Archive for the ‘New Media’ Category

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 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 […]


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 […]


I am tremendously excited to announce that Christian Keathley and I received another Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, allowing us to host two additional years of our videographic criticism workshop, Scholarship in Sound & Image, at Middlebury College in 2017 and 2018!!! The first workshop […]


This is the third and final (and, to me, most interesting) excerpt from my essay draft on “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method.” The first laid out my approach to deformative criticism via the format of PechaKuchas; the second explored videographic 10/40/70 analyses. I highly recommend watching some of the musical videos discussed near […]


I’ve spent the last month working on an essay called “Videographic Criticism as Digital Humanities Method” for the second edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities. The full essay should be online soon for open peer review, but I want to share three excerpts that feature numerous video examples, as the blog is an easier […]


The last two weeks were some of the most exciting and energizing of my academic career. My colleague Chris Keathley and I hosted an NEH-sponsored digital humanities workshop at Middlebury, called Scholarship in Sound & Image, focused on producing videographic criticism. We define videographic criticism as creating videos that serve an analytic or critical purpose, […]


At the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference in Seattle, I am part of a workshop on “Making Digital Scholarship Count,” where we are discussing how to frame digital projects for hiring, tenure, and promotion. One of the points that I am making is that external reviewers in the tenure process are important figures […]


Wednesday was one of the more interesting days on Twitter I’ve ever seen, from the snarking about the new Pope (same as the old Pope), to the anger over Google mothballing Reader, to the more local disappointment of Wes Welker signing with the Broncos. But nothing generated more interest, excitement, and conversation amongst the TVitterati […]


I have a video to share with you: [vimeo 58659769] If you haven’t seen it, take the eight minutes to watch & enjoy. But there’s a good chance you’ve seen it, as it’s been viewed over 72,000 times (and counting) in the three days it’s been online. It’s been written about on Buzzfeed, Jezebel, CBS News, CBC, Yahoo!, Mashable, and many […]


Lately I’ve become more and more intrigued by Digital Humanities as a subfield/movement/trend/etc. within academia, in large part because the people who are actively driving much of DH are super engaging & welcoming via social networks like Twitter and various blogs. As I am committed to open access publishing, public-facing scholarship, and innovative modes of […]


One of the reasons I most enjoy studying the fan culture side of media studies is that fans can come up with some fascinating stuff, a boggling array of creativity discovered through the contraints provided by the source texts. I document some of the most interesting examples I’ve found in my chapter on “Orienting Paratexts,” […]


It’s time for another chapter of Complex TV to go live on MediaCommons Press—this time, the topic is Transmedia Storytelling. It builds on work I have done in recent years about how television narratives expand into other media, especially around Lost and its ARGs, but very few of the chapter’s ideas have been published elsewhere. As […]


I’m pleased to post the next chapter of Complex TV, focused on the topic of Orienting Paratexts. Here’s the abstract: Along with shifts in the television industry and technologies, viewer practices have adapted to the digital era with new developments in how people consume narrative television. This chapter explores the range of paratexts that have […]


Last week, the TV-themed corners of the Internets were all atwitter around a pair of interviews David Simon gave, first to The New York Times, then to Alan Sepinwall at HitFix. I won’t try to summarize them fully, but I did want to weigh in on one of Simon’s core arguments about the place of episodic criticism. […]