Take the Red Pill: A New Matrix of Literacy

Using The Matrix film series as an inspiration, aspiration and model, this article integrates horizontal and vertical models of literacy. My goal is to create a new matrix for media literacy, aligning the best of analogue depth models for meaning making with the rapid scrolling, clicking and moving through the read-write web. To undertake this study I deploy not only the filmic series, but one of the scholars who inspired it. I explore the relevance and application of Jean Baudrillard’s research on contemporary understandings of media literacy

Analyzing Genre in Post-Millennial Popular Music

This dissertation approaches the broad concept of musical classification by asking a simple if ill-defined question: “what is genre in post-millennial popular music?” Alternatively covert or conspicuous, the issue of genre infects music, writings, and discussions of many stripes, and has become especially relevant with the rise of ubiquitous access to a huge range of musics since the fin du millénaire. The dissertation explores not just popular music made after 2000, but popular music as experienced and structured in the new millennium, including aspects from a wide chronological span of styles within popular music. Specifically, with the increase of digital media and the concomitant shifts in popular music creation, distribution, and access, popular music categorization has entered a novel space, with technologies like internet radio, streaming services, digital audio workstations, and algorithmic recommendations providing a new conception of how musical types might be understood and experienced. I attempt to conceptualize this novel space of genre with what I call a genre-thinking or a genreme, a term which is meant to capture the ways that musical categorization infiltrates writings about, experiences of, and the structures connecting genres. This dissertation comprises four main chapters, each of which takes a slightly different perspective and approach towards questions concerning genre in popular music of the post-millennial era. Chapter 1 provides a general survey and summary of music theory’s and musicology’s discourses on musical categorization and genre. After describing the “problem of genre,” I outline the main issues at stake and chief strategies previous authors have employed. This involves describing the closely intertwined facets of the “who” of genre (is a musical category defined by music, a musician, an audience, the industry?) and the “how” of genre (is it a contract, a definition, a pattern, a system, an experience?) By asking these questions, I open new approaches to understanding and analyzing genre’s role in both the structure and potential experiences of post-millennial popular music. Chapter 2 takes on the digital compositional practice of mashups—most prevalent in the first decade of the 2000s—in an attempt to understand genre as a crucial element of meaning-formation and creation. Previous mashup scholars have tended to focus on the ironic, subversive, or humorous juxtapositions of the particular samples or artists which get layered together. However, this leaves out the broad, exceptionally potent acts of signification that are possible even when a listener lacks the knowledge of the specific autosonic source materials. By incorporating methodologies from musical semiotics and topic theory, I create a field of “interaction methods” to explain the dynamic relations between samples, exploding the analytical potential for signification and collaboration in mashups. These interaction methods are placed in dialogue with formal analysis to show ways that artists, samples, and genres intermingle in this form of digital musicking. Chapters 3 and 4 then progress chronologically into the second decade of the new millennium, taking a twinned approach to our contemporary world of streaming services and online musical cultures. First, I pursue a brief musicological and sociological exploration of current discourses engaged with genre in the 2010s, outlining the ways that critics, fans, and musicians deploy stylistic terms and musical categories. A somewhat paradoxical position emerges in which genre is both in a state of decline and a state of proliferation, simultaneously atrophying yet employed in increasingly abundant and sophisticated manners. I then describe how this contradictory state fits into sociological research on “omnivorousness” and musical taste. The following chapter investigates how these perceptions and linguistic usages of genre compare to two main ways that Spotify classifies its artists. This quantitative analysis reveals some potential systemic patterns of bias that shed light onto genre’s paradoxical position; whether genre is dead or not depends on who is classifying the music and who is being classified. These two chapters map out my concept “#genre” which I employ to describe the multivalent genre-thinking we currently inhabit

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers

Self-Representation in an Expanded Field

Defined as a self-image made with a hand-held mobile device and shared via social media platforms, the selfie has facilitated self-imaging becoming a ubiquitous part of globally networked contemporary life. Beyond this selfies have facilitated a diversity of image making practices and enabled otherwise representationally marginalized constituencies to insert self-representations into visual culture. In the Western European and North American art-historical context, self-portraiture has been somewhat rigidly albeit obliquely defined, and selfies have facilitated a shift regarding who literally holds the power to self-image. Like self-portraits, not all selfies are inherently aesthetically or conceptually rigorous or avant-guard. But, –as this project aims to do address via a variety of interdisciplinary approaches– selfies have irreversibly impacted visual culture, contemporary art, and portraiture in particular. Selfies propose new modes of self-imaging, forward emerging aesthetics and challenge established methods, they prove that as scholars and image-makers it is necessary to adapt and innovate in order to contend with the most current form of self-representation to date. The essays gathered herein will reveal that in our current moment it is necessary and advantageous to consider the merits and interventions of selfies and self-portraiture in an expanded field of self-representations. We invite authors to take interdisciplinary global perspectives, to investigate various sub-genres, aesthetic practices, and lineages in which selfies intervene to enrich the discourse on self-representation in the expanded field today. Ace LehnerEdito

