Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-181) and index. / Transmedia narratives use a combination of Barthesian hermeneutic codes, negative capability and migratory cues to guide audiences across multiple media platforms. This thesis examines complex narratives from comics, novels, films and video games, but draws upon the transmedia franchises built around Jim Henson's Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal to provide two primary case studies in how these techniques can be deployed with varying results. By paying close attention to staying in canon, building an open world, maintaining a consistent tone across extensions, carefully deciding when to begin building a transmedia franchise, addressing open questions while posing new ones, and looking for ways to help audiences keep track of how each extension relates to each other, transmedia storytellers can weave complex narratives that will prove rewarding to audiences, academics and producers alike. / by Geoffrey A. Long. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-68). / This paper addresses the changes in cartography since digitization and widespread popular dissemination. Cybercartography, an emergent system of maps, mapmaking tools, and mapmakers, forces a rethinking of spatial representations. The implicit distinction in digital media enables a new type of map user or neo-geographer that creates layers of expressions based on subjective experience. This paper argues that the neo-geographer signifies a new cartographic behavior that affords a complex subjectivity. This behavior is further exhibited in the practice of navigable maps and virtual globes which lead the way to a paradigmatic change in the way we represent and interact with space. It is divided into three parts: Part I addresses the role of digitization in maps and lays out framework and vocabulary. Part II examines layers of spatial representations in historical context. Part III opens room for future study in the quickly developing inhabitable cartographic spaces of virtual globes and virtual worlds. / by Amanda Finkelberg. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / This work examines how images of disability are used to frame cultural narratives regarding technology. As advances in biotechnology ensure that more people will be living with technological prosthetics against and beneath their skin, there is an increasing importance in examining how such bodies challenge traditional cultural attitudes regarding identity and non-normative bodies. This work uses a cultural studies approach to explore the intersections between disability and technology. Additionally, memoir is often included to illustrate some of the complexities regarding how experiences with disability and technological prosthetics can influence aspects of identity. Like disability, technology is often framed in gothic terms of lack or excess, and thus a discussion of the "techno-gothic" also features in this work. Furthermore, such a discussion is also relevant to seemingly unrelated modes of characterizing the other, such as the archetype of the cyborg, the queer body, or the formation of non-traditional social groups, even to images of the city as urban ruin. / (cont.) This work demonstrates that, while images of disability rarely inform us about the everyday experience of disability, they can inform us about how technology frames non-normative bodies as either "less than" or "more than" human, and how the tropes and language associated with disability is often used to characterize technology itself. / by Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-156). Filmography: p. 157. / In addition to being a keyfigure in the history of filmmaking, Orson Welles was an original theatre director and radio performer and producer. The aim of this thesis is to study Welles' achievements and failures in theatre, radio and film, as well as comparing his craft and techniques in each medium during his early career. Welles' adaptations of Shakespeare will provide the guiding thread of this intermedial exploration. Close reading of these texts will show the recurrence of intermediality in Welles' work, namely, the way techniques from one medium feed into the other two. Borrowing conventions and devices that are proper to other media and importing them into a target medium is his basic innovative strategy. This use of intermediality brings about innovative effects that favour agile and gripping storytelling, though it can also hamper the understanding of the piece. / by Clara Fernández-Vara. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70). / This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which interactive features in the virtual space can be developed to complement physical museum exhibitions, as well as create opportunities for museums to reach broader audiences. I provide a critical analysis of current online museum exhibition features and how they support museum curatorial missions. As a case study, I describe from the viewpoint of a participant/observer, the design and development of the Web site for the exhibition Pattern Language: Clothing as Communicator at Art Interactive. / by Moneta Kwok-Ching Ho. / S.M.

This thesis responds to a question: if the Western mainstream superhero genre is so radical then why does it feel so reactionary in practice? The framing of this distinctive question points to the genre's ideologically unstable and contradictory meaningscape. Genre meaning is polysemous and shaped by official and unofficial meaning-makers, and yet, it routinely falls into duality. The genre tells, and facilitates, an astonishingly seamless tale of opposing ideologies. But, how? This thesis, innovatively maps this untheorised ideological divergence through three fronts: transformation, representation, and worldmaking. It is sited outside the conventional parameters of genre discourse and knowledge production. It makes several contributions to knowledge, as indicated below, and introduces some new terms and tools. It demonstrates, for instance, the value in reconceoptialising the concept of escape as 'e-scape' and worldmaking as 'world-un/making'. It asserts that genre meaning (and our perception of transformation) is shaped by a nexus of divergent forces: concept (how we think about it), representation (how we show/see it), and practice (how we do it). It draws the idea of 'promise' from Haraway (1992) and Cohen (2012) and institutes the idea that superheroes, as well as monsters, possess 'promise' (radical or otherwise). It reveals superheroic transformation as an omnipresent source of radicalism. It goes on to identify and theorise a disconnect between the (radical) concept of a superhero and its mainstream representation (conservative). It asserts that even though portraying transforming figures, superhero representation stays firmly within hegemonic lines, and it concludes that the radicalism of transformation, and superheroes, is lost in the telling. But it does not stop there; to do so would be to mark an area of the genre's meaning-map, 'Here Be Monsters'. Fans and audiences, particularly minority fans, are the final, critical, worldmaking element of this thesis. Whilst the genre talks about fantastic transformations, transgressive minority superhero fans perform them. This thesis illuminates continuing minority engagement with a beloved, but exclusionary and often hostile, genre. It reconceptualises this transgressive mode of textual engagement as a form of textual escapology, or 'texcapology'; a practice that not only keeps the genre 'alive' for excluded audiences and fans, but aids the recovery of the genre's lost radical promise. Theorising the genre's multivocal meaningscape allows the assertion that genre meaning is promissory rather than binary. This thesis asserts that genre meaning is a case of 'both/and' (radical and conservative) rather than 'either/or'. It concludes that the genre's unstable and contradictory meaningscape is itself a site of radical promise.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [133]-[150]). / Media policy in the United States has, since its inception, been governed by the principle that infrastructure providers should serve "the public interest." The Federal Communications Commission has traditionally been charged with enforcing various obligations on businesses under this principle. Policymakers have developed different regimes for different media, but these distinctions no longer make sense in a technologically converged environment. This study draws upon the historical origins of the principle in order to inform contemporary debates in communication policy. It recovers some of the normative meaning behind "the public interest" phrase, and identifies the several dimensions in which it remains relevant today. The thesis argues that universal access, platform innovation, and general-purpose technologies should inform network-aware media policy. / by Stephen James Schultze. / S.M.

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This dissertation investigates undersea cinema from its origins to the present. Addressing a range of documentaries, narrative fiction films, and sound recordings made undersea, this project emphasizes ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of ocean exploration, conquest, and conservation—contexts from which undersea films cannot be extricated. For over a century, undersea films have brought the distant world of the deep up close to the eyes and ears of a broad public; they have been a major influence on popular understanding of the ocean, which today is of great environmental significance and a powerful symbol of a fragile global ecology. This project aims to show how the ocean as a cinematic site of ecological consciousness is, as a condition of its production, intimately linked to environmentally unfriendly histories of technology. The often-dazzling images of marine life shown on film can increase viewers’ sensitivity to the other forms of life with which they share the planet. At the same time, producing these images has historically relied on exploratory technologies built for the purpose of better exploiting the marine environment economically and militarily. This contradiction between films’ meanings and their conditions of possibility is not limited to ocean cinema; it characterizes a wide range of environmental films. By focusing on ocean cinema, a particularly rich case of unseen worlds, environmental consciousness, and destructive techno-scientific commitments coming together, this dissertation aims to illuminate a tension that pervades environmental cinema in general.

This dissertation argues that a critical anti-war cinema emerged with the birth of the so-called war documentary during World War I. Focusing on Leon Caverly, the first official war cinematographer of the United States military, I that argue America’s first war propaganda films gave birth to America’s first anti-war cinema. Military-produced images of World War I are available in various archives such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Marine Corps History Center. In addition to unedited reels of war related footage, the archives hold propaganda films such as Pershing’s Crusaders (1918), America’s Answer (1918) and Under Four Flags (1918). These feature films were shot by cameramen in the Marines or the Signal Corps and then edited into works of propaganda by the United States Government’s Committee on Public Information. Caverly was the first cameraman to join the effort of filming at the front. While he was a Marine and an instrumental player in America’s propaganda program, he also completed a cinematic history of the Great War through his creative nonfiction camerawork that was more subtle and critical than conventional war documentaries would suggest. Previous studies of World War I propaganda provide context for America’s cinematic efforts or profiles of individual cameramen. But little or no attention has been paid to formal analysis of the films themselves. Furthermore, scholars have not yet regarded these films as anything other than examples of early documentary or government propaganda. The same holds true concerning Leon Caverly. Not only was Caverly the first United States war cinematographer, but the most significant work of propaganda made during the war was composed of footage shot entirely by him. Released in 1918, America’s Answer captivated audiences in America and Europe, providing inspiration for the home front to support the war. However, a striking discrepancy exists between the content of Caverly’s shots and the rhetorical editing structure of the film. In contrast to the pro-war sentiment articulated by the editing and its intertitles, America’s Answer’s individual shots reveal a practice of camera-writing that represents an aesthetics of anti-war cinema at odds with pro-war propaganda. Caverly’s work does not show the horrors of war with documentary realism. Nor does his work openly critique America’s war effort. Rather, Caverly aspires to be a camera-historian whose moving images and photographic work demonstrate a preoccupation with writing history steeped in the temporal aesthetics of the camera arts. This dissertation considers still and moving image practices that “write with time” such as double-exposures, shots that emphasize duration, moving camera shots that evoke temporal relationships, and framing that gives metaphorical expression to time. The fact that these practices appear in Caverly’s wartime work indicates that World War I footage has a greater significance for film history than simply exemplifying documentary realism or propaganda. This dissertation shows that, while the most harrowing aspects of World War I combat remain unseen in Caverly’s work, his creative camera-writing approaches war and the fragility of life in unconventional ways.