Archive for July, 2015

On behalf of the coordinating editors for Velvet Light Trap's 78th issue, Caroline Ferris Leader outlines the call for investigating children's media.
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Like time's arrow, transmedia franchises move relentlessly forward. Or do they? Matthew Freeman looks at the retro fixation of the transmedia James Bond storyworld as an anomaly in contemporary entertainment’s perpetual present.
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Jennifer Lynn Jones analyzes recent images and discourse on non-normative female athletes in sports media.
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Laura LaPlaca writes about the material resilience of broadcast history from the perspective of a collector and archivist, discussing the importance of acknowledging the stuff that radio and television leave behind, especially in the face of an overwhelming emphasis on the "ephemerality" of these media.
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Brian Fauteux inaugurates our "The Podcast Review" series with an analysis of The Only Music Podcast, a music podcast from Gothenburg, Sweden that offers a refreshing take on the music industries by critically engaging with bi-weekly topics.
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Kyra Hunting continues her discussion of software options for media textual analysis, suggesting that while there is no single perfect qualitative research software application available, a combination of Filemaker Pro, NVivo, Dedoose, and Cinemetrics has helped her dig more deeply into media texts.
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Spending public funds on sports stadiums and arenas is just as much about cultural policy as it is economic policy.
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Magic Mike XXL adds new iconography to the intersectionally raced, gendered, and very classed pleasures found within the women's film through its attention to the centrality of women's sexual desires vis-à-vis the deployment of male bodies who serve to maintain that pleasure.
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Soldiers, survivors, 3 a.m. fathers—Anthony Smith looks at families in recent video-game advertising and finds a "gamer dad" who’s gamer first, dad a distant second (while gamer mom is first and always a mom).
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Kyra Hunting discusses how the creative use of open-ended software can serve media scholars — yet the available research software is not yet designed for the diversity of information, multiplicity of data input types, and unique twists and turns that accompanies the study of media texts.
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Everybody knows about Kickstarter, which is considered to be world’s most popular crowdfunding platform; however, Kickstarter is only one of an estimated number of over 1,000 platforms worldwide. Patryk Galuszka and Blanka Brzozowska look at MegaTotal, a music-oriented platform implementing a significantly different model than Kickstarter.
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Stephanie Sapienza, Project Manager at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), advocates for why the audio and paper materials of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB)'s radio collection - housed at the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin-Madison - need to be integrated online to maximize their usefulness...
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Jennifer Jones recommends checking out Damages on Netflix in our "Late to the Party" series.
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Melanie Kohnen reflects on what she learned at Middlebury College's videographic criticism workshop.
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The outdoor "maid’s room" was a common suburban feature of apartheid Johannesburg. In the 21st century many of these spaces have been reimagined as "garden cottages" and transformed into middle class assets, but traces of their segregated histories persist.
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