Relational reinvention : writing, engagement, and mapping as wicked response

textThis multimedia dissertation, situated in Rhetoric and Composition, Digital Media Studies, and Civic Engagement, articulates a sustainable, agile approach to “wicked problems.” These complex, definition-resistant, interlocking problems (such as racism or climate change) aren’t ultimately solvable; rather than wicked problems being “acted upon,” they can only be creatively and rigorously “responded to” by networks of committed individuals and institutions. This dissertation posits that a wicked problem necessitates a “wicked response”: a sustained, emergent, and fluid strategy that focuses on changing relationships – to people, to space, and to knowledge. In order, to make this argument, I present the case of Mart, a small, formerly prosperous town in East Texas that has been in decline over the last half of a century. Throughout this dissertation, I analyze the ongoing efforts of the Mart Community Project (MCP), a cohort of Mart residents, international artists, and students and instructors from a variety of departments at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the past two years, the MCP has engaged in over twenty-five discrete projects, all with the aim of helping the Mart Community reimagine itself in the face of its primary wicked problem: a lack of civic cohesion. In the first chapter I explore how language fails to define or describe a wicked problem, yet is still necessary in order to transform it. I illustrate this contradiction in part through the Chambless Field mural, a successful MCP community arts project that by “writing community” became a productive response. My second chapter examines service learning and demonstrates how university/community partnerships and “participatory engagement” can be part of a nuanced approach to a wicked problem. Using the work of UT students in design-oriented and civic engagement classes, I demonstrate in the third chapter how “mapping” can be both a savvy pedagogical tool and a key element in reinventing the relationships of people to space and to one another. This dissertation offers up these diverse strategies with the sincere hope that the particulars of the MCP’s wicked response might be productively generalized to aid others participating in similarly challenging civic engagement work on wicked problems.Englis

Fall 2023 Supplement to Brauneis & Schechter, Copyright: A Contemporary Approach

This Fall 2023 Supplement is the product of our effort to capture important developments in copyright law since the publication of the second edition of Copyright: A Contemporary Approach. It includes three Supreme Court decisions as principal cases: the fair use cases of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (p. 23) and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (p. 41) and the 2020 decision about copyright protection for state statutes, Georgia v. Public.Resources.Org (p. 74).. (Because there are now so many Supreme Court fair use cases to cover, this supplement also includes a note on Harper & Row, Publishers v. Nation Enterprises (pp. 13-14), as an option to replace its treatment as a principal case in the second edition of the casebook. The supplement also includes notes on many other cases, and a few new features that we thought would enhance study of U.S. copyright law. It includes new material on copyright and artificial intelligence, both on the issue of AI authorship, (see the new notes on page 7-9), and the issue of infringement and fair use in training generative AI models (see the new feature on p. 21). Because the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”) opened up its doors for business in June 2022, we have included a new section at the end of Chapter 6 on the CASE Act and CCB proceedings (p. 67). We have also completely revised Chapter 12.E., on digital audio transmission rights, and Chapter 12.F., on rights in pre-1972 sound recordings. The new Chapter 12.E. in this supplement, “Digital Streaming of Music After the Musical Works Modernization Act” (p. 101), now consists of a general introduction to copyright and the streaming of music, covering both rights in sound recordings and rights in musical works, and all of the relevant exclusive rights

Head Up Games : on the design, creation and evaluation of interactive outdoor games for children

