Multimedia Fundamentals: Concepts, Applications, and Information Architecture

Posted on Nov 28, 2024 in Computers

Multimedia

  1. Blending or use of two or more media concurrently.
  2. Using different means and technologies to present information.
  3. The term appeared in the 60s and 70s, when describing the new media to support the learning process in the classroom.
  4. It integrates text, graphics, sound, animation, and video to convey information.
  5. A key element: interaction.

Features:

  1. Integration of text, graphics, images (still or moving), and sound.
  2. Scanning: converts data into electronic impulses, simple codes.
  3. Interactive: the user controls program flow.

Applications:

  1. Carrying information: a way to distribute information effectively, with significant potential to study new techniques daily.
  2. Interaction: the user is included. Widely used in the learning process.
  3. Presentation and information: Utilized to present products. (Places where used: art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics, business, and scientific research.)

1-Source Interaction

  • Latin: treatment of two or more persons.
  • In sociology: refers to the interaction between cultures.
  • In computers: this means that the execution of the program depends on user input; the user controls the program flow.

Resources that use interactive multimedia: Still images (photos, illustrations), moving images (video, animations), text in all its forms, audio (music, sound).

Definition

Multimedia Applications:

Understanding products and services ranging from computers (read from a CD to virtual communications via the Internet), interactive video on a television to videoconferencing as Monet defined in 1995:

  1. Simplistic notion: Alliance of communication capabilities of television and videos, with the power and action of the computer to bring the information.
  2. Technology notion: When the information given can be viewed and organized immediately by the user through the material and the program to allow action on the display. Two aspects of this concept are important:
    • First, multimedia applications transform the passive model of communication, useful in many areas (e.g., education), possibilities have developed many techniques, aesthetics, communication, and interactivity.
    • Second, there must be a hierarchy of activities; the content aspect is important.

Forms of Production Main Contents:

  1. Encode the contents; here the computer has the lead role.
  2. Determine a set of goods that may become multimedia applications (books, encyclopedias, films, etc.).

Key players: Microsoft and companies in the entertainment industries.

Analysis of multimedia applications: addressing the technological base and the main constraints and technical solutions based on three dimensions:

  1. Elements.
  2. Basic technologies.
  3. Main applications.

Conception of multimedia:

  • Communicative: refers to the rhetorical characteristics of the messages.
  • Instrumental: concerns the organization of the means by which they communicate those messages.

Realities that refer to media in the field of communication:

  • Languages: flat communicative informational messages sent or presented.
  • Media: instrumental background, “brokers” involved in the transmission of an information product.
    1. When multimedia messages are integrated textual and audiovisual content in a single message.
    2. It is a multicode information (text, sound, or static/moving image, etc.) and communication unit (a harmonious integration of these codes into a unified message).

Communicative Unit

  1. Definition: a quality of some information products that have meaning only through the harmonization of different pieces of information, communicated through various codes.
  2. Used in film, journalism, photography, etc.
  3. As digital technology aims to develop a language that allows information to properly integrate three codes: text, image, sound (and maybe more).

Requirements of Multimedia

Hardware + software components to combine video, music, animation, graphics, and text. Other platforms from PC: ATMs, cell phones, etc.

Information Architecture (IA)

  1. Design, organization, labeling, navigation, and search system to help users find and manage information effectively.
  2. Terminology first used in 1975 by Richard Saul Wurman, who defined it as: studying the organization of information in order to allow the user to find their way of navigating to knowledge and understanding of information. Campbase-IN WEB: the art and science of structuring and classifying websites and intranets in order to help users find and manage information.

    Comprises:

    1. The systems’ organization and structuring of content.
    2. Labeling systems and labeling content.
    3. Recovery systems to provide navigation information and the website.

Library and Information Science

  1. Definition: A set of scientific and technical activities whose purpose is the knowledge of information, how material is presented, and where it is used in order to respond with better quality and quantity of information to the demands society makes.

  2. Origin: Greek. Biblion (book), theke (chest), and nomos (law).

  3. Library uses basics:

  4. Theoretical: deals with issues such as:

    1. The theory of information and knowledge management.
    2. The study of the need for information and how to satisfy it, or external factors influencing the interpretation of information, etc.

  5. Applied: deals with issues such as:

    • Development and maintenance of collections.
    • Technical Services Collections.
    • Interlibrary cooperation.
    • Copyright.
    • Freedom of information.
    • Conservation.
    • Management of the library, etc.
  6. AI aspects to develop and use:
    • Description.
    • Controlled vocabularies.
    • Retrieving information.
    • System of classification and cataloging.
    • Informetrics.
    • Display of information.
    • Electronic document.
    • Study the information needs of users.