bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding the Complexity of Journalistic Practices: the Case of Xinhua
Authors: Xin Dr Xin
Published: February 2020

The major theme of this research (2003-2006) is to conceptualize the change of Xinhua over the last two-and-a-half decades in the context of globalization. However, no existing English and Chinese literature on Chinese media and news agencies provides adequate knowledge of Xinhua. Instead, both fields have fallen into numerous controversies. Many scholars in the two fields have turned to the globalization controversy for a conceptual framework, which itself has been confused by various versions of the global/local polarization.
Introduction
Authors: Sills-Jones Dafydd
Published: February 2020

The speakers at this workshop were experienced media practitioners, who faced the challenges of having a foot in both camps: in that of the media practitioner, and that of the academic researcher of media.
A Return to the ‘Big’ Discourse : Interviewing History Documentary-Makers
Authors: Sills-Jones Dafydd
Published: February 2020

In looking at the connections between changes in the political economy of the television industry in the UK and the changing form of history documentaries during the 1990s, my starting point was an alleged boom in the production and viewership of history documentaries on terrestrial television during that period. The centrality of documentary to debates regarding quality and public service during a period of marketisation, often evidenced by a decline in ‘serious’ programming, made this alleged growth particularly interesting.

But due to the 25-year embargo on the BBC written archives, the lack of an accessible Channel 4 written archive and the commercial confidentiality surrounding the archives of independent television producers I had to turn to my industry experience, and to interviews with industry figures, in order to conduct my study. This meant returning to a discourse which I had once been part of, but one which I had seriously questioned throughout my previous career in history documentary production.

This paper looks at how differing working practices, knowledge sets, terminology, and my own shifting sense of identity affected the way in which this research was conducted.
‘Documents of Ordinariness – The BBC Video Nation Project’
Authors: Henderson Jo
Published: February 2020

My research examines the interface between amateur video production and the UK cultural industries, specifically the BBC’s Video Nation. This paper, ‘Documents of Ordinariness’ firstly examines a range of practices that are incorporated under the term video generated content, highlighting the dualism of amateur / professional raised in its inclusion in the media which is continued in the examination of the Video Nation project.
Daily or Diary? Towards a New Profile in e-Journalism
Authors: Perales Cristina , Rodríguez Mon
Published: February 2020

Who’s there? A human figure projected against the light in the mist: is this figure still the main character of media information? Journalism erected itself on the contradiction between an unreachable objectivity and a silenced subject. Is it time to change the model from “daily” to “diary”? This individual in the shadow, what does he want? What shape might he have?
One Form, Many Letters: Fluid and transient letterforms in screen-based typographic artefacts
Authors: Brownie Barbara
Published: February 2020

Current understanding of the nature of type assumes it to be static, with properties of form and colour. With the introduction of temporal media, typographic artefacts may additionally have properties of behaviour. Temporal media allow type to perform and evolve. ‘Fluid’ (Kac, 1997) type, as it appears in onscreen, is ‘dramatized’ (Helfand, 1997). A single form may present multiple letters through processes of morphing, rotation or deconstruction, and multiple forms may present a single letter through processes of reorganisation.

Analysis of such artefacts not only requires us to re-evaluate our understanding of the nature of type, but also to reassess the notion that a single letterform may only have a single identity. Referencing examples of typographic performance, this paper will discuss the nature of fluid type, and propose that current typographic theory may need to adapt in order to respond to the introduction of temporal media.
The Ideology of Objectivity: Constructs of Language in the Popular Press of Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Authors: Heske Claudia
Published: February 2020

Relying on archival research, particular events occurring during the First World War will be singled out that generated articles in the popular press, and acts of close reading will be performed to see which journalistic styles and techniques are being used to relate the details of wartime events. I will also explore how imperialism is featured, either as an implicit or an explicit construct, when journalists write articles concerning global affairs. This focus on the thematic representation of war and the epistemological supposition of an imperialist order in newspapers will show the ways in which a nationalist discourse is configured. Newspaper reports are ideally thought of as a transparent and impartial medium. However, in studying the links between the mass production and circulation of popular newspapers, the dramatic increase of a literate public, and the state of the British imperialist project in the early twentieth century, journalism’s so-called transparent discourse can be fundamentally questioned.
The Killer Father and the Final Mother: Womb-Envy in The Cell
Authors: Sharma Shweta
Published: February 2020

This paper introduces and examines the ‘Killer’ Father and the ‘Final’ Mother in Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (2001). They are descendants of Carol J. Clover’s ‘Killer’ and ‘Final Girl’ respectively. The Killer Father is a bad father figure who tortures or even kills his family. The Final Mother is a ‘muscle mother’, who kills the Killer Father in order to save her child from his fringes. This study uses the psychoanalytical concept of ‘womb-envy’ as a critical tool to illustrate the unconscious motives of the Killer Father. The employment of womb-envy shows that the Killer Father’s behaviour displays unconscious envy of the female reproductive organs, and the capacity to give birth and nurture. In the end, this paper argues that the presence of the Killer Father and the Final Mother in the contemporary horror cinema is indicative of the dilemmas that preoccupy modern parenthood and the agency of the nuclear family.
Read My Voice: Expressing Silence and Sound in Text-messages
Authors: Knaś Agnieszka
Published: February 2020

Texting as a modality of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has attracted the attention of researchers as a sociological and linguistic phenomenon. They have focused on usage patterns and peculiarities of SMS-language, while other, more complex forms of CMC have been discussed as a field for creating virtual communities and co-constructing social realities. In this paper, I establish that texters co-opt technology to record audible features in writing, and propose that ‘text tools’ employed to replace voice features can be divided into three categories: silences, fillers, and phoneticons. Based on samples of English and Polish texts, I establish that silence and voice features are present in texting and play an important role in increasing the perception of physical proximity of the participants. This paper advances current knowledge about text-messages and contributes to questions about the ways non-verbal features are marked and the illusion of conversational reality created in this important, but often overlooked, medium.
The Medium is Global, the Content is not: Translating Commercial Websites
Authors: Lee Yvonne
Published: February 2020

Unrestricted by geographic constraints, websites seek to counter linguistic barriers via translation or localisation to reach international web users. Website translation serves as a mediator between users and the reality constructed with multimodal signs in different linguistic and cultural contexts by multinational companies. In comparison with literary translation, website translation is characterised by various unconventional elements, such as the uncertain presence or lack of a definite source text, the choice of multimodal materials for translation, and the representation of meanings in different language versions. Verbal and non-verbal elements, therefore, hold equal significance in the translation process. Considering the complex and interwoven factors in the translation of a website, this paper investigates the non-verbal and verbal signs in commercial websites translation with a corpus of multinational companies (MNCs) operating in Greater China. It argues that translation in commercial websites, contrary to the traditional paradigm with a definitely source-target textual pair, is a fluid concept that involves a ‘globally-relevant source text’ (Adab, 1998 p.224) that allows space for locally-relevant factors to weigh in to produce content appealing to the target website users.
Family Photography as a phatic construction
Authors: Blanco Patricia Prieto
Published: February 2020

When the camera became a domestic consumer good, photography was adapted to the needs of private production and reception (Slater, 1991: 50). The family archive contains images of selfportrayal, whose form is oriented towards established patterns, like cartes-de-visite, since they are

received privately as well as in a quasi-public area (wallet, desk in an office etc.).

Family photography gains its performative character by means of its phatic function (Malinowski, 1923/1949: 315-7), inscribed in a historical and socio-cultural frame (Hirsch, M. 1997: 10-2). It actuates in the border between naivety and formality, and these Memory-Pictures (Keppler, 1994: 187) create an impression of reliability and authenticity by their ritualized reception.

The storage in a family archive and the perfomativity of its reception oscillate between the paradigm of scripture and the regime of narration (Langford, 2006: 227). The characterization of the media category ‘family photography’ by means of the phatic function of communication, and the

identification of suitable tools for the analysis, are the topics of this article.
Public Service Broadcasting and the Public Sphere: Normative Arguments from Habermasian Theory
Authors: Ramsey Phil
Published: February 2020

Discussing Public Service Broadcasting from the perspective of the public sphere has both historical form and theoretical rationale. This article surveys some of the arguments forwarded on the commonality between the theoretical category of the public sphere, and Public Service Broadcasting (PSB). Drawing from scholarly work over the past three decades, it also addresses the problems with this approach, outlining an argument against applying public sphere theory in this setting. This article then applies normative arguments drawn from Habermasian theory to the subject, arguing that public sphere theory remains a critical tool for studying PSB. This article suggests that on the public sphere principles of inclusion, deliberation and opinion formation, PSB helps sustain the notion of the public sphere, and indeed provides one of the most important realisations of it. In particular, this article focuses on PSB in the UK, and gives evidence from the case of the BBC to support its claims.
Metal, Machismo and Musical Mode: How the ‘Feminine’ Phrygian Second has been Appropriated and Transformed
Authors: Moore Sarha
Published: February 2020

Heavy Metal music has made extensive and deliberate use of the ‘medieval modes’, particularly those starting with a semitone. Historically the second note of these modes, the Phrygian second, was deemed ‘weak’ and ‘feminine’, a far cry from the machismo of Heavy Metal.

