New Textbook Review
I am currently researching the possibility of publishing a new text on Multimedia by Anton Eliens, and am keen to receive feedback from lecturers who are currently teaching in these areas. Many thanks, therefore, for agreeing to help with my research. Below are listed the questions I would like you to answer.
A report following the headings listed below would be ideal. If you would please avoid answering "yes" or "no" to individual questions, and answer all questions as fully as possible, I would be very grateful.
As far as length is concerned, I would hope to receive approximately five sides of typed A4. Can I please remind you that the deadline for this review will be Friday, 28th January 2005.
Please contact me if you have any queries or require any further information:
020 7067 2580
philippa.gallagher@thomson.com
Thomson Learning,
High Holborn House,
50-51 Bedford Row,
London,
WC1R 4LR.
Many thanks
Philippa Gallagher
Editorial Assistant
Definition and Teaching
It’s very broad, but would cover as a minimum the creation, storage, and retrieval of audio, still images, video, animation, 3D audio and video, immersive environments, virtual reality, augmented reality, surround sound, and audio-visual assets, together with the use of audio & visual components in documents, e-learning materials, web pages, etc.
Image and video creation, and the tools that help do this, e.g. Photoshop, Director, Flash, Adobe Premiere/Final Cut.
Sound and music creation, and associated tools, such as CoolEdit/SoundForge, Cubase,
Media production using professional tools such as Nuendo and ProTools.
Theory of sound (waves, fourier analysis, psychoacoustics, psychology of hearing)
Human-computer Interaction is a vital co-requisite course of study – bad multimedia products are very hard to use. Being aware of HCI theory and practice is essential for a multimedia designer.
It also helps to cover associated topics like music production, film language, foley art, auditory display, and so on. General headings might include:
Art and design foundations, visual literacy, semiotics, theory of sound, gestalt psychologiy principles, aesthetics, image capture, creation, storage, and retrieval, and distribution, audio capture, creation, storage, retrieval, and distribution, story boarding, sound and vision as communication media, the link between sound and vision in the communications processes.
Technologies will include
That’s a good question. It’s hard to teach multimedia from a purely theoretical standpoint and retain any sense of meaning or engagement, but HCI can be (and often is) taught as a theoretical subject. In my opinion, really effective multimedia and HCI courses should be practice-based with the theory being taught as an anchor point to justify design decisions. Lots of hands-on with multimedia authoring tools and scripting languages really helps to cement the theoretical sides. Students seem to respond better with hands-on courses. This doesn’t mean dumbing down as everything can be linked back to the latest literature (especially the research literature) and students can be led to produce some quite sophisticated work.
It’s tricky in a text book because the practical aspects are much harder to get across without lots of exercises and solutions which requires either a very big book or focusing on one or two proprietary technologies which then limits the prospective audience. Because so many of the principles are best appreciated when real examples are seen, books with accompanying Cds (or web sites) can be invaluable. For example, Trevor Wishart’s book "Audible Design: A Plain and Easy Introduction to Sound Composition" has an accompanying CD and is a very well-regarded book in its field. Very theoretical books are great as reference material, but we also need tutorial books with lots of examples, how-to guides, and exercises.
Very well, naturally! Seriously, though, we start out by introducing students to the basic principles and language of multimedia. They are taught from the outset to use authoring tools. In our case we have settled for the Macromedia and Adobe products for image and video work and CoolEdit and Cubase/Nuendo for the audio and MIDI work. There are other brands out there, but we stick with the same basic platforms across the years of the course so that we can concentrate on teaching the application of theory and practice without having to spend too much time on how to use the different tools.
Having learnt the principles of the creation of basic multimedia assets using tools like Photoshop, Director, Flash, and Cooledit, we then teach the students how to mix their assets for a range of multimedia applications, including stand-alone products, web products, and so on.
By the time we get to the final year of the degree programmes, the multimedia modules have become very much research-informed, that is, the curriculum is largely driven by the latest research results. This keeps the programmes current and interesting as students are working at the current state of the art.
We have a Multimedia Computing degree and a new degree in Multimedia and Digital Entertainment. Both these undergraduate programmes have very specific multimedia core components. Some of the multimedia modules are also offered as both core and option on the other undergraduate programmes. We also have a degree in Computer Games Software Engineering which share some of the Multimedia Computing curriculum, but also covers some of the more advanced topics, such as the physics of movement, etc. We also have a number of Masters degrees which include HCI and multimedia as both core and option modules.
Altogether, we will have several hundred students studying the multimedia modules.
Recently, we moved the multimedia degree away from having a shared first year with the other undergraduate computing programme which allows us to do much more specialist multimedia stuff in the first year which then rolls out over the following years. We did this because we needed to be able to cover more theory. Also, we noticed that students had poorly developed skills in visual literacy – remember, these are computing students, not art & design students, so we felt we had to plug this gap in their knowledge. I haven’t seen any significant changes in the profile of our multimedia students, except that now they come in with more knowledge of how to use some of the specialist software that a few years ago they did not have access to before coming to university.
We are, however, looking to move further towards practice-based multimedia and HCI teaching, as it’s clear that too much ‘dry’ theory doesn’t get well received.
Interactive television. That’s the next big area. The technology is in its infancy but looks set to get really exciting. The increase of home media centres will also help to drive the demand for this type of thing.
General
It was not possible to tell from the proposal alone, so I downloaded the complete manuscript and looked through that. Overall, the language is clear, though it would need correcting by a copy editor fluent in standard English. For example, Chapter 1 opens with "Life is becoming digital for some time now, Negroponte (1995)" which is awkward for an English reader (also, this should be an indirect citation "…some time now (Negroponte, 1995)" rather than the direct form used by the author).
This book is an introduction to multimedia, so one would not expect deep theoretical discussions and lots of academic discourse and analysis. However, I think the first few chapters go too far the other way. The author seems to have tried to kept things simple by using bulleted lists and lots of quotations from external sources. Unfortunately, this gives the impression of reading like a set of notes an author would make with the intention of fleshing them out into finished prose. Bullet lists and direct quotations are fine in their place, but I found myself getting irritated by the large numbers of both. This also has the effect that whilst much is introduced, it is not explained. An introductory text needs to have good and clear explanations of concepts.
The style makes a qualitative change in the chapter titled "Content Annotation". Instead of the over-simple language of the first few chapters, we get, instead, rather formal academic prose of the kind used in journal articles. For example, on p. 69 we find the following:
"Also, given a suitable representation, we may compare pitch-event strings (assuming a normalized pitch representation such as position within a scale) or intervallic contours (which gives the distance between notes in for example semitones). Following Selfridge (1998), we may observe however that the more general the system of representation, the longer the query) string will need to be to produce meaningful discriminations. As further discussed in Selfridge (1998), recent studies in musical perception indicate that pitch-information without durational values does not suffice."
(Note, it’s Selfridge-Field, not Selfridge). Phrases such as "normalized pitch representation" and terms such as "intervallic contours" require the reader to have quite a lot of background knowledge – in an introductory primer this is not a reasonable expectation. Here’s another example, also from page 69:
"Given a set of musical fragments, we may envisage several reductions to arrive at the hypothetical) prototypical melody. Such reductions must provide for the elimination of confounds such as rests, repeated notes and grace notes, and result in, for example, a pitch-string (in a suitable representation), a duration profile, and (possibly) accented note profiles and harmonic reinforcement pro les (which capture notes that are emphasized by harmonic changes). Unfortunately, as observed in Selfridge (1998), the problem of which reductions to apply is rather elusive, since it depends to a great extent on the goals of the query and the repertory at hand."
Another device the author uses a lot is to put qualifying phrases in parentheses. For example, on the first page of the proposal we read "…universally accessible multimedia (information) repository, for which (unfortunately) the notion of (multimedia) information retrieval seems to have occurred only as an afterthought." This is fine in moderation but the author uses this device rather a lot, which means it begins to act as a stumbling block – it certainly began to irritate me after a short time.
The material gets even harder to follow on the next page:
"The matching algorithm can be summarized by the following recurrence relation for the dissimilarity metric. Given two sequences A = a1,…..,am and B = b1,…..,bn and dij = d(ai ,bj ), we define the distance as… The weights w(_,_) are determined by the degree of dissonance and the length of the notes involved…"
I think this is out of the reach of the person reading an introductory text. It might be alright as the background reading to support classroom-based teaching in which these terms are explored and explained, but once you make it a text book it has to be able to stand on its own as an information source for the reader.
In summary, I think the first part of the text is too cursory (too many lists and lack of explanation) which the second adopts a style that is too hard for the non-specialist and uninitiated reader to understand. The bullet list style is annoying whilst the formal academic style later on is fine for the likes of me, but it out of place in a primer text.
I found the chapter titles puzzling. The book is called "Introduction (sic) Multimedia", but it does not have a list of chapters that one might expect to find in such a book. Rather, the chapter headings come across as what you would find in a more advanced book (a "Readings in Multimedia" type of text) that aims to give the informed reader a deeper grounding in and appreciation of the current themes to be found in multimedia research. I know the author intended for this book to be informed by the research, but you need to do this at the level that the novice will understand. Also, for a book that claims to be informed by the current research, the reference list seems a bit short.
Calling chapter 1 "Digital Convergence" and chapter 2 "Information (hyper) spaces" would not lead me to think this was a book that was going to ground me in the foundational aspects of multimedia. It may sound clichéd, but I would look for a chapter titled "What is multimedia?" or some such. Chapter 3 could be called "Multimedia formats and standards" rather than using the more esoteric term "codec". The codec should be brought in as a topic and explained fully, but not used as a chapter heading.
Nothing in the contents list suggests that this book is going to teach me what multimedia is and how I can create, edit, capture, and store multimedia assets, applications, and systems.
The contents list for Chapter 7, "Virtual environments", covers the specialist research area of intelligent agents but seems to miss out fundamental things like virtual reality, immersive environments, sound and video for virtual environments, augmented reality, and so forth. Actually, I see from browsing the manuscript that augmented reality is mentioned, so I think part of the problem may just be an odd choice of chapter titles and section headings.
I like the attempt to talk about things such as information spaces, as this gives a context to multimedia that is often missed when we just talk about artefacts and technologies. I think though, that some of the core topics that should be in an introductory multimedia course are missing (see comment on previous question).
We could improve matters by adding foundational material, overhauling the style to put more flowing prose in the first part and by simplifying the very complex prose of the second part, and by looking again at the table of contents – the chapter headings may seem interesting to someone that knows the field, but I think they have little meaning to the sort of person who would want to read a multimedia primer.
The material in chapters 4, 5, and 6 is too advanced for an introductory course – it’s the sort of thing you would find on the later years of a degree programme.
See comments above.
I was surprised at how few figures there were – none, in fact. In a book on multimedia one would expect diagrams, pictures, and figures. Topics such as feature extraction would surely benefit from having some illustrations. Many of the concepts covered can be explained with the help of diagrams (even compression schemes).
I think I just answered that! This type of book needs a lot of illustrations to exemplify the concepts, theories, and guidelines being presented.
Pedagogical features
I didn’t find them helpful. The examples in chapters 4, 5, and 6 were very technical and assumed a lot of prior knowledge.
There were exercises at the end of each chapter but these were bookwork-type questions (i.e., explain, describe, or give some examples of what you have just read about). A multimedia book needs practical exercises – things to do.
I didn’t like it, I’m afraid. The first few chapters skim over the surface of multimedia issues without going into depth whilst the latter chapters go straight into the inward parts of some quite difficult subjects without dealing with the foundational and background knowledge first. The first part gives me (the novice reader) some general overview whilst the second half doesn’t teach me much at all because it’s too hard to understand.