This thesis proposes a new genre of outdoor games for children, namely Head Up Games. The concept was inspired by the observation that existing pervasive outdoor games for children were mostly played head down, as the predominantly screen-based interaction of existing games required constant attention of the children. First, the vision of Head Up Games is described and illustrated with several design cases (Chapter 2). In contrast to the head down games, Head Up Games aim to encourage and support rich social interaction and physical activity, play behaviors that are similar to play behaviors seen in traditional outdoor games (such as tag and hide-and-seek). The design process of Head Up Games poses several challenges. In User Centered Design it is commonly accepted to start the development of a new product using low-fi mock-ups, e.g., paper prototypes, and evaluate these with end-users. In the case of Head Up Games this proved to be difficult, as the emerging game experience is significantly altered when using paper prototypes. Therefore, a study was carried out that used high-fi prototypes, i.e. working, interactive, prototypes, from a very early stage in the design process (Chapter 3). This way, the effect of interactions on the game experience can be addressed earlier and better in the design process. Furthemore, having access to technology early in the design process, allows designers to better explore the design space. However, designers often do not possess adequate skills to quickly prototype interactive products, particularly products that need to be evaluated in an outdoor context. Such a development is often costly and time-consuming. Therefore, the RaPIDO platform was developed (Chapter 4). The platform not only includes the appropriate hardware for creating outdoor games, but is also bundled with software libraries, to allow designers not specifically trained in software engineering to adopt the platform easily. RaPIDO was evaluated using a case study methodology with two Industrial Design master students. The evaluation not only focused on the usability of the platform, but, more importantly, how the use of the platform affected the design process. The main conclusion of the study was that the designers indeed were able to rapidly create mobile games, and that the hardware offered was suitable for creating outdoor games. Furthermore, issues were identified with regard to writing the game software, e.g., managing the complexity of the software. Finally, for evaluating Head Up Games with children two methods were applied: the Outdoor Play Observation Scheme (OPOS) was used to quantify the intended play behavior. Furthermore, GroupSorter was developed to provide a framework to interview a group of children simultaneously, resulting in qualitative comments. Both OPOS and GroupSorter were applied for evaluating three Head Up Games, which are described in Chapter 5

Copyright: A Contemporary Approach

This Fall 2022 Supplement is the product of our effort to capture important developments in copyright law since the publication of the second edition of Copyright: A Contemporary Approach. It includes three new principal cases. The first two are Supreme Court decisions: the 2021 fair use decision in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (p. 18), and the 2020 decision about copyright protection for state statutes in Georgia v. Public.Resources.Org (p. 58).. The third is an excerpt from the Second Circuit’s fair use decision in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (p.37), a decision that the Supreme Court has decided to review, with oral argument scheduled for October 12, 2022. The portion of this opinion on “transformativeness” is likely making a one-time appearance in the supplement, to be replaced by the Supreme Court decision when it is issued, but we thought some folks would like to teach the Goldsmith case in the fall as the Supreme Court is considering it.The supplement also includes notes on many other cases, and a few new features that we thought would enhance study of U.S. copyright law. Because the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”) opened up its doors for business this June, we have included a new section at the end of Chapter 6 on the CASE Act and CCB proceedings (p. 50). We have also completely revised Chapter 12.E., on digital audio transmission rights, and Chapter 12.F., on rights in pre-1972 sound recordings. The new Chapter 12.E. in this supplement, “Digital Streaming of Music After the Musical Works Modernization Act” (p. 84), now consists of a general introduction to copyright and the streaming of music, covering both rights in sound recordings and rights in musical works, and all of the relevant exclusive rights

More-than-social innovation : the material and discursive enactment of an open ed-tech network

Education policymakers, researchers and reformers are experimenting with “open” urban innovation hubs and ecosystems, calling upon teachers and school leaders to be more “entrepreneurial” in their approaches to change with technology. Open innovation networks are fundamentally multivoiced and participatory by design, but we do not know very much about how they work with technology or what we might expect from them in terms of educational change. Despite the democratic possibilities of open innovation networks, if the history of technology-driven educational reform in this country serves as any guide, we might well expect the status quo in terms of their impact on school-based learning and teaching. The broad purpose of this revelatory case study is to characterize the composition and enactment of one nominally open, urban ed-tech innovation network, identifying how and why actors swarm and learn around goals and projects that exist in dialogic tension. I take a mixed methods approach to capturing and interpreting highly mediated network interactions, combining egocentric network analysis, computational topic modeling and multimodal narrative analyses. I show how and why individual entrepreneurs of the self position themselves around and become a part of the spectacle of the ed-tech network, and how a pervasive market form patterns identity and interest discourses in both digital and physical urban space. The ed-tech network is revealed to act, know and learn in different ways within a variety of distinct scenes, including an inter-institutional assemblage of loosely coordinated computer science education actors, a scene of commercial and social entrepreneurs and a precarious community of practice focused on the production of marketable ed-tech professional identities and futures. The study concludes that the ed-tech network as a social technology and a spectacle can indeed convene broad discourse and boundary-spanning activity around the changing goals of school and education for the common good, even as the network is deeply patterned by enterprise. A framework for carnivalesque innovation is presented as a way of thinking about how open innovation networks and contemporary open learning environments can better pursue social goals of equity and justice in a marketized context.Curriculum and Instructio