Tagged / potw

Photo of the Week: Understanding Digital Immersion within Streaming and E-Sports

BU research, Featured, Research communication

Digital Tethering: Understanding Digital Immersion within Streaming and E-Sports

Our Photo of the Week series features photo entries from our annual Research Photography Competition taken by BU academics, students and professional staff, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.

This week’s photo of the week is by Charlie Simmons, a final year undergraduate student on a BA (Hons) Business Studies with Marketing programme. This project was co-created with Dr Elvira Bolat, Senior Lecturer in Marketing in the Faculty of Management, and won a prize for the Centre for Excellence in Learning (CEL) co-creation awards. Charlie’s work is around digital tethering, particularly in understanding digital immersion.

Immersion is used outside of digital space as a term to measure the degree of involvement in a specific activity. Digital immersion is now a ubiquitous phenomenon that can be observed in all human activities starting with consumption of services and products as well as professional tasks. Overall academic literature, in particular business and management literature, lacks understanding of digital immersion, perhaps due to methodological challenges associated with researching this area. Using the context of e-sport, this research study revealed that in the context of digital connectivity immersion is not only a feeling but a state of mind; it causes behavioural changes in its e-sport players and keeps them habitually absorbed. At the heart of digital immersion are people, streamers (influencers) and community whom have the power to manipulate individuals’ behaviour.

At the heart of digital immersion is community; the more an individual is experiencing community and feels part of that community, the more likely they are to be immersed in the digital environment. Entertainment within content is also irrelevant to the digital immersion, which is contrary to existing research. Content allows users to escape from reality and forget about real world problems, and learning in combination with community factors found to have a strong and positive impact on digital immersion. Findings of this research have implications beyond its contextual focus, e-sports. Businesses can utilise learning, escape and community effects to improve online presence and stimulate much more meaningful engagement with a digital content.

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For more information about this research, please contact Dr Elvira Bolat here.

Digital Me is an online collection of research publications/narratives within the domain of digital, written by BU academics and students. This research covers various disciplines, i.e. management and marketing, health and social science, computing and media, education and more; and spreads through various topics, i.e. digital consumption, digital business, education and digital and more. Find out more here.

Photo of the Week: Welcome to BU from China!

BU research, Featured, Research communication

Welcome to BU from China! From the beginning to the end of your studies at BU, let’s focus on the middle bit and the all-important ‘sandwich placement’!

Our Photo of the Week series features photo entries from our annual Research Photography Competition taken by BU academics, students and professional staff, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.

This week’s photo of the week is a selfie taken by Vianna Renaud (Placement Development Advisor and Postgraduate Researcher, Centre for Excellence in Media Practice) with our Chinese students from Beijing Normal University Zhuhai (BNUZ). BU works closely with BNUZ to give students on a number of undergraduate courses the opportunity to complete their studies with us. In an increasingly global business environment, having the opportunity to study in an international community of academics and students is invaluable in helping to develop global perspective and gain a better understanding of how business is conducted across borders and elsewhere in the world.

With the idea of attending Bournemouth University planted in the minds of Chinese students who have attended the Global Festival of Learning on their home campus, the dream becomes a reality when they find themselves in the UK a few months later. Along with having to adjust to the British higher education system, they must begin looking for a sandwich placement suitable for their academic course which can be a challenging time for them.

Vianna is currently trialling a pilot project where she regularly engages with our BNUZ students on a monthly basis and will research to what degree an impact has been made from this intervention, which will include having coaching conversations, using the GROW Model & informational handouts signposting BU services, as well as encouraging the students to engage in peer-to-peer learning in their preparation for placement year.

“By building upon the relationship BU currently has with BNUZ, combined with the feedback from these students, I am confident we can build our own innovative approach to best support those students that choose BU,” says Vianna.

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For more information about this research, please contact Vianna Renaud here.

Photo of the Week: Protest Art for Social Change

BU research, Research communication

Protest Art for Social Change

This week’s photo of the week was taken by Dr Anastasia Veneti and shows how protests and social movements can transform spaces into a form of art.  Our Photo of the Week series features photo entries from our annual Research Photography Competition taken by BU academics, students and professional staff, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.

From the squares of Athens and Istanbul to the streets of New York and Cairo, social movements have been rising during the 21st century. Contrary to public perceptions of urban protest camps as arenas of violence and confrontation, this research at the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement indicated that protest camps can transform the city into an open space of massive arts participation. Thousands of protesters, citizens and tourists participated in collaborative arts projects that communicated universal values related to freedom, equality and democracy. The research team suggest that, in an increasingly turbulent world, peaceful and collective protest art has the capacity to empower, unify and motivate people.

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Dr Anastasia Veneti is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing Communications at Bournemouth University. For more information about this research, please contact Anastasia here.

Researchers involved: Dr Georgios Patsiaouras (School of Business, University of Leicester), Dr Anastasia Veneti (Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University), Dr William Green (School of Business, University of Leicester).

The research project was recently published online at the prestigious journal, “Marketing Theory” in August 2017:

Patsiaouras, G., Veneti, A., and Green, W., (2017) Marketing, art and voices of dissent: promotional methods of protest art by the 2014 Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. Marketing Theory. Online first: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470593117724609

Photo of the Week: The TACIT Trial

BU research, Research communication

The TACIT Trial: TAi ChI for people with demenTia

This week’s photo of the week is Dr Samuel Nyman‘s entry of a Tai Chi class in action. This weekly series features photo entries from our annual Research Photography Competition taken by BU academics, students and professional staff, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.