At this stage, I would say it would benefit most by being thoroughly overhauled. Go back to first principles and decide what topics need to be in an introductory multimedia course. The author wanted a short book (no problem with that), but the current manuscript is far too short for the number of topics it tries to address. 200 pages is just about enough to deal with the basics of multimedia concepts, but you couldn’t also hope to address content annotation, content-based retrieval, intelligent agents, and so on as well.
Decide whether you want to cover introductory multimedia OR advanced readings in multimedia research, but don’t try and do both as you end up doing neither very well.
The author says that students don’t read long books, but publishers I have spoken to say students prefer to buy big books because they seem to be getting more for their money. Also, books are expensive, so they want the book they buy to be as comprehensive and thorough as possible.
Supplements
Definitely lots of examples to play with.
Yes, some freeware software to get the complete novice started in multimedia, and lots of exercises (with solutions) linked to the main text that can be opened up and played with.
Competition
On my own modules I use 7, 15, and 16 because of their coverage. It would need a lot to convert me away.
Yes, but I have commented above that I think there are some fundamental problems with Eliens’ current approach..
It isn’t, yet.
Summary
The title suggests someone just starting a multimedia course, but I think they would find it quite usuitable. Likewise, the short bibliography also means it would be unsatisfying for someone who knew the basics but wanted to find out about advanced research topics.
No, not yet.
I think I have covered this aspect in the above critique? Rather, I don’t think I have anything to add.
I would like the book to decide whether it’s fish or fowl – is it an introductory book or an advanced reader? Either way, the contents list needs addressing.
It’s to be applauded that the author is trying to link the ideas discussed with the current research – exposing students from the outset to good scholarship of this kind is a good idea, but it needs to be done sympathetically recognising that the novice will likely not understand some of the key terms (e.g. "normalized pitch representation").
That’s impossible to answer unless you define what area of multimedia you’re looking at. If you want an introduction to the whole subject, then, something like Elsom-Cook’s book is along the right lines. Here’s its table of contents:
Ch1: What is interactive multimedia? 1) Introduction. 2) Multimedia. Modalities.
Channels. Medium. So what is multimedia? 3) Interaction. Action and interaction. Physical interaction. Communicative interaction. Summary. 4) A brief history of computers and multimedia. Tape control devices. Branching systems. Computer presented media. 5) A brief history of computers & interaction. External memory. External algorithms. The first computer. 6) So - what is imm?.
Ch2: Communicative interaction. 1) Introduction. 2) Objects and agents. 3) Channels of communication. 4) Formal languages. 5) '||'''Natural'||''' communication. 6) Languages of non-interaction. 7) Meta-languages? 8) Components of imm.
Ch3: Knowledge. 1) Introduction. 2) Why does knowledge matter? 3) The basic idea of knowledge. 3.1) Information, knowledge and belief. 3.2) Organisation of knowledge.
4) A working definition. 5) Techniques of knowledge representation. 5.1) Declarative knowledge. 5.2) Procedural knowledge. 5.3) When do procedures become declarative?.
6) Techniques of knowledge elicitation.
Ch4: Understanding users. Why are users important? Things you might know about a user. 2.1) Task models. 2.2) What is a user? 2.3) Organising user knowledge. Background and foreground knowledge. Cognitive, conative and affective components. Cognitive. Conative. Affective. 3) How to apply user knowledge. 3.1) What can be adjusted? 3.2) User centred design. 3.3) Adapted (customised) Systems. 3.4) Adaptive systems. 4) How to acquire user knowledge. Research - background - demographics. Pretesting. Asking. Testing during interaction. Inference. 5) Techniques: user profiling. 6) Techniques: user modelling. 6.1) Subset modelling. 6.2) Perturbation modelling. 6.3) Extending the user models. 7) Summary and conclusions.
