The entertainment industry has long been dominated by legendary screenwriter William Goldman’s “Nobody-Knows-Anything” mantra, which argues that success is the result of managerial intuition and instinct. This book builds the case that combining such intuition with data analytics and rigorous scholarly knowledge provides a source of sustainab...
In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of journalistic sources, Smoodin recounts the ways films moved through the city, the favored stars, and what it was like to go to th...
Are games worthy of academic attention? Can they be used effectively in the classroom, in the research laboratory, as an innovative design tool, as a persuasive political weapon? Game Mods: Design Theory and Criticism aims to answer these and more questions. It features chapters by authors chosen from around the world, representing fields as divers...
A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of cinema. From the earliest iterations to the latest innovations, this introductory text explores the tools and techniques of mise-en-scene, narrative form, cinematography, editing, sound and acting, how each has contributed to the evolution of cinematic language, and how that evolution im...
How do social networking services earn money?What is the "second hand of the market" and how does it operate? Why does society need so many different kinds of goods? What does happiness economics not reveal about happiness?What is the link between talent, success and "stardom"? What is the business development model for the ent...
This book presents nine outstanding doctoral dissertations in Information Technology from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Information Technology has always been highly interdisciplinary, as many aspects have to be considered in IT systems. The doctoral studies program in IT at Politecnico...
Deejaying, emceeing, graffiti writing, and breakdancing. Together, these artistic expressions combined to form the foundation of one of the most significant cultural phenomena of the late 20th century - Hip-Hop. Rooted in African American culture and experience, the music, fashion, art, and attitude that is Hip-Hop crossed both racial boundaries an...
This book deals with one the most interesting aspects of human life - the search for meaning. It discusses how the science of semiotics is equipped to provide insight on what meaning is and how we produce it. Why is it that certain people routinely put their survival at risk by smoking? Why is it that some women make locomotion difficult for themse...
In this book we learn that there is a clear but complex relationship between setting and character on screen. Certain settings stand out above others—think of the iconic gooey dripping tunnels that Ripley stumbles through in Aliens, Norman’s bird-decorated parlour in Psycho or the dark Gotham of certain Batman movies. But what makes these parti...
Love it or hate it, JavaScript is avidly eating the world of software development. From web sites and apps to servers, smartphones and connected objects, JavaScript is everywhere. It has evolved from a niche scripting tool crafted in a few days into a modern, multi-purpose language sitting on top of a rich ecosystem and a vibrant developer communit...
This text is an introduction to the future of mass media and mass communications - cross-media communications. Cross-media is explained through the presentation and analysis of contemporary examples and project-based tutorials in cross-media development. The text introduces fundamental terms and concepts, and provides a solid overview of cross-medi...
In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before - something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientif...
HD movies and videos, gigabyte photo and music collections, extreme games ... today's digital content is bigger and better than ever. And now you (and many others!) are interacting with this content simultaneously on an expanding range of Wi-Fi devices, from smartphones, tablets, and laptops to consumer electronics and appliances. The Wi-Fi of...
MongoDB is one of the biggest players in the NoSQL database market, providing high performance, high availability, and automatic scaling. It's an open-source document database written in C++ and hosted on GitHub. Zoran Maksimovic's MongoDB 3 Succinctly touches on the most important aspects of the MongoDB database that application develope...