The 6th issue of the Fresh Perspectives series takes you on a playful but serious journey along the issues at stake when designing a mixed reality experience in the context of theatre and performance. The publication features a selection of projects describing in detail the artistic design processes, as well as the challenges and opportunities brought about by the use of mixed reality technologies.Joris Weijdom, researcher and lecturer at the Professorship, wrote the key article and curated this publication.
Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science and has since then been applied across a wide range of academic disciplines.So-called ‘content analysis’ provides a means to study (mass) media content in many media shapes and formats to retrieve signs of the zeitgeist, such as cultural phenomena, representation of certain groups, and the resonance of political viewpoints. In the era of big data and digital culture, in which websites and social media platforms produce massive amounts of content and network this through hyperlinks and social media buttons, content analysis needs to become adaptive to the many ways in which digital platforms and engines handle content.This book introduces Networked Content Analysis as a digital research approach, which offers ways forward for students and researchers who want to work with digital methods and tools to study online content. Besides providing a thorough theoretical framework, the book demonstrates new tools and methods for research through case studies that study the climate change debate with search engines, Twitter, and the encyclopedia project of Wikipedia.
MULTIFILE
The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge simulation platform helps planners and stakeholders understand and manage the complexity of MSP. In the interactive simulation, different data layers covering an entire sea region can be viewed to make an assessment of the current status. Users can create scenarios for future uses of the marine space over a period of several decades. Changes in energy infrastructure, shipping, and the marine environment are then simulated, and the effects are visualized using indicators and heat maps. The platform is built with advanced game technology and uses aspects of role-play to create interactive sessions; it can thus be referred to as serious gaming. To calculate and visualize the effects of planning decisions on the marine ecology, we integrated the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web modeling approach into the platform. We demonstrate how EwE was connected to MSP, considering the range of constraints imposed by running scientific software in interactive serious gaming sessions while still providing cascading ecological feedback in response to planning actions. We explored the connection by adapting two published ecological models for use in MSP sessions. We conclude with lessons learned and identify future developments of the simulation platform.
MULTIFILE
