Globalization was supposed to connect people, but instead ended up connecting the powerful. Local news is rapidly disappearing and leaving crucial stories unreported, communities unrepresented and disconnected, a side-effect of digitalization and the ownership concentration in media markets. But local and hyperlocal media play an important role in sustaining robust and resilient regimes of public service. In an age of technological changes and political pressure, niche publications and a renaissance of zines lead the quest for new, sustainable models in publishing.In the second instalment of the special edition Eurozine podcast series, produced by Talk Eastern Europe, Eurozine editor-in-chief Réka Kinga Papp talks media models old and new with Rachael Jolley, editor of Index on Censorship and philosopher Miriam Rasch of the Institute of Network Cultures.
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03/08/2020The purpose of this literature study is to obtain information about educational approaches to teaching 11 to 12 years old children focusing on how to distinguish between real news and fake news. With this purpose we studied 16 academic papers about learning activities to make primary school children media-literate and able to recognise fake news. What we found is that having children create their own news messages seems to be the most effective approach. News messages that they create can be text messages as well as videos, audios, pictures and animations. Based on this conclusion, students from The Hague University of Applied Sciences Teacher Training Institute (PABO) have been asked to develop a set of learning materials that can be used for instruction in primary schools. The effectiveness of those materials is currently being tested at an elementary school in Rijswijk. The results of the literature and the field study will be shared in the Dutch centre of expertise for media literacy education, Mediawijzer.net.
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11/30/2020
Immersive journalism (IJ) is often assumed to be inherently emotion-inducing. Through using inclusive technology, interaction possibilities and immersive narratives, the audience should ideally experience what feels like to be in a certain situation. However, for the most part we do not know to which extent and in what form IJ influences the experience of emotions. We wanted to investigate, whether, and if so, which characteristics of IJ are related to the experience of emotions, and which role the personality trait empathy tendency plays in this respect. This is important, as the evaluation of IJ often relies on the emotion-inducing assumption thereof. Four different experiments comparing one immersive journalistic characteristic (level of inclusion, interaction possibilities, immersive narratives) to the respective non-immersive counterpart were conducted. Results indicate that while the level of inclusion and interaction possibility increase the intensity of the experience, the immersive narrative influences the valence dimension of emotions. Additionally, empathy tendency is found to be a relevant moderator for these effects. Conclusions are threefold. First, the narrative form of IJ is key; second, the analysis of IJ needs to go beyond the level of inclusion; third, including emotions when assessing IJ is fundamental to understand its impact.
-Chatbots are being used at an increasing rate, for instance, for simple Q&A conversations, flight reservations, online shopping and news aggregation. However, users expect to be served as effective and reliable as they were with human-based systems and are unforgiving once the system fails to understand them, engage them or show them human empathy. This problem is more prominent when the technology is used in domains such as health care, where empathy and the ability to give emotional support are most essential during interaction with the person. Empathy, however, is a unique human skill, and conversational agents such as chatbots cannot yet express empathy in nuanced ways to account for its complex nature and quality. This project focuses on designing emotionally supportive conversational agents within the mental health domain. We take a user-centered co-creation approach to focus on the mental health problems of sexual assault victims. This group is chosen specifically, because of the high rate of the sexual assault incidents and its lifetime destructive effects on the victim and the fact that although early intervention and treatment is necessary to prevent future mental health problems, these incidents largely go unreported due to the stigma attached to sexual assault. On the other hand, research shows that people feel more comfortable talking to chatbots about intimate topics since they feel no fear of judgment. We think an emotionally supportive and empathic chatbot specifically designed to encourage self-disclosure among sexual assault victims could help those who remain silent in fear of negative evaluation and empower them to process their experience better and take the necessary steps towards treatment early on.
In this project, immersive media (XR, VR, AR) are created and tested as a remediation strategy to help improve the experience of existing TV content and reach and engage both new and existing target groups more effectively. In this project, students and alumni from AGM and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) work together under the supervision of the R&D department from the professorship Digital Media Concepts and QUT to develop innovative immersive media products based on existing TV productions from Banijay. Banijay is the largest independent production and distribution company in the world. Banijay will provide the challenges, content and feedback on the students’ progress and skills during the (VIS) project, and will offer the opportunity to work on existing international productions with real expectations and demands, and the opportunity to actually market the concepts the students develop. Several new concepts are now in production stage to be released and tested.
Postdoc research project Transformation through Interactive Narrative DesignMedia psychologist dr. Christian Roth's postdoc project Transformation through Interactive Narrative Design (TIND) is part of the Professorship Performative Creative Processes, the school Games & Interaction, and the Expertisecentrum Onderzoek, Innovatie en Internationalisering (OOI). Here, Christian interweaves education and practice-oriented research. He studies the artistic, pedagogical and academic perspectives regarding the power of transformation through applied Interactive Narrative Design (IND).Within the two-year postdoc research project TIND, Christian studies the training of interactive narrative designers with the goal of developing teaching methods and learning tools for artists and designers, such as game and interaction designers, to enable them to create more effective artefacts.Why interactive narrative design?IND offers agency, defined as the ability to influence narrative progression and outcomes in a meaningful way. As such, it carries the potential to create and emotional impact and spark transformative change. This enables interactors to explore different points of view and to feel the weight of their own choices and consequences. This, in turn, allows for a more thorough understanding of complex multi-stakeholder issues, which could have a significant impact on the success of emerging artistic, and learning applications.The TIND project will enable designers through an interdisciplinary approach, including applied game design, immersive theatre, behavioral and cognitive psychology, and the learning sciences.A good example for offering different perspectives on a complex topic is the narrative simulation Mission Zhobia: Winning the Peace, which is used for the training of peacekeepers. Or the news game, I am Mosul, which aims to raise awareness around the effects of war by bringing it close to home: choose your Dutch city and make choices on how to survive if the war was there. And the interactive story Adventures with Anxiety offers a new understanding by letting interactors play anxiety embodied within a wolf. IND is a complex and challenging interdisciplinary field in which design knowledge from other media can often not be directly transferred. As a new medium, it introduces new affordances in technique and user experience. This requires practice-based research for further development of the educational format, demonstrating its potential while identifying and overcoming common learners’ challenges. This project aims to develop a framework for the design and evaluation of meaningful interactive narrative experiences that effectively stimulate a variety of cognitive and emotional responses such as reflection, insight, understanding, and potential behavior change. It provides tools, methods and activities to enable aspiring or practicing narrative designers through an interdisciplinary approach, including game design, immersive theatre, behavioral and cognitive psychology, and the learning sciences.HKU education means to prepare students for success in the creative industries and IND plays an important role for current and future jobs in education, arts and entertainment. IND has the potential to create an emotional impact and spark transformative change by offering agency, defined as the ability to influence narrative progression and outcomes in a meaningful way. This enables interactors to feel the weight of their own choices and their consequences, to explore different perspectives, and to more thoroughly understand complex multi-stakeholder issues, which could have significant impact on the success of emerging artistic, and learning applications.The planned output is a collection of design tools and methods for interdisciplinary workshops and courses, which can be integrated into different curricula at the HKU, thereby enhancing existing programs while enabling the refinement of training methods. Once completed, this postdoc project delivers a training method with multiple applications designed to harness the power of interactive storytelling for transformative personal and societal impact.ColloborationsThe research project is directly embedded in the curriculum of the HKU schoolGames & Interaction with annual educational offerings such as the Minor Interactive Narrative Design (MIND) and HKU wide broad seminars. Course evaluation and literature research will be used to create new and adjusted training for different HKU schools and the industry.More informationAre you interested to learn more about the postdoc research project Transformation through Interactive Narrative Design? Get in touch with Christian Roth: christian.roth@hku.nl
