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The representation of publicists in popular culture appears to have a direct relationship with how publishing sector publicity staff are perceived by their colleagues and peers, having a distinct knock-on effect to work practices and labour conditions. In this article, we explore these perceptions and, through interviews with eight publicists working in publishing houses in Australia, explore how the work of publicity is commonly misrecognised and undervalued. In framing publicists as cultural intermediaries who contribute to the shaping of cultural tastes, we further illuminate the significant gap between the common gendered perceptions of publicists and the realities of their professional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book publicists are important intermediaries in generating earned media attention, creating discoverability opportunities, and getting new books into the hands of potential readers. Despite their important function in book culture, publicists' labour in producing and framing value in the book industry is often rendered invisible in the industry and scholarly literature, which we trace back to field-defining conceptual models, particularly Robert Darnton's Communications Circuit (1982). This article draws on interviews with eight Australian publicists to make visible, interrogate, and explain the material and symbolic labour involved in the affective relationship-building and cultural framing work of publicity. This article explores publicists' day-to-day work, their relationships with authors, colleagues and the media, and publicity's function in contemporary book culture. Book publicists are important cultural intermediaries: they are integral to the economic and social contexts of publishing, and influence and shape cultural tastes and value through strategic promotional work, resulting in considerable effects across the domains of production and reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live literature – events where literature is the dominant art form presented or performed – is a highly visible form of contemporary book culture. In this article, we examine the live reading events organised by #RomanceClass in the Philippines as a case study, using a digital ethnography method which draws on fieldnotes, interviews, social media content, a decibel reader, and a bingo card; and grapple with some of the methodological challenges of researching post-digital literary events. By doing so, we seek not only to explore these fascinating live reading events as specific local phenomena, but also the ways in which the characteristics of a given genre world shape the phenomenology of live literature events more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital platforms have reshaped the creative industries and restructured relationships between media sectors. Creative writing and reading social media platforms like Wattpad are challenging what it means to publish fiction in the early 21st century, and digital streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and others have begun looking to these platforms to source creative content for adaptation. Praxis on creative writing social media platforms is shaped by a complex and ongoing interplay between the technocultural and socio-economic conditions of platforms and their users. This article argues for an integration of publishing studies and platform studies by applying a media ecology framework to map behaviour on Wattpad, one of the largest creative writing social media platforms, and the relationships it has developed with other media companies. Specifically, it draws on and extends José van Dijck's ((2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.) microsystem/ecosystem connective media model and proposes a broader conceptualisation of the entertainment ecosystem that incorporates adaptation of content across the book publishing and entertainment media sectors. Mapping these platforms alongside legacy media and publishing companies offers a productive framework for theorising contemporary entertainment media production within the platform media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses adoption of creative innovations by #RomanceClass, a Filipino community of authors, artists, and actors amid COVID-19 pandemic. Topics discussed include use of phenomena like storytelling festivals, author readings, and literary festivals in virtual environment; role of escapism for creating art during the 2020 lockdowns; and focus to engage art community.

Abnormal oscillatory movement (i.e. tremor) is usually evaluated with qualitative assessment by clinicians, and quantified with subjective scoring methods. These methods are often inaccurate. We utilized a quantitative and standardized task based on the Fitts' law to assess the performance of arm movement with tremor by controlling a gyration mouse on a computer. The experiment included the center-out tapping (COT) and rectangular track navigation (RTN) tasks. We report the results of a pilot study in which we collected the performance for healthy participants in whom tremor was simulated by imposing oscillatory movements to the arm with a vibration motor. We compared their movement speed and accuracy with and without the artificial "tremor." We found that the artificial tremor significantly affected the path efficiency for both tasks (COT: 56.8 vs. 46.2%, p <; 0.05; RTN: 94.2 vs. 67.4%, p <; 0.05), and we were able to distinguish the presence of tremor. From this result, we expect to quantify severity of tremor and the effectiveness therapy for tremor patients.

Assessments of tremor characteristics by movement disorder physicians are usually done at single time points in clinic settings, so that the description of the tremor does not take into account the dependence of the tremor on specific behavioral situations. Moreover, treatment-induced changes in tremor or behavior cannot be quantitatively tracked for extended periods of time. We developed a wearable tremor measurement system with tremor and activity recognition algorithms for long-term upper limb behavior tracking, to characterize tremor characteristics and treatment effects in their daily lives. In this pilot study, we collected sensor data of arm movement from three healthy participants using a wrist device that included a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope, and classified tremor and activities within scenario tasks which resembled real life situations. Our results show that the system was able to classify the tremor and activities with 89.71% and 74.48% accuracies during the scenario tasks. From this results, we expect to expand our tremor and activity measurement in longer time period.