Six students present their Media Technology MSc graduation thesis work, in 20-25 minutes and followed by 10-15 minutes public discussion. Everyone is invited to attend!

    

Language

English

Access

Public for everyone

Duration

40-45 minutes per graduate

Media Technology MSc graduation presentations follow a classic conference format. Each student presents their work in 20 minutes. With the primary advisor acting as a conference session chair, the presentation is followed by a moderated public discussion.
Although everyone can ask questions in the discussion, the right to ask the first questions is for the two invited critics. These were personally invited by the graduate to read their thesis before the presentation, and to formulate one or two questions for the discussion. Ambitious students have been known to invite high-profile academic critics.

Presentation Schedule

10:00-10:40

Jiaqi Li. "Zoom Plus? An Experimental Study on a Virtual Classroom with More Natural Face Interaction and Its Effect on Videoconferencing Fatigue"

10:45-11:25

Michaël Grauwde. "Correlating Emotional Content in Journalists’ Personal and Professional Writing"

12:30-13:10

Ivo Lemken. "Stories of a Real Man: A Hybrid Autoethnography on My Maleness & Masculinity"

13:40-14:20

Simone Lammertink. "Presence in 360-degree video: A research into the presence enhancing abilities of film narratological effects in spatial presence oriented media"

14:25-15:05

Carlos Martin Roman. "Collective Speech in the Hybrid Urban Space. Intervention in a Residential Neighbourhood in an Ecuadorian Andean City"

15:10-15:50

Marthe Visser. "Love Language Over Time: An Analysis of Self-Presentation in Dating by Comparing Historical Personal Ads and Contemporary Dating App Biographies"

Jiaqi Li

Zoom Plus? An Experimental Study on a Virtual Classroom with More Natural Face Interaction and Its Effect on Videoconferencing Fatigue

In the last two years, there has been a massive use of videoconferencing tools for distance learning all over the world. However, a feeling of fatigue has been found among students when they learn on those videoconferencing tools. Researchers have proposed multiple problems in the online interaction with several human faces that may contribute to the videoconferencing fatigue (VCF), and made calls for corresponding empirical examinations. To close this research gap, this study aims at investigating whether VCF can be reduced if we change the unnatural interaction with multiple faces on videoconferencing tools. An innovative videoconferencing tool FRAME was adopted to enable participants to look around to see more faces selectively, rather than seeing all faces simultaneously, and an experiment was conducted where participants had an online lecture in Zoom and FRAME and receive fatigue and stress-related measurement and learning effectiveness measurement for comparison between the two tools. Results showed that the distance learning in FRAME led to a significantly higher level of stress and less satisfaction than learning in Zoom. This tool effect was believed to be caused by the functionality and usability issues of FRAME as a distance learning tool, and implications were discussed for future research and policy making in distance education.

Thesis advisors: Maarten H. Lamers & Rene Riedl (University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria)

Michaël Grauwde

Correlating Emotional Content in Journalists’ Personal and Professional Writing.

Emotion detection and sentiment analysis are fields of natural language processing that is gaining steam in artificial intelligence. With the emergence of large language models such as GPT-3, more questions are being asked of what can be expected from AI in the future. This study uses text analysis tools to detect emotion in journalists’ writing to explore questions of objectivity. Journalism has long been a field that prides itself on being the gatekeeper of truth, however, with the rise of the internet, there has been a decline in traditional journalism. There has been a rise in opinion pieces and an embracing of emotion in journalism. Twitter has seen journalists interact with their audience on an almost daily basis. This paper uses Twitter as a proxy for personal writing (tweets) and correlates the emotional content in tweets and journalistic articles. By using LIWC – a text analysis programme – and HuggingFace transformers that use sentiment analysis, this study analyses the emotion (negative and positive) in tweets and journalistic articles and the correlation between the emotional content. Results suggest a significant positive correlation between emotion variables (affect, negative emotion, emotion) in the tweets and professional articles. Even so, this study is limited and requires future research and hopes to function as a foundation for future research in the field.

Thesis advisors: Maarten H. Lamers & Suzan Verberne

Ivo Lemken

Stories of a Real Man: A Hybrid Autoethnography on My Maleness & Masculinity

Masculinity and maleness are highly personal subjects. This hybrid autoethnography uses autoethnographic stories and qualitative interviews with people in my surroundings to research how my personal views on masculinity and maleness were formed and how they relate to those around me and to shared social constructs and biologically evolved male traits. The study shows that my views on maleness, as an internal feeling that one cannot attribute to another, and masculinity, as a qualification that lies in the eye of the beholder, were formed by a combination of factors. Three main components are identified: my personality not fitting into the dominant normative narrative around maleness and masculinity while growing up, an upbringing that supported a non-normative understanding of the world, and living in an orchestral subculture that had its own alternative norms. The results of this study are discussed in a scientific context, but the original methodology and the effects that such a personal study had on me are also discussed.

