The purpose of this study is to examine particular aspects three web designers use, with regard to layout and content, to effectively create a bilingual or multilingual website that targets Hispanics. In addition, it examines the processes that are used in creating a Spanish-language website. In-depth interviews were conducted with three web designers from top 25 Hispanic-targeted websites, as determined by Hispanic Online. Results indicate a six-step process that web designers should follow when creating a bilingual or multilingual website. Implications for web designers of organizations thinking about creating a bilingual or multilingual website are cited and recommendations for future studies are discussed.

This practicum paper looks at the work of contemporary artists: Char Davies, Jen Southern, Wolfgang Laib, Pierre Huyghe and Max Neuhaus. From examining the artists ideas on perception many links and ideas are drawn out. From this examination the author plays with the idea of perception and the training of the senses. Sound becomes an important element. In the end the author designs a strike walk. The strike walk is focused on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. / October 2008

This paper is intended to serve as a supporting document for the exhibition This Site Is Under Construction that was held at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, University of Waterloo, April 17th – May 14th, 2010. The work explores the ways in which we constitute and mediate our specific place in a space that is constantly changing. It is concerned with notions surrounding how we make and perceive images now in our computerized visual culture and the ways in which we can mark a subjective painting aesthetic and visual vocabulary. The painting installation, “This Site Is Under Construction”, investigates the effects of new media and digitization on experiential perception, and the nature of making and re-configuring images. The title alludes not only to the on-line, virtual space of the computer, but also to the physical spaces of building and urban development sites. The subjects for the paintings are spaces in flux – specific locales of construction and building sites that are in-between states of development – placing emphasis on the mechanized devices that fabricate the new structures. The paintings themselves reveal seemingly spontaneous and optically warped immersive spaces; alternative architectural environments which subvert interpretations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms of visual presentation and recognition. The work aims to contrast outward appearance and illusionistic staging as it relates to both the picture and its support.

The purpose of this study is to examine particular aspects three web designers use, with regard to layout and content, to effectively create a bilingual or multilingual website that targets Hispanics. In addition, it examines the processes that are used in creating a Spanish-language website. In-depth interviews were conducted with three web designers from top 25 Hispanic-targeted websites, as determined by Hispanic Online. Results indicate a six-step process that web designers should follow when creating a bilingual or multilingual website. Implications for web designers of organizations thinking about creating a bilingual or multilingual website are cited and recommendations for future studies are discussed.

Communications scholars recognize two related trends in twenty-first century politics: the rise of information and communications technologies promising major changes in civic participation and a growing disconnection between citizens and their governments. The coexistence of these trends raises some interesting questions about the role of ICTs for enabling new forms of civic participation. How can new technologies better enable civic participation? This report proposes a typology for evaluating online civic participation projects that allows researchers to analyze the goals, designs, and outcomes of particular projects. The typology also incorporates Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation in order to enumerate the relationships between the project’s goals and its outcomes and to provide a flexible model for understanding the democratic conceptualizations manifested in particular projects. The report analyzes three online civic participation projects, highlighting their innovations and discussion their levels of citizen participation. The analyses suggest that a project’s goals, designs and outcomes are related to, and inform, its desired and realized levels of citizen participation. The review also suggests clarifications to Arnstein’s ladder for future use in understanding online civic participation. The report’s evaluative typology can aid in the interpretation of past online civic participation projects and guide the conceptualization and implementation of future projects in order to facilitate the development of more direct connections between citizens and governments and more open and transparent democratic governance structures. / text

This dissertation examines Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” in order to locate an emerging digital rhetoric. That emerging rhetoric is being developed from the bottom up by various rhetors, and it offers rhetoricians a framework for rethinking some of the foundations of the discipline. The discipline has tended to define agency in terms of the conscious rhetor, intellectual property in terms of an author-origin, and community in terms of a shared project that a collective has agreed upon. This dissertation rethinks each of these disciplinary key terms by examining Wikipedia’s hospitable structure, a structure that welcomes writers regardless of identity or credentials. This structure of hospitality troubles the notions that agency can be reduced to consciousness, that texts are easily linked to an owner, or that community is the result of an agreed upon project. In many ways, Wikipedia acts as a microcosm of the various rhetorical collisions that happen to rhetors both online and offline. The proliferation of new media makes for more rhetors and more rhetorical situations, and this requires a complete rethinking of certain portions of rhetorical theory. The theory of hospitality that grounds this project is not utopian—it is instead a full consideration of the complications and perils of welcoming others regardless of identity or credentials. This is a structural hospitality, one that is not necessarily the result of conscious choice. This structure means that Wikipedia is far from a utopia—certain voices are filtered or silenced. But these filters are put up in the face of a hospitable structure that welcomes a broad range of writers, invites colliding interests, allows libelous or inaccurate writings, and encourages an endless chain of citations. The invitations extended by hospitable texts open up difficult questions for rhetoricians: Who is editing this text as I read it? How do we define “community” in such a situation? Who owns this text? “Hospitable Texts” rethinks these questions in light of the Web’s emerging ethical and rhetorical structures. / text

Though a relatively new form of communication technology, the podcast serves as a remediated form of the classical orator—merging the classical practices of oration with current methods of production and delivery. This study draws connections from the historical five canons of rhetoric and current usability studies to build a heuristic for developing and evaluating usable podcast design.

This report attempts to trace a path through my time in higher education, from an undergraduate degree in English to the completion of my Master's degree in Media studies. The report will focus on examining how school has differed from my expectations, and how my difficulties and struggles therein led me through various class models and modes of learning. In the course of retelling the projects and studies I worked on, I will compare different methods of pedagogy, from the typical grad school class to the free-form space of the ACTLab. I close by reflecting on how a report on my own time here at UT might be useful to others unsure of how grad school is supposed to go, much I was when I started out. / text

The purpose of the study was to provide a comprehensive framework that explains how consumer experiences within new, innovative media affect advertising effectiveness. Several concerns about previous advertising models motivated this study. For instance, advertising models traditionally have focused on message recipients’ characteristics and information processes, ignoring the significant role of media in understanding advertising effectiveness. In addition, recently developed advertising models dealing with the impact of media have been narrowly applied to a specific medium, the Internet, and have focused largely on interactivity. The proposed model and our findings highlighted the prominent roles of media novelty and presence in enhancing advertising effectiveness in an innovative, new medium that emphasizes vividness, stereoscopic 3-D. The novelty effect, created by the newness of the medium, had the power to attract viewers’ attention and the increased attention enhanced their sense of presence, the experience of being plunged into a new virtual world that advertisers constructed. The findings demonstrated that these sequential relationships can result in positive measures of advertising effectiveness, such as improved product knowledge and increased enjoyment, and ultimately more favorable attitudes toward the ad. Also our findings revealed that an irritation, such as cybersickness resulting from the stereoscopic 3-D, can hinder ad viewers’ communication processes and reduce their attention to the ad and their enjoyment of it. The model predicted that user characteristics, such as innovativeness, curiosity, and previous experience with the medium, would affect the process, but no effects were found. The current research provided advertising practitioners and researchers with opportunities to consider the significant role of media, especially innovative media, in assessing overall advertising effectiveness. For managers, it highlighted the potential of stereoscopic 3-D technology as an emerging advertising vehicle. Given the rapid changes in the media environment, it is increasingly important to understand the important roles that media play in advertising effectiveness. / text

This dissertation examines new media by taking as its starting point the definition offered by Lev Manovich, "the shift of all culture to computer culture"--new media are new not so much because they have not existed before but because they must adhere to the conventions of a computer. Media, according to Manovich, become programmable, and in their new programmability, along with a host of other implications and repercussions of that programmability, we human beings experience something new. Articulating that something remains no easy chore, and Manovich continually makes his case that "the language of new media" much resembles the language of that older medium, cinema.However, to nod in agreement with Manovich is not the present task; instead, I take Manovich and place his notion of new media in direct dialogue with rhetorical theorists Aristotle, Plato, Kenneth Burke, Barry Brummett, Jeffery Walker, Michel Foucault, and other writers and thinkers in order to pursue a portion of that "shift of all culture": I ask, "If new media has a language, what is the poetics of that language?" In order to pursue an answer to this question, I take individual new media objects--the film Saving Private Ryan; the video game Medal of Honor: Frontline; the computer worm MyDoom; the media coverage of the 1996 presidential campaign trail, including the "Dean Scream"; the SanDisk's cooperation with the Alzheimer's Association's "Take Action against Alzheimer's" campaign; the film The Manchurian Candidate; and the modern database--and analyze how they make meaning. In order to do this, I frequently reach back into antiquity, specifically into the early and predisciplinary areas of philosophy, rhetoