Digital Humanities Commons^™

Media Literacy As Mindful Practice For Democratic Education. A Response To “Transaction Circles With Digital Texts As A Foundation For Democratic Practices”, Theresa Redmond

Democracy & Education

This essay is a response to Brown’s (2015) article describing her strategy of transaction circles as a student-centered, culturally responsive, and democratic literacy practice. In my response, I provide further evidence from the field of media literacy education (MLE) that serves to enhance Brown’s argument for using transaction circles in order to promote democratic discourse, specifically augmenting her ideas by connecting the purposes and processes of transaction circles with key implications of media literacy pedagogy. I invite Brown to consider how her concept of transaction circles may be extended in three ways: (a) through acknowledging the indispensable role of the …

Greatness From Small Beginnings: Amy Hennig And The Women Of The Uncharted Series, Rachel Wood

Posters-at-the-Capitol

“Greatness from Small Beginnings: Amy Hennig and the Women of the Uncharted series,” Rachel Wood, Faculty Mentor Andy Black, English & Philosophy Department

Amy Hennig, creative director and writer for the Uncharted video game series, has had a great impact on the world of interactive storytelling, namely with her portrayal of female characters in the action-adventure genre. During her time at Sony-owned developer Naughty Dog, Hennig encouraged gamers and developers alike to redefine the genre through in-depth storytelling and well-rounded characters. This paper explored how these female characters, while unique in their backgrounds and roles within the games’ plots, represent …

The Consequences Of Narrative, Kylie Mosbacher

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

Preservation First? Re-Viewing Film Digitization, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This article addresses the politics of film digitization by arguing that we should reconsider archival and preservation "best practices" that require film restoration. Instead, it advocates for digitizing films "as is," which, in turn, captures the film's current materiality (i.e., fading, scratches, and other facets that reveal age, wear, and use). Using the work of Luis Vale, one of the youth filmmakers from New York City's Lower East Side's Young Filmmaker Foundation's Film Club, as a case study, the article points to the importance of archiving and saving these youth films as part of a growing movement to look beyond …

The Colonial Remix: Power And Language In Colonial And Digital Spaces, Susana Aho

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper maps the similarities between colonial and digital media histories, as well as the repercussions these similarities might have on constructions of power and language in a digital age. The colonial encounter in sixteenth century led to the eventual displacement of indigenous pictographic forms by Western alphabetic ones. However, the first years of encounter are also marked by experimentation in which these two forms were combined in unique ways, creating hybrid reading and writing methods. Similarly, digital platforms are able to combine previously separate media (photography, film, 3D animation, print design, maps, etc) in the same files and environments, …

Digital Gaming And Tolkien, 1976-2015, Helen Young

Journal of Tolkien Research

‘Tolkien’ the cultural phenomenon is far bigger than J. R. R. Tolkien the author, or even J. R. R. Tolkien the author-and-oeuvre. When Christopher Tolkien asserted in 2012 that his father’s legacy has been rendered monstrous he blamed its fate on the gross depredations of commercialization generally and the Warner Bros’ franchise in particular. Explorations of – and encomiums on – the afterlives of Tolkien’s novels generally focus on the impact of Peter Jackson’s films. The forces which have shaped contemporary ‘Tolkien’ are not only commercial however; fans also ‘do things’ with Tolkien’s writings. The drive to make …

Nietzsche’S Digital Alexandrians: Greek As Musical Code For Nietzsche And Kittler, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Facilitating Student Documentary Projects Toward 21-Century Literacy And Civic Engagement, Steven Goodman

Occasional Paper Series

The author describes how he uses video making as a way to engage students in high-needs schools. Goodman believes video making projects can help counter the ways minority students are made invisible by school curriculum and the culture of testing. More importantly, creating video documentaries allows students to use multiple literacies and does not exclude those who struggle with the written word.

Confessions Of A Media Literacy Scholar-Practitioner: Job Market Advantages, Research Agenda Challenges, And Theory-Driven Production, Christopher Boulton

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This essay explores how higher education’s move away from the liberal arts tradition of learning by thinking and towards more vocational “experiential” approaches has implications for media literacy educators’ career options, scholarly identities, and teaching strategies. Specifically, I consider my own negotiation of increasing administrative and student demands for “hands-on” production courses by confessing both my advantages on the job market and my post-hire challenges in articulating a clear research agenda. I then conclude with a case study of how I repurposed my scholar-practitioner identity and used critical theory to drive production by bringing film students into a cultural studies …

Dynamic Media: A Need For The Dynamic Use Of Media To Meet Organizational Goals, Alexander J. Scott

