'The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World': Trailers in the Digital Age

At a time of uncertainty over film and television texts being transferred online and on to portable media players, this article examines one of the few visual texts that exist comfortably on multiple screen technologies: the trailer. Adopted as an early cross-media text, the trailer now sits across cinema, television, home video, the internet, games consoles, mobile phones and iPods. Exploring the aesthetic and structural changes the trailer has undergone in its journey from the cinema to the iPod screen, the article focuses on the new mobility of these trailers, the shrinking screen size, and how audience participation with these texts has influenced both trailer production and distribution techniques. Exploring these texts, and their technological display, reveals how modern distribution techniques have created a shifting and interactive relationship between film studio and audience

Global Economic Expansion and the Prevalence of Militarized Interstate Disputes

Over the past several decades the entire world has experienced both the positive and negative effects of globalization. The question that this report will address is whether or not global economic expansion has led to a decline in the prevalence of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and what factors influence the prevalence of MIDs. This report will take an in-depth look at Thomas Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”. It also includes a quantitative analysis in which regression techniques were used to see how different economic factors influence the prevalence of MIDs, while also introducing a previously unused independent variable that reflects how the presence of multinational corporations within a nation’s economy influences the prevalence of violent conflicts. Results indicate that variables representing contiguity, the lower trade share, and FDI have significant effects on the prevalence of conflict. Furthermore, while the theoretical underpinnings behind Friedman’s theory appear to be partially correct, empirical analysis of the influence of multinational corporations on the prevalence of conflict yielded no significant conclusions

A framework for interrogating social media images to reveal an emergent archive of war

The visual image has long been central to how war is seen, contested and legitimised, remembered and forgotten. Archives are pivotal to these ends as is their ownership and access, from state and other official repositories through to the countless photographs scattered and hidden from a collective understanding of what war looks like in individual collections and dusty attics. With the advent and rapid development of social media, however, the amateur and the professional, the illicit and the sanctioned, the personal and the official, and the past and the present, all seem to inhabit the same connected and chaotic space.However, to even begin to render intelligible the complexity, scale and volume of what war looks like in social media archives is a considerable task, given the limitations of any traditional human-based method of collection and analysis. We thus propose the production of a series of ‘snapshots’, using computer-aided extraction and identification techniques to try to offer an experimental way in to conceiving a new imaginary of war. We were particularly interested in testing to see if twentieth century wars, obviously initially captured via pre-digital means, had become more ‘settled’ over time in terms of their remediated presence today through their visual representations and connections on social media, compared with wars fought in digital media ecologies (i.e. those fought and initially represented amidst the volume and pervasiveness of social media images).To this end, we developed a framework for automatically extracting and analysing war images that appear in social media, using both the features of the images themselves, and the text and metadata associated with each image. The framework utilises a workflow comprising four core stages: (1) information retrieval, (2) data pre-processing, (3) feature extraction, and (4) machine learning. Our corpus was drawn from the social media platforms Facebook and Flickr

Political Broadside Ballads in Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (Pickering and Chatto: London, 2011)

Ballads on ‘affairs of state’ have been largely eschewed by scholars of popular political history, despite the growing digital availability of ballad literature. McShane’s extensive critical bibliography makes these texts accessible for the first time by providing a systematically and rigorously researched bibliography of all recorded and published broadside ballads on affairs of state between the outbreak of the Bishops’ Wars in 1639 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Based on comprehensive research into all the major holdings in the UK and USA, the bibliography locates, dates and fully indexes more than 3,100 ballad sheets. McShane, an authority on English print culture, also provides a 10,000-word introduction based on this original research. It sets out the history of printing background of the genre; the importance of typographical and material analysis in helping to understand the broadside as a marketed medium; and the significance of its collecting history to any notion of the ballad as representative of popular political mentalites. A reviewer notes, ‘this comprehensive bibliographic survey, which often corrects previous errors on dating and in its notes offers invaluable contextual information, will open up new research pathways’ (English Historical Review, 2013). McShane has been invited to speak on this research on numerous occasions, including Reading University’s Early Modern Research Centre Colloquium, ‘Printed Image and Decorative Print, 1500–1750′ (2013); the 8th Bildlore Congress, Bassano, Italy (2012); for the international panel on Popular Culture and Media Diversity at the ESSHC Conference, Glasgow University (2012); the ‘Popular Music Participation and the People’ symposium, Goldsmiths (2012); and Leeds University ‘Text and Orality’ research seminar (2011). She is currently a consultant to the JISC-funded Integrating Broadside Ballad Archives project, Bodleian Library (2011–13), and the Popularisation and Media Strategies 1700–1900 project, Utrecht University, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2010–14)

Modernity in British advertising: selling cocoa and chocolate in the 1930s

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolution of 'push' marketing in the confectionery industry in Britain during the 1930s. It examines the interplay between a manufacturer and advertising agency in creating advertising for cocoa and chocolate. Design/methodology/approach: A survey of the literature examines the uses of health and well-being in the design of advertising in Britain between the wars. The records of Rowntree and its main advertising agency, J Walter Thompson, are used to examine the themes and tactics used in advertising for cocoa and Aero chocolate bars during the 1930s. Findings: The paper emphasises the different ways in which health and nutrition was used in advertising for the two products. The campaigns of the 1930s built on earlier use of these themes. J Walter Thompson looked for ways of presenting commodities as 'new and improved' and their role extended into pressing for changes to production methods and the nature of products. Themes of modernity, sexuality and lifestyles all featured, confirming conclusions of earlier studies. However targeting of mothers and of different age and gender groups indicated that market segmentation was used extensively via print media and tailored advertising messages. Research limitations/implications: . Originality/value: Although Cadbury, Rowntree and confectionery have been studied in depth before, this paper emphasises their role in applying new advertising ideas to everyday items. It points to the influence of advertising on the mass of consumers compared to the middle and upper-income groups targeted in the marketing of houses, motor-cars and new consumer durable

Dominion cartoon satire as trench culture narratives: complaints, endurance and stoicism

Although Dominion soldiers’ Great War field publications are relatively well known, the way troops created cartoon multi-panel formats in some of them has been neglected as a record of satirical social observation. Visual narrative humour provides a ‘bottom-up’ perspective for journalistic observations that in many cases capture the spirit of the army in terms of stoicism, buoyed by a culture of internal complaints. Troop concerns expressed in the early comic strips of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and British were similar. They shared a collective editorial purpose of morale boosting among the ranks through the use of everyday narratives that elevated the anti-heroism of the citizen soldier, portrayed as a transnational everyman in the service of empire. The regenerative value of disparagement humour provided a redefinition of courage as the very act of endurance on the Western Front

Towards 3-D Sound: Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum

This chapter demonstrates the evolution of relationships between sound design and music in cinematic representations of the interstellar space vacuum. Mera provides a framework for understanding how audiences believe they are physically present in the represented environment and argues that, in the late 2000s, we move towards three-dimensional (3-D) sound, an aesthetic and technical extension of the superfield and the ultrafield as defined by Chion and Kerins, respectively. 3-D Sound’s primary characteristic is the emancipation of music from a fixed sound-stage spatialization, resulting in greater fluidity between sound design and music. This chapter examines the relationship between two types of spatial presence, articulating both the audience’s suspension of disbelief within a film’s narrative world and the spatial presence of sound and music within a multichannel cinema environme

Event-based media monitoring methodology for Human Rights Watch

Executive Summary This report, prepared by a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota for Human Rights Watch (HRW), investigates the use of event-based media monitoring (EMM) to review its application, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and offer suggestions on how HRW can better utilize EMM in its own work. Media monitoring systems include both human-operated (manual) and automated systems, both of which we review throughout the report. The process begins with the selection of news sources, proceeds to the development of a coding manual (for manual searches) or “dictionary” (for automated searches), continues with gathering data, and concludes with the coding of news stories. EMM enables the near real-time tracking of events reported by the media, allowing researchers to get a sense of the scope of and trends in an event, but there are limits to what EMM can accomplish on its own. The media will only cover a portion of a given event, so information will always be missing from EMM data. EMM also introduces research biases of various kinds; mitigating these biases requires careful selection of media sources and clearly defined coding manuals or dictionaries. In manual EMM, coding the gathered data requires human researchers to apply codebook rules in order to collect consistent data from each story they read. In automated EMM, computers apply the dictionary directly to the news stories, automatically picking up the desired information. There are trade-offs in each system. Automated EMM can code stories far more quickly, but the software may incorrectly code stories, requiring manual corrections. Conversely, manual EMM allows for a more nuanced analysis, but the investment of time and effort may diminish the tool’s utility. We believe that both manual and automated EMM, when deployed correctly, can effectively support human rights research and advocacy