This paper describes the journey of the Phrygian mode and its semitone second note, from ancient Greek times to the present, detailing changing connotations and the consequences of these on present day Heavy Metal music. The paper will include particular discussion of how the Phrygian second supports machismo through Metal music in film, and the subgenre of Oriental Metal that can challenge the Othering of the Phrygian second.

It can be argued that within Metal the Phrygian second is significant and central to its aggressive power, and that Metal has given the Phrygian second unique and innovative masculine significations that contribute new expressive aspects to the contemporary musical palette.
The Role of Lucha Libre in the Construction of Mexican Male Identity
Authors: Pereda Javier , Murrieta-Flores Patricia
Published: February 2020

Lucha Libre has played an important role in Mexican culture since the late 1950s. The sport became famous mainly due to its masked wrestlers, who incorporated their own family traditions, beliefs and fears into the design of their masks, transforming an ordinary person into a fearless character.

After the introduction of the Monsters Cinema in the 1930s, Mexican audiences welcomed and adopted characters like Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein and The Werewolf. The success of Monster Cinema in Mexican culture was based on the integration of national legends and beliefs, placing them in local and identifiable concepts in the Mexican popular imagination. Later, Lucha Libre Cinema mixed with Monster Cinema resulting in the birth of new heroes and myths. These emergent paladins of the Mexican metropolis set the cultural and moral standards of that time and how Mexicans wanted to be perceived.

Through an anthropological and historical analysis of Mexican Cinema and Lucha Libre, this paper investigates the main social interaction of male wrestlers who perform as heroes inside the celluloid world and outside of it. We explore how masculinity and the male figure evolves in Lucha Libre Cinema, and the processes that wrestlers have to undergo in order to be able to portray themselves as superheroes of an evolving and fast growing Mexico.
Masculinity and Institutional Identity in South Cyprus - the case of ‘I do not forget’
Authors: Efthymiou Stratis Andreas
Published: February 2020

This paper explores Greek-Cypriot masculinity through the lens of ‘I do not forget’ and was triggered by personal experiences with educational and military institutions in South Cyprus. The aim is to put forward a theoretical framework enabling a better understanding of Cypriot conflict identities, using an enquiry into institutionalised identities. The iconic image of the mother of the missing persons is mobilised in understanding the inter-constitution of post-war Greek-Cypriot nationalism as based on explicit notions of victimhood, in which the military assumes a key role in ensuring national survival. Through a discussion of two chosen institutions as examples – schools and military – I highlight that gender discourses have played a vital role in the construction of these specific institutional identities. I am using the evolution of the above slogan to mobilise the idea of identity being transmitted and crystallised through interinstitutional dialogues. ‘I do not forget’ comes to be seen as operating through meticulous institutional support of constructions of national identity, mobilised through gender. The military takes up some of these impulses and constructs specific militarist masculinities.
Preparing for the MeCCSA-PGN Conference: Reflections from the Organising Committee
Authors: Bisht Pawas , Pfoser Alena , Van Romondt Vis Pauline
Published: February 2020

Preparing for the MeCCSA-PGN Conference: Reflections from the Organising Committee
Telefantasy’s Conflicting Verisimilitudes: Composite Genre and The X-Files
Authors: Gil Steven John
Published: February 2020

When discussed as a genre, Telefantasy may be regarded as a hybrid category because it subsumes existing labels. Although Telefantasy is a composite genre, the characteristics of its constituent elements - namely Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror - are often in conflict, requiring an appraisal of the tensions between them. This article explores the prospects of using Telefantasy as a generic classification by showing the collective presence of these different genres within The X-Files (1993-2002). It traces the historical interaction between the three genres that make up Telefantasy through a series of examples from Edgar Allan Poe to H.P. Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), thus providing a historical grounding for generic interaction. The present article forms part of a larger project concerning the interaction of generic motifs in North American cultural history. Here, the focus of that project is directed at examining Telefantasy and the utility of the composite genre to the study of television programs.
Repackaging Popular Culture: Commentary and Critique in Community
Authors: Barnett Tully , Kooyman Ben
Published: February 2020

