Digital Sound Studies

The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities. Drawing on multiple disciplines—including rhetoric and composition, performance studies, anthropology, history, and information science—the contributors to Digital Sound Studies bring digital humanities and sound studies into productive conversation while probing the assumptions behind the use of digital tools and technologies in academic life. In so doing, they explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive

TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING THROUGH ORAL NARRATIVE IN A PARTICIPATORY COMMUNICATION CONTEXT: AN INQUIRY INTO RADIO DRAMA-BASED TRAINING AMONG ZAMBIAN CAREGIVERS OF ABUSED AND EXPLOITED CHILDREN

This research investigates instructional narrative interventions for transformative learning among high orality reliant peoples. Two research questions asked: “Does an oral strategy of radio drama in a participatory environment lead to significant changes in knowledge and beliefs,” with a hypothesis stating there would be significant positive changes; and “When listeners experience narrative transport can it affect receptivity leading to knowledge and belief change,” and the hypothesis stated that narrative transport would correlate to higher positive responses. The mixed methods design analyzed personal experiences and survey responses of treatment group and control groups. Quantitatively I assessed a treatment group using a matched pre/posttest survey related to learning goals and the Transportation Imagery Survey. The qualitative data was gathered in focus groups and personal interviews. The findings showed a significant change in treatment group in knowledge and beliefs (40%). The treatment group also scored 74% correct answers in contrast to the posttest only survey control group of 56%. The additional modified Transportation Imagery Survey (TMS) assessed the treatment group’s level of transport into the narrative (6.1/7) and a positive correlation (.65) to the change in answers for the posttest. The study presents relevant considerations for instructional communication designers and professionals serving higher orality reliant audiences and the power of participatory narrative instruction constructing healthier knowledge and beliefs

Matchmakers or tastemakers? Platformization of cultural intermediation & social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’

There are long-standing practices and processes that have traditionally mediated between the processes of production and consumption of cultural content. The prominent instances of these are: curating content by identifying and selecting cultural content in order to promote to a particular set of audiences; measuring audience behaviours to construct knowledge about their tastes; and guiding audiences through recommendations from cultural experts. These cultural intermediation processes are currently being transformed, and social media platforms play important roles in this transformation. However, their role is often attributed to the work of users and/or recommendation algorithms. Thus, the processes through which data about users’ taste are aggregated and made ready for algorithmic processing are largely neglected. This study takes this problematic as an important gap in our understanding of social media platforms’ role in the transformation of cultural intermediation. To address this gap, the notion of platformization is used as a theoretical lens to examine the role of users and algorithms as part of social media’s distinct data-based sociotechnical configuration, which is built on the so-called ‘platform-logic’. Based on a set of conceptual ideas and the findings derived through a single case study on a music discovery platform, this thesis developed a framework to explain ‘platformization of cultural intermediation’. This framework outlines how curation, guidance, and measurement processes are ‘plat-formed’ in the course of development and optimisation of a social media platform. This is the main contribution of the thesis. The study also contributes to the literature by developing the concept of social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’. This concept illuminates how social media operate as sociotechnical cultural intermediaries and participates in tastemaking in ways that acquire legitimacy from the long-standing trust in the objectivity of classification, quantification, and measurement processes

Information and Communication Technologies and Migration

Surveying existing literature, this paper starts by identifying links between attainments in human development and the presence of ICTs. The research then looks at instances where ICTs affect the opportunity for migration and how they affect its outcomes. We will see how migrants are making use of ICTs and the importance that these technologies have come to occupy in their life. Attempting to illustrate both positive and negative implications of the roles of ICTs in human mobility, this paper surveys research that demonstrates how ICTs are used in both regular and irregular migration, in maintaining family relations, in sustaining cultural identities, and in supporting a family from abroad. We will see that ICTs have not replaced older forms of communication but that they have greatly increased the range of available options for communications. Throughout the text, this paper also includes the roles of governments and civil society in working to increase access and use of ICTs while also making mention of instances where they actively pursue the opposite. As we will see, the skills necessary for use of ICTs and the infrastructure necessary for their access can be found in all countries of the world, albeit in unequal distribution.information and communication technologies, diaspora, migration

Good Cynicism : The Civic Potentials of Political Comedy and The Reasons for Its Absence on Colombian Television

This research addresses the potential of political comedy and satire as television genres in the construction of democracy and civic culture in Colombia. Through a set of elite interviews with representative individuals in the media, political humor and media scholarship circles of the country; and through genre-based and political, economical and cultural analyses, this research underscores the real reasons for the absence of domestic political comedy on Colombian television. The discussions take into account constraints such as media ownership issues, censorship, economic bans, power struggles, the assassination of the comedian Jaime Garzón, and the Colombian audiences’ TV consumption habits. At the same time, it is explained how the telenovela TV genre adopted some aspects of political comedy, thus helping to the survival of satirism in the medium. Also, this research discloses how entertaining politics can provide useful input to the formation of cultural citizenship, and explores the civic skills that a society would develop if political comedy shows were produced. Furthermore, a new approach is suggested to understand the political cynicism concept used by political communication scholars to explain the citizens’ apathy and political disengagement resulting from the consumption of media contents -particularly entertaining ones. By bringing into the debate a contextual re-signification of the term cynicism, this research finds that a sort of ‘good cynicism’, represented by more analytical and critical stances towards the powers, can politically engage the potential viewership of political comedy and satirical shows on Colombian television

From the Utopia of Quietness to the Fear of Stillness: A Taxonomic Research Study to Understanding 'Silence' through the medium of radio and its Implications for Media, Education and Psychology.

Questioning ‘what is silence?’ and wondering about silence and its very existence is not something that one would frequently witness. The definition of this noun by the Oxford dictionary states it as “a complete absence of sound” (‘Silence’, 2018), and it is even compared to language – “the fact or state of abstaining from speech”. Although these definitions must carry some kind of validity, experiencing silence could also be considered daunting. Having examined literature from ancient philosophers such as Socrates, as far back as 469 BC, to our present culture of immersion in the mass-media, this thesis aims to offer a systematic taxonomy of silence. A wider and more informed understanding of silence is established, that is hoped to benefit knowledge in fields such as health, psychology, media, education and personal development. This taxonomical approach has been created by means of qualitative interpretative phenomenological research, comprising a blend of different methods and styles: the study of a specific case employing a grounded theory lens (preliminary exercise) and eleven semi-structured interviews. The choice of a radio programme as a pilot was considered the best tool to use as a starting point, to enable examination of current thinking in the field, and because of the ‘blindness’ of the medium, so there is an advantage to expounding and exploring its cognitive resources without being limited or jeopardising the use of the vision. Content has been discussed, compared and contrasted after the transcriptions of both methods, supported by literature, in order to reinforce veracity and reliability. The findings of the empirical research have confirmed the different meanings of silence encountered in the review of literatures. It also adds another layer of critical and detailed understanding of silence. The meanings of silence drawn from literature – investigated through the case study and distilled by media professionals will provide a better understanding of silence within society, so that they could use silence to their own advantage. The contribution to knowledge offers and informs views and experiences about the role of silence, cultivating cognitive and critical skills, exposing four scopes: psychology; socio-psychology; physiology; and neuroscience. Although the results are not conclusive, this research project suggests informing professionals in health, media and education to take time to consider how silence could be beneficial, not just for them, but for their patients, clients and pupils