TV 2.0: animation readership / authorship on the internet

Traditional platforms for animation, such as broadcast television or cinema, are rapidly becoming obsolete as a new type of spectator demands more choice, the ability to interact with animated content and access to global distribution for their own user-generated work. Audiences are no longer satisfied with receiving a top down distribution of content from traditional cinema or broadcasters. Internet technologies are emerging to address this demand for active spectatorship and enable communities of interest to evolve their own alternative distribution methods. Viewing animation online has become increasingly accessible with the mass adoption of broadband and the emergence of new file formats. TV 2.0 is an amalgamation of Internet technologies that combine video on demand with the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0. In the age of TV 2.0, the role of the viewer has increased in complexity with new possibilities for active interaction and intervention with the content displayed. This new audience seeks a form of spectatorship that can extend beyond the passive recipience of programming distributed by elite broadcasters. TV 2.0 on the Internet has changed both methods of distribution and traditional patterns for the viewing of animation. However, any potential for democratic participation in the visual culture of moving images that this could entail may be a brief historic moment before the assimilation and control of active readership by mainstream corporate culture

Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter

Current findings, news and announcements related to the history of Australian newspapers

Reading Nation in Translation: The Spectral Transnationality of the Malaysian Racial Imaginary

In recent decades, literary studies has experienced a global turn, often understood as a move beyond national paradigms of analysis, which are deemed to be narrow and particularistic. Although wary of the tacit universalizing tendencies of global frames, scholars of race and postcoloniality have critically embraced the global by arguing for the need to theorize transnationalism from marginalized perspectives. However, casting the global and the national in oppositional terms ignores the fact that national racial ideologies both actively shape and are shaped by globally circulating ideas about race. An understudied site in postcolonial studies, Malaysia--formerly known as Malaya--is an exemplary case that unsettles this binary opposition. Informed by racialized distinctions between native and migrants inherited from colonial rule, the constitutionalized special position of bumiputera (literally sons of the earth or autochthonous group) citizens effectively renders race a defining aspect of national identity. This dissertation presents translation as an entry point into theorizing the relation between the national and the global in the production of the Malaysian racial imaginary. Drawing on theories of cultural translation, I begin with the premise that translation is a process of figuration, rather than a transfer of uncontaminated cultural essence, from one mode of signification to another. Through analyses of graphic narratives, novels and films, I consider how various modes of translation are used in these texts both to articulate a common national identity that unifies these groups, and, at the same time, to maintain their racialized distinctions. I argue that discerning the modes of translation embedded in the process of national identity formation--what I call, reading nation in translation--elucidates the transnational historical forces, be it the reordering of the British Empire amidst its impending end; the burgeoning global Cold War; or the intensification of global financial capitalism in the late twentieth-century, that shape the national racial imaginary. Reading nation in translation thus contributes toward a critical conception of transnationalism, one that not only presents the nation and the global as oppositional frames of analysis, but as mutually haunting one another. In foregrounding the global forces, both past and present, that animate the national racial imaginary, it also argues for the importance of attending to processes of racialization as a mode of globalization

Animating perception: British cartoons from music hall to cinema, 1880 - 1928

This thesis examines the history of animated cartoons in Britain between 1880 and 1928, identifying a body of work that has been largely ignored by film and animation historians, covering the production, distribution, and exhibition of these films. Throughout this history, graphic arts - especially print cartooning and illustration - and the music-hall lightning cartoon act are found to have played a formative role in British animated cartoons. The artists who made the first British animated cartoons were almost exclusively drawn from one of those two fields and thus this work may be considered to form a parallel history of ‘artists’ film’. They brought with them to film a range of concerns from those prior forms that would shape British animated cartoons. Examining that context provides an understanding of the ways British animated cartoons developed in technologic, economic, and aesthetic terms. This work includes the first in-depth history of the music-hall lightning cartoon act, which finds that it anticipates cinematic animation, featuring qualities such as transformation, the movement of line drawings, and the desire to bring drawings to life. Building on this history, a new critical framework for examining these films aesthetically is provided, emphasising the role of the spectator and their perceptual processes. This framework draws upon the work of E.H. Gombrich and Sergei Eisenstein, and extends it to include recent findings from neuroscientific fields. The result is an original aesthetic reading of this body of work, which finds the films to have a deep engagement with the basic perceptual processes involved in viewing moving line drawings

“Roast Seagull and other Quaint Bird Dishes” The development of features and “lifestyle” journalism in British newspapers during the First World War

The accepted narrative of British press conduct during the First World War is highly negative. Commentators overwhelmingly agree that newspapers downplayed the horror of life in the trenches and afterwards were found to have published fabricated atrocity stories to encourage hatred of “the Hun” on a grand scale. Scholarly assessment of news coverage of women’s involvement in war work is also predominantly negative, highlighting patronising and unrealistic portrayals of munitions workers and others. These narratives, however compelling, ignore sections of newspapers and other current affairs journals devoted to helping readers trying to feed families on restricted budgets with scant food, who were grieving for or caring for sons and husbands and who were adjusting to bewildering disruptions to family life. The dominant historical narratives ignore the development of a previously unexamined form of “lifestyle” journalism and a genre of vivid features journalism focussing on lives on the “Home Front” and which helped undermine traditional boundaries between the domestic and public realms. This article asks whether “soft” genres of journalism actually better reflected the realities of Wartime readers’ lives, and better satisfied their need for information than propaganda-driven news pages. Assessing readers’ responses to these different genres of journalism helps explain why readers can simultaneously mistrust and also enjoy their news media

Disputes of offence : making sense of the discursive construction of political correctness

PhD ThesisThis thesis explores how Political Correctness (PC) is discursively constructed and has emerged in contemporary society as a cultural signifier for a new politics of language and identity. The thesis begins by arguing that the literature has not adequately reconciled the various tensions which continue to underlie how PC is defined and understood. In doing so it examines how the celebration and prevalence of anti-PC rhetoric has emerged alongside our increasing intolerance of ‘politically incorrect’ forms of discourse (such as racist or homophobic language). It also considers why varying levels of PC might be present (and absent) within different levels of discourse. The project uses data from popular cultural and media sources which draw upon the multifarious and increasingly participatory nature of our public domain. The data sources include newspaper articles and editorials; a parliamentary debate; the social media site Twitter; popular comedy and political cartoons. In order to conduct a socio-cultural analysis, the research incorporates the use of various discourse and visual analytical approaches including Bakhtinian dialogism; Bourdieu’s capital theory; Barthesian semiology and Hall’s representational analysis. The thesis argues that our preoccupation with disputes of offence (or ‘PC disputes’) has acquired an increasingly individualised dimension. It suggests that our concern with group rights and identity politics may overshadow how the giving or taking of offence is also attached to the diverse ways in which individual identity is felt and experienced. In particular, it argues that the assertion of offence is increasingly grounded in the hurt offence is felt to cause to the beliefs which form our sense of self-hood or personal identity. The project maintains that disputes of offence relating to wider inequalities (like racism or sexism) are more usefully understood through exploration and recognition of both their broader and individualised contexts