Reviewing the Virtual Worlds Entertainment Study

These thoughts were produced at the end of my time on this project, in May of 2012, for the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University. These thoughts involve my reflection on the project that I completed as part of the research group, and do not reflect the thoughts of anyone else involved with the […]

Sense-Making and Avatars Research Proposal

This post contains a research proposal I wrote in 2008 for a project to involve virtual worlds that I never completed. This proposal would be changed to become the main experiment I did with the Roskilde University Virtual Worlds Research Group. If anyone is interested in building off this proposal, then please contact me. Sense-making […]

Fandom as Repeatedly Returning to What Matters Most

Being a fan can mean many different things to many different people. It may mean a person likes to collect memorabilia for a favorite sports team. It may mean a group like to wear costumes and reenact an important event. It may mean individuals compete with one another to test their knowledge in trivia contests. […]

Metaphors for making sense of virtual worlds

The following paper comes from a presentation given at ECREA in 2010 and at NCA in 2011 (the version of which can be found here on the blog). I submitted this paper to a journal, but never did anything with it after it was rejected. I still think there are interesting ideas in the paper, […]

Women self-identifying as digital game addicts: Their interpretations of power

[This paper comes from 2007 and was completed for a qualitative methodology course at Ohio State University under the amazing Patti Lather. She encouraged us to try different methods of communication research results; so I did a comic book, which you can see here.] What is digital game addiction? A number of approaches, theories, and […]

My Philosophy of Media Reception Studies

Along with my thoughts on the encoding-decoding-recoding model, what follows comes from my dissertation on gendered media engagings and describes how I consider the fundamental elements of media reception and audience studies. What are media products? Media products are the technologies, channels and contents that constitute our understanding of what is ‘the media’. They are […]

An Encoding-Decoding-Recoding Model of Media Studies

This blog posts continues the dissection of my dissertation that I began by introducing the topic of gendered media engagings earlier this year. This post focuses on a model I used in my dissertation to understand the array of media studies conducted to investigate the ways in which gender is involved in how people engage […]

Men and Their Engagements with Stereotypically Feminine Media Products

The following is an excerpt from the paper I will be presenting at the 2014 Central States Communication Association Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This paper presents a new analysis from the data collected for my dissertation on gendered media engagings. With the help of my undergraduate research assistant, Kevin Miller, we were able to conduct […]

Virtual Worlds – Sense-making and Innovation

The team from the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University in Denmark were filmed giving talks about their varied and unique research projects — about the major findings that came out of their participation in the group. You can view each by following this link. Unfortunately, unless you understand Danish, only mine and Ates’ […]

The Metaphors of Virtual Worlds

How do people make sense of a novel situation, such as engaging with a media product they’ve never used before? If that media product is a virtual world, then it appears people may make a bridge between the virtual and the physical by using metaphors to compare their experiences in the virtual world to those […]