reach of each supporter. The research conducted aims to analyze, with a quantitative methodology, the Engagement Rate, of the 10 teams participating in the 2021 championship on Facebook and Instagram.

A comparative and acceptance study of women’s discourse in Chinese-American online stand-up comedy

As an emerging form of comedy, stand-up comedy has developed rapidly and attracted widespread attention in various countries today through the production and dissemination mode of new media. In order to better understand the cultural characteristics of stand-up comedy and provide methodological inspiration for contemporary feminist public expression, this essay focuses on online stand-up comedy in China and the United States. Drawing on relevant theories from feminism, gender sociology, reception aesthetics, and communication studies, this essay uses textual close reading and comparative analysis to examine the expressive characteristics and reception mechanisms of women’s discourse in these two countries. Through analysis, this essay concludes that the female comedic discourse in China and the United States, which differs in perspective, expressive approach, and offense and its re-speaking, is repeatedly negotiating resistance or compromise at the intersection of the three influencing factors, namely, the diachronic socio-cultural traditions, the synchronic audience acceptance, and the external impact of the market and censorship.

Rebooting Content: Broadcasting Sport and Esports to Homes During COVID-19

Beginning in early March 2020, sport in the United States entered an unprecedented period of hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The postponement, suspension, and cancellation of live sporting events impacted every professional and amateur sport organization, from the National Basketball Association to the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, high school sports to college football, and even esports leagues. Although the abrupt cancellation of live sporting events was disruptive, it did create opportunities for the production of new media and consumption opportunities for sport leagues, teams, and their fans through different types of sport media broadcasts. This commentary examines how the U.S. sport industry developed media content strategies using new, mixed, and rebroadcasted content, across multiple broadcast and streaming platforms, to provide sport consumption opportunities to fans who were largely quarantined at home. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on live and rebroadcasted mediated content, while providing guidance to content owners and rights holders facing uncertainty in the marketplace.

Tweens as Technofeminists

In this article we discuss how the Girlhood Remixed Technology Camp (GRTC) empowers tween girls to challenge sexist and misogynistic media portrayals of girlhood by constructing their own digital identities. Drawing from campers’ projects and blogs, we foreground two important outcomes of the camp: the development of technological, critical, and rhetorical literacies as girls pursued their own technology-related goals; and the crafting of powerful, positive articulations of girlhood through girls’ production of new media and technologies. We conclude with further considerations for the development of girls’ technology camps.

The Beautiful and the Damned

This article examines new media production in professional climbing through the prism of the work relationships between climbers and companies. The development of new media has driven significant transformations in the production, diffusion, and consumption of professional sports, notably in the relationships between athletes, companies, fans, and organizations. However, little is known on the influence of new media on the work of professional athletes and their relationships with companies. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Europe and the United States, I show that the production and diffusion of new media content have become key for professional rock climbers wishing to build their careers, and are complexly embedded in the organization of the labor market. This supports an understanding of the production of new media acknowledging the relationships between companies, athletes, and media producers. Indeed, producing and diffusing new media content have become a central part of the job of an athlete and brand ambassador for climbing companies.

WHENCE? WHITHER? THE MODERN ARABIC LITERARY NARRATIVE: SOME HAZARDED SPECULATIONS

Postwar Lebanon, Sufism, imperial translations, Hamlet, trials and atlases, city streets, literary cafés, and Tahrir Square: disorienting as these various themes might appear to be, they nonetheless entitle eight recent inquiries into contemporary—and precedent—directions of literary critical studies of the modern Arabic novel and their calculated revisions of, perhaps, another Arabic literary historical narrative that necessarily engages multigenre, comparative literary–historical investigations. Each of the works under review here was published between 2010 and 2013, with just one specifically, and that ex post facto, addressing the momentous events in Cairo's Tahrir Square in the early months of 2011. In other words, these works might well have already anticipated a more than seasonal, some would even argue historic, “Arab spring,” and at least several of the works’ authors found it necessary to append an epilogue to their in-production text, or otherwise slightly, subtly, revise at the last minute their presumptive chronologies and the contested trajectories of modern Arabic literature that attend them. From the classically proverbial “tradition versus modernity” discussions through their historicist implications for the cultural production of new media and alternative public spheres, each of these studies seeks, in its own way/s, to instantiate Arabic literature—and Arabic literary criticism—within and against its respected precursors. But where will that self-same literature, and its current critical mediations, eventually wind up, whether globally, nationally, or historically?

