There has been significant progress in the graphical realism of digital humans in recent years. This work investigates the realistic portrayal of emotions beyond facial expressions by analysing how skin colour changes when expressing different emotional states. The study combines existing knowledge from old painters, photogrammetry data, thermal imaging, and skin colouration maps to create an artistic guideline to portray emotions realistically, resulting in the proposal of a set of colour maps representing the six basic emotions. By using skin colour changes to represent emotional states, the proposed colour maps offer an alternative workflow for portraying emotions. During the experiment of this research four of these proposed colour maps, which represent neutrality, anger, disgust, and happiness, were preferred over traditional alternatives in terms of realism perception and likeability. The findings have implications for the development of digital human technology, particularly in the creation of more realistic and expressive digital characters.
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Skyler White is a protagonist in the top-ranking television series Breaking Bad. She is also one of the most hated characters on television. This paper focuses on how the character of Skyler and Anna Gunn – the actor that plays her – are turned into a ‘composite celebrity’ in audience discussions. This is achieved by analysing threads on the social news website Reddit that specifically discuss Skyler. We discovered three main speaking positions: ‘savvy’ viewing; moral realism; and public shaming. This type of audience research may help further discussion on how celebrity culture is supported by neoliberal changes in the public sphere and caught up in the devaluation of professionalism and professional status – which, as will be shown, has especially dire consequences for professional women. Breaking Bad showcases predominantly masculine narratives. The derogation of its key female character therefore does not come as a surprise. However, a feminist defence of both the character and the actor – although a minority perspective – is also voiced. This article reveals how the interlinking fields of celebrity gossip and television criticism are a space of vibrant and sometimes frightening discussion in which a neo-conservative gender agenda is simultaneously asserted and contested
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Previous research suggests that narrative engagement (NE) in entertainment-education (E-E) narratives reduces counterarguing, thereby leading to E-E impact on behavior. It is, however, unclear how different NE processes (narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, narrative presence) relate to different thought types (negative or positive; about the narrative form or about the target behavior) and to E-E impact. This study explores these relations in the context of alcohol binge drinking (BD). Participants (N = 172) watched an E-E narrative showing negative BD consequences, thereby aiming to discourage BD. The main findings were that the E-E narrative had a positive impact on discouraging BD on almost all assessed BD determinants such as beliefs and attitude. It was shown that attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence were associated with BD-discouraging impact, albeit on different BD-related determinants. No evidence was found that negative thoughts about BD mediated these associations. From this, we conclude that attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence were important for E-E impact but that negative thoughts about BD did not play a role therein. The study’s empirical and practical implications are discussed.
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In: Frank Gadinger, Martina Kopf, Ayşem Mert, and Christopher Smith (eds.). Political Storytelling: From Fact to Fiction (Global Dialogues 12) This essay presents a summary of important perspectives concerning the distinction between what counts as truth or fiction. As a source of inspiration, it starts with two examples found in literature – the first a classical Spanish novel and the second a collection of stories written by the leader of a social movement in Mexico. These two examples of the conflictive relations between truth and fiction, authenticity and imagination serve as a source of inspiration for the rest of this article, which shows that this issue has been a subject of intense debate in philosophy and in the philosophy of science and still presents a challenge in the 21st century. The essay states that absolute, objective truth is a myth. It describes that what counts as ‘truth’ in a particular era, is, among other things, the result of power relations. It suggests productive ways to deal with this problem in modern society, through deliberative, emancipatory processes of reflexivity (Weick 1999), participatory research and dialogue, facilitating innovation and generation of new solutions.
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Presentation at the European Conference for Social Work Research, Leuven: Belgium
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Living labs are complex multi-stakeholder collaborations that often employ a usercentred and design-driven methodology to foster innovation. Conventional management tools fall short in evaluating them. However, some methods and tools dedicated to living labs' special characteristics and goals have already been developed. Most of them are still in their testing phase. Those tools are not easily accessible and can only be found in extensive research reports, which are difficult to dissect. Therefore, this paper reviews seven evaluation methods and tools specially developed for living labs. Each section of this paper is structured in the following manner: tool’s introduction (1), who uses the tool (2), and how it should be used (3). While the first set of tools, namely “ENoLL 20 Indicators”, “SISCODE Self-assessment”, and “SCIROCCO Exchange Tool” assess a living lab as an organisation and are diving deeper into the organisational activities and the complex context, the second set of methods and tools, “FormIT” and “Living Lab Markers”, evaluate living labs’ methodologies: the process they use to come to innovations. The paper's final section presents “CheRRIes Monitoring and Evaluation Tool” and “TALIA Indicator for Benchmarking Service for Regions”, which assess the regional impact made by living labs. As every living lab is different regarding its maturity (as an organisation and in its methodology) and the scope of impact it wants to make, the most crucial decision when evaluating is to determine the focus of the assessment. This overview allows for a first orientation on worked-out methods and on possible indicators to use. It also concludes that the existing tools are quite managerial in their method and aesthetics and calls for designers and social scientists to develop more playful, engaging and (possibly) learning-oriented tools to evaluate living labs in the future. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/overdiek12345/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mari-genova-17a727196/?originalSubdomain=nl
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Many visitor studies make social background variables the central point of departure to explain participation patterns. How the past is 'staged', however, also has an influence on those to whom it appeals. This relational perspective calls for new conceptual tools to grasp empirical reality. Inspired by the historical philosophy of Georg Simmel and the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin a number of concepts which enable us to grasp the subtle relationship between museum presentations and visitors are presented. Bakhtin's notion of chronotopy serves as a key concept. By linking museum presentations and visitor perceptions with each other, it is also possible to identify certain tendencies within the contemporary museum landscape.
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The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative autoethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.
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There has been limited adoption of Immersive Journalism (IJ) by the audience; simultaneously, the audience’s perspective is rarely considered in the production and research of IJ. At this point, however, it is crucial to incorporate an audience perspective to identify potentially unintended effects of IJ and improve on the innovation of IJ. This study investigates the audience’s experience and evaluation of IJ by qualitatively analyzing their thoughts after viewing two IJ cases. Our results indicate that the audience may pick up on intended effects, such as a sense of presence and an intense emotional experience, but some also express unease towards these effects. Furthermore, the audience struggles to comprehend this study’s two immersive journalistic cases as part of the journalistic genre. These findings provide insight into the gap between the initial hype and the current reality of IJ and provide the basis for propositions for future IJ productions.
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