topical media & game development
book proposal (28/10/2002)
PDF
title: introduction multimedia
author: A. Eliëns
status: manuscript
online:
www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/media
I. Prospectus
1. Brief description
From the preface:
This book provides a concise and comprehensive introduction to multimedia. It arose out of the need for
material with a strong academic component, that is (simply) material related to scientific research.
The themes and variations addressed in this book may be summarized
as follows.
themes and variations
- digital convergence
- broadband communication
- multimedia information retrieval
To explain in somewhat more detail, digital convergence
may be characterized as the coming together of data
(including audio, video and information)
in a possible multitude of platforms,
to which these data are delivered by a variety
of (broadband) communication channels.
In fact, the increasingly powerful communication infrastructure
due to the popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web,
leads to an almost universally accessible multimedia (information)
repository, for which (unfortunately) the notion of
(multimedia) information retrieval seems to have occurred
only as an afterthought.
An underlying thought that motivated the writing of this book is that somehow the gap between authoring and retrieval should be bridged.
In other words, either by developing the technology for extracting features or attributes from multimedia objects, or by applying content annotation for such objects, multimedia information retrieval should be considered as a necessary asset to make a multimedia web an effective information repository.
This book aims at giving a concise (less that 150 pages)
introduction to multimedia, covering the themes mentioned above.
It can be used either for self-study or as material
for presentation in class.
In the book an overview is given of concepts and technology
that are present in multimedia practice and research.
In addition, numerous hints are given for further reading, research
and student projects.
2. Outstanding features
- The material is available online, and includes a
presentation-ready 'slide format'
See below.
-
A distinct advantage of the book, over the competition,
is that it is short. The text will not exceed 150 pages.
Any of the other books is 400-500 pages, at least.
In my experience, no student has the patience (nor the ability)
to read that all.
-
Although the book is meant for first year students, it is not
limited to that audience. The level of the students is of
more importance when considering how to take the exam.
The text contains sufficient references to other material
to be user for higher level students, or even research students
and professionals. To assist the instructor, a number of
questions are included (organised wrt. insight, conceptual knowledge,
and detailed knowledge of technology and facts).
There is also a sample of lectures, with a brief explanation.
-
Since the course, as I taught it, also included a practical
assignment, the online version contains a manual for Macromedia
Director, in the same format as the text.
- For many sections a research directions
section is included, discussing topics for further reading
or projects.
-
The book is (so to speak)
'a book with an attitude', it is slightly authorative
and directive towards the students, telling them to learn
the facts and 'do the exam'.
Some students take refuge to learning the 'keywords and phrases'.
They are even helped in this respect, since the text uses
a 'graphic' layout to emphasize important point, and
to allow for a quick recognition of chunks of relevant material.
The book collects material from a variety of sources.
The authors own research is only discussed in chapter 7,
and some parts of chapter 6.
Also included are a number of research directions sections,
these provide suggestions for projects and future research.
The suggested lectures do not all follow the linear
structure of the text, but may take parts at will.
For example, with an eye on the practical assignments,
section 2.3 will usually be dealt with before
discussing chapters 1 or 2 in any detail.
In summary: The book offers a concise (max 150 pages)
introduction to multimedia, a field that is gaining
academic interest rapidly. It fills a gap in the existing
literature, by giving a broad overview and references to
research and development in the areas of interest.
It provides online material (also on CDROM) to assist the instructor
in presenting the course and allowing students to explore
further references.
It has a distinct style, that meets academic standards.
slides format
Using my experience in writing the OO book, I again adopted
the so-called 'slides' as a means to take text from the book
for presentation. Let me explain that in somewhat more detail:
a slide is a piece of text, a list, table or figure,
that (using some tools) is taken out of the text and presented.
The advantage of this approach is that the relation between slides
and the text is immediate, which is not the case with other
presentation formats. In contrast with the OO book, however,
where the slides were made explicit by boxes in the text, I
now use an implicit slide mode, to allow for more continuous text.
The use of slides is, however, reflected in the text by what
may be called a graphical or short hand style, using layout
and brief bulleted phrases instead of long passages of text.
There are a number of other books in the field
that might qualify as a book for the kind of
course my book is intended for.
Some of the comments, which are all in shorthand,
are repeated elsewhere in this proposal.
(The complete references are given at the end.)
Multimedia -- Making It Work
+ used at Univ of Amsterdam
- unwieldy, colloquial, sub-academic
Dust or Magic
+ nice, lot of feeling for the field
- chaotic, full of cheap advice to the 'talent', sub-academic
Principles of Multimedia Databases
+ excellent, highly academic, good ideas + formalization
- too database oriented (SQL), too many technical details,
too much irrelevant material
Understanding networked multimedia
+ broad coverage, well-structured, reasonably well written
- too technical, too much material, slightly outdated
Handbook of Multimedia Information management
+ good material, in-depth
- collection of articles, difficult to adapt for presentation
The Computer in the Visual Arts
+ well-written, from artist's viewpoint
- too narrow, and too many details
Further, these are all 500 pages+ books.
None, with the exception of Principles of Multimedia
Databases has material for educational purposes.
In comparison, in the same brief way I could
characterize my own book:
A (not so) gentle introduction to multimedia
as
+ concise, broad overview, excellent thematic focus
- sometimes cryptic, requires study of reference
with the additional remark that it is only about 100 pages,
and contains all the material discussed in the book
in a presentation ready format.