The TACIT Trial is all about people. The study is undertaken by a team of researchers led by Dr Samuel Nyman at BU who are looking into the benefits of Tai Chi for people with dementia.  Qualified Tai Chi instructors, such as senior instructor Robert Joyce from Elemental Tai Chi (photographed), lead the classes.  The classes are attended by people with dementia and their informal carers.  The classes involve slow, gentle, fluid body movements and slow breathing that leave you feeling relaxed and yet you have exercised your core muscles.  In this randomised controlled trial, we are following up for six months people who have taken part in the classes and practiced at home and are comparing them to others who have not done Tai Chi.  This will provide initial evidence for the first time in the UK as to the benefits of Tai Chi for the health and well-being of people with dementia and their informal carers.  This photo is taken from a workshop for Solent NHS led the the chief investigator Dr Samuel Nyman and Robert Joyce.

You can find out more about the TACIT Trial here:

Webpage: www.bournemouth.ac.uk/tai-chi/

Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheTACITTrial/

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Dr Samuel Nyman is a Principal Academic at Bournemouth University. For more information about this research, please contact Samuel here.

 

Photo of the Week: All My Meeples

BU research, Featured

All My Meeples

Our next Photo of the Week is Alexandra Alberda‘s photo of her drawing of  people engaging with Graphic Medicine comics at a museum exhibition. This weekly series features photo entries taken by our academics, students and professional staff for our annual Research Photography Competition, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.

Alexandra’s work takes Medical Humanities and Graphic Medicine into non-clinical and public settings where health related works are being engaged with presently. Her research furthers Medical Humanities’ engagement with public perceptions of health by expanding the critical vocabulary available to scholars through Comics Studies and curatorial practice. The space of the museum holds a social identity as upholding and defining culture and has a history of exhibiting works that relate to healthcare and the “ill” other/body. How do these bodies and the experiences they illustrate reach our own interpretations of illness, flesh bodies, and lived experiences? Alexandra’s PhD research focuses on these experiences as they are tied to exhibitions and museums, which creates three groups of ‘people’ to the research.

The first group (green) are the people that exist in the museum: viewers, artists, curators, and other museum staff. The second group (pink) are the people represented in the exhibition artwork: both fictional and non-fiction characters in the case of memoirs. Her research focuses on the relationships and engagement that happens between the first and second groups. The third group (orange) involves the relationships between my supervisors, and their expertise, and Alexandra. These relationships will translate into her professional practices and research skills.

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Alexandra Alberda is a PhD researcher in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. Her supervisors are Dr. Sam Goodman, Dr. Julia Round and Professor Michael Wilmore. She received her MA in Art History minoring in Sculptural Painting/Studio Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and BA in English and Art minoring in Honours, Art History and Writing at Briar Cliff University.

Find out more about the role that comics can play in the study and delivery of healthcare on the Graphic Medicine website here.

– @ZandraAlberda

Photo of the Week: The researcher as tourist: “Photographing the photographer”

BU research, Research communication

The researcher as tourist: “Photographing the photographer”

Our next Photo of the Week is Edwin van Teijlingen‘s photo taken in the Nawalparasi district of Nepal. This weekly series features photo entries taken by our academics, students and professional staff for our annual Research Photography Competition, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.

In early 2017, Bournemouth University led the last of six one-day training sessions in Nepal. This project in improving maternal mental health involved bringing UK volunteers to this South-Asian country to do the training.  The training was conducted jointly by UK volunteers and Nepali-speaking trainers and translators. The project, under the Health Partnership Scheme (HPS), was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DfID) and managed by THET (Tropical Health & Education Trust).

The project centred on Auxiliary Nurse Midwives working in birthing centres in Nawalparasi.  This is relatively poor a district in the south of Nepal, bordering India.  Since the training site was very close to Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha, we always tried to take volunteers there for a visit.  This photo was taken just outside of the main building (not in view).  It shows many Nepali visitors to the site trying to get a photograph of, or be in a photograph with, our fair-haired Scottish volunteer, Dr. Flora Douglas.

Edwin van Teijlingen is a Professor of Reproduction Health. For more information about this research, please contact Edwin here.

– @EVanTeijlingen

Photo of the Week: Surviving the advertising apocalypse with RAISA

BU research, Research communication, student research

Surviving the advertising apocalypse with RAISA (Robotics, Artifical Intelligence, Service Automation)

Our Photo of the Week series has returned and we’re kicking off with Elizabeth Falkowska’s research photo in collaboration with Dr Elvira Bolat (Senior Lecturer in Marketing) for this project.

This weekly series features photo entries taken by our academics, students and professional staff for our annual Research Photography Competition, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.

A 2016 World Economic Forum report has predicted that more than five million jobs will be lost to automation and robots by 2020. This causes unease for people within marketing and creative firms who are already struggling to survive an ‘advertising apocalypse’ due to digital transformation of business, consumption and communication. This project founds that to avoid disruption and enable creative agencies focus on doing what they are great at – creative idea generation – relationship resources are critical to RAISA complex ecosystems where companies like Microsoft become an important partner for creative agencies for successful deployment of RAISA.

Elizabeth Falkowska is a final year undergraduate student in BA (Hons) Business Studies with Marketing. For more information about this research, please contact Dr Elvira Bolat.