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…
Tag: Sense-making
Work In Progress: Applying SMM to Fan Studies
This draft comes from a presentation given at the 2018 MPCA/ACA conference in Indianapolis. Introduction Communication scholar Brenda Dervin created the Sense-Making Methodology as a methodological approach for conducting interviews that draws on metatheoretical concepts such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the humanistic approach to psychology. Since its formulation, Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) has been utilized across…
Gendering Robots: A Class Discussion
The next research project I hope to work on looks at how people make sense of robots. I am particularly interested in how people apply gendered assumptions and attributions to robots or artificial agents, and how apply those assumptions then impact how people engage with robots. In a sense, robots have become another medium as…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Problems with Perceptions in Fandom
Part of the process of understanding the phenomenon of fractured fandom is to gather stories that thematically reveal its nature, such as my ongoing analysis of how My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fans reacted to the feature film Equestria Girls and its soon-to-be sequel Rainbow Rocks. The more stories we can gather, then the more…
The Oddness of Old Comic Books
(This post originally appeared on Clearance Bin Review. I am reposting it here given my interest in studying the morality of superheroes as well as my interest in understanding how people make sense of texts as they engage with them. I also believe there is something to be said about the importance of the nature of the…
