Heavy Hero or Digital Dummy? Multimodal Player–Avatar Relations in Final Fantasy 7

This article analyses the player-avatar relation in Final Fantasy 7, drawing on multimodality theory to analyse textual structures both in the game and in the discourse of player-interviews and fan writing. It argues that the avatar is a two-part structure, partly designed in conventional narrative terms as a protagonist of popular narrative, and partly as a vehicle for interactive game-play. The former structure is replete with the traditions and designs of Japanese popular narrative, oral formulaic narrative and contemporary superhero narratives; and is presented to the player as an offer act – a declarative narrative statement. The latter is a construct of evolving attributes and economies characteristic of roleplaying games; and is presented to the player as a demand act – a rule-based command. Though these two functions separate out in the grammar of player and fan discourse, it is their integration which provides the pleasure of gameplay and narrative engagement

The Opie Recordings: What’s Left to be Heard?

This chapter presents an analysis of selected recordings from the Opie Collection of Children's Games in the National Sound Archive. It contextualises them with an account of the Opies' research approach, and identifies three themes emerging from the recordings which are not found in published work by the Opies. These are: the strong rleatinoship between children's media cultures and traditional play cultures; more extensive variation of words and music in the singing games; and more extreme examples of obscene and scatological rhymes

EU Media Literacy Experts Group Offers Lessons for UK Media Literacy

The Institute of Education’s Andrew Burn warns that media literacy in the UK is not as stellar as it might appear and shares some lessons from broader European expertise that could focus intervention in the UK and upcoming revisions to EU level policy

Potterliteracy: Cross-Media Narratives, Cultures and Grammars

This is an opportunity to think hard about the rhetorics of multiliteracy and media literacy. What exactly do these mean when we look at the detail, at the 'micro-level' of literacy (Buckingham 2003)? How does a particular image or narrative moment 'translate' across different media? If we expect children to learn about the notion of 'character' in literature or film, what does this mean in the context of a game? If they learn the category of 'verb' in language, how do we talk about this category in film? How is the 'verb' different in the interactive media of computer games? And how do these processes relate to macro-literacy, to the broader cultural experience of books, films and games within which such meanings are situated? And what are these different formal structures representing? At the heart of this question, I want to place the question about the social purpose of Harry Potter for children, and the forms of agency the character represents

Work and Society in Newcastle upon Tyne, c. 1600-1710

This study examines the social context of work in seventeenth-century England through a case study of Newcastle upon Tyne, based on a relational database of tens of thousands of linked parish, tax and probate records. Newcastle was a boom town at the start of the seventeenth century, and while the surge in the coal industry produced great wealth for some, it brought flocks of migrant workers that made Newcastle perhaps the fastest-growing provincial town in England. Newcastle’s experience was by no means typical, but it is an example of an early modern town changing under economic opportunity and demographic pressure. As well as coal, the town sustained a variety of older trades throughout, although there was a decisive and important structural shift towards wage labour over the century. However, there was no artificial separation between these industrial and ‘traditional’ workers, nor were the new migrants as universally poor as has sometimes been suggested; the ‘hierarchy of occupations’ was more an overlapping series of loose categories rather than a rigid structure. The availability and regularity of work is shown to be the critically important factor in making a living in the town even when, by the second half of the seventeenth century, the first coal boom was over and Newcastle society began to settle into its new patterns of life and work. The study is structured around a series of thematic chapters. Chapter Two charts the development of Newcastle from a relatively marginal port to a huge exporter of coal. Chapter Three explores the impact this growth had on Newcastle’s migration-fuelled demography. Chapter Four offers analysis of structural change in occupations brought by these developments, using the parish registers to offer a fuller picture than can be gleaned from other sources. Chapter Five maps occupations in the town and considers whether it was geographically segregated by occupation or class, as well as the role of Newcastle’s burgeoning suburbs. Chapter Six introduces linked probate and hearth tax evidence to analyse the wealth and status of individuals working in different groups. Chapter Seven considers the work role of the family in supplementing the income of the household head. Finally, Chapter Eight brings together work from other chapters in considering the meanings and rewards of proletarian labour in early modern England, and in particular in Newcastle

Supporting Project Comprehension with Revision Control System Repository Analysis