Temporalidades críticas: el caso de Douglas Gordon

This paper analyzes the temporality of the moving image and its manipulation as conceptual resource in the work of Douglas Gordon. The analysis is based on the specific characteristics of the type of artistic production of the time-based new media, i.e. those artworks that rely on technology and the temporal duration as interpretive dimension. The intent of this article is to reflect and discuss the different temporalities that appear in the work of Gordon and reveal the connections between their temporary resources and ideological critique. So, at first explores the relationship between perception and language to go on considering the slowing down of time and the shift of focus of attention in his work that reveals relationships of ideological and contextual type.

From ABCs to DVDs: Profiles of infants' home media environments in the first two years of life

The very definition of print exposure has evolved in recent years as has the production of new media for infants and toddlers. Recognising that parents now have a confluence of media to select from, our study was designed to provide a richer understanding of home-literacy environments among 100 infants. Three profiles of families' home media environments emerged: (1) media abstainers, who neither knew much about baby books and DVDs nor owned them; (2) media knowers, who knew about baby books and DVDs, but chose to own many books and hardly any DVDs; and (3) media owners, who owned many baby books and DVDs, but appeared to have little knowledge about them. Parents who were readers themselves owned more baby books but fewer baby DVDs than parents with less print exposure. Results suggest a more complex understanding of print exposure in home environments than previously understood.

The New Media and Digital Divide: Knowledge Gap Exacerbated

The Information Age driven by the internet has widened the gulf in knowledge obtained by different groups of people from the media. This paper observes that the degree of disparity in knowledge prior to the internet age is infinitesimal when juxtaposed with the present situation. It identifies discrepancies in access, use and ownership of the new media as causative factors. The paper recommends domestication of production of new media with regard to their hardware and software, incorporation of new media as a course of study in schools��? curricula and establishment of government-sponsored internet centres as remedial measures.

Collaborative Filmmaking in the Digital Age

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsSam PackSam Pack is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kenyon College. His research interests address the relationship between media and culture and specifically focus on an anthropological approach to the production and reception of television, film, photographs, and new media. His ethnographic film, Celebrating Semana Santa: Change, Conflict, and Continuity in Rural Honduras, has been screened at ethnographic and documentary film festivals around the world and will be distributed by Berkeley Media LLC.

Electronic Art in Peru: The Discovery of an Invisible Territory in the Country of the Incas

This article begins by recognising the cultural territory that defines Peru through an idiosyncrasy based on political powers and taking the permanence of its pre‐Columbian past as paradigm. This is a patrimonialist perspective, eroticised and distant from the process of modernity that instrumentalises and capitalises the past and its constant reinvention through cultural industries and public policies. A second paradigm is that of a ‘politically engaged art’ with its basis in an indigenist and syncretic approach, elaborated during the 1970s and 1980s in a context of political violence. The development of new media art in Peru has emerged in this context to offer an alternative dimension for understanding contemporary art production in the country. The authors distinguish two different scenarios in Peruvian media art: a high‐tech scenario with global aspirations and the professionalisation of work through technological media; and another scenario of productions related to critical local research on information technologies, mass media strategies and the culture of entertainment. Both scenarios are understood through the confluence of two events that have taken place since the end of the 1990s: The National and Iberoamerican Biennials of Lima and the Internacional Festival of Video/Arte/Electrónica (VAE). Finally, the article looks at the change in direction of the last instalments of the VAE Festival in the hands of a new organisation, Realidad Visual. A new generation of producers and promoters are developing the event in new directions. The main features of this new approach are described: interdisciplinarity, decentralisation of the event to other regions in Peru and the generation of new audiences and platforms for the diversification of Peruvian production of new media, in dialogue with an international context.

Activist Media in Native AIDS Organizing: Theorizing the Colonial Conditions of AIDS

Global deliberations of HIV/AIDS today increasingly describe social inequalities as conditions of the AIDS pandemic. Agencies and advocates address global public health by arguing that disease transmission and its effects are enabled by power relations such as homophobia and sexism, racism and poverty, and the colonial histories that foster them. Saying that such conditions enable HIV’s disproportionate spread surpasses tales from the disease’s first decade of risk groups, which Cindy Patton has read as a “tropical” logic that locates danger in the perverse embodiment of marginal sexual, racial, or national groups.1 Current claims also modify how some activists countered risk-group tales by addressing practice in arguments that risk arises not from who you are, but what you do. If such a shift invited harm-reduction approaches to HIV, it also could avoid considering how one’s choices are shaped by one’s locations in power relations, which can create illusions of choice. Early AIDS activists argued the pandemic’s power-laden social construction by critiquing public health institutions for complicity in the spread of AIDS or by mobilizing people affected by AIDS to alter conditions in their lives. A key mode activists used to address social marginality was the production of new media. AIDS activists recorded experiences, shared health information, and articulated agendas for change in creative texts, visual art, video, and performance that marked and challenged the power relations that marginalized people affected by AIDS. Thus, when Paul Farmer famously argued that “critical perspectives

Digital Communication Networks and the Journalistic Field: The 2005 French Riots

Coverage of the 2005 riots in France underlined the multimedia and transnational nature of contemporary news. The controversies that spun out of the coverage even as it was being produced extended larger debate about emerging journalism practices and products. This case study, centered on the meta-discourse of the riots and the relationships among the diverse media covering the riots, underlines the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's influential field theory to studies of new media and suggests a critical update to Bourdieu's conception of the field. Bourdieu placed the norms and values of the participants of a field at the center of his analysis, but his theory, as it has been applied to journalism, rests on a stark division between journalists and their audiences. The news story of the French riots was very much a new-media product in that it was created by professionals and non-professionals. In Bourdieu's vocabulary, the amateurs at the middle of the riots and in nations around the world contributing news product constituted new “agents” whose influence on the field has yet to be fully considered. The rise of the audience-participant poses compelling new challenges to field study. This article points out some of the areas scholars across disciplines and methodological approaches might take up for research.

Anna Marie Piersimoni

Anna Marie Piersimoni, our distinguished editorial board advisor, is Director of Internet Communications and Director of Media & Technology at the American Film Institute. Previously, as Director of Enhanced TV for the AFI, she developed the acclaimed AFIIntel Enhanced TV Workshop, a unique hands-on R&D training environment for television professionals in the production of new convergent media.

Political Economy, Power and New Media

This article suggests that it is timely to revitalise studies in the tradition of the political economy of media and communications in order to develop a critical and comprehensive analysis of the social and economic dynamics of the production and consumption of new media. Specifically, a coupling of research on mediated communication and on highly situated communities of practice with some strands of research in political economy could shed new light on the way changing power relationships are informing the development and application of new media products and services. There are precedents for this approach in studies of the older media and signs of a greater receptivity to such an approach in some studies of Internet developments and the open source software movement.

Shifting New Media: From Content to Consultancy, from Heterarchy to Hierarchy

This is a detailed case history of one of London's iconic new-media companies, AMX Studios. Some of the changes in this firm, we assume, are not atypical for other firms in this sector. In particular we want to draw attention to two transformations. The first change in AMX and in London's new-media industry more generally refers to the field of industrial relations. What can be observed is a shift from a rather heterarchically organised new-media industry towards a more hierarchically organised one, a shift from short-term project networks to long-term client dependency. The second change refers to new-media products and services. We want to argue for a shift from cool content production towards consultancy and interactive communications solutions.

Microphotoluminscence of C60 fullerenes doped with ions of rare-earth elements

Optical properties of various fullerene matrices based on C60 were studied by scanning microphotoluminescence in the range of 660–2300 nm. Variations observed in the photoluminescence spectra at room temperature after prolonged exposure to focused He−Ne laser irradiation directly after implantation of ions of rare-earth elements (Yb+ Nd+, or Er+) or after an isochronal thermal annealing of ion-implanted samples in the temperature range of 50–150°C are attributed to changes in the ratio of the generation and recombination rates of native lattice defects. Photoluminescence of fullerene matrices implanted with Yb+ ions has an intracenter origin at liquid-nitrogen temperature. A variation in the photoluminescence of fullerene matrices following dissolution of the samples in toluene and subsequent recrystallization indicates that Yb atoms are involved in the formation of fullerene-based endohedral or more intricate cluster complexes. The results obtained make it possible to identify a number of technological factors that are important for the production of new photoluminescent media, including those for laser operation.