Typographic Transitions
Asynchronous Session
Featured The Use of Mass Media by Think Tanks in China: The Case of the Charhar Institute View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dechun Zhang
With the rapid growth of China as a regional and global power, think tanks in China have received increasing attention, mostly due to the achievements of academic and processing policies. Recently, collaborations between the media and think tanks have become increasingly tight. Thus, in order to determine how the think tanks in China utilize media, this study used the case of the Charhar Institute (one of the most significant independent international relations think tanks in China) to explain this situation. This study finds that Chinese think tanks regard the media as the main conduit to disseminate their ideas. While Chinese think tanks utilize the social media as an alternative way to get publicity to attract officials since they are hard to contact officials. This study suggests that think tanks as in China regard media as a public sphere to express their interest, while still follow the traditional media logic which helps to further disseminate the government’s interests when utilize the media.
The Voice of Typography: A Study of How Typography Can Be Used as a Poetic Form in the Making of the Film Poem View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Sinfield
William Wees notes that “a number of avant-garde film and video makers have created a synthesis of poetry and film that generates associations, connotations, and metaphors neither the verbal nor the visual text would produce on its own” (1984, p. 109). According to Wees the film poem may not use the written text in the film poem but produces poetic significance by using the narrative and moving image without relying on written or spoken text. This paper explores the creation of typefaces designed on the paralinguistic of the spoken vernacular from workers’ narratives and how they can have a significant influence on the making of the film poem. It further draws on the connection of people and place and examines how typography has a connection to the human condition. Based on interviews of workers from a small town community and the result of the closure of the only industry in the area it had on the community, this paper demonstrates how typography can influence the narrative of the film poem. Though a series of created film poems and designed typefaces, this paper discusses the creation of typographical design and film poems specifically produced from the workers’ narratives.
Featured Mediation of Techno-capital: Space of Contestation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Abu Haque
Technological mediation of capital produces spatial practices that are the new terrain of contestation. The infiltration of neoliberal ideology into these spaces for control over bodies sets the resistance in motion. Techno-capital produces new opportunities but is also the agent of power and control against which Franklin argues to enforce limits in the practice of justice, as the exclusionary practice of technology creates a different division of labor through control and compliance. The new technology-based business models like UberEats do not render personal growth for the marginal bodies but ensure capital accumulation. This is within the realm of new media of visual screens, converging media, internet, GPS, mobile app-based business techniques, etc. These techno-capitals are changing our relations to production and social communication, where the delegation of duties is transformed first into an app, then to an intermediary, and subsequently to a motor vehicle, to roads and highways, to the communications network and thus binding people to non-humans. Unlike in a fiction where we can be here and elsewhere, be ourselves and someone else, in a delegation, a long lost action of an actor remains active today: “I live in the midst of technical delegates; I am folded into nonhumans” (Latour 189). Hence, the shifting of delegation through the app moves further away from the body, from the real to the online, toward a vanishing existence. Even though, it remains active as a traceable subject within the app like a moving dot—within the realm of the visual.
Combining Traditional News Sources and Social Media Data for Conflict Prediction and Analysis: A Rohingya Conflict Case Study
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jean Dinco
For the longest time, traditional mass media has always had quasi-monopolistic power over information exchange. The fall of Soviet communism paved the way for the neoliberal order to supersede as the superior economic model for the world to abide by. In paper, the neoliberal globalisation was advertised as the purveyor of peace and reconciliation across the globe, but the reality on the ground is different. Intra-state conflicts in the Global South defined the post-Cold War era, but international coverage of these conflicts have been erratic paving way for mediatised conflicts and stealth conflicts. Studies in mediatised and stealth conflicts mostly focused on the role of the traditional mainstream media in reporting conflicts. This thesis specifically looks at what has changed in the digital post-truth era. Audience trust in traditional media is rapidly fading; thus, people have started to seek for alternatives. This situation has left a gap in the media-audience duo; and it is in this gap where social media finds itself in the middle as it offers new opportunities for news exposure. This research intends to analyse the alignment and divergence of frames produced in social media and by traditional press and how they correlate with political trends surrounding the conflict in spectator countries. Furthermore, not only do media frames vary from one medium and one phase to another, research has shown that it also changes based on the geopolitical proximity of a foreign country to the conflict zone.
“Radical Blackness”: Ebony Magazine, the Black Revolt, and the Search for a Social Resolution, 1966-1967 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sid Ahmed Ziane
This paper argues for Ebony’s effective intervention during the Black revolt that swept the U.S between 1967 and 1968. Ebony was a widely read glossy magazine. It was designed mainly to promoting Black fashion, advertising, and marketing. In 1967, the U.S was embroiled in a massive Black rebellion that swept the whole nation. Over 200 major cities were engulfed in race riots, resulting in hundred deaths, thousands injured, and over a million properties in damage. Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration quickly established an 11-member commission to investigate the riots but their conclusion fretted over a racial division. Amidst national turmoil, the American media also lavished its attention to the Black revolts but failed to provide a practical resolution to these unabated riots. In fact, some popular White-oriented newspapers sought to vilify the revolts whereas others provided instances of sensationalism to demonise its advocates. From a contrasting perspective, Ebony magazine, owned by the Black businessman John H. Johnson, positioned itself at the heart of the Black revolts by bringing about effective approaches to quell the race riots and improve the race relations in America. Its intervention and its injection of a set of social resolutions had paid off, with the popular White and the Black-owned media admiring its crucial role while the Johnson administration urgently approached the magazine to work with them over the suppression of the riots. Based on archival materials as well as Ebony’s special issues, this paper sheds new light on Ebony’s social standing in Post-war America.
Choice of Words in Communication
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Milford Jeremiah
All communication whether in spoken, written, or in gestural form, involve an idea to be communicated to an audience. Communicants then move from the idea stage to the selection of linguistic units (e.g., phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics and prosody) pertinent to the message. In observing the choice of words in recent communication, one notices the plethora of figurative language used by speakers, primarily, to send a message. Examples of these communicative forms are Light at the End of the Tunnel, Throw under the Bus, and Walk it Back. The recent political atmosphere has contributed to communication with respect to the language seen and heard among protesters. Two examples that are relevant for this presentation are I Can’t Breathe and Stop the Steal. Words of this sort allow for an interdisciplinary approach to communication. One can deduce aspects of discourse analysis, cognitive psychology, and neurolinguistics. For this study I address three questions: 1) Why do speakers, primarily, use these forms of language? 2) To whom is the message directed? and 3) What can we learn form these forms of communication?
Film Preservation: Film Prints Embrace the Digital Age View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sharon Greytak, Siqiao Ao
With emerging digital media, many established and lauded filmmakers are now tasked with the essential and often cost-prohibitive mission of preservation for their award-winning works. After ceremonious festivals and standing ovations, it becomes a race for time to digitize and preserve many daring and culturally important independent films as they begin to deteriorate. In North America, nearly half the films produced before 1950 have permanently disappeared. Only since the enactment of the National Film Preservation Act of 1988 in the U.S. can these disintegrating works be rescued. The benefit of digital preservation will offer access to an incredible range of media, on numerous subjects for academics and future generations. In addition, it also provides the independent filmmaker the valuable opportunity of renewed, potentially global exposure, and expanded distribution via today's emerging media platforms. This labor-intensive preservation process requires the collaboration of independent filmmakers and preservation organizations. Previous research has shown the complicated, sequential steps, the rationale behind them, and the results. This paper analyzes the up-to-date status of film preservation by referencing the actual case of the researcher’s 1996 film The Love Lesson. This research provides a practical perspective on today's film preservation practices and challenges through vigorous interviews with several esteemed media archivists in the U.S. and Canada. In particular, film archivists' views, preservation organizations' operating mechanisms, and filmmaker's challenges are reported based on this case study. This engaging and in-depth analysis also offers practical guidance for film and digital media communities.
Metadata Analytics for Critical Research on Visual Media Culture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Martin Roth, Zoltan Kacsuk
Among the many existing approaches to analyzing culture, the trend toward data-driven methodologies has given rise to a wide range of novel perspectives on cultural phenomena. Alongside quantitative textual analysis, recent scholarship emphasizes the potential of web native data for understanding social processes, or engages with new types of data extracted computationally from digitized cultural artifacts. In this paper, we explore the new direction of metadata analytics distinct from bibliometrics and scientometrics, which takes advantage of a wide range of descriptive metadata resources compiled by enthusiast groups online in order to understand cultural processes and phenomena at scale. In our concrete case, this involves large quantities of metadata on Japanese visual media, which allow us to develop, among other things, a contextual understanding of developments in anime, manga and video game culture. In following this pathway, however, we also need to take the limitations descriptive metadata impose on us seriously. The nascent field of critical data studies has already made strides towards addressing the potential threats and challenges that arise in working with big data. Descriptive metadata foreground a specific set of challenges: they appear neutral or factual, and as such are even more likely to be taken at face value. Descriptive metadata, however, are just as much constructing their objects as they are describing them. Metadata Analytics needs to take these peculiarities into account in its approach.
