Perfectly Boring? The Public Afterlife of Private Films

<p>Home movies are now viewed in a variety of public contexts, a shift that entails a loss of their original meanings. In order to consider the impact of exhibiting these private documents, this thesis analyses the use of home movies within recycled footage productions, archival curation and online video-sharing. Investigating a variety of formal and informal screening contexts through close readings and archival research, it asks: what meanings do home movies acquire in new contexts? How might the reuse of home movies affect our understandings of their production and the past they portray? Does a perception that home movies could appear boring influence how they are framed or altered for public audiences? Due to their form and content, home movies may seem ill-suited to public exhibition. Popular discourses about home movies during their heyday of production reveal a widespread belief that they were boring (for outsiders) to watch. While recent literature has assessed home movies more favourably, it has tended to overlook their potential to bore viewers who have no personal relationship to them. Drawing upon theories of boredom, this study argues meaningfulness is the principal factor determining whether a viewer finds a particular film interesting or boring. In their original form, home movies may appear relatively meaningless and therefore boring to public audiences. Recycled footage films re-edit images, however, to create engaging viewing experiences through narrative and affect. While more experimental productions frequently question the evidential value of home movie images, television documentaries tend to encourage audiences to perceive footage as authentic or nostalgic. Narrative and affect also feature in the exhibition strategies of moving image archives. Curated public programmes provide informative and enjoyable viewing for general audiences, but almost inevitably promote certain understandings of the past by offering specific interpretations of selected films. Moreover, the affective appeal of home movie images may outweigh other forms of meaning for viewers, particularly in community or participatory screening contexts. Online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which are curated by algorithms rather than human expertise, feature numerous home movies without any kind of framing or description. While this might seem profoundly boring, viewer comments suggest meaninglessness can foster imaginative and empathetic responses to home movies, often expressed as nostalgic longing. This propensity of home movie footage within different screening contexts to encourage nostalgic sentiments, or a belief that life was better in the past, has implications for collective memory and understandings of history. Moreover, the ability of at least some viewers to enjoy home movies in relatively contextless spaces suggests that in certain instances qualities associated with boredom may not be a significant impediment to meaningful experience after all.</p>

Perfectly Boring? The Public Afterlife of Private Films

<p>Home movies are now viewed in a variety of public contexts, a shift that entails a loss of their original meanings. In order to consider the impact of exhibiting these private documents, this thesis analyses the use of home movies within recycled footage productions, archival curation and online video-sharing. Investigating a variety of formal and informal screening contexts through close readings and archival research, it asks: what meanings do home movies acquire in new contexts? How might the reuse of home movies affect our understandings of their production and the past they portray? Does a perception that home movies could appear boring influence how they are framed or altered for public audiences? Due to their form and content, home movies may seem ill-suited to public exhibition. Popular discourses about home movies during their heyday of production reveal a widespread belief that they were boring (for outsiders) to watch. While recent literature has assessed home movies more favourably, it has tended to overlook their potential to bore viewers who have no personal relationship to them. Drawing upon theories of boredom, this study argues meaningfulness is the principal factor determining whether a viewer finds a particular film interesting or boring. In their original form, home movies may appear relatively meaningless and therefore boring to public audiences. Recycled footage films re-edit images, however, to create engaging viewing experiences through narrative and affect. While more experimental productions frequently question the evidential value of home movie images, television documentaries tend to encourage audiences to perceive footage as authentic or nostalgic. Narrative and affect also feature in the exhibition strategies of moving image archives. Curated public programmes provide informative and enjoyable viewing for general audiences, but almost inevitably promote certain understandings of the past by offering specific interpretations of selected films. Moreover, the affective appeal of home movie images may outweigh other forms of meaning for viewers, particularly in community or participatory screening contexts. Online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which are curated by algorithms rather than human expertise, feature numerous home movies without any kind of framing or description. While this might seem profoundly boring, viewer comments suggest meaninglessness can foster imaginative and empathetic responses to home movies, often expressed as nostalgic longing. This propensity of home movie footage within different screening contexts to encourage nostalgic sentiments, or a belief that life was better in the past, has implications for collective memory and understandings of history. Moreover, the ability of at least some viewers to enjoy home movies in relatively contextless spaces suggests that in certain instances qualities associated with boredom may not be a significant impediment to meaningful experience after all.</p>

Performance of Cryptographic Hash function used in Digital Forensic tools

Cryptographic hash functions are which transform any long message to fixed-length data. It seeks to ensure the confidentiality of the data through the cryptographic hash. The digital forensic tool is a method for extracting information from various storage devices, such as hard drives, memory. SHA-1 and SHA-2 methods are both widely used in forensic image archives. The hash method is usually used during evidence processing, the checking of forensic images (duplicate evidence), then at the completion of the analysis again to ensure data integrity and forensic evaluation of evidence. There was a vulnerability called a collision in the hashing algorithm in which two independent messages had the same hash values. While SHA-3 is secure than its former counterparts, the processors for general purposes are being slow and are not yet so popular. This task proposes a basic yet successful framework to meet the needs of cyber forensics, combining hash functions with other cryptographic concepts, for instance, SALT, such as modified secured hash algorithm (MSHA). A salt applies to the hashing mechanism to make it exclusive, expand its complexity and reduce user attacks like hash tables without increasing user requirements.

“Shall we put the heart in now?” A comparative analysis between creature features and their single reel abridgements

Single reel abridgements of commercial feature films are entering moving image archives because home movie collections that contain them are slowly increasing in archival representation. The abridged commercial films occupy a liminal space in between sustained preservation efforts that focus on studio films and the current interest paid to preserving home movies. As a result, the abridged films are being neglected. The films’ liminal status stems from a dearth of information regarding their relationship to the original films and a clear definition of what they are narratively and aesthetically. After analyzing fourteen abridged horror and science fiction films found in the Ryerson Moving Image collection and comparing them to their original counterparts this project finds that the abridged films are heavily altered in terms of narrative, characters, and causality, and should be treated as individual objects instead of derivative works, thus absolving their liminal status.

“Shall we put the heart in now?” A comparative analysis between creature features and their single reel abridgements

Single reel abridgements of commercial feature films are entering moving image archives because home movie collections that contain them are slowly increasing in archival representation. The abridged commercial films occupy a liminal space in between sustained preservation efforts that focus on studio films and the current interest paid to preserving home movies. As a result, the abridged films are being neglected. The films’ liminal status stems from a dearth of information regarding their relationship to the original films and a clear definition of what they are narratively and aesthetically. After analyzing fourteen abridged horror and science fiction films found in the Ryerson Moving Image collection and comparing them to their original counterparts this project finds that the abridged films are heavily altered in terms of narrative, characters, and causality, and should be treated as individual objects instead of derivative works, thus absolving their liminal status.

Dozens of virtual impactor orbits eliminated by the EURONEAR VIMP DECam data mining project

Context. Massive data mining of image archives observed with large etendue facilities represents a great opportunity for orbital amelioration of poorly known virtual impactor asteroids (VIs). There are more than 1000 VIs known today; most of them have very short observed arcs and many are considered lost as they became extremely faint soon after discovery. Aims. We aim to improve the orbits of VIs and eliminate their status by data mining the existing image archives. Methods. Within the European Near Earth Asteroids Research (EURONEAR) project, we developed the Virtual Impactor search using Mega-Precovery (VIMP) software, which is endowed with a very effective (fast and accurate) algorithm to predict apparitions of candidate pairs for subsequent guided human search. Considering a simple geometric model, the VIMP algorithm searches for any possible intersection in space and time between the positional uncertainty of any VI and the bounding sky projection of any image archive. Results. We applied VIMP to mine the data of 451,914 Blanco/DECam images observed between 12 September 2012 and 11 July 2019, identifying 212 VIs that possibly fall into 1286 candidate images leading to either precovery or recovery events. Following a careful search of candidate images, we recovered and measured 54 VIs in 183 DECam images. About 4,000 impact orbits were eliminated from both lists, 27 VIs were removed from at least one list, while 14 objects were eliminated from both lists. The faintest detections were around V ∼ 24.0, while the majority fall between 21 < V < 23. The minimal orbital intersection distances remains constant for 67% detections, increasing for eight objects and decreasing for ten objects. Most eliminated VIs (70%) had short initial arcs of less than five days. Some unexpected photometric discovery has emerged regarding the rotation period of 2018 DB, based on the close inspection of longer trailed VIs and the measurement of their fluxes along the trails. Conclusions. Large etendue imaging archives represent great assets to search for serendipitous encounters of faint asteroids and VIs.

The Advent of the 4D Mirror World

The 4D Mirror World is considered to be the next planetary-scale information platform. This commentary gives an overview of the history of the converging trends that have progressively shaped this concept. It retraces how large-scale photographic surveys served to build the first 3D models of buildings, cities, and territories, how these models got shaped into physical and virtual globes, and how eventually the temporal dimension was introduced as an additional way for navigating not only through space but also through time. The underlying assumption of the early large-scale photographic campaign was that image archives had deeper depths of latent knowledge still to be mined. The technology that currently permits the advent of the 4D World through new articulations of dense photographic material combining aerial imagery, historic photo archives, huge video libraries, and crowd-sourced photo documentation precisely exploits this latent potential. Through the automatic recognition of “homologous points,” the photographic material gets connected in time and space, enabling the geometrical computation of hypothetical reconstructions accounting for a perpetually evolving reality. The 4D world emerges as a series of sparse spatiotemporal zones that are progressively connected, forming a denser fabric of representations. On this 4D skeleton, information of cadastral maps, BIM data, or any other specific layers of a geographical information system can be easily articulated. Most of our future planning activities will use it as a way not only to have smooth access to the past but also to plan collectively shared scenarios for the future.