Japanese animation and glocalization of sociology

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Visualization of spirography-based objective measures in Parkinson's disease

Objective: To investigate whether advanced visualizations of spirography-based objective measures are useful in differentiating drug-related motor dysfunctions between Off and dyskinesia in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Background: During the course of a 3 year longitudinal clinical study, in total 65 patients (43 males and 22 females with mean age of 65) with advanced PD and 10 healthy elderly (HE) subjects (5 males and 5 females with mean age of 61) were assessed. Both patients and HE subjects performed repeated and time-stamped assessments of their objective health indicators using a test battery implemented on a telemetry touch screen handheld computer, in their home environment settings. Among other tasks, the subjects were asked to trace a pre-drawn Archimedes spiral using the dominant hand and repeat the test three times per test occasion. Methods: A web-based framework was developed to enable a visual exploration of relevant spirography-based kinematic features by clinicians so they can in turn evaluate the motor states of the patients i.e. Off and dyskinesia. The system uses different visualization techniques such as time series plots, animation, and interaction and organizes them into different views to aid clinicians in measuring spatial and time-dependent irregularities that could be associated with the motor states. Along with the animation view, the system displays two time series plots for representing drawing speed (blue line) and displacement from ideal trajectory (orange line). The views are coordinated and linked i.e. user interactions in one of the views will be reflected in other views. For instance, when the user points in one of the pixels in the spiral view, the circle size of the underlying pixel increases and a vertical line appears in the time series views to depict the corresponding position. In addition, in order to enable clinicians to observe erratic movements more clearly and thus improve the detection of irregularities, the system displays a color-map which gives an idea of the longevity of the spirography task. Figure 2 shows single randomly selected spirals drawn by a: A) patient who experienced dyskinesias, B) HE subject, and C) patient in Off state. Results: According to a domain expert (DN), the spirals drawn in the Off and dyskinesia motor states are characterized by different spatial and time features. For instance, the spiral shown in Fig. 2A was drawn by a patient who showed symptoms of dyskinesia; the drawing speed was relatively high (cf. blue-colored time series plot and the short timestamp scale in the x axis) and the spatial displacement was high (cf. orange-colored time series plot) associated with smooth deviations as a result of uncontrollable movements. The patient also exhibited low amount of hesitation which could be reflected both in the animation of the spiral as well as time series plots. In contrast, the patient who was in the Off state exhibited different kinematic features, as shown in Fig. 2C. In the case of spirals drawn by a HE subject, there was a great precision during the drawing process as well as unchanging levels of time-dependent features over the test trial, as seen in Fig. 2B. Conclusions: Visualizing spirography-based objective measures enables identification of trends and patterns of drug-related motor dysfunctions at the patient’s individual level. Dynamic access of visualized motor tests may be useful during the evaluation of drug-related complications such as under- and over-medications, providing decision support to clinicians during evaluation of treatment effects as well as improve the quality of life of patients and their caregivers. In future, we plan to evaluate the proposed approach by assessing within- and between-clinician variability in ratings in order to determine its actual usefulness and then use these ratings as target outcomes in supervised machine learning, similarly as it was previously done in the study performed by Memedi et al. (2013).

A comparative study of approaches to audiovisual translation

For those who are not new to the world of Japanese animation, known mainly as anime, the debate of "dub vs. sub" is by no means anything out of the ordinary, but rather a very heated argument amongst fans. The study will focus on the differences in the US English version between the two approaches of translating audio-visual media, namely subtitling (official subtitles and fanmade subtitles) and dubbing, in a qualitative context. More precisely, which of the two approaches can store the most information from the same audiovisual segment, in order to satisfy the needs of the anime audience. In order to draw substantial conclusions, the analysis will be conducted on a corpus of 1 episode from the first season of the popular mid-nineties TV animated series, Sailor Moon. The main objective of this research is to analyze the three versions and compare the findings to what anime fans expect each of them to provide, in terms of how culture specific terms are handled, how accurate the translation is, localization, censorship, and omission. As for the fans’ opinions, the study will include a survey regarding the personal preference of fans when it comes to choosing between the official subtitled version, the fanmade subtitles and the dubbed version.