Synthesizing NPR Styled Street View Animation Based on Deep Learning

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Digital Tools in Urban Schools: Mediating a Remix of Learning

Digital Tools in Urban Schools demonstrates significant ways in which high school teachers in the complex educational setting of an urban public high school in northern California extended their own professional learning to revitalize learning in their classrooms. Through a novel research collaboration between a university and this public school, these teachers were supported and guided in developing the skills necessary to take greater advantage of new media and new information sources to increase student learning while making connections to their relevant experiences and interests. Jabari Mahiri draws on extensive qualitative data—including blogs, podcasts, and other digital media—to document, describe, and analyze how the learning of both students and teachers was dramatically transformed as they utilized digital media in their classrooms. Digital Tools in Urban Schools will interest instructional leaders and participants in teacher preparation and professional development programs, education and social science researchers and scholars, graduate and undergraduate programs and classes emphasizing literacy and learning, and those focused on urban education issues and conditions

The Race of Sound

In The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. Eidsheim illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre—the color or tone of a voice. Eidsheim examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as the vocal synthesis technology Vocaloid to show how listeners carry a series of assumptions about the nature of the voice and to whom it belongs. Outlining how the voice is linked to ideas of racial essentialism and authenticity, Eidsheim untangles the relationship between race, gender, vocal technique, and timbre while addressing an undertheorized space of racial and ethnic performance. In so doing, she advances our knowledge of the cultural-historical formation of the timbral politics of difference and the ways that comprehending voice remains central to understanding human experience, all the while advocating for a form of listening that would allow us to hear singers in a self-reflexive, denaturalized way

"Get Listenin' Kids!": Independence as Social Practice in American Popular Music

This dissertation examines the concept of independence--defined as alternative approaches to the creation, distribution and consumption of music that actively resist cultural hegemonies--as an ongoing tradition in American popular music. While previous studies of independence have focused on specific independent record labels or eras, this project views independence as a historical trajectory that extends to the beginnings of the recording industry. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the social field frames my investigation of the ways in which independence becomes socially and musically manifested in communities of musicians, mediators and audiences. I explore how these communities articulate their distinction within the dominant music industry by responding to the social and aesthetic chasms created by the centralization of media. This study is divided into two sections. The first focuses on independent record labels and local radio broadcasts in the first half of the twentieth century, when "independent" referred to either a record label that distributed outside major label channels, or a radio station unaffiliated with a network. In the second section, I show how the modern concept of independence became more overtly political with the emergence of the punk movement of the late 1970s. I follow the subsequent development of independent underground networks in the 1980s through their present-day fragmentation in twenty-first century internet culture. I conclude with an ethnographic examination of independent music performances in order to show that, while independence remains situated in ideas about community, authenticity and autonomy, it is subjectively understood and constructed by individual members of independent communities. The primary research for this study draws from eight years of personal experience as a freeform DJ and active consumer of independent music, as well as seven years working as a sound archivist at the University of Maryland Broadcasting Archives. Because this is a study of popular music, I engage with several interdisciplinary theoretical areas, including ethnomusicology, musicology, sociology and media studies, in order to conceptualize some of the patterns that shape independent social practices

Crossing Gender Boundaries

This volume presents a collection of the most recent knowledge on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments – how dress creates, disrupts and transcends gender – the chapters investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, focusing on unisex and genderless clothing. The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them

From Fan Videos to Crowdsourcing: The Political Economy of User-Driven Online Media Platforms and Practices

Following its rise to popularity from 2004 onwards, an increasingly idealistic and dominant conception of platforms, practices, and projects shaped by the Web 2.0 paradigm or the Social Web would emerge and rehabilitate past utopian assertions about the democratizing, participatory, and collaborative potential of the Internet, so as to attractively characterize them as enabling radically empowering forms of online participation by average citizens. In this dissertation, the core features of the affectively charged discourse surrounding this growing media environment are critically examined in order to understand their misleading character and supportive function within the communicative economy of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and the media apparatus of flexible control strategies that sustains it. Moreover, with the help of critical-theoretical, political-economic, and autonomist theories, this dissertation analyzes a set of representative online media practices driven by users and embodying the individualistic and collective incarnations of the Social Web — such as YouTube-based gameplay commentary videos and fanvid parodies of animated media from Japan along with key examples of media crowdsourcing like the Life in a Day documentary and the Star Wars Uncut remake project. Its analysis of these case studies exposes how the above media apparatus of strategies and decisions increasingly shaping this digital media ecosystem, while encouraging the creative agency of online users, often results in its flexible control by corporate interests and the formation of new forms of power relations, inequality, and exploitation

Myths Of The House Theatre Of Chicago (2002-2007): A Dramaturgical Study Of Chicago\u27s next Big Thing

In 2002, Chicago\u27s theatre critics targeted The House as the next big story in the city\u27s theatre community. The House\u27s first play, The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan was a critical and financial hit for the young company. Peter Pan began a five-year period of nearly unprecedented success for The House. During this time, many discussions about The House dealt with a perceived mythical quality to the type of plays the young company was creating. This study examines this question of myth in The House\u27s plays by creating a dramaturgy that incorporates the myth theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell to identify and analyze the presence of elements of myth and the patterns in which they occur. These patterns can be potentially identified by examining five of The House\u27s most significant performance texts: The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, Death and Harry Houdini, the three plays of The Valentine Trilogy and The Sparrow, this study aims to identify what elements are at work in The House\u27s hero stories