Educational hypercomics: learners, institutions, and comics in e-learning interface design

Current literacy education research suggests that formal affordances of the comics medium lend themselves to critical pedagogies of new media literacy (see, e.g., Schwarz, 2006; Jacobs, 2007; Schwartz & Rubinstein-Ávila, 2006; Duffy, 2010). This research connects comics and new media because both are visually dominant, juxtapositional compositional forms that make meaning through multiple modes of communicative design. However, this research generally construes comics as a narrative form that bridges the traditions of print-based literacy with the wide array of multiliteracies required by new media. The evolution of comics as a form of digital communication within new media pedagogical texts has received far less attention. The present study addresses this lacuna in the literature through analysis of social semiotics of comics in the contexts of online learning. This is a study of multimodal pedagogical discourse in online educational comics, specifically educational hypercomics. Hypercomics can be loosely defined as comics on the World Wide Web which incorporate semiotic affordances of digital delivery such as interactivity, multiplicity of reading paths, hypertextuality, audio, video, and animation. This study is a comparative social semiotic analysis of three educational hypercomics, focused on the ways in which the comics form interacts with digital affordances in educational institutional contexts in order to construe readers as learners. The goal of this research is to explicate ways in which digital comics' formal characteristics can function not only as a vehicle for narrative expression in pedagogy, but also as a strategy for e-learning information organization and interface design

Porting Transmedia Storytelling to Journalism

This thesis examines how the methods of transmedia storytelling emerging in the entertainment industry might be used in a journalism context. Journalism is facing many crises, not the least of which is a loss of readership and perceived relevance to its public. Presented with an ever-expanding array of media with which to interact, the public is more difficult to attract to a socially relevant issue or a politically important story. Faced with similar issues, the entertainment industry has developed a means to engage with fans in a way that draws them across multiple media platforms, better captures their imagination and engages them personally into the story being told. Transmedia Storytelling lets narrative unfold on multiple lines, from varying perspectives and with the help of the fans themselves. Scholars of the methodology describe it as the art of world building. This thesis illustrates that journalists can better engage their publics by adapting the methods of transmedia storytelling to journalism. By comparing entertainment transmedia storytelling theory and technique with examples of journalism that illustrate one or more of these techniques, this thesis explores whether journalists can reach more individuals, achieve better engagement and participation from their publics and more thoroughly communicate the complexity and context of any story

Deliverable D6.2 Scenario Demonstrators

This deliverable reports on the demonstrators prepared using the LinkedTV technologies for the two principle scenarios: Interactive News (partner: RBB) and the Hyperlinked Documentary Scenario (partner: Sound and Vision). Complementing the working demos, we report on the user trials performed with the first year scenarios, the resulting revisions made, and the progress in our third scenario, Media Arts (partner: University of Mons)

Reading the Margins: The Politics and Processes of Feminist Comics-Based Research and Pedagogy

This multi-methods dissertation explores the politics and processes of creating comics-based research and pedagogy. My central framework of “reading the margins” refers to the process of asking critical questions about the history, genealogy, and methods of comics studies, particularly as it intersects with feminism. I argue that considering feminist studies and comics studies together centers each field’s history with marginality and envisions their shared potential for making arguments through the critical and self-conscious representation of marginalized experience. Throughout this project, I examine the formal properties, stylistic conventions, and narrative patterns that make the comics medium particularly effective for feminist scholarship. I do this first through a review of examples of popular feminist educational comics, examining their use of the comics medium for feminist pedagogy through common tropes and discourse analysis. Next, I offer an original piece of feminist comics-based scholarship to demonstrate a few of these formal commitments and affordances

Global Sceptical Publics: From non-religious print media to ‘digital atheism’

Global Sceptical Publics is the first major study of the significance of different media for the (re)production of non-religious publics and publicity. While much work has documented how religious subjectivities are shaped by media, until now the crucial role of diverse media for producing and participating in religion-sceptical publics and debates has remained under-researched. With some chapters focusing on locations hitherto barely considered by scholarship on non-religion, the book places in comparative perspective how atheists, secularists and humanists engage with media – as means of communication and forming non-religious publics, but also on occasion as something to be resisted. Its conceptually rich interdisciplinary chapters thereby contribute important new insights to the growing field of non-religion studies and to scholarship on media and materiality more generally