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By reviewing an extensive corpus of philosophical studies and sources published during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter will pinpoint how modern authors identified the ephemeral as the distinctive trait of the metropolitan experience and of visual media. This evidence leads to a reassessment of the present based on the discovery of the value of change, and its evolution into a constitutive attribute of contemporary thought. It is the metropolis that creates sensorial conditions for an experience of the acceleration of time, which is the origin of the importance of the ephemeral in 19th and 20th thought. By focusing on a genealogical approach, and by following the methodological framework proposed by Paul de Man, I try to execute a systemic analysis of the multifaceted constellation of the ephemeral. This chapter focuses on the creation of a conceptual lattice of ephemeral-related concepts (time, memory, media, habits and addiction, lifestyle, displays, and opinion), allowing historical and philosophical research to deal with the fundamental issues of the media experience.

Designers create sketches, diagrams, and other visual media to both externalize a specific design concept as well as to explore design spaces. The largely visual and spatial nature of these diagrams used to support design activities poses several challenges for blind and visually impaired (BVI) designers to participate along sighted peers. This challenge includes the creation of tools to support the teaching of tactile graphics and their collaborative use in the context of design education. In efforts to address several of these challenges, we present PantoGuide, a low-cost system that provides audio and haptic guidance, via skin-stretch feedback to the dorsum of a user’s hand while the user explores a tactile graphic overlaid on a touchscreen. This system allows programming of haptic guidance patterns and cues for tactile graphics that can be experienced by students learning remotely or that can be reviewed by a student independently.

A discussion of Borges’s early tale “The Mirror of Ink” and the title sequence of Brooker’s Black Mirror series lays the groundwork for the introduction of some of the key themes to be addressed in the volume. These include the materiality of forms of written and visual media, the nature of self-awareness as it takes shape in the works of both authors, and the concept of remediation as an interpretive strategy for bringing Borges and Brooker into dialogue. Some attention is also given to the challenges posed by “anachronistic” approaches to reading Borges as well as the danger of failing to attend to the ways that the vision of Black Mirror is grounded not just in recent technological developments but in the broader literary and philosophical tradition.

Libraries, museums, and other heritage institutions are digitizing large parts of their archives. Computer vision techniques enable scholars to query, analyze, and enrich the visual sources in these archives. However, it remains unclear how well algorithms trained on modern photographs perform on historical material. This study evaluates and adapts existing algorithms. We show that we can detect faces, visual media types, and gender with high accuracy in historical advertisements. It remains difficult to detect gender when faces are either of low quality or relatively small or large. Further optimization of scaling might solve the latter issue, while the former might be ameliorated using upscaling. We show how computer vision can produce meta-data information, which can enrich historical collections. This information can be used for further analysis of the historical representation of gender.

Persons with visual impairments may encounter difficulties in their activities of daily living. To alleviate the situation, the use of assistive devices has been proposed in the past. In the development of such devices, haptic feedback has received increasing attention over the years. Notably, touch stimuli do not block or distort the auditory signals coming from the environment. In this chapter, we first will provide a brief overview of related work on haptically-assisted solutions for helping persons with visual impairments. Next, we address electronic travel aids that employ haptic feedback to support safe and independent ambulation and navigation of these users. A newly developed system and several related studies with end users will be discussed. Finally, haptically-assisted solutions to provide access to visual media on mobile devices will be addressed. A number of prototype systems, combining shape displays with surface haptics will be covered.

This chapter examines the first Blade Runner movie, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the original novella (1982). In Blade Runner, Replicants become undetectable, undifferentiated visually, from humans. The newer models can pass the Voight-Kampff test—a test which distinguishes true emotional responses from implanted ones. This perfect mimicry is our next iteration of how we desire sex robots to behave, and it is desired well in advance of the possibility of building such bots. It is in this iteration of the story where two theoretical questions appear—that of the racialization of the characters, which is far more apparent in a visual media, and the humanity of death—that how being able to die, and the fear of it, humanize the movie’s Replicants.

Chest X-ray images are currently the best available visual media for diagnosing pneumonia, which plays a crucial role in clinical care. Medical images diagnosing can be error-prone for inexperienced radiologists, while tedious and time-consuming for experienced radiologists. To address these issues, we study automatically detect pneumonia in Chest X-ray images. However, this task exists several challenges. First, abnormal regions of pneumonia are difficult to identify due to the noise interference from other tissue and lesions. Second, the features of lung regions are usually essential information for diagnosis. With the pneumonia disease happens in lung areas, only training CNNs using global image may be affected by the irrelevant noisy regions. Third, the appearance of pneumonia in X-ray images is often vague, can overlap with other diagnoses. To cope with these challenges, we first introduce a lung segmentation network, which segments the lung from the original images. Then, develop a feature extraction model, which incorporates global and local features for pneumonia classification. Finally, build a cooperative learning framework, which merges bounding boxes (localization of pneumonia) from two cooperative models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods on the Kaggles RSNA Pneumonia Detection Challenge dataset and reaches excellent performance with the level of the top 1% in this competition.

