Digital ethnography can be understood as a method for representing real-life cultures through storytelling in digital media. Enabling audiences to go beyond absorbing facts, computer-based storytelling allows for immersion in the experience of another culture. A guide for anyone in the social sciences who seeks to enrich ethnographic techniques, Digital Ethnography offers a groundbreaking approach that utilizes interactive components to simulate cultural narratives.

Integrating insights from cultural anthropology, folklore, digital humanities, and digital heritage studies, this work brims with case studies that provide in-depth discussions of applied projects. Web links to multimedia examples are included as well, including projects, design documents, and other relevant materials related to the planning and execution of digital ethnography projects. In addition, new media tools such as database development and XML coding are explored and explained, bridging the literature on cyber-ethnography with inspiring examples such as blending cultural heritage with computer games.

One of the few books in its field to address the digital divide among researchers, Digital Ethnography guides readers through the extraordinary potential for enrichment offered by technological resources, far from restricting research to quantitative methods usually associated with technology. The authors powerfully remind us that the study of culture is as much about affective traits of feeling and sensing as it is about cognition—an approach facilitated (not hindered) by the digital age.

After a half-century of glacial creep, television technology has begun to change at the same dizzying pace as computer software. What this will mean--for television, for computers, and for the popular culture where these video media reign supreme--is the subject of this timely book. A noted communications economist, Bruce Owen supplies the essential background: a grasp of the economic history of the television industry and of the effects of technology and government regulation on its organization. He also explores recent developments associated with the growth of the Internet. With this history as a basis, his book allows readers to peer into the future--at the likely effects of television and the Internet on each other, for instance, and at the possibility of a convergence of the TV set, computer, and telephone.

The digital world that Owen shows us is one in which communication titans jockey to survive what Joseph Schumpeter called the "gales of creative destruction." While the rest of us simply struggle to follow the new moves, believing that technology will settle the outcome, Owen warns us that this is a game in which Washington regulators and media hyperbole figure as broadly as innovation and investment. His book explains the game as one involving interactions among all the players, including consumers and advertisers, each with a particular goal. And he discusses the economic principles that govern this game and that can serve as powerful predictive tools.

A substantially updated edition of Video Coding: An introduction to standard codecs (IEE 1999, winner of IEE Rayleigh Award as the best book of 2000), this book discusses the growth of digital television technology, from image compression to advanced video coding. This third edition also includes the latest developments on H.264/MPEG-4 video coding and the scalability defined for this codec, which were not available at the time of the previous edition (IEE 2003). The book highlights the need for standardisation in processing static and moving images and extensively exploits the ITU and ISO/IEC standards defined in this field. The book gives an authoritative explanation of pictures and video coding algorithms, working from basic principles through to the advanced video compression systems now being developed. It discusses the reasons behind the introduction of a standard codec for a specific application and its chosen parameters. Each chapter is devoted to a standard video codec, and chapters are introduced in an evolutionary manner complementing the earlier chapters. This book will enable readers to appreciate the fundamentals needed to design a video codec for any given application and should prove a valuable resource for managers, engineers and researchers working in this field.

A substantially updated edition of Video Coding: An Introduction to Standard Codecs (IEE, 1999, winner of IEE Rayleigh Award), this book discusses the growth of digital television technology and the revolution in image and video compression (such as JPEG2000, broadcast TV, video phone). It highlights the need for standardisation in processing static and moving images and their exchange between computer systems. ITU and ISO/IEC standards are now widely accepted in the picture/video coding field. The book gives an authoritative explanation of picture and video coding algorithms, working from basic principles through to the advanced video compression systems now being developed. It discusses the reasons behind the introduction of a standard codec for a specific application and its chosen parameter. This book will enable readers to appreciate the fundamentals needed to design a video codec for any given application and should prove to be a valuable resource for engineers working in this field.