Televisão digital: interação e usabilidade

Pós-graduação em Comunicação - FAAC

A CIÊNCIA NO PICADEIRO: UMA ANÁLISE DAS REPORTAGENS SOBRE CIÊNCIA NO PROGRAMA FANTÁSTICO

Esse trabalho visa elaborar uma análise crítica do discurso sobre ciência presente no programa Fantástico de televisão. Dentro da perspectiva da análise crítica do discurso, busca-se encontrar marcas que indiquem a intencionalidade do discurso, tanto de cientistas como de comunicadores, bem como discrepâncias entre a intenção e a comunicação efetivamente realizada, na medida em que todo ato comunicativo é permeado também pelas condições em que foram gerados e recebidos. Dentro desse marco, o trabalho identifica o programa como enunciador de um discurso que se tece a partir das múltiplas vozes que contribuem para sua a realização. A partir da identificação desse papel, a análise se volta para as características da informação científica nele presente.

A CIÊNCIA NO PICADEIRO: UMA ANÁLISE DAS REPORTAGENS SOBRE CIÊNCIA NO PROGRAMA FANTÁSTICO

Esse trabalho visa elaborar uma análise crítica do discurso sobre ciência presente no programa Fantástico de televisão. Dentro da perspectiva da análise crítica do discurso, busca-se encontrar marcas que indiquem a intencionalidade do discurso, tanto de cientistas como de comunicadores, bem como discrepâncias entre a intenção e a comunicação efetivamente realizada, na medida em que todo ato comunicativo é permeado também pelas condições em que foram gerados e recebidos. Dentro desse marco, o trabalho identifica o programa como enunciador de um discurso que se tece a partir das múltiplas vozes que contribuem para sua a realização. A partir da identificação desse papel, a análise se volta para as características da informação científica nele presente.

Get the picture? The effects of iconicity on toddlers' reenactment from picture books

What do toddlers learn from everyday picture-book reading interactions? To date, there has been scant research exploring this question. In this study, the authors adapted a standard imitation procedure to examine 18- to 30-month-olds' ability to learn how to reenact a novel action sequence from a picture book. The results provide evidence that toddlers can imitate specific target actions on novel real-world objects on the basis of a picture-book interaction. Children's imitative performance after the reading interaction varied both as a function of age and the level of iconicity of the pictures in the book. These findings are discussed in terms of children's emerging symbolic capacity and the flexibility of the cognitive representation.

A CIÊNCIA NO PICADEIRO: UMA ANÁLISE DAS REPORTAGENS SOBRE CIÊNCIA NO PROGRAMA FANTÁSTICO

Esse trabalho visa elaborar uma análise crítica do discurso sobre ciência presente no programa Fantástico de televisão. Dentro da perspectiva da análise crítica do discurso, busca-se encontrar marcas que indiquem a intencionalidade do discurso, tanto de cientistas como de comunicadores, bem como discrepâncias entre a intenção e a comunicação efetivamente realizada, na medida em que todo ato comunicativo é permeado também pelas condições em que foram gerados e recebidos. Dentro desse marco, o trabalho identifica o programa como enunciador de um discurso que se tece a partir das múltiplas vozes que contribuem para sua a realização. A partir da identificação desse papel, a análise se volta para as características da informação científica nele presente.

Saturday Morning Television Advertisements Aired on English and Spanish Language Networks along the Texas-Mexico Border

Objectives: The aim of this content analysis study is to characterize the TV advertisements aired to an at-risk child population along the Texas-Mexico border. Methods: We characterized the early Saturday morning TV advertisements aired by three broadcast network categories (U.S. English language, U.S. Spanish language, and Mexican Spanish language) in Spring 2010. The number, type (food related vs. non-food related), target audience, and persuasion tactics used were recorded. Advertised foods, based on nutrition content, were categorized as meeting or not meeting current dietary guidelines. Results: Most commercials were non-food related (82.7%, 397 of 480). The majority of the prepared foods (e.g., cereals, snacks, and drinks) advertised did not meet the current U.S. Dietary Guidelines. Additionally, nutrition content information was not available for many of the foods advertised on the Mexican Spanish language broadcast network category. Conclusions: For U.S. children at risk for obesity along the Texas-Mexico border exposure to TV food advertisements may result in the continuation of sedentary behavior as well as an increased consumption of foods of poor nutritional quality. An international regulatory effort to monitor and enforce the reduction of child-oriented food advertising is needed. Editors' Note: This article was submitted in response to the first issue of the Journal of Applied Research on Children: Latino Children.

