Digital Commons Network^™

New Media Reading Strategy, Cheryl E. Ball

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This dissertation addresses the need for a strategy that will help readers new to new media texts interpret such texts. While scholars in multimodal and new media theory posit rubrics that offer ways to understand how designers use the materialities and media found in overtly designed, new media texts (see, e.g,, Wysocki, 2004a), these strategies do not account for how readers have to make meaning from those texts. In this dissertation, I discuss how these theories, such as Lev Manovich’s (2001) five principles for determining the new media potential of texts and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2001) four …

Through The Back Door : Melungeon Literacies And 21st Century Technologies, Katherine G. Vande Brake

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The Melungeons, a minority recognized in Southern Appalachia where they settled in the early 1800s, have mixed heritage—European, Mediterranean, Native American, and Sub-Saharan African. Their dark skin and distinctive features have marked them and been the cause of racial persecution both by custom and by law in Appalachia for two centuries. Their marginalization has led to an insider mentality, which I call a “literacy” of Melungeon-ness that affects every facet of their lives.

Just a century ago, while specialized practices such as farming, preserving food, hunting, gathering, and distilling insured survival in the unforgiving mountain environment, few Melungeons could read …