The purpose of this creative thesis project is to complete video greetings for the business "Recherche Cards," expected to be launched by late August 2007. Recherche DVD cards is a relatively new concept in the greetings industry, and will offer various video and 2D/3D animated greetings. The greetings can be sent online as they are or can be personalized with the client's videos and be mailed on a DVD format. For the clients looking for something exclusive, they can order a custom made card designed just for them. The ordering will take online only at www.recherchecards.com. The following proposal will discuss how it was conceived and brought to completion. / Department of Telecommunications

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences / Department of Communication

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulation—“viral.” This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the web’s celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomena—the production, watching, listening to, circulation, or “sharing” of such objects—has constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christopher Small’s influential 1998 coinage, I theorize these strands of practice as viral musicking. While scholarship on viral media has tended to center on visual parameters, rendering such phenomena silent, the term “viral musicking” seeks to draw media theory metaphors of voice and listening into dialogue with musicology, precisely at the intersection of audiovisual objects which are played, heard, listened to. The project’s methodology comprises a sonically attuned media archeology, grounded in close readings of internet artifacts and practices; this sonic attunement is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of genre, aesthetics, and style, discourse analysis, and twenty-first-century reception (micro)histories across a dynamic media assemblage. By analyzing particular ecosystems of platforms, behavior, and devices across the first decades of the twenty-first century, I chart a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, enabling a capacious “virality” comprising disparate phenomena from simple looping animations to the surprise release of Beyoncé’s 2013 album. Alongside this narrative, I challenge utopian claims of Web 2.0’s digital democratization by explicating the iterative processes through which material, work, and labor were co-opted from amateur content creators and leveraged for the profit of established media and corporate entities. “Unmute This” articulates two main arguments. First, that virality reified as a concept and set of dynamic-but-predictable processes over the course of the first decades of the twenty-first century; this dissertation charts a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s. Second, that analyzing the musicality of viral objects, attending to the musical and sonic parameters of virally-circulating phenomena, and thinking of viral participation as an extension of musical behavior provide a productive framework for understanding the affective, generic, and social aspects of twenty-first-century virality. The five chapters of the dissertation present analyses of a series of viral objects, arranged roughly chronologically from the turn of the twenty-first century to the middle of the 2010s. The first chapter examines the loops of animated phenomena from The Dancing Baby to Hampster Dance and the Badgers animation; the second moves from loops to musicalization, considering remixing approaches to the so-called “Bus Uncle” and “Bed Intruder” videos. The third chapter also deals with viral remixing, centering around Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, while the fourth chapter analyzes “unmute this” video posts in the context of the mid-2010s social media platform assemblage. The final chapter presents the 2013 surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album as an apotheosis to the viral narratives that precede it—a claim that is briefly interrogated in the dissertation’s epilogue.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2008. / Communication Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Ap.C.T. & M.)--Cleveland State University, 2008. / Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 11, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p.111-118). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center. Also available in print.

Server selection is an important problem of cloud computing in which cloud service providers direct user demands to servers in one of the multiple data centers located in different geographical locations. The existing solutions usually assume homogeneity of cloud services (i.e., all users request the same type of service) and handle user demands in an individual basis which incurs high computational overhead. In this study, we propose a new and effective server selection scheme in which diversities of cloud services are taken into account. We focus on a specific cloud service, i.e., online video service, and assume that different videos have different bandwidth requirements. We group users into clusters and handle user demands on a cluster basis for faster and more efficient process. Firstly, we assume that user demands and bandwidth capacities of servers are given in the data centers, our problem is to assign the user demands to the servers under the bandwidth constraint, such that the overall latency (measured by the network distance) between the user clusters and the selected servers is minimized. We design a server selection system and formulate this problem as a linear programming formulation which can be solved by existing techniques. The system periodically executes our scheme and computes an optimal solution for server selection. User demands are assigned to the servers according to the optimal solution and the minimum overall latency can be achieved. The simulation results show that our scheme is significantly better than the random algorithm and the YouTube server selection strategy. Based on the first part, we take the storage capacities of servers constraint into consideration. In the second part, our new problem is to assign the user demands to the servers under the bandwidth and storage constraint, such that the function of overall latency (measured by the network distance) between the user clusters and the selected servers and standard deviation of traffic load of every server in the system is minimized. We design a server selection system and formulate this problem which can be solved by existing techniques. User demands are assigned to the servers according to the optimal solution and the two goals (minimum overall latency and the most balanced traffic load) can be achieved. The simulation results show the influence of different weights of these two goals on the user demands assigning.

Chen, Liang. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-175). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

Thesis (M.A.)--Michigan State University. Advertising, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (Proquest, viewed on Aug. 7, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-76). Also issued in print.

Online video media share a great part of similar attributes with traditional mass media. They also bear some fresh features of Web 2.0, such as integration, interactivity, both synchrony and asynchrony, which break the traditional pattern of media viewing and using. They allow for new forms of user activities and offer the user a participatory experience/role so as to facilitate the evolution and dynamic reintegration of the networked society as well as the whole social environment. Online video media have therefore been drawing lots of attention from both the industry and academic field since the emergence. The aims of this research are to: 1) investigate uses and gratifications theorizations in the era of Web 2.0, with online video media the typical target, by finding out the wide and coherent spectrum of online video media usage motivations and gratifications; 2) construct a comprehensive framework of online video media uses and gratifications from integrated and interdisciplinary perspectives; 3) verify the interactive relationships between or among the variables presented in the framework. Survey is adopted for data collection in this study. Convenient sampling and snowball sampling are used. A total of 470 respondents in mainland China complete the questionnaire online, in which 462 are online video media users and the rest 8 are non-users. The online video media uses and gratifications items are then subject to principal components factoring with varimax rotation. Seven factors are identified to explain 67.31% of the variance. Results indicate that the nature of device is a potential source of resulting in unique media outcomes, and habitual behavior of mobile video use has become a part of netizens’ life. More importantly, significant differences in both motivation and gratification between the two user identities are found. Besides, different genres of media contents are related to different motivations and gratifications, and may predict different degrees of interactivity. Moreover, results show that, people in different types of emotions (positive and non-positive) tend to arouse different motivations and attempt to seek different gratifications. Investigation also detect the relationships among dependency, activities after use and attitudes during the motivation and gratification process. It is concluded that, online video media usage is a spiral feedback process of dependency, activities after use and attitudes. During the process of motivation and gratification, people gain experience and derived perceptions, and the beliefs/loyalty gradually forms. Online video media usage is an interactive and dynamic process. During the process, user interacts with the media as well as with other users in the networked society. Though media culture, media literacy and social participation are still weak and limited in the domestic networked society, online video media user exhibits more active, intentional and conscious actions, which is distinguished from traditional mass media audience. In general, this study contributes to the understanding of user’s behaviors, needs and the effects of the new media.

Since students can adjust the speed of online videos by time-compression which is available through common software (Pastore & Ritzhaupt, 2015), it is important to learn at which point compression impacts comprehension. The focus of the study is whether the speaker’s face benefits comprehension during a 50% compressed lecture. Participants listened to a normal lecture or a 50% compressed lecture. Each participant saw an audio and audiovisual lecture, and were eye tracked during the audiovisual lecture. A comprehension test revealed that participants in the compressed lecture group performed better with the face. Eye fixations revealed that participants in the compressed lecture group looked less at the eyes and more at the nose when compared to eye fixations for those that viewed the normal lecture. This study demonstrates that 50% compression affects eye fixations and that the face benefits the listener, but this much compression will still lessen comprehension. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection