Archive for the ‘Academia’ Category

I continue to find it mind-boggling that people seem to think that a good use of AI tools like ChatGPT is to gather accurate information. Any cursory reading on the topic should explain that ChatGPT is designed to predict language in response to a prompt, not actually present information based on “knowledge” or “intelligence.” I […]


Like many academics, I’ve been seeing a lot of concerns around how AI tools like ChatGPT might impact the work academics do as teachers and scholars. I don’t want to dive too much into those muddy waters, but I saw one post on Mastodon that piqued my interest and led me to do some experimenting. […]


I just returned from a truly exceptional conference: The Theory and Practice of the Video Essay at University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Not only was there the simple joy of attending my first in-person conference in three years, but it was best type of conference: a single-stream of presentations that help to connect and build […]


Today I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote address at the Television Aesthetics conference at University of Kent in the UK, entitled “Television Aesthetics, Videographic Criticism, and the Case of Breaking Bad.” Well, not exactly “at” the conference – my Tuesday flight out of Vermont was so delayed that it prohibited me from getting […]


I am excited to launch a new project called Media Mirrors: Critical Analysis of Film & TV and Film & TV! This website collects undergraduate student writing that has emerged from my course Key Concepts in Film & Media Criticism. The site emerged from a decision many years ago to encourage my students to write […]


As my blog has become more intermittent over the past few years, one topic seems to still get lots of traffic: rethinking grading. I first started experimenting with grading (and writing about it) around five years ago, and I’m proud to say that I have not “graded” an assignment since! But the ways that I’ve […]


It’s been more than two years since I posted to this blog, but I’m back with some good news. Obviously, it’s been a not-great couple of years of silence, although comparatively I have little to complain about personally or professionally. Things have sucked, but far less for me than for many people. But for 2022, […]


In the spirit of the season, I am pleased to announce a gift to anyone who wants it: a new open access, multimedia site, The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy, available at videographicessay.org. This site collects both previously-published and new versions of writings by Christian Keathley, Catherine Grant, and me, as well as numerous examples […]


For the last two weeks of June, we welcomed another cohort of budding videographic scholars to Middlebury for our Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop, now under the auspices of the Digital Liberal Arts Summer Institute. Fourteen strangers came in together, and a robust community of practice emerged at the end, with amazing drafts of […]


I’m writing this from Pamplona, Spain, where I’m attending the 2019 Conference for the International Study of Narrative. Just now I had the pleasure of chairing a panel on Videographic Criticism & Serial Narrative, where Kathleen Loock, Sean O’Sullivan, and I all presented video essays – a first for this conference, which is more predominantly […]


As I’ve written about before, I’ve had the great pleasure of co-directing a summer workshop, Scholarship in Sound & Image, with my colleague & friend Christian Keathley at Middlebury over the past few years. The three previous iterations of the workshop have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, allowing us to bring […]


As of today, I am officially on leave for the next academic year. I recognize what a privilege it is to get such a leave, as the tradition of the tenured academic position with regular leaves for focused research is becoming more rare and confined to elite institutions (and only some appointments within such institutions […]


I’m excited to announce two upcoming opportunities in 2018 to explore videographic criticism as a method in film & media studies! The first will be a new type of session at the 2018 Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference in Toronto: a seminar on March 18 called “Making Videographic Criticism: The Videographic Epigraph.” Kevin […]


The month of June was spent preparing for, and then leading, the second installment of our NEH-funded workshop, Scholarship in Sound and Image, a.k.a. “videocamp.” (See this excellent article that my student Will DiGravio wrote for our local paper for a good account of the workshop and ideas behind it.) Much like the first iteration […]


As mentioned last month, we’ve been fortunate enough to get another NEH grant to conduct two more videographic criticism workshops at Middlebury, in June 2017 and June 2018. We are now accepting applications for the 2017 workshop, which is open to graduate students in Film & Media Studies or related disciplines. Please spread the word […]