Our active lifestyles see us playing, pausing, and skipping through life all the while our phones are in our hands. For many, completing the daily grind requires regular audio and visual media accompaniment and for this we interact with our phones as we skip, run, and jump. In this respect, a unique form of digital library is our mobile media player of choice. These media players serve as both the interface for listening to and watching these audio and visual media as well as the media library and storage. We argue therefore that the interface design considerations of the media library as well as the media interaction require user centered investigation. We tested button placement variations and analyzed the user preferences as well as user interaction with these mobile media player prototypes while on the move. Early insights suggest users prefer what they are most accustomed to, yet issues of accuracy with interface designs that are unfamiliar require further investigation.

The concluding chapter turns to children’s fiction to demonstrate that the complicated relationship between language, suffering, and intertextuality is central to contemporary literature, regardless of genre or audience. These texts present very different approaches to animal language. Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go highlights the way language can take on a material presence that changes the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. The chapter then turns to Kate DiCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, alongside work by Claire Barker, Emer Stamp, and Ursula Vernon, to show how the integration of visual media challenges the anthropocentric hierarchy of the written word. These texts suggest that as much as nonhuman animals are always mediated, humans, and human texts, are also similarly mediated.

Bill Barrett writes that the role of photography as an instrument for understanding human rights is worthy of exploration, with the aim of enhancing HRE in responsible, ethical ways. Media of visual communication can be used broadly, but students of human rights must critically examine the purpose, and potential consequences, of how images are used. His chapter outlines the key issues inherent to imagery in HRE, as well as resources for educators to use visual media for advancing human rights learning. It uses photographic case studies from the recent sites of conflict and human rights abuse, as well as his personal experiences as a documentary photographer, to investigate ethical issues and explore the possibilities for combining photographic expression with HRE.

This chapter explores the influences of South African urban performance poetry, which is said to be highly influenced by the slam poetry movement in the United States. It argues that this poetry draws from local and international linguistic repertoires, dialects and registers, and live performances include non-linguistic resources such as body, movement, hand gestures, as well as the use of visual media and music. Like urban youth languages, urban performance poetry manipulates language and dialects for specific purposes. Urban youth languages such as iScamtho or Tsotsitaal, as well as other South African languages, are sometimes incorporated into performances, along with the country’s indigenous languages. Despite this, many performance poets choose to write and perform mostly in English. South African urban performance poetry remains an under-researched area, as it is still developing. However, the diverse multimodal and linguistic influences make urban performance poetry an interesting field to research.

This chapter analyzes the capacity of visual media to produce an affective atmosphere capable of evoking embodied memories of intergenerational experiences of historical violence. Focusing on the detailed personal narrative of an Indisch (Indo-Dutch) descendant of survivors of the 1965–1966 killings living in the Netherlands, the chapter examines how she began to confront her personal family history and their connections to 1965 only after watching The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), documentaries by Joshua Oppenheimer et al. Dragojlovic argues that the spectator—a descendant of the 1965–1966 events—is overwhelmed by the affective atmosphere of the violent past, which necessitates a re-establishment of her affective connection to the past events and its incorporation within the present.

The study of Galician audiovisual production in a global context underlines the need to open Galician Studies to interdisciplinary media studies in a wider context, one that takes into account the social, cultural, and economic realities of the twenty-first century, as well as the impact of the representation of Galician culture in our visual media age, both at home and abroad. This chapter examines the wide reach of Galician animation in the global age, its achievements, and its challenges. It studies the different strategies employed by Galician animation studios and their efforts to project a national imaginary around the world as well as to debunk romanticized national stereotypes.

Because of wideness in adults’ age range and differences in all ages’ characteristics, there have been different definitions and classifications on adults in literature, and also making different classifications are possible. Adults have been classified in three groups as adult-child, adult-adolescence and adult-adult in this study. Age range has not been considered while classifying. Leaders and also political leaders has been focus of attention throughout history not only in written and visual media but also in academic researches. In this study, primarily adult-child, adult-adolescence and adult-adult properties have been defined in feeling, thought and behavior dimensions. Profiles were taken as two: feeling, thought and behavior dimension related to characteristics of individual in profile analysis; attitude frequency which contains adult-child, adult-adolescence and adult-adult characteristics of individual. According to results, a unique model of classification of adults, adult-child, adult-adolescence and adult-adult, has been formed. Although dimensions of leaders’ interventions in chaotic situations have been differ in challenging, moderate, destructive, positive circle, this leadership attitudes have been placed even more chaotic to chaotic situations or have been transformed chaos to cosmos. In this context, finally, leaders’ coping strategies in chaotic ambiance have been evaluated on the base of adult-child, adult-adolescence and adult-adult classification model.

Clarifying the point with which the previous chapter culminates, Chap. 3 begins by returning to Seaford’s concept of a monetised chronotope. To enhance this idea, the monetised chronotope is placed within its historical context, namely alongside the emergence and transformation of a visualised chronotope that first appears with Homer’s invention of alphabetic writing around 800 B.C.E. This abstract, visual essence, when it combines with that of money, produces what we can call—to borrow a phrase from Noam Chomsky —early historic “media control”. Confronting this new lethal danger to their world, the Greeks absorb the unlimited nature of the new visual media of money into the unlimited chronotope of mystery-cult that is, for this purpose, opened out on the public stage. One thinks of the blindness to which the money-tyrants such as Pentheus, Kreon and Oedipus succumb.