Television satire, decmocracy and the decay of public language: John Clarke's verbal caricature

This paper examines the contributions of John Clarke to the field of political satire through his interviews with straight-man Bryan Dawe on ABC TV’s The 7.30 Report. Clarke’s work represents one of the last vestiges of what was once a vigorous satiric tradition in TV comedy, specifically the practice of political caricature. There was The Mavis Bramston Show in the 1960s and The Naked Vicar Show in the 1970s, while The Gillies Report in the 1980s was probably the best example of sustained political caricature in television comedy. Even in later sketch-based shows such as Fast Forward and The Late Show in the early 1990s, political caricature was a significant component of the material, whereas it seems to have all but disappeared from current television comedy. The paper investigates the disappearance of this type of comedy from Australian television screens and also discusses why the longevity, consistency, not to mention accuracy, of Clarke’s satire is so important in the current political climate. Clarke’s political caricature is almost entirely language-based, expertly parodying the spin-doctored rhetoric of our elected representatives and business leaders. This leads to a secondary focus of the paper, which is a discussion of Clarke’s unique form of satire in the context of what an historian (and former satirist) identifies as ‘the decay of public language’.

English as a Global Language

How far has English already spread? How much further can we expect it to go? In response to the first question, this chapter tries to identify the areas of life where English already serves as a lingua franca in the world (more or less) and those where the language faces sharp competition and does not threaten to marginalize the other major languages. The former areas of life are international safety, the internal business of international organizations, internal communication within the international news industry, international sports and science. The latter areas are the press, television, the internet, publishing and international trade. As to the second question, about the future prospects of English, the chapter argues that the advance of English will depend heavily on the motives to learn the other major languages in the world as well. Based on the empirical evidence, the same model applies to the incentives to learn English and these other languages. On the important topic of welfare, the cultural market is the single one where it is arguable that the progress of English has gone too far. English dominance in the song, the cinema and the best-seller is indeed extraordinary and difficult to reconcile with the evidence popular attachments to home languages, which is otherwise strong and apparent.

Realism and politics in alienated space: Trevor Griffiths's plays of the 1970s in the television studio

The television studio play is often perceived as a somewhat compromised, problematic mode in which spatial and technological constraints inhibit the signifying and aesthetic capacity of dramatic texts. Leah Panos examines the function of the studio in the 1970s television dramas of socialist playwright Trevor Griffiths, and argues that the established verbal and visual conventions of the studio play, in its confined and ‘alienated’ space, connect with and reinforce various aspects of Griffiths's particular approach and agenda. As well as suggesting ways in which the idealist, theoretical focus of the intellectual New Left is reflexively replicated within the studio, Panos explores how the ‘intimate’ visual language of the television studio allows Griffiths to create a ‘humanized’ Marxist discourse through which he examines dialectically his dramatic characters' experiences, ideas, morality, and political objectives. Leah Panos recently completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Dramatizing New Left Contradictions: Television Texts of Ken Loach, Jim Allen, and Trevor Griffiths’, at the University of Reading and is now a Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC funded project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, which runs from July 2010 to March 2014.

Televised Whorf: cognitive restructuring in advanced foreign language learners as a function of audio-visual media exposure

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events, e.g., “two nuns walk to a house,”, and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages (e.g., English), on the other hand, are more prone to direct attention to the ongoingness of motion events, which is reflected both in their event descriptions, e.g., “two nuns are walking.”, and in their non-verbal similarity judgements. This study examines to what extent native speakers of Swedish (n = 82) with English as a foreign language (FL) restructure their categorisation of goal-oriented motion as a function of their English proficiency and experience with the English language (e.g., exposure, learning). Seventeen monolingual native English speakers from the United Kingdom (UK) were engaged for comparison purposes. Data on motion event cognition were collected through a memory-based triads matching task, in which a target scene with an intermediate degree of endpoint orientation was matched with two alternative scenes with low and high degrees of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that the preference among the Swedish speakers of L2 English to base their similarity judgements on ongoingness rather than event endpoints was correlated with their use of English in their everyday lives, such that those who often watched television in English approximated the ongoingness preference of the English native speakers. These findings suggest that event cognition patterns may be restructured through the exposure to FL audio-visual media. The results thus add to the emerging picture that learning a new language entails learning new ways of observing and reasoning about reality.