Capstone Collection

This qualitative research study looks at how media can be used dynamically as a vehicle for study abroad students to create more meaningful engagements with the communities they visit. It takes a post-structural approach with an emphasis on how media supports participatory community-driven initiatives. It is the result of a 3-month participatory research process that looks at how media is emerging as a resource in some of the most remote communities in Nicaragua. The study was based on interviews with community stakeholders of the study abroad program, participatory observation, questionnaires, talks with community members, and the results of dynamic media …

Isis Rhetoric: A War Of Online Videos, Kathryn Mcdearis

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In an attempt to combat ISIS recruitment videos, the United States Department of State (USDS) developed the Think Again, Turn Away social media campaign featuring videos attempting to persuade viewers to resist the message of ISIS. In the article “U.S. government: A war of online video propaganda,” authors William Allendorfer and Susan Herring (2015) analyze the textual rhetoric of the ISIS video series Flames of War in comparison to eight Think Again, Turn Away videos. To add to Allendorfer and Herring’s (2015) textual analysis, this study uses the framework of scholar David Blakesley’s (2004) four elements of film rhetoric ( …

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety, Rebecca Schroeder

Honors Projects

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety is a triptych video and artifact piece inspired by the abstract analysis of my dreams. It recognizes worries held within my subconscious and brings them to life through graphic design, photography, and video. The process of creating provides a new perspective of looking at both art and occupational therapy as methods of solving emotional distress.

I have recorded over 80 of my dreams in the past year. In these dreams, regret, grief, and anxiety are common themes. These themes are represented in three triptychs that cycle through past, present, and future problems. The cycling of …

Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections, Urszula Anna Pawlicka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections" Urszula Pawlicka discusses the development of electronic literature by visualizing material available in the Electronic Literature Collection <http://collection.eliterature.org/>. Her visualization of electronic literature presents a timeline with tag clouds of keywords related to works classified chronologically by dates of publication. Pawlicka's visualization includes also all keywords of the Collection (two date there exist three Collections) separately without division in the publication dates of works. Pawlicka argues that keywords turn out to be important data to demonstrate changes occurring in the history of electronic literature. Further, in her visualization of electronic literature …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Magic At The Crossroads: The Rise Of The Video Essay, Morganne Tinsley August

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create …

The New Gatekeepers: How Blogs Subverted Mainstream Book Reviews, Rebecca E. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and …

Prancing Shadow Connecting Worlds, Tiffany D. Randle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

The practice of being conscious about the environment and how shadows, light, and movement create an intellectual space for different interpretations allows the viewer to make their own associations. Concrete, the ground that people of different shades walk on, to one person can look and seem like an ethereal and unknown environment, but to another may seem like a moving body of liquid. When artists stop and look at the simple things such a concrete, and water, or passersby they can capture a moment in time that transcends the mundane and suddenly the artist is in a position to present …

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: A Metaphorical Look At Life, The Universe, And Everything, Thomas David Thompson

Communication Studies

A look at the integral use of metaphor as a heuristic in the process of human learning.

Multimedia Reporting: Creating Unique Content That Spans Multiple Platforms, Joshua Carl Holland

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

With the continued ease of access to the internet, it has become a vital medium to distribute news and sports information. This study documents the process of starting from a relatively absent online product to developing daily web content. Trial and error of different original content ideas for online as well as experimentations with translating broadcast content into a web product are coupled with interviews from professionals to create a framework of how to go about establishing an internet presence in an age of instant news. The case is generally focused on sports media due to the nature of my …

The Assignment: How The Videographer's Role Is Shaped By The Job Assignment, Ian J. Dowty

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

I am a videographer. Yes, my degree will qualify me as a reporter, someone familiar with the inner workings of a news station. However, I posit that the School of Journalism and Broadcasting does not give you a career, but rather a skillset that prepares you for a range of jobs. My discipline taught me how to articulate my thoughts in a clear, concise manner, which translates well to script or track writing. In addition, I have technical abilities that enable me to handle video and audio equipment proficiently. Combining these capabilities with soft skills I honed over the past …

They're Watching Us: Conspiracy Theorists In Popular Media, Parker A. Hanna

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The term “conspiracy theorist” is often used in discussions as a rhetorical device to discredit a speaker on the basis of their opinions. The effect of this has been to turn attention away from the speaker’s stated opinions towards the speaker himself and his character as a “conspiracy theorist.” These negative connotations are recognized and understood by many thanks to archetypes of the “conspiracy theorist” character found in popular media, making the accusation an effective tool for muting the “conspiracy theorist’s” opinion in mainstream public forums, whether that forum is the news, politics, or real life. This paper examines stereotypical …