Contemporaneous with the collision of Science Fiction/Fantasy with the mainstream evident in the success of nerd culture show The Big Bang Theory (2007- ), Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012), the growth of Comic Con audiences and so on, Dan Harmon developed Community (2009- ), a sitcom depicting a study group at a second-rate community college. The show exemplifies a recent gravitation away from the multi-camera, laugh-track driven sitcom formula, alternating between “straight” episodes dealing with traditional sitcom premises, though always inflected with self-aware acumen, and more ambitious, unconventional episodes featuring outlandish premises, often infused with the trappings of genre and geek fandom. The show presents apocalyptic action- and Western-style paintball wars, epidemics that evoke zombie cinema, a Yahtzee game that spirals into alternate timelines, and a high-stakes Dungeons and Dragons game that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy.  Both the straight and the unconventional episodes ultimately serve the same purpose, examining the intersection between nerd culture and everyday life. This essay discusses a number of episodes which exemplify Community’s intersections between everyday life and popular culture, charting the show’s evolving preoccupation with pop culture and intertwining of reality and fantasy. It discusses Community’s self-referentiality as a sitcom, its ambitious and elaborate recreations of and homages to pop culture artefacts, and its explicit gravitation towards Science Fiction and Telefantasy in its third season. Through its various homages to popular culture and ongoing depiction of fan culture, we posit that the show is both a work of fandom and a work about fandom, advocating for the pivotal role of fandom in everyday life and for popular culture as a tool for interpreting, comprehending and navigating life. In this respect, the show contributes to the long history of both the sitcom and Telefantasy as vehicles for cultural commentary.
Who’s Afraid of the Rubber Man? Perversions and Subversions of Sex and Class in American Horror Story
Authors: Taylor Tosha
Published: February 2020

This article examines representations of sexuality in the first series of American Horror Story. Though the series presents many supernatural villains and is, on the surface, a typical haunted house story, it often creates its sense of horror through deployment of sexual tropes. The haunted house story itself is traditionally linked to notions of sexuality and class (Bailey, 1999; Ellis, 1989); this paper argues that American Horror Story (2011- ) emphasizes that link and manipulates such notions to explore their place in contemporary American thought and entertainment. Analysis of Kristeva’s and Creed’s linking of Horror to sexuality demonstrates that the series builds its sense of horror on abjection. Ghosts and other supernatural creatures in the series, this article contends, are merely accoutrements to a plot that is steeped in sexual anxieties. Grounded in Foucault’s characterization of sanctioned sexual repression as ‘a sentence to disappear’ and ‘an injunction to silence’ (Foucault, 1978: 4), this discussion of American Horror Story studies the show’s explicit references to, and depictions of, sexual practices that are typically neglected on mainstream television. Finally, this article questions the show’s success in subverting popular opinions about aberrant sexualities.
The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication: An Introduction
Authors: Robinson Matthew
Published: February 2020

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Fantasies, Micro-Identity, and Web 2.0
Authors: Garland Christopher
Published: February 2020

This essay discusses how socialnetworking site-styled “adult” websites facilitate online socialization throughshared “fantasies.” Moreover, and perhaps more crucially, this essay alsoexplores how users on these websites construct identity online. I argue thatthe development of Web 2.0 has changed significantly changed the form and useof Internet pornography, and those who engage in “Porn 2.0” are part of asignificant (if impossible to accurately measure) Web 2.0 community.Furthermore, I seek to interrogate the limits involved with the performance ofmicro-identity on the Porn 2.0 stage—focusing on sites that largely providepornographic video and live web chats—while also taking into account the ethicalconsiderations that accompany the Porn 2.0 landscape.
Communitarianism 2.0: Austerity Protests and Political Participation on Social Media
Authors: Maronitis Kostas
Published: February 2020

Within the context of the financial crisis and austerity protests in Greece, this article elucidates the potential of Facebook communities to realise democracy as a notion that transcends instrumental processes of electing political elites while at the same time reinstating a cultural order and legitimising exclusionary political and communication practices. The article contrasts Facebook communities with John Dewey's vision of democracy as a form of social cooperation, which orients citizens toward pluralistic associations and overlapping political discourses. In order to overcome discredited economistic approaches, the article highlights the social dimension of the crisis by developing a media sociology for the analysis of the technological turn to community. The media sociology developed here refrains from sociology of media approaches, which explain the formation of social media communities as a result of hard variables such as the economy and political corruption. Media sociology will deploy social media communities for the analysis of the collective meanings of these variables. The article deals with the Facebook community ‘Indignants in Syntagma’. The focus is on the activism of the movement from 25 May 2011 to 23 June 2012. Instead of Dewy's concept of democracy the Indignants' communities tend to forge a Web enhanced regime – defined here as Communitarianism 2.0. The direct democracy envisioned by this regime is closer to Schmitt's constitutional theory in which national and cultural homogeneity is a necessary precondition for the democratic exercise of any given political formation and authority.
Social Media during the Egyptian Revolution: Egyptian Nationals at Home and Abroad
Authors: Buchanan Margot , El Batrawy Soha
Published: February 2020

This article considers the significance of social media platforms during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution to two small groups of Egyptian nationals. Interviews were conducted with small groups of Egyptians living in the UK and Egyptians living at home. It establishes how these citizens used social media during the revolution and whether during the days of civil unrest they became citizen journalists by accessing and sharing information and video content with family and friends via digital media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. This research found that the sharing of online revolutionary content was dependent upon the level of trust with which the interviewees regarded its source. Significantly, interviewees in the UK were reluctant to share any content they received through social media platforms, and trusted only sources that they judged were ‘reliable’, while interviewees in Egypt shared content that was posted by fellow citizens regardless of whether or not they completely trusted the source.
‘Something is Trying to Get Inside My Body’: A Gay Reception and Narrative Analysis of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
Authors: Scales Adam
Published: February 2020

The critical understanding of horror film has traditionally been locked into a particular psychoanalytic framework concerning audience composition of the genre, as well as the identity politics operating within (Twitchell 1985; Carroll 1990; Clover 1992; Creed 1993; Grant 1996). Within this work, little attention has been paid to alternative audience demographics, especially gay and sexually non-normative viewers. This is rather surprising considering the horror film, and the monster in particular, has been understood as a material manifestation of queerness, as that which bourgeois ideology cannot accept and must therefore construct as ‘Other’ (Benshoff 1997; Wood 1986; Saunders 1998). As a result, this article looks at a gay online reception of gay audiences of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985). Such a text is important, as it fractures the established formula of the slasher film by introducing a ‘male scream queen’ – a ‘final boy’ named Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton). This article employs Janet Staiger’s (2000) work on reception studies to argue that the strategies and tactics brought by the spectator to the filmic experience are constructed by particular historical circumstances, which in turn, assist in the formation of ‘interpretive communities’. While the introduction of the final boy certainly disrupts fixed points of gendered identification, such features are only part of a holistic approach to understanding the subjective responses of gay audiences to Jesse’s characterisation. Textual subversions therefore mobilise gay audiences’ affective responses to the film – as Jesse’s narrative struggles mirror the lived experiences of gay audiences as they relate to the social context of homosexuality in the 1980s.
Screenplay Discourses: Bridging the Screenplay-Film Divide
Authors: Moreno Dolores
Published: February 2020

This article suggests that screenplay studies should pay more attention to the meaning that screenwriting and the screenplay are given around, and after, the release of finished films. A review of existing screenwriting and screenplay theory reveals that in the past ten years there has been a tendency to reconsider these terms, relating them to the contexts in which they are culturally operative. Nonetheless, these new academic approaches primarily attach the study of screenplays to films’ development and pre-production, although the term is discussed and used significantly in contexts other than film development. This article identifies different sites where screenplay discourses emerge from finished films, and I argue that it is necessary to study these sites in order to understand how they contribute to current ideas about the screenplay. On the basis that both finished films and published screenplays generate screenplay discourse outside the development and pre-production of films, I contend that each iteration of the screenplay has its particular function. In light of this, no form of the screenplay should be considered subsidiary in screenplay studies, and this includes screen-idea documents, released films and published screenplays. The uses of the different screenplay forms range from commissioning financiers to gaining awards at festivals and securing press reviews to facilitating screenwriting pedagogy. Therefore, it is important to take screenplay studies beyond pre-production stages to better understand the roles of screenplays within contemporary film culture and film studies.
Artist Mobility and the Baltic Cities: Revealing a Transnational Art World
Authors: Duester Emma
Published: February 2020

Mobility is an important part of the everyday life and practice of artists. Many artists take part in short-term mobility in order to gain inspiration, form partnerships and contacts, and create networks and/or collaborations. Some of these pathways created through mobilities are well-established while other transnational connections have only recently been formed as artists connect to new, emerging art centres. With each new connection usually linking up yet another city, and with every artist presenting a different set of connections and trajectories, the artistic ‘transnation’ (Yeoh and Willis 2004, 1) is constantly developing. This article describes how this type of short-term, multi-directional mobility not only creates connections, forms collaborations, and helps to establish transnational communities, but is also vital in helping liminal cities to become part of the so-called global art world. More importantly, these artists’ base remains in the Baltic cities - Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn - as they are moving only temporarily. This mobile population, in turn, enables the Baltic cities to become a hub of connections or ‘relational spaces’. This article argues that such forging of ‘routes’ via mobility rather than planting permanent ‘roots’ (Clifford 1997, 1) in migration has helped the network of Baltic cities to form a transnational region and become part of the global art world.
Selling Across the Spectrum: The Multiplatform Brand Flows of Heroes
Authors: Giannini Erin
Published: February 2020