(The teacher has the choice between dynamic HTML and VRML.)
references
- Making
- T. Vaughan,
Multimedia -- Making It Work, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1998 4th edn
- Magic
- B. Hughes,
Dust or Magic -- Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design, Addison-Wesley, 2000
- MMDBMS
- V.S. Subrahmanian ,
Principles of Multimedia Databases, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998
- Networked
- F. Fluckiger,
Understanding networked multimedia -- applications and technology, Prentice Hall, 1995
- Handbook
- W. Grosky, R. Jain, R. Mehrotra (eds),
The Handbook of Multimedia Information Management, Prentice Hall, 1997
- Computer
- A.M. Spalter,
The Computer in the Visual Arts, Addison-Wesley, 1999
4. Apparatus
The book covers the theoretical part of the Introduction Multimedia course.
The online version gives a skeleton assignment that
may adapted by the one responsible for a similar course.
The online version contains all the material needed for
presentation, including:
- presentations for all chapters, including the preface in dynamic HTML and VRML slides
- a manual for Macromedia Director, also available in presentation format
- presentable versions of the MPEG-4 standard, and other relevant material
- possible exam questions, with back links into the text for quick learning and review
- seven sample lectures, with additional explanation for the instructor
5. Audience
The course notes were explicitly written for first year
Computer Science and Information Science students.
(The Information Science students are expected to choose
the specialisation Multimedia and Culture, a curriculum
provide by the Division mathematics and Computer Science
of the Faculty of Science of the Free Universityof Amsterdam).
The course has a practical part and a theoretical part.
which in combination takes 2-4 weeks, full time study.
How would the
the potential category of users/buyers
look at the book?
students:
+ compact, quick overview, few irrelevant details
+ exam can be learned by clicking on questions in checklist
- somewhat abstract, guidance or reference lookup is needed
instructors:
+ concise, well-structured overview, in presentation-ready form
+ provides full course, and skeleton practical assigment
+ skeleton exams, with backlinks for review
+ additional references to other material
- unusual style of formatting and presentation
professionals:
+ quick overview + (online) references
+ material for making presentations
- rather concise (slightly academic) style
laymen:
+ easy to read overview
- reference to (too) many fields of knowledge
6. Market
As the title indicates, the book is meant
as an introduction to multimedia.
More specifically, as an introduction
to multimedia for first year Computer Science and Information Science
students. When setting up the course, I discussed the topics
and issues to be dealt with with collegues of the CWI, and
we came up with a general description of the course.
Then I selected the Principles of Multimedia Database Systems book
(discussed in more detail below) and started the course.
The course didn't work well. The topics seemed to be too limited,
and although the book chosen is of high academic standards,
it did not appeal to the students, due partly to the fact
that is was too database-oriented. It also appeared that many students
did not buy and read the book, but took the exam just by reading
my course notes. They were assisted in this, I must admit, by the fact
that I formulated a fixed set of questions, and provided backlinks
from the questions to the course notes in the online version.
For the time they had for it, I do consider that an adequate strategy.
Since no other book seemed to meet my demands, I decided to
take the existing course notes and extend them with material
that I considered relevant and interesting. More in particular,
also interesting for students. First year students are easily
bored. The themes I organized the book around may be
summarized as
- digital convergence
- broadband communication
- multimedia information retrieval
These themes allowed me to pay attention to a variety of subjects,
popular trends in digital entertainment, but also standards
in development such as MPEG-4, compression and multimedia
information retrieval.
In other words, I tried to find a balance between
interesting material and academically relevant subjects.
Although other books may be liked by students, such as for example
'Dust or Magic' or 'Multimedia -- Making It Work', I did not consider
these books to be acceptable from an academic point of view
(although I know the latter is used for a Multimedia course
at the University of Amsterdam.)
7. Status
A first version of the manuscript is available at:
www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/media
It is a complete version, in the sense that all chapters
and appendices are written out.
The material has been used in the 2002 spring course
Introduction Multimedia.
brief history:
I started developing the course notes for the course
Introduction Multimedia
in the beginning
of 2000. I used Principles of Multimedia Databases then as a book.
But I was dissatisfied with the course, and decided to develop
my own material. After presenting that in class, I decided
to write the book, since the idea of it had grown over a period of
almost two years.
II. Contents:
The material is divided over 7 chapters, including a preface,
afterthoughts and some appendices:
preface
1. digital convergence
2. information (hyper) spaces
3. codecs and standards
4. information retrieval
5. content annotation
6. information system architecture
7. virtual environments
afterthoughts
appendix
acronyms
Web3D
XML-based multimedia
a platform for intelligent multimedia
multimedia casus
A full contents listing is given in the PDF version of the manuscript:
www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/media/doc.pdf
Sample chapters
The full online version can be found on:
www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/media
The PDF version of the manuscript is available as:
www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/media/doc.pdf
A selection of sample chapters (in PDF) is given below.
IV. curriculum vitae
A full CV is available at:
www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/cv/cv.html
previous titles of the author:
- DLP -- A language for Distributed Logic Programming, Wiley (1992)
- Principles of Object-Oriented Software Development,
Addison-Wesley (2000), 2nd edn.
(research) experience of the author:
I have been doing research
in multimedia information retrieval and virtual environments
(partly as a guest at the dutch research institute CWI),
for a period of over four years. This research is reflected
in the book, notably chapter 7 and in some of the 'research
directions' parts in the other chapters.
courses taught by the author:
(C) Æliens
04/09/2009
You may not copy or print any of this material without explicit permission of the author or the publisher.
In case of other copyright issues, contact the author.