Occupy The Future: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Dystopian Film And The Occupy Movement, Justin J. Grandinetti

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The anarchic Occupy Wall Street protests, which began in 2011, had an immediate impact on politics and the global lexicon. By introducing the terms “the one percent” and “the 99%” into the public sphere, Occupy was able to draw attention to growing global income inequality. This revolutionary spirit was not lost on popular culture, as a number of films that followed the protests were linked to Occupy. The Hunger Games (2012), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Elysium (2013) represent films that were not only extremely successful in the box office, but were also connected to the Occupy Movement because …

Jewish Games For Learning: Renewing Heritage Traditions In The Digital Age, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Rather than a discontinuity from traditional modes of learning, new explorations of digital and strategic games in Jewish learning are markedly continuous with ancient practices. An explication of the close connections between traditional modes of Jewish learning, interpretive practice, and gaming culture can help to explain how Jews of the Digital Age can adopt and are adapting modern Games for Learning practices for contemporary purposes. The chapter opens by contextualizing a notion of Jewish Games and the field of Games for Learning. Next, the chapter explains the connections between game systems and Jewish traditions. It closes with a case study …

Lone Wolves And Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931-1969, Aaron Gerow, Rea Amit, Samuel Malissa, Noriko Morisue, Hsin-Yuan Peng, Stephen Poland, Grace Ting, Takuya Tsunoda, Justine Wiesinger, Young Yi, Inuhiko Yomota, Jō Ōsawa, Phil Kaffen

Film Series Commentaries

“Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931–1969” is a continuing collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Ever since the success of the French crime film Zigomar in 1911, the Japanese film industry has produced numerous movies depicting criminals and the detectives who try to apprehend them. Chivalric yakuza, modern mobsters, knife-wielding molls, hardboiled gumshoes, samurai detectives, femme fatales, and private eyes populate Japanese cinema, from period films to contemporary dramas, from genre cinema to art film, from the …

Digital Aids Documentary: Webs, Rooms, Viruses And Quilts, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Social Media & Audience Participation In Regard To Television, Jean Marie Mcbride

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Jean McBride

Major: Communications: Radio/TV Broadcasting & Mass Media Production

Project Sponsor: Dr. Sylvia White

Number of Project Credits: 3

Social Media & Audience Participation in Regard to Television

The purpose of my honors project was seeing if social media had an influence on television show ratings and popularity by incorporating audience participation. Especially in regards to television shows that have been around for years, I was interested to see if television ratings went up when using Twitter compared to when they did not use Twitter to increase viewers and audience participation. I surveyed forty-nine collegiate women between the ages …

Introduction To New Work On Electronic Literature And Cyberculture, Maya Zalbidea, Mark C. Marino, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Meaning And Relevance Of Video Game Literacy, Jeroen Bourgonjon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Meaning and Relevance of Video Game Literacy" Jeroen Bourgonjon argues that video gaming deserves scholarly attention as a social practice and a site for meaning-making and learning. Based on an overview of contemporary trends in literacy and cultural studies, he argues that video games cannot be approached like traditional text forms. He contends that video games serve as an important frame of reference for young people and call for informed decision making in the context of culture, education, and policy. Bourgonjon provides an integrated perspective on video game literacy by employing theoretical insights about their distinctive …

Teaching Digital Humanities In Romania, Mădălina Nicolaescu, Adriana Mihai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Teaching Digital Humanities in Romania" Mădălina Nicolaescu and Adriana Mihai describe a research project that sets out to promote digital humanities with an internet based platform in Shakespeare studies at the University of Bucharest. Texts have been collected and catalogued and the platform's technical construction is in construction. Based on the Shakespeare platform's content and presentation, Nicolaescu and Mihai propose participation strategies for involvement in the creation of a digital database that is both a research tool and a digital storytelling environment. The database is a collection of digitized translations of Shakespeare in Romanian followed by participants' …

New Challenges For The Archiving Of Digital Writing, Heiko Zimmermann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing" Heiko Zimmermann discusses the challenges of the preservation of digital texts. In addition to the problems already at the focus of attention of digital archivists, there are elements in digital literature which need to be taken into consideration when trying to archive them. Zimmermann analyses two works of digital literature, the collaborative writing project A Million Penguins (2006-2007) and Renée Tuner's She… (2008) and shows how the ontology of these texts is bound to elements of performance, to direct social interaction of writers and readers to the uniquely subjective …