1st Edition

Applied Media Studies

Edited By Kirsten Ostherr Copyright 2018
    292 Pages
    by Routledge

    292 Pages
    by Routledge

    In the age of the maker movement, hackathons and do-it-yourself participatory culture, the boundaries between digital media theory and production have dissolved. Multidisciplinary humanities labs have sprung up around the globe, generating new forms of hands-on, critical, and creative work. The scholars, artists, and scientists behind these projects are inventing new ways of doing media studies teaching and research, developing innovative techniques through experimental practice. Featuring leading scholar-makers with years of experience creating applied media projects, this book presents behind-the-scenes stories, detailed case studies, and candid interviews with contributors. They describe projects such as reverse-engineering Spotify algorithms, building new mobile media networks in low-resource settings, hashtag activism, community-based locative storytelling app creation, collaborative and participatory design of medical media interfaces, and invention of new platforms for multimodal, transmedia storytelling. Readers will find practical advice and conceptual frameworks that prepare them to launch their own hands-on, participatory media projects using twenty-first-century tools and methods.

    Introduction

      1. "Applied Media Studies: Interventions for the Digitally Intermediated Age," by Kirsten Ostherr
      2. "Applied Media Studies and Digital Humanities: Technology, Textuality, Methodology," by Lindsay Graham

    Foundations

      1. "Foundations of Applied Media Studies," by Kirsten Ostherr, Heidi Rae Cooley, Bo Reimer, Anne Balsamo, Patrick Vonderau, Elizabeth Losh, Eric Hoyt, Tara McPherson, and Jason Farman
      2. "From Vectors to Scalar: A Brief Primer for Applied Media Studies," by Tara McPherson
      3. "The Medical Futures Lab: An Applied Media Studies Experiment in Digital Medical Humanities," by Kirsten Ostherr

    Challenges

      1. "Pleasures and Perils of Hands-On, Collaborative Work," by Kirsten Ostherr, Lisa Parks, Patrick Vonderau, Elizabeth Losh, Bo Reimer, Tara McPherson, Jason Farman, Heidi Rae Cooley, and Eric Hoyt
      2. "Media Fieldwork: Critical Reflections on Collaborative ICT Research in Rural Zambia," by Lisa Parks, Lindsay Palmer, and Daniel Grinberg
      3. "Rapid Response: DIY Curricula from FemTechNet to Crowd-Sourced Syllabi," by Elizabeth Losh

    Translation

      1. "Transdisciplinary Collaboration and Translational Media-Making," by Kirsten Ostherr, Eric Hoyt, Tara McPherson, Bo Reimer, Lisa Parks, Jason Farman, Elizabeth Losh, Patrick Vonderau, and Heidi Rae Cooley
      2. "Collaborating Across Differences: The AIDS Quilt Touch Project," by Anne Balsamo
      3. "The Time and Structure of Cross-College Collaboration: Developing a Shared Vocabulary and Practice," Heidi Rae Cooley

    Intervention

      1. "Unintended Consequences," by Kirsten Ostherr, Anne Balsamo, Jason Farman, Elizabeth Losh, Patrick Vonderau, Heidi Rae Cooley, Eric Hoyt, Tara McPherson, and Bo Reimer
      2. "Technology and Language, or How to Apply Media Industries Research?" by Patrick Vonderau
      3. "Transforming the Urban Environment: Media Interventions, Accountability and Agonism," by Bo Reimer

    Infrastructure

      1. "Architectures of Sustainability," by Kirsten Ostherr, Tara McPherson, Heidi Rae Cooley, Patrick Vonderau, Lisa Parks, Jason Farman, Elizabeth Losh, Eric Hoyt, Anne Balsamo, and Bo Reimer
      2. "Building a Lantern and Keeping It Burning," by Eric Hoyt

    Conclusion

      1. "Conceptual Models and Helpful Thinkers," by Kirsten Ostherr, Jason Farman, Anne Balsamo, Patrick Vonderau, Elizabeth Losh, Bo Reimer, Heidi Rae Cooley, Tara McPherson, and Eric Hoyt

     

    Biography

    Kirsten Ostherr is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is a media scholar and health researcher, and author of Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (2013) and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005), and co-editor of Science/Animation (2016). She is the director and co-founder of the Medical Futures Lab. Her current research is on information and communication technologies in medicine, patient narratives, and the role of simulation as a mediator between human and technological forms of medical expertise.

    "An indispensable guide to an emerging field, Applied Media Studies brings together a truly interdisciplinary group of scholars to argue for a critical, hands-on, and deeply engaged new form of multimodal scholarship. As inspiring as it is challenging, Applied Media Studies points the way toward the kind of boundary-breaking scholarship we need to solve problems in the twenty-first century." – Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles

    "Informed by the same spirit of collective enterprise that is its subject, Applied Media Studies offers an environmental scan of practice-based research from an array of sites, developing in the process a new disciplinary map that finds common cause between media studies and the digital humanities. This is truly a field-defining volume." – Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara