Tag: Sense-making
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Exploring the Trauma of the Spanish Civil War at the Intersection of Fantasy and Reality
Guillermo del Toro — when he isn’t thrilling us with hellboys or kaiju — has given us some of the most intensely personal and fantastically dark films to explore how we cope with living. In The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, according to Christopher Olson’s interpretation, del Toro is utilizing fantasy tropes to illustrate how…
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The Whats, Hows and Whys of Film Spectatorship
Earlier this month, Christopher Olson and I presented at the 2013 SCMS conference work I started in my graduate school and he is helping me finalize and expand. These are some preliminary thoughts about approaching the study of how spectators engage with films. Answering the Whats, Hows, and Whys of Film Spectatorship from Dominican University…
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On Transgressing Audiencehood: Web 2.0, Interactivity, and Becoming What We’ve Always Been
I think I have now determined what my main research trajectory will be, and I wanted to take the opportunity to organize these thoughts to provide the beginning of a structure for how to organize my research, past, present and future. For awhile now, I’ve been convinced that how the new media has affected our…
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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’…
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