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MediaBASE
Research
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Objects
Each user can enter media objects
(.jpg, .gif, .mov, .avi, .mp3).
Entered objects are available
to every member of the community.
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MediaBASE is
a software application for creating, sharing and exchanging
media objects and compositions within a delimited social context.
It places rich media authorship -- ordinarily confined to discrete,
resource-intensive media projects -- in the hands of casual
users, who are able to manipulate and exchange media compositions
with the speed and informality of text-centric technologies
such as weblogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, discussion
forums and e-mail. Because it is built around an associatively-indexed
database, MediaBASE allows these media "conversations" or "dialogues" to
transcend their original contexts and take on relevance for
subsequent users of the system. MediaBASE can be used:
to augment existing discourse communities, such as a school,
course, museum, local forum or design collective; to provide
a common forum for linked classes and remote user groups;
to create networks around a given topic or body of material,
such as an online art collection or digital archive.
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Compositions
With functionality
to manipulate opactiy, size, background color,
frame, and text, the multiscreen composition is
the primary unit of expression
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In one sense MediaBASE is a communication tool. The fundamental
units of discourse in MediaBASE are composition, media
object, and concept. Compositions consist of
imported and edited media objects, text, and verbal “concepts” selected
from a palette of pre-defined terms. Media objects are any
of a range of rich media, including still and moving
images and sound files. Objects imported
for use in a given composition are made instantaneously available
to all in the user-group. They can be viewed separately with
accompanying metadata, or incorporated into other compositions
and resized, cropped, positioned, etc. using a set of built-in
tools. Conversely, entire compositions or whole pieces
thereof can be rubber-stamped into other compositions, to
enable responses to synthetic claims or arguments embodied
in design and compositional choices. Dialogs can be navigated
chronologically, or reconstructed virtually through a search
function, which seeks associations between compositions by
number of shared objects or concepts, or by directly inserted
links.
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Concepts
Terms and definitions
entered by an instructor or group leader orient
dialogue around themes. Every published composition
is required to at least have one.
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In another sense, MediaBASE is a dynamic
database. Media objects can be imported individually for each
composition, or an entire archive of material relevant to a
given community can be preloaded. The concept palette, intended
to provide a conceptual framework for a given user group, is
input ahead of usage time, and updated by an administrator.
Thus, while each object is tagged with “objective” metadata
during the importation process, it also accretes cumulative “subjective” metadata
during usage by virtue of its associations with concepts,
discursive text and other objects in compositions. As older
compositions are sampled and repurposed for new ones, the
media objects contained within them develop deep histories
especially meaningful to the user community. Over a period
of time, MediaBASE could provide a valuable ethnographic
tool for exposing a cross-sectional view of media artifacts
and the social structures and networks that surround them.
MediaBASE is a collaborative
project of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia
Literacy (IML) at the Annenberg Center for Communication
and the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) of the Viterbi
School of Engineering. It is licensed for further
development, promotion and distribution to Emerson College
in Boston, Massachusetts. The Principal Investigators of
the project are Chris Gilman, Associate Director of the
IML, Eric Gordon, Assistant Professor of New Media at Emerson
College and Victor Lacour, Creative Director of the IMSC.
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