Online Deliberation Lived Experiences of Kānaka Maoli Women.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Educational use cases from a shared exploration of e-books and iPads

E-books and e-book readers are becoming increasingly widely available, particularly for the general reader, and there have been many studies on their adoption. However, less is known about their use for educational and academic purposes. We report here on work carried out on e-books and e-book applications using iPads by academic and teaching staff. After considering pedagogical issues and reporting survey results, we identify a spiral of six key use case areas for e-books. This spiral of use cases moves from basic e-book use, through situational reading, e-books and learning, using multiple learning resources, collaborative/group learning, to e-book production. We discuss each of these use case areas and provide guidelines that will be of interest to practitioners and researchers alike

Digital books in literary education: a semiotic approach to analysis

http://www.ester.ee/record=b4715970*es

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

Coraline

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) is stop-motion studio LAIKA's feature-length debut based on the popular children's novel by British author Neil Gaiman. Heralding a revival in global interest in stop-motion animation, the film is both an international cultural phenomenon and a breakthrough moment in the technological evolution of the craft. This open access collection brings together an international group of practitioners and scholars to examine Coraline’s place in animation history and culture, dissect its politics, and unpack its role in the technological and aesthetic development of its medium. More broadly, it celebrates stop motion as a unique and enduring artform while embracing its capacity to evolve in response to cultural, political, and technological changes, as well as shifting critical and audience demands. Divided into three sections, this volume’s chapters situate Coraline within an interconnected network of historical, industrial, discursive, theoretical, and cultural contexts. They place the film in conversation with the medium’s aesthetic and technological history, broader global intellectual and political traditions, and questions of animation reception and spectatorship. In doing so, they invite recognition – and appreciation – of the fact that Coraline occupies many liminal spaces at once. It straddles the boundary between children’s entertainment and traditional ‘adult’ genres, such as horror and thriller. It complicates a seemingly straight(forward) depiction of normative family life with gestures of queer resistance. Finally, it marks a pivotal point in stop-motion animation’s digital turn. Following the film’s recent tenth anniversary, the time is right to revisit its production history, evaluate its cultural and industry impact, and celebrate its legacy as contemporary stop-motion cinema’s gifted child. As the first book-length academic study of this contemporary animation classic, this volume serves as an authoritative introduction and a primary reference on the film for scholars, students, practitioners, and animation fans. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

A (S)hero's Journey: Paths to Re-writing Myths in the Star Wars Franchise

The Star Wars franchise shares a common storytelling thread with ancient myths, which have consistently centered on individuals experiencing life-changing journeys that influence their—and others’—world forever. How did Star Wars, now owned by the media conglomerate Disney, contribute to the process of making myths persistent throughout history? The key to this persistence seems to have been media adaptations: the franchise has re-written and re-interpreted tropes from previous mythologies and cultural products using the intertextual practices of contemporary visual media forms (film, TV series and animation). By using theories of intertextuality and adaptation, my dissertation analyzes how Star Wars re-writes and adapts two dominant mythologies in American culture—the Campbellian monomyth and the American Western mythos—in the new movies of the saga and in the series The Mandalorian and Forces of Destiny to explain the process of mythical re-writing in contemporary media. The aim is to advance the field of cultural studies by investigating how and why mythical representation has survived in Star Wars through the commodifying cultural mechanisms involved with re-distributing myths in contemporary media. I will also analyze the larger issues that mythical portrayals in Star Wars represent about American culture, especially their ability to depict American identity. My dissertation sheds light on how mythical storytelling in the new Star Wars movies, The Mandalorian and Forces of Destiny helps disrupt old dominant American ideologies of male- and white-centred heroic models to offer diverse representations of gender and ethnicity. My analysis shows that despite contradictions the new Star Wars hints at positive changes in the representation of American identity. This change signifies that the adaptable polysemic nature of myths—their ability to incorporate new meanings—is key to this process of ideological shifting. Also, my analysis provides evidence that this process of mythical revival becomes possible by adopting, as in Disney’s case, cultural production mechanisms that center around media technologies and commercialized products. Disney’s commodification results in turning myths into materialistic possessions for contemporary audiences to interact with, as my analysis of the Star Wars “Princesses” dolls and the “Baby Yoda” puppet suggests

Project knole: an autocosmic approach to authoring resonant computational characters

Project knole, consisting of this thesis and a mixed reality installation artwork centred around a computational simulation, is a practice-based response to the question of how a character in a work of computational narrative art might maintain their defining quality of dynamic agency within a system (arguably one of the key potentials of the form), while achieving the ‘resonant’ qualities of characters in more materially-static artforms. In all aspects of this project, I explore a new design philosophy for achieving this balance; between the authorship of a procedural computational system, and the ability of that system to ‘resonate’ with the imagination of an audience. This philosophy, which I term the ‘autocosmic’, seeks inspiration for the curation of audience response outside the obvious boundaries of artistic discipline, across the wider spectrum of human imaginative engagement; examples often drawn from mostly non-aesthetic domains. As well as defining the terms ‘resonance’ and ‘autocosmic’, and delineating my methodology more generally, this thesis demonstrates how the ‘autocosmic’ was employed within my creative work. In particular, it shows how some of the perennial problems of computational character development might be mediated by exploring other non-aesthetic examples of imaginative, narrative engagement with personified systems. In the context of this project, such examples come from the historio-cultural relationship between human beings and the environments they inhabit, outside of formal artistic practice. From this ‘autocosmic’ launchpad, I have developed an artwork that starts to explore how this rich cultural and biological lineage of human social engagement with systemic place can be applied fruitfully to the development of a ‘resonant’ computational character