TR-2015001: A Survey and Critique of Facial Expression Synthesis in Sign Language Animation

Sign language animations can lead to better accessibility of information and services for people who are deaf and have low literacy skills in spoken/written languages. Due to the distinct word-order, syntax, and lexicon of the sign language from the spoken/written language, many deaf people find it difficult to comprehend the text on a computer screen or captions on a television. Animated characters performing sign language in a comprehensible way could make this information accessible. Facial expressions and other non-manual components play an important role in the naturalness and understandability of these animations. Their coordination to the manual signs is crucial for the interpretation of the signed message. Software to advance the support of facial expressions in generation of sign language animation could make this technology more acceptable for deaf people. In this survey, we discuss the challenges in facial expression synthesis and we compare and critique the state of the art projects on generating facial expressions in sign language animations. Beginning with an overview of facial expressions linguistics, sign language animation technologies, and some background on animating facial expressions, a discussion of the search strategy and criteria used to select the five projects that are the primary focus of this survey follows. This survey continues on to introduce the work from the five projects under consideration. Their contributions are compared in terms of support for specific sign language, categories of facial expressions investigated, focus range in the animation generation, use of annotated corpora, input data or hypothesis for their approach, and other factors. Strengths and drawbacks of individual projects are identified in the perspectives above. This survey concludes with our current research focus in this area and future prospects.

Synchronizing Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) on videos for Open Digital TV with educational purposes

The TV is a potential midia of communication that affects all social classes and it is available in 98% of Brazilian homes. It has been used as a distributor of educational materials since the 1950s. By 2016 the Open Digital TV (ODTV) in Brazil might cover the entire national territory, replacing the TV with analog signals. Concerns about accessibility for People with Special Needs (PSN) in that media have become more intense since the 1990s worldwide. In Brazil, it is estimated 24.6 million of PSN, 23% of them having some type of hearing loss. Of these, 2.9% are reported as deafs. Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) is considered the first literacy language for deaf people in Brazil. In this context, this paper presents a proposal to facilitate the generation of educational content for ODTV based on two components. One is called SynchrLIBRAS and allows subtitles synchronization in Portuguese and a LIBRAS translator window of videos downloaded from the Web. The second component allows the visualization of this content through the Brazilian System of Digital TV and IPTV - environments that implement the middleware Ginga-NCL. The main focus of this paper is the presentation of the first component: SynchrLIBRAS. This proposal has educational purposes, contributing to teach LIBRAS to people who may collaborate with social inclusion of the deaf people.

The role of language in tv shows and its impact on the audience: A linguistic analysis of Game of Thrones

Through the analysis of American TV show Game of Thrones, this dissertation will focus on the linguistic issues concerning the adaptation from books to television, the power of language over the audience, and the creation of two languages, with all the linguistic and cultural implications related to this phenomenon.

Language ideologies: the formation and legitimisation of New Zealand English

New Zealand English first emerged at the beginning of the 19th century as a result of the dialect contact of British (51%), Scottish (27.3%) and Irish (22%) migrants (Hay and Gordon 2008:6). This variety has subsequently developed into an autonomous and legitimised national variety and enjoys a distinct socio-political status, recognition and codification. In fact, a number of dictionaries of New Zealand English have been published1 and the variety is routinely used as the official medium on TV, radio and other media. This however, has not always been the case, as for long only British standard norms were deemed suitable for media broadcasting. While there is some work already on lay commentary about New Zealand English (see for example Gordon 1983, 1994; Hundt 1998), there is much more to be done especially concerning more recent periods of the history of this variety and the ideologies underlying its development and legitimisation. Consequently, the current project aims at investigating the metalinguistic discourses during the period of transition from a British norm to a New Zealand norm in the media context, this will be done by focusing on debates about language in light of the advent of radio and television. The main purpose of this investigation is thus to examine the (language) ideologies that have shaped and underlain these discourses (e.g. discussions about the appropriateness of New Zealand English vis à vis external, British models of language) and their related practices in these media (e.g. broadcasting norms). The sociolinguistic and pragmatic effects of these ideologies will also be taken into account. Furthermore, a comparison will be carried out, at a later stage in the project, between New Zealand English and a more problematic and less legitimised variety: Estuary English. Despite plenty of evidence of media and other public discourses on Estuary English, in fact, there has been very little metalinguistic analysis of this evidence, nor examinations of the underlying ideologies in these discourses. The comparison will seek to discover whether similar themes emerge in the ideologies played out in publish discourses about these varieties, themes which serve to legitimise one variety, whilst denying such legitimacy to the other.