Tim J Smith, expert in scene perception and film cognition, and of The DIEM project [1] recently starred as a guest blogger for David Bordwell, a leading film theorist with an impressive list of books and publications widely used in film cognition/film art research/studies [2]. In his article featured on David’s site, Tim expands on his research on film cognition including continuity editing [3], attentional synchrony [4], and the project we worked on in 2008-2010 as part of The DIEM Project. Since Tim’s feature on David Bordwell’s blog, The DIEM Project saw a surge of publicity and our vimeo video loads going higher than 200,000 in a single day and features on dvice, slashfilm, gizmodo, Rogert Ebert’s facebook/twitter, and the front page of imbd.com.
Not to mention, our tools and visualizations are finally reaching an audience with interests in film, photography, and cognition. If you haven’t yet seen some of our videos, please head on over to our vimeo page, where you can see a range of videos embedded with eye-tracking of participants and many different visualizations of models of eye-movements using machine learning, or start by reading Tim’s post on DavidBordwell.net. You can also visit our website and create your own visualizations with our completely open-source tool, CARPE, and our completely royalty free database, the DIEM database. I’ve linked a few of my favorite videos below which were all made with CARPE with the last one showing a unique visualization of a movie as it’s motion:
[1]. The DIEM Project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Grant Ref F/00-158/BZ) and the ESRC (RES 062-23-1092) and awarded to John M Henderson.
[2]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bordwell
[3]. http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/1076/1/smith_ATOCE_0506.pdf
[4]. Mital, P.K., Smith, T. J., Hill, R. and Henderson, J. M., “Clustering of gaze during dynamic scene viewing is predicted by motion,” Cognitive Computation
Over the past 2 years, I have been working under the direction of Prof John M Henderson together with Dr Tim J Smith and Dr Robin Hill on the DIEM project (Dynamic Images and Eye-Movements). Our project has focused on investigating active visual cognition by eye-tracking numerous participants watching a wide-variety of short videos.
We are in the process of making all of our data freely available for research use. As well, we have also worked on tools for analyzing eye-movements during such dynamic scenes.
CARPE, or more bombastically known as Computational Algorithmic Representation and Processing of Eye-movements, allows one to begin visualizing eye-movement data together with the video data it was tracked with in a number of ways. It currently supports low-level feature visualizations, clustering of eye-movements, model selection, heat-map visualizations, blending, contour visualizations, peek-through visualizations, movie output, binocular data input, and more. The videos shown above on our Vimeo page were all created using this tool. Head over to Google code to check out the source code or download the binary. We are still in the process of stream-lining this process by creating manuals for new users and uploading more of the eye-tracking and video data so keep checking back if you are interested.
An event organized by the new Center for Film, Performance, and Media Arts (CFPMA) was held today in Edinburgh University discussing recent topics in… film, performance, and media arts.
It was an interesting group of people that strangely somehow all had much in common. I had the fortune of presenting my research as it relates to DIEM in the place of Tim J. Smith.
The schedule:
Close-Up 2: Schedule for Wednesday 17th June 2009
10am coffee and tech checks (G.11, William Robertson Building)
10.30 Welcome, Annette Davison (Music, ACE and Director, Cfpma), Martine Beugnet (LLC, Convener of Film Studies)
Who is who, where is what? People and resources for which the Cfpma will provide a point of convergence.
11am Individual Presentations (MAX 10 mins each):
Andrew Lawrence (African Studies, SSPS) — Difficult satire under austerity: the films of Sissako and Amoussou
Martine Beugnet (Film, LLC) — “The Wounded Screen”
Richard Williams (Architecture, ACE) — “The Modernist City on Film”
Stephen Cairns (Architecture, ACE) — “Cultures of Legibility: Emergent Urban Landscapes in Southeast Asia”
Simon Frith and Annette Davison (Music, ACE) — “The Role of Cinemas in the History of Live Music”
Mary Fogarty (Music, ACE) — “The New Silent Cinema in Live”
Yoko Matsumoto-Sturt (Asian Studies, LLC) — “Japanese language and culture in J-pop”
Kriss Ravetto (Film, LLC) — “Spectres of the Digital”
Eric Laurier (Geosciences) — “Agreements in Editing”
Smita Kheria (Law) — “Copyright law and new media art
Lunch: 1-2pm
2pm – joint presentations
Richard Coyne, Penny Travlou, Mark Wright (ACE, ECA, and Informatics) — “Emerging forms of digital media and the democratization of urban discourse”
Jolyon Mitchell, Alina Birzache, Milja Radovic, Yasmin Fedda (Divinity) — “Seeing Through Film, Religion and Ethics
3pm COFFEE
3.30pm DISCUSSION FORUM 1
Cross-Subject/School /Institution teaching and research supervision: current/future plans
Chair: Kriss Ravetto
With Martine Beugnet, Sarah Colvin, John Lee, Fiona Littleton, Martine Pierquin
4pm INFO and UPDATES
Knowledge Transfer and Exchange: Anne-Sofie Laegran
Cfpma Web Presence: Annette Davison
‘Film in the Public Space’ and the Roberts Fund: Martine Beugnet
4.20pm DISCUSSION FORUM 2
The future of the Cfpma.
Chair: Annette and Martine
What could the Centre usefully do/encourage to support its members and foster research collaboration?
5pm BREAK – and move to David Hume Tower conference room
5.15pm Professor Tim Lenoir, CONTEMPLATING SINGULARITY
Cinet (Cinema Network) talk, followed by wine reception and launch of CFPMA
The talk explores how the postbiological and posthuman future has haunted cultural studies of technoscience for two decades. Concern (and in some quarters enthusiasm) that contemporary technoscience is on a path leading beyond simple human biological improvements and prosthetic enhancements to a complete human makeover has been sustained by the exponential growth in power and capability of computer technology since the early 1990s. The deeper fear is that somehow digital code and computer-mediated communications are getting under our skin, and in the process we are being transformed.
Tim Lenoir is the Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society at Duke University. He has published several books and articles on the history of biomedical science from the nineteenth century to the present. His more recent work has focused on the introduction of computers into biomedical research from the early 1960s to the present, particularly the development of computer graphics, medical visualization technology, the development of virtual reality and its applications in surgery and other fields. Lenoir has also been engaged in constructing online digital libraries for a number of projects, including an archive on the history of Silicon Valley. Two recent projects include a web documentary project to document the history of bioinformatics funded by the Bern Dibner and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, and How They Got Game, a history of interactive simulation and video games. With economists Nathan Rosenberg, Henry Rowen, and Brent Goldfarb he has just completed a collaborative study for Stanford University on Stanford’s historical relationship to Silicon Valley entitled, Inventing the Entrepreneurial Region: Stanford and the Co-Evolution of Silicon Valley. In support of these projects, Lenoir has developed software tools for interactive web-based collaboration. In this connection he is currently engaged with colleagues at UC Santa Barbara in developing the NSF-supported Center for Nanotechnology in Society, where he contributes to the effort to document the history, societal, and ethical implications of bionanotechnology.
There were those interested in the slides of my presentation and I thought to include it online:
The videos shown in the slides are available online on our Vimeo and Youtube accounts:
