This essay contains an early draft of what I ultimately wrote for the Participations special issue on “media engagement” as a concept in audience studies. This essay contains some good ideas that were no where near ready for publishing. I may also not have the time to come back to them, as I have been…
Tag: reception studies
Why Is Sense-Making Methodology Methodological?
This is from a class paper I wrote for Brenda Dervin in 2006 at Ohio State University. The most efficient and useful way I can conceive of answering this question is by exploring it in relation to my phenomenon of interest, fandom. Fandom has been studied using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, as a…
Gender Schematic Men and the Somatotypes They Perceive: Influences on attraction and recall
The following is the first original empirical research project that I completed for my psychology research class at UW-Madison as an undergrad. I took the class at summer and went around asking men to participate in the study about how gender schema impacts perception of the female form in advertisements, making it my first audience…
On Representing Our Subjects/Participants/Informants/People
One final old reflection to share, that appears more questions than answers, but, as with the previous one, shows me wrestling with how do to research in a way that validly represents those that I study. These questions are both why I love to study people, but also why I understand the frustration of studying…
On Studying the Other
Sometimes it is very useful to go back, find those old writings, and revisit them to see the trajectory of your thoughts, and how much they have matured. In this 15-year-old piece that I wrote for a class, I can see some basic ideas I still have about people (especially given my exorcism cinema work),…
The Multiplicity of “Pop”
To start with, I’m not even sure I would continue to call popular cultural studies the study of the culture of the working class, and my reluctance to do so underlies my entire argument about what is the current status of the mass and the pop. The culture studies of the 1970s, with its focus on the working class, is not truly adequate to explain the ways in which culture is experienced and produced in modern American society.
Being Methodological in Audience Studies: Applying Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology
I’ve shared in previous posts (here and here) thoughts from my PhD candidacy exam. In this post, I share my thoughts on being methodological when it comes to doing audience studies. As with the other posts, this essay was originally written in 2007. 1. What does being methodological mean? To paraphrase myself from an earlier…
Identification with Favorite Media Personae
I presented this study at my first International Communication Association conference in May 2005. It was the first major study I did by myself in graduate school. I remember making these slides to show on a projector — there was no PowerPoint! I should probably revisit it. Identification with Favorite Media Personae: A phenomenologically-informed conceptualization of…
Gendering Robots 2005 Research Proposal
Recently, the question of how we attribute gender to asexual entities like robots and AI has been something I have been pondering more and more. How we understand engage with entities like Alexa from Amazon, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft is fascinating, as well as how we think about robots like BB-8 or…
Making Sense of Cinema Anthology
Edited by Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and myself, Bloomsbury Academic will release Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship on February 25, 2016. Making Sense of Cinema is an anthology collecting empirical studies that display different methods for studying real film spectators engaging with real films. Film studies has…