Ch5: Interaction and HCI. 1) What is interaction in practice? 2) The idea of '||'''interface'||'''. 3) Iconography. 4) Devices (i/o). 5) Ergonomics. 6) HCI. 7) Formal models of the interface. 7.1) Prove before build. 7.2) Mental models of the interface. 7.3)accessibility and usability. 8) Communicative interaction and the interface. 8.1) If and dialogue. 8.2) If and channels. 8.3) If and multimedia. 9) Guidelines and rules.
9.1) Low-level stuff. 10) Dialogue model interfaces. 11) Natural language interfaces.
Ch6: Semiotics. 1) Multimedia content. 2) What is semiotics? 3) The idea of sign. Terminology. Signifier, signified and referent. Symbolic, iconic and indexical. Language, utterance and code. Construction of signs. Context and culture. 4) More complex signs. 5) Introducing myth. 6) Semiotics and media.
Ch7: Text as a medium. 1) Images on a page. When does an image become a letter? When does a letter become a word? Pictograms, fonts and font families. The alphabet as a visual concept. 2) A (short) History of writing and painting. 3) The sound of text.
Structure. Intonation. Emphasis. 4) The concept of readability. Psychology of reading.
Standard measures. 5) Layout and readability. 6) Document styles. Narrative. Prose. Manuals. References. Tutorials. 7) Metalanguages. Metalanguage and style. Power of metalanguage. 8) Text and the screen.
Ch8: Sound. 1) The spoken word. Verite recording. Talking live and for tape. A history of recording media. Aspects of speaking. 1.1) Scripting for speaking. 1.2) Editing. 2) Sound effects. 2.1) Non-natural. 2.2) Natural (etc.). 3) Music. 3.1) One note. 3.2) Scale. 3.3) What is rhythm? 3.4) Musical genre and interpretation. 4) Sound in a digital age.
Ch9: Still pictures. 1) Cartoons. 1.1) Abstraction and minimalism. 1.2) Political cartoons. 2) Painting. 2.1) Visual grammars. 3) Still photographs. 3.1) History of the camera (pre-film). 3.2) Film and reality. 3.3) Communicating with image. 3.4) Authenticity and image. 3.5) Beyond the human eye. 4) Sequences of still images. 4.1) Magic lantern. 4.2) Temporal and spatial context. 4.3) Cartoon strips. 4.4) Slide projection.
Ch10: Moving images. 1) Introduction. 2) Animation. 3) "live" action. 3.1) Origins - fixed point '||'''documentary'||'''. 3.2) Links to theatre? 3.3) Film as reality or toy? Does '||'''art'||''' matter? 3.4) A language of reality? 3.5) The studio. 3.6) The shot. 3.7) Closer to reality? 3.8) Scripts and drama. 3.9) Filming emotion. 4.0) The idea of '||'''ultimate'||''' cinema. 4) Film is not video. 4.1) Imitating film language with video. 4.2) Technical differences and their effects. 4.3) Live editing. 4.4) Language of errors. 4.5) Technology effects. 5) The digital world. 5.1) Complex visual channels. 5.2) Created '||'''real'||''' images. 6) Virtual reality, immersion and control.
Ch11: Stakeholders and teamworking. 1) Importance of teamwork. 2) Players and roles.
3) Communication problems and processes. 4) Documentation for the team.
Ch12: Product design processes. 1) Standard design processes. 2) Issues for multimedia.
3) Categories of multimedia systems. 3.1) Flow-based. 3.2) Hyper-based. 3.3) Object based. 3.4) Agent based. 4) An integrated design process for interactive multimedia. 5) Evaluation and testing. 6) Product documentation.
Ch 13: Project design and management. 1) Project design. 2) Special issues for multimedia. 3) Project management. 4) Documentation. 5) Deployment of systems.
Ch 14: Future trends. 1) Conceptual changes. 2) Cultural evolution. 3) Technological models. 4) Hot topics for the immediate future.
I would gladly receive any other comments you have on this proposal or Multimedia textbooks and teaching in general.
This is the end of your review. Very many thanks again for your time and feedback.