Review of Eliëns. proposal, Introduction to Multimedia

The author.s own online proposal covers rather well both strengths and
weaknesses of the written work, and it is unusually thorough in comparing
with competitive works. I can concur with most of what is said there.

There is great merit in the idea of publishing a short but compelling
volume on this subject, and based on the available text, this may be it.
With a sound grounding in an existing introductory course, and integrated
with online presentational and exercise material, it is easy to like the
proposal or the work as it stands.

Most of the issues I can critique stem from occasional problems in the
writing as such. I believe that some back-and-forth between author and
editor, and with technical reviewers, can improve the presentation for
publishing.

I find no fatal flaws and therefore recommend consideration for publishing.
The following comments do contain some cautions with examples of things the
author can do or should consider to improve the text before submission. One
important matter is to fact-review and update sections that may have become
out of date.

Fact and Scope

The stated goals of the book include that .the gap between authoring and
retrieval should be bridged. for Web content. As a short introduction
volume, the text goes at least some way toward fulfilling this highest aim.

The concept appears well-aimed and overall provides suitable portions of
learning chapter by chapter, melding multimedia-on-Web philosophy with
discussion around some of the fundamental technologies used in authoring,
distributing and presenting multimedia. The high point comes with the
closing chapter when the focus is squarely on the virtual environments that
can be created using the technologies described.

Apropos later technical review, I note that some factual material appears
out of date.

One example: .SMIL-1 has become a W3C recommendation in 1998. SMIL-2 is at
the moment of writing still in a draft stage.. As it happens, SMIL-2 became
a W3C recommendation over three years ago (Aug 2001).
The reader might also find it curious that a search of RM3D today returns
no hits at all in the W3C web, yet the technology is extensively covered in
the book as an important product of a W3C working group. Only a handful of
older references turn up in a more general Google search. Clearly something
significant regarding these .standards. has changed that the author needs
to explain early in this section. Perhaps even rework the chapter
completely. (I note that critical VRML Web links are also broken, even at
W3C.)
Another area that the author needs to review is the sections on the
Semantic Web, as much has happened there since the text was first written.
The text here risks being highly misleading since its overview is so
cursory to begin with.

The chapters on information retrieval and content annotation could use
updating. The last four years have seen some interesting work on providing
practical multimedia indexing (mostly image, but also audio) by search
engines, which may usefully be tied into the descriptions. E.g. similarity
criteria. The text references work from 1999 and earlier.

The current version of the book manuscript delivers a considerable amount
of terse technical information as optional reading after the course
material, especially in Appendix D. The book seems unusually .back-heavy.
in this respect (almost one quarter the current total page count is
appendix material). I do appreciate the rationale in that the main body of
the book is tied to the time constraints of an existing course, and
appendix material provides deeper optional reading outside it, but the
perceived imbalance remains.

The proposed appendix extension to discuss OpenGL/ActiveX and production
tools, while also an admirable idea, does seriously risk making the
appendix section totally dominate. I can easily see it becoming a third or
more of the total page count, say 60 or 70 of 200, at which point one must
wonder if all this extra-curricular material is not, in fact, turning into
the basis of another and more technical book (e.g. .Developing Multimedia
Content.), a second course.

**Is it possible to re-organise the material into Parts, bringing the
Appendices back into the body of the book, but sectionalising it so that it
doesn't interfere with the theoretical first part?

The current text has some rough patches and occasional seeming duplication.
Having .captions. for bullet list may seem a useful tactic, but it is not
consistently applied and may now sometimes actually confuse the reader
about descriptive transitions. It.s possible some of this .stutter. is an
unintentional artifact of the .slide-mode. structuring. Slide transitions
with someone talking around the points is however rather different from the
narrative progression readers are used to in books.

** I'm also not convinced that it helps readers orient themselves in the
material.

For example, the Amsterdam Hypermedia Model is introduced and described (pp
32-33) in such a way that confusion results when reading about it. The main
problem is that the term and its abbreviation are formally declared long
after being introduced in the text and its characteristics described in
bullet lists. The late declarative style appears to introduce something
new, along with subsequent .captioned. bullet list, yet it is largely
restating and reformulating previous material.
I would have liked to see more .fundamental explanations. earlier in each
section, and perhaps a few more ones about facts that now are only implied.

For example, in the chapter about codecs (p 33 ff), it is correctly noted
that compression algorithms can be either lossless or lossy, but I found
that this fact comes a bit late in the presentation (p 35). It is not
however explained why and in which contexts one would choose methods that
lose data over ones that do not. Not mentioned at all is another dimension
to compression, that codecs for multimedia comprise a subset of algorithms
intended for compression on the fly that doesn.t require knowledge of
upstream data.
Furthermore, it should really have been pointed out that the preceding
table with compression-rate comparisons (p 34) only applies to lossy
compression . actually by several rather different algorithms, none of
which are specified. Some slightly more and consistent detail about the
named codec standards seems appropriate; a bullet list of names with
arbitrary explanation (p 45) is just not sufficient.
The discussion on following pages introduces several critical codec
fundamentals but again fails to explain in even a cursory manner what they
mean, or to point the reader to useful external references. These areas
need expansion.
These lacks detract from the desired .academic. nature of the book. From
the existing text, I cannot determine if the author actually knows any of
this technology, or is just copying selected fragments of some reference
work. The conveyed impression is the latter, which is a not a good thing.

Similar caveats and reservations apply in varying degree to other sections
of the core text.

Style and Voice

The author shows a bad habit of overworking parenthetic insertions. The
first page of the preface alone has seven, and three of those single-word
qualifiers are in a single sentence! As recurring style element, it badly
interrupts flow, weakens presentation, and in several places makes the
reader unsure what the author.s intent is. The parenthetic breaks must be
redone by the author, or most simply removed to clarify voice and intent.

Some reader uncertainty is also due to idiosyncratic usage typical of a
writer whose first language is not English, often visible in the common
inappropriate choice of ongoing present tense (-ing forms). Such
grammatical issues are easily remedied in copyedit.

The lead sentence in Chapter 1 is a typical example of both collapsed and
problematic formulation: .Life is becoming digital for some time now....,
which most readers may well understand but feel compelled to reread to make
sure.
I found unfortunate lapses such as the repeated and needless qualification
.Bush' (not the presidents'). instead of just using the full name .Vannevar
Bush.. Not only is this kind of gratuitous off-topic insertion jarring, it
at least momentarily introduces its own needless confusion in the mind of
the reader: .Which President Bush?.

Another possible problem is the frequent use of citations to make or expand
on a point, especially in the first chapters. Not all of these are as clear
or illuminating as the author wants to suggest by using them.

Ted Nelson, for example, while a brilliant innovator in many respects, and
rightly acknowledged, was overly fond of making up cute terminology (.
intertwinkle., .intertwingularity., these not explained in this text). He
often wrote and said things that are very hard to properly understand,
especially out of context, or as paraphrased in some other author.s
citation.
Citations and opinions from popular press can be equally problematic, as
the journalists who wrote the text easily misrepresent or ignore important
points. They frequently quote vendor management making statements less
about the technology than about the current corporate view influenced by
agenda and market vision.
Attributing a cluster of expressed opinions only to .the press. seems
unprofessional and leaves the reader at a loss for context, and sometimes
for who said what. Was this from technical press, popular news, online
magazines, or what? And also critical is when these opinions were
expressed.
Given the format of complementary online slides that rely on textual
excerpts, such citations are no doubt attractive, but I question whether
some points are not better made as a more concise formulation in the author
.s own voice, with perhaps a short pointer to the original thinker.

As it is, I sometimes felt when reading as if this was a book of quotations
about multimedia. And there are times when I feel the author is also led
astray by spurious associations from all the quoted bits. I suggest more
caution in citation and higher requirements on immediate relevance.

Closing comments

In the previous, I am close to straying into a technical review mode and
perhaps making the text seem worse than it is by highlighting the lacks and
lapses. Overall, it.s good. The point is that it can be made even better.

I realize that the bulk of the existing material was written several years
ago, and must assume the author is aware that some revision is required to
bring relevant sections up to date. This should not present any problems,
even if one or two chapters perhaps require more substantial rewrites.
Allow time for it.