Thesis advisors: Maarten H. Lamers & Max van Duijn

Simone Lammertink

Presence in 360-degree video: A research into the presence enhancing abilities of film narratological effects in spatial presence oriented media

This research explores how film narratological effects can be used to affect feelings of presence in 360-degree video. To explore how the sense of 'involvement' can be enhanced this research takes inspiration from film narratology, since there are strong indications that in media such as books and film, it is their narrative abilities that generate feelings of presence. It is done with the expectation that these insights would be potentially useful for enhancing the feeling of presence in virtual reality - a medium that is known to generate high feelings of ‘presence’ in spatial terms, but not necessarily in terms of 'involvement'. This research focuses in particular on the effects of focalisation and voice-over as narratological devices of choice. 360-degree video is chosen as an accessible medium, adjacent to both virtual reality and film. Participants (N=12) viewed three videos with varied focalisation (character focalisation, object focalisation, neutral focalisation) and two videos with varied voice-over (external voice-over, no voice-over). Mixed methods of both quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (in-depth interviews) research were used. Early results indicate that ‘object focalisation’ reports relatively the highest feelings of presence. In future development of narrative virtual reality experiences, this form of focalisation could be seen as a viable option to enhance overall presence.

Thesis advisors: Zane Kripe & Edwin van der Heide

Carlos Martin Roman

Collective Speech in the Hybrid Urban Space. Intervention in a Residential Neighbourhood in an Ecuadorian Andean City

Hybrid urban spaces, defined as those urban spaces where physical and cybernetic dimensions merge and influence one another, are a common phenomena of growing complexity which create new social and political relations with public space. In our research we look at how digital technologies help to articulate the collective speech of a residential neighbourhood in the Andean city of Riobamba, who seeks bigger engagement of the inhabitants. For this we design an intervention setting up a public scrolling text LED display to which urban space inhabitants can connect and contribute to a collective text by writing a message and uploading it to the display, where it is added up to the previous contributions. After ten months collecting data, we analyse the produced interactions in relation with the social context and in contrast with the communication structure and language functions of the text messages.
Data shows a rather constant use of the device over time, with some social context events which notably modify this pattern. We appreciate a slight growth in complexity of individual interactions. Language function analysis shows a preeminence of phatic messages and a differential structural character when considering collectively composed texts over individual contributions. Analysis of factors of communication shows a growing collective character of messages, and in messages regarding the two most salient social groups —neighbours and students— it shows a dominance of the neighbours and an unbalanced inter-group communication.
We conclude that the system of the intervention facilitates collective communication and gives the opportunity to underrepresented social groups in the neighbourhood to participate in a public collective speech.

Thesis advisors: Edwin van der Heide & Max van Duijn

Marthe Visser

Love Language Over Time: An Analysis of Self-Presentation in Dating by Comparing Historical Personal Ads and Contemporary Dating App Biographies

This research focused on the biographies of dating apps which are space-limited and self-written and therefore give insight in what users find crucial to mention about themselves and their wishes for possible partners. The content of the biographies was compared to the content of personal ads, collected and analysed between 1947 and 1985, providing insight in self-presentation in mate search through time.
The method relied on biographies which were collected in The Netherlands in 2021 from the three dating apps, Tinder, Bumble, and Lexa. Profiles of men and women aged 18 to 37 looking for a heterosexual partner were selected. The texts were analysed on mentions of intention, lifestyle, personality, and appearance and on usage of negation and emojis. The personal ads collection was composed and annotated by researcher Wil Zeegers, according to similar content themes. Comparisons were made between men and women, between age 18 to 27 and 28 to 37, and between dating applications. Historical analyses was done between men and women and overall.
Results give insight in how content of biographies varies by gender, age, and dating application and how descriptions around mate search changed through time by gender. In conclusion, this research gives insight in how description of identity and projected partner in personal ads and dating app biographies can be used as indicator for mate choice criteria. The collected data gives insight in how these mate choice criteria differ between men and women now and over time, between age groups and between contemporary dating apps.

Thesis advisors: Max van Duijn & Maarten H. Lamers