Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

A Research Program For Studying Lams And Community In The Digital Age, Andreas Vårheim, Roswitha Skare, Noah Lenstra, Kiersten F. Latham, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The paper outlines a research effort into the changing representations, policies, strategies, activities, and practices of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in the digital age. Comprehensive social changes including big slow-moving processes, such as aging populations, global migration, technological change, and environmental change, expose communities and LAM institutions to vulnerabilities. How do the institutions handle vulnerabilities, how do they become more resilient, and how do they contribute to building the resilience of their local communities?

Fake Or Visual Trickery? Understanding The Quantitative Visual Rhetoric In The News, Rohit Mehta, Lynette Deaun Guzmán

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In online and video/television spaces, news media discourses incorporate multimodal design as a discursive move capable of steering meaning toward desirable implications. Around the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, while polarized news outlets made their positionality on the candidates obvious, more neutral or central news outlets revealed their preferences through subtle multimodal design choices. One of these design choices is using a quantitative visual rhetoric: persuasive multimodal moves that draw on quantification through visual, spatial, and textual manipulation—involving the choice of data representation, visual images, and illustrations, (im)balance between numeric and alphabetic texts, and general quantitative narrative. This quantitative visual rhetoric …

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

For Better, Or For Worse: Photographing In A Digitally Cluttered Crowd, Dale L. Carty Ii

Masters Theses

In recent years, smartphones have been utilized to photograph treasured moments. However, some are unaware they are distracting others in events such as weddings. The distracting smartphone user could potentially obstruct professional wedding photographers and hinder them from capturing priceless shots. The purpose of this thesis is to research the motive behind the addictive nature of smartphones and potentially decrease the number of smartphone pictures taken during the wedding ceremonies. The goal of this study is to bring awareness to the problem and to create a mobile application, which could then reduce the intrusiveness of smartphones during weddings. The researcher …

Hackers And The Dark Net: A Look Into Hacking And The Deep Web, Danielle Lefrancois, Christina Reilly, Russell Munn, Andy Strasel, Jess Garcia, Lindsey Chiles

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

The dark web is notorious for the illicit activities it facilitates, including human trafficking, narcotics and weapons sales, and illegally obtained information transfers. In order to combat this constant, invisible threat to security, governments and experts have called for tougher legislation and increased surveillance. But on the opposite end of all this crime and villainy lie persecuted groups who use the dark web and the anonymity it affords to protect themselves from retaliation. This article uses Atavist’s digital storytelling medium to explore how hackers “hack” the web, ethical questions surrounding the dark web, and policy solutions to cyber security.

The Vanishing Line, Jacopo Mazzoni

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is an exploratory effort to bridge the rift that political and monetary powers created between art and technology. In my practice, these socio-political motivations are exposed through the creation of non-utilitarian inventions that use different technologies as charged metaphors. I research mass media language and construct interactive pieces while borrowing strategies from the entertainment industry to make environmental, social, and political issues more palatable than documentary films or raw data could. In my work, technology is regarded as a semidivine entity with supernatural powers that can both elevate and reduce the human experience. My work functions differently according …

Orthodontists’ And Patients’ Preferences In Website Design In The Selection Of An Orthodontic Practice: A Comparative Study, Taylor R. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Objective: To determine which website characteristics are preferred by orthodontists, adult patients, and parents of patients.

Materials and Methods: 1,000 active members of the American Association of Orthodontists and 750 active orthodontic patients/parents were sampled. Participants rated the importance of website characteristics, indicated presence of those characteristics on the current website, and ranked sample website images. Preferences were compared between orthodontist and the patient/parent group using t-tests and sample websites were compared using ANOVA models and Tukey’s adjusted post-hoc tests. Significance level was set at 0.05.

Results: 11 of the 16 website features showed significant differences between patients/parents and orthodontists. …

Like Me: Generation Z, Instagram, And Self-Branding Practices, Emily Longley

Scripps Senior Theses

The newest generation, raised and immersed in today's hyper-consumer culture, has learned to define the self within a neoliberal and capitalist framework in which self-branding and ascribing to hegemonic principles appears imperative to one’s personal success.

Emergent Narrative: Stories Of Play, Playing With Stories, Eric Murnane

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emergent narrative, a phenomenon of unexpected contextual stories arising through play, has been researched in the field of game studies since 1999. However, that discussion largely lies in the realm of theoretical stories which are generated by either the system or the player. The purpose of this dissertation is to deepen our understanding of emergent narrative by examining real-world examples of the phenomenon. Four hundred player posts were gathered from forums relating to the video game Skyrim (a large, open world fantasy roleplaying game) and analyzed using a mixed-method framework which is informed by digital ethnography, fan studies, and game …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk

Theses and Dissertations

We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.