Context: Project comprehension is an activity relevant to all aspects of software engineering, from requirements specification to maintenance. The historical, transactional data stored in revision control systems can be mined and analysed to produce a great deal of information about a project. Aims: This research aims to explore how the data-mining, analysis and presentation of revision control systems can be used to augment aspects of project comprehension, including change prediction, maintenance, visualization, management, profiling, sampling and assessment. Method: A series of case studies investigate how transactional data can be used to support project comprehension. A thematic analysis of revision logs is used to explore the development process and developer behaviour. A benchmarking study of a history-based model of change prediction is conducted to assess how successfully such a technique can be used to augment syntax-based models. A visualization tool is developed for managers of student projects with the aim of evaluating what visualizations best support their roles. Finally, a quasi-experiment is conducted to determine how well an algorithmic model can automatically select a representative sample of code entities from a project, in comparison with expert strategies. Results: The thematic analysis case study classified maintenance activities in 22 undergraduate projects and four real-world projects. The change prediction study calculated information retrieval metrics for 34 undergraduate projects and three real-world projects, as well as an in-depth exploration of the model's performance and applications in two selected projects. File samples for seven projects were generated by six experts and three heuristic models and compared to assess agreement rates, both within the experts and between the experts and the models. Conclusions: When the results from each study are evaluated together, the evidence strongly shows that the information stored in revision control systems can indeed be used to support a range of project comprehension activities in a manner which complements existing, syntax-based techniques. The case studies also help to develop the empirical foundation of repository analysis in the areas of visualization, maintenance, sampling, profiling and management; the research also shows that students can be viable substitutes for industrial practitioners in certain areas of software engineering research, which weakens one of the primary obstacles to empirical studies in these areas

"What exactly is a paedophile?" Children talking about Internet risk

Reports tell us that the internet is opening new dangers to children, including online grooming, exposure to pornography and financial scams (Carr 2004; Gardner 2003; UK Home Office 2001; O'Connell 2003). The result has been various initiatives which attempt to teach children safe surfing habits. The UK Home Office "ThinkUKnow" campaign featured advertisements on the radio, internet and cinemas, targeting teens and preteens with the message that the person they are chatting to "may not be who you think they are". There are indications that such campaigns have had an impact on children's awareness of "stranger danger" on the internet (Livingstone/Bober 2003). However, many organisations are still struggling with the question of how best to prevent internet-related harm to children. Children are exposed not only to advertising campaigns about stranger danger but also sensationalist stories about, for example, what happens to girls who enter chat rooms. When a teenage girl goes missing, police investigations routinely include looking at the girls' online activities, and tabloid media frequently make the connection between missing school girls and chat room activities. These connections are firmly embedded in the minds of the children we interviewed for the study we will be discussing. Alongside the very rational and prohibitive discourse coming from campaigns which warn children against any chat with strangers, sit the folkloric stories about girls meeting up and getting killed by paedophiles. The challenge to educators is to find an approach which will engage with both sets of discourses.Reports tell us that the internet is opening new dangers to children, including online grooming, exposure to pornography and financial scams (Carr 2004; Gardner 2003; UK Home Office 2001; O'Connell 2003). The result has been various initiatives which attempt to teach children safe surfing habits. The UK Home Office “ThinkUKnow” campaign featured advertisements on the radio, internet and cinemas, targeting teens and preteens with the message that the person they are chatting to “may not be who you think they are”. There are indications that such campaigns have had an impact on children's awareness of “stranger danger” on the internet (Livingstone/Bober 2003). However, many organisations are still struggling with the question of how best to prevent internet-related harm to children. Children are exposed not only to advertising campaigns about stranger danger but also sensationalist stories about, for example, what happens to girls who enter chat rooms. When a teenage girl goes missing, police investigations routinely include looking at the girls' online activities, and tabloid media frequently make the connection between missing school girls and chat room activities. These connections are firmly embedded in the minds of the children we interviewed for the study we will be discussing. Alongside the very rational and prohibitive discourse coming from campaigns which warn children against any chat with strangers, sit the folkloric stories about girls meeting up and getting killed by paedophiles. The challenge to educators is to find an approach which will engage with both sets of discourses