This article examines how the NBC show Heroes (Tailwind Productions/Universal Media Studioes, 2006-10) and its use of product placement across multiple platforms represented an early response by networks and advertisers to concerns over ad-skipping and alternate viewing platforms by attempting to reconfigure how brand flow operates across multiple platforms. Not only did the series employ ‘second shift aesthetics’ (Caldwell 2003, 135), which represents networks bringing viewer-users back to the programme by ‘further engag[ing] and activat[ing] the text’ (Caldwell 2004, 50), but the products integrated within the text are pulled into the available world of Heroes’ alternative platform’s textual world, particularly Nissan branded cars. As Henry Jenkins writes: ‘Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their framework and structure shifted by the introduction of new technology’ (2006, 3-4). How these products are used within Heroes' storylines and its interaction with characters and platform goes beyond simple placement to make the product another character within the show. Further, I examine the way in which Heroes, as a transmedia text, provided many points of entry for viewer-users to interact with it. While an analysis of fan activity is not the focus of this article, it is important to note these possibilities because of the ways in which the promotional apparatus of the network utilized these types of convergences for the series. Yet, in the case of Heroes, this was achieved by suturing new technological abilities of brand extension with an older model of ad- supported television (namely, the single-sponsorship model of early American television), both within the terrestrial television series and across multiple platforms. With the 2008 writers’ strike derailing narrative television for that season—leading to prematurely ended or truncated seasons, or outright cancellations—these transmedia elements became both contentious and useful on both the production and narrative level.
Transmediating Tim Burton’s Gotham City: Brand Convergence, Child Audiences, and Batman: The Animated Series
Authors: Freeman Mathew
Published: February 2020

During the early 1990s, Batman, a highly valued media franchise, was an ever-expanding phenomenon, with franchise owner Warner Bros. having reinvigorated the property with Batman (Tim Burton, 1989). This article will examine the subsequent six-year period of its franchise production, using Batman as a case study for exploring the ways in which distinct versions of a fictional character – each constructed under different creative contexts with differing artistic sensibilities, aimed at varying groups of audiences across media – became the combined products of brand convergence across each media iteration, a concept that was crucial to the transmediality of Batman as both commercial brand and fictional storyworld.
Investigating the Practice of Television Branding: An Afterword on Methodology
Authors: Ward Sam
Published: February 2020

In this afterword the editor of Networking Knowledge concludes the current issue by considering some of the methodological questions, problems and innovations that are raised by the preceding articles. With a view to provoking further thought and contributions on the complex and fast-developing subject of television branding, it describes two fundamental methodological requirements. Firstly, it argues that branding itself must be treated as a collaborative and fluidly defined industrial practice that is reliant on a relational network of various companies, professions and individual workers. Secondly, given that no television brand exists solely on television a fundamentally transmedia scope of analysis is necessary, not just for effective critical analysis of the ‘finished’ brand text, but to properly understand that underlying practice. By discussing some of the author’s (more and less successful) experiences of trying, as a junior academic, to get to grips with the practice of television branding, this piece considers the practical and epistemological obstacles and opportunities presented by engagement with industrial professionals on the level of their everyday work and self-identity.
Racialised body modifications: framing genital mutilation, cosmetic surgery and gender assignment surgery
Authors: Danelzik Mathis
Published: February 2020

This article investigates the racial framing of genital modifications in political and media contexts. It suggests that a racialised understanding of genital mutilation, cosmetic surgery on the vulva and the vagina, as well as gender assignment surgery on intersexual minors, predetermines policy decisions regarding the practices. In the first part of the analysis, I discuss some of the major inconsistencies that emerge from the categorisation of these practices. The second part of the article addresses media representations of genital modifications. It asks how the incomparability of what is framed as mutilation and what is framed as cosmetic surgery is upheld. Based on the British television show Embarrassing Bodies and an episode of the German series Tatort, the article shows how the rationality and autonomy of practitioners of genital modifications are construed differently depending on their racial framing.
Mediatizing Gaza: An Introduction
Authors: Shreim Nour , Dawes Simon
Published: February 2020

This full-length article introduces a special issue on the mediatization of Gaza. Beginning with a discussion on the ‘remarkable’ debate that took place on the MeCCSA mailing list during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in July-August 2014, the article goes on to consider the role of the media in the conflict, and the relation between media and war, more generally. The article provides an overview of recent events in Gaza, the critique of media coverage of the conflict and recent literature on mediatization theory, before summarising the contents of this special issue of Networking Knowledge. The issue features articles on media coverage of Gaza by BBC World, the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz; the use of social media by the Palestine Solidarity Movement and young adult Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; critical documentary photographs of ‘unspectacular’ violence; and data visualisations of audio and visual tweets during the 2014 assault on Gaza. It closes with an interview with Helga Tawil-Souri on the ‘digital occupation’ of Gaza.
Workshop on Creative Methods: Gender, Sex and Relating, 15 October 2014
Authors: Wilde Poppy , Broekhuizen Francien
Published: February 2020

This is a report on the 'Workshop on Creative Methods: Gender, Sex and Relating' conference, 15 October 2014
Waiting for the Next Part: How the Temporal Dimensions of Digital Serialisation Have Changed Author-Reader Dynamics
Authors: Romaguera Gabriel
Published: February 2020

A work of serial fiction is defined as ‘a continuing story over an extended period of time with enforced interruptions’ (Hughes & Lund 1991, 1). It is that “enforced interruption” which makes for a temporal an­d spatial pause between the author, the reader, and the text. The distribution and publication of instalments for traditional print publishing and print comics works on strict schedules but this is not necessarily the case for digital comics. This paper explores how the serialization of webcomics functions with both defined and indeterminate publication schedules and how this affects the author-reader relationship. It uses textual criticism to better explain the publication aspects of narrative production and adapts these concepts to digital comics and their serialization. The analysis focuses on Rich Burlew and Tarol Hunt, two professional webcomic cartoonists who continue to search for the best publication schedule for their authorial processes.
Approaching the Cognitive and Social Functions of World of Warcraft Fan-Comics
Authors: Dale Jones Roger
Published: February 2020

This article addresses the question of how video game players make sense out of their experiences by looking specifically at World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) fan-comics on the official game website. It first develops an analytical framework consisting of game discourse to address the different levels that fan-comics refer to the “game” and game narrative to address the ways in which fan-comics utilize narrative aspects of the game in their stories. Sense-making in comics is then used to address how fan-comics use graphic images and verbal text to embed (and narratively frame) conflicting perspectives into specific cognitive and social forms of sense-making. It then applies this analytical framework to three World of Warcraft fan-comics that participate in three different levels of game discourse and presents three different types of sense-making processes. Finally, the article raises questions for future research on the sense-making processes and strategies of video game fan-comics.
Hyper/Comics/Con/Text: Institutional Contexts and Interface Design in Online Educational Hypercomics
Authors: Duffy Damian
Published: February 2020

When he first coined the term 'hyper-comics' in his 1970 essay 'No More Teacher's Dirty Looks,' Ted Nelson envisioned 'comic strip' images connected via hyperlinks for educational purposes (2003, 316). However, while Internet technologies have allowed for various narrative and artistic actualizations of Nelson's futurist prognostications, educational hypercomics remain largely understudied. This paper returns to Nelson's original themes by comparing interface designs and institutional origins of two educational hypercomics: Factoring with Mr. Yang and Mosley the Alien, a comics lecture series on algebraic factoring and The Secret in the Cellar, an annotated webcomic fictionalization of forensic anthropological field work. This analysis will show how sociocultural contexts created by institutional stakeholders give shape to multimodal designs of pedagogical discourse, in order to further knowledge of the evolving practices and processes of integrating comics into e-learning.
Dr Dario Llinares in Conversation with Dr Sarah Atkinson
Authors: Llinares Dario , Atkinson Sarah
Published: February 2020

Dr Dario Llinares interviews Dr Sarah Atkinson about the core themes addressed in her recent monograph Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences (Bloomsbury, 2014). The conversation explores the context for new conceptualisations of cinema, which encompass and reflect the myriad ways film can be experienced beyond the auditorium in a digitally networked society. They also explore the historical antecedents for embodied cinema, discuss examples of expanded, extended and mobile film spectatorship, and postulate as to the effect of these transformations for film production, criticism and scholarship.     KEYWORDS Expanded Cinema; Film Criticism; Film Theory; Digital Technology; Mobile Cinema; Spectatorship
Introduction Be Your Selfie: Identity, Aesthetics and Power in Digital Self-Representation
Authors: Busetta Laura , Coladonato Valerio
Published: February 2020

This is an introduction to the special issue, 'Be Your Selfie: Identity, Aesthetics and Power in Digital Self-Representation', edited by Laura Busetta and Valerio Coladonato
Hybrid Content Analysis of the Most Popular Politicians’ Selfies on Twitter
Authors: Farci Manolo , Orefice Mario
Published: February 2020

The growing presence of selfies on the Web proves how personal photography is changing its role: from a tool for documenting everyday lives to an identity-building resource used to create life narratives, to be shared with a public that is constantly connected online. Our definition of a ‘selfie’ includes those personal snapshots that: (a) are created with the awareness of belonging to a specific genre of self-portraits; (b) combine textual and iconic dimensions; and (c) are distributed in one’s own social network. Our claim is that selfies offer the opportunity to experiment with diverse prospects of self-presentation, especially thanks to their framing power. Using Goffman’s theory, we claim that every selfie produces a framing effect that can relate more or less with the main frame in which the snapshot is taken. The aim of this paper is to explore how the framing effect of a selfie affects the politics of self-representation of individuals whose role expectations are quite obvious, such as political figures. Taking advantage of this framing effect, our findings show how politicians use selfies as a strategic self-promotion tool.
The Aesthetics of Zipai: From Wechat Selfies to Self-Representation in Contemporary Chinese Art and Photography
Authors: De Seta Gabriele , Proksell Michelle
Published: February 2020

Zipai, literally ‘self-shot’, is the Chinese word for ‘selfie’, and it indicates both the action and the product of taking a picture of oneself. This paper presents an account of the “ways of working” through which the authors – a media anthropologist and a performance artist – negotiated a collaborative approach to zipai. The essay begins with a discussion of contemporary practices of self-representation on Chinese digital media, arguing that the zipai uploaded by Chinese users on online platforms can be understood as locational and relational self-portraits, a media-specific genre of vernacular photography. It then proceeds to consider the ethical implications of appropriating vernacular photography for artistic and ethnographic representation, proposing to adapt the practice of filtering as an ethical intervention. After an overview of contemporary works by Chinese artists and photographers engaging with the aesthetics of zipai, the essay concludes with a reflection on the possibilities of collaboration between art practice and media anthropology.
#nomakeupselfies: the Face of Hashtag Slacktivism
Authors: Hampton Claire
Published: February 2020

This article interrogates the significance of the selfie in the construction of contemporary female identity through a close analysis of the #nomakeupselfie meme. Drawing on the distinct but conversant theoretical frameworks of cyber-feminisms, post-feminisms and breast cancer culture, it involves both a theoretical investigation and a phenomenological reflection on the selfie trend in question. Mobilizing Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which he used to contextualise the link between technologies of domination and his later postulations on technologies of the self, the article explores the oppositional feminist viewpoints regarding empowerment and agency in online identity construction. It also constitutes an auto-ethnographic response to the phenomenon from my nuanced position as a young, female, selfie-taking, feminist, academic, breast cancer survivor. The analysis of the #nomakeupselfie meme focuses on three central issues: the problematic relationship between breast cancer and beauty; the trivialization, infantilisation and sexualisation of the disease inherent in contemporary breast cancer culture and the self-commodification of the female body as part of a consumer activist transaction.
Performativity and Metaphor in New Materialist Media Theory
Authors: Flynn Niall
Published: February 2020

Some media theorists have begun to rethink the material basis of media in light of ‘new materialist’ thought. This involves expanding the concept of media to include the temporal and indeterminate processes involved. The process of mediation, rather than stable media objects, emerges as the point of departure. The basic claim of this essay is that media theory’s recent embrace of material forces and practices should not take place as refusal of representation. The critical context of new materialism, which concerns the instability between objects and their representation, has led some media theorists to reconsider the relation between media theory and its objects of study in the world. This takes place in some cases in the name of a performativity of method—an appeal to the creative, practical, and material forces of media-theoretical research that reconceives the theory-world relation in these terms. Metaphor, the rhetorical transfer of meaning from one term to another, and usually understood as supplemental, can also be conceived as a material process of mediation, if we think in terms of a new materialist perspective. Thinking about metaphor in this way allows us to carry new materialism’s important insights on materiality, meaning, mediation and method further.
The Narrative Economy of Social Media: Mobilising Farming Economies, Identities and Relations
Authors: Millard Adele
Published: February 2020

This paper looks at social media as new fields through which Western Australian farmers of black truffles negotiate potentially global consumer markets. The author argues that the analytical concept of narrative economy deserves greater exploration in social theories on market relations through changing mediascapes. Some farmers embrace social media as influential, though problematic, marketing forums while others refuse to engage. What ensues are shifting distributions of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital as truffle farmers who use social media have strategic development advantages over those who do not.
Organiser’s Report on the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2-3 July 2015
Authors: Broekhuizen Francien , Mikelli Danai , Wilde Poppy
Published: February 2020

In this visual essay, the organising committee look back on the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 and reflect on the overarching theme, the organisation and the running of the conference. The conference’s theme, ‘Transformative Practice and Theory: Where We Stand Today’, forms the basis of this special issue of Networking Knowledge, with developed papers from the conference, as well as interviews with some of the keynote speakers, included in this issue.
Mobile Music Listening: The Users and their Art of Making Do Lionel Detry
Authors: Detry Lionel
Published: February 2020

Research on mobile music listening lacks empirical data to provide a good understanding of the practice. My ethnography of mobile listeners aims at investigating the act of listening by taking into account situational and technical dimensions of the practice. In this paper, I support a theoretical position to consider the listening environment when investigating the practice of mobile music listening.  By looking closely at the affordances and constraints of the situation of use and of the technical device, it is possible to determine how these aspects configure the practice. My interpretations, based on Antoine Hennion’s (2002) concept of ‘performance’ of listening, confirm the idea of listening as a product of the ecology in which it takes place. Further interpretations can lead to detail the more creative practices of the listeners and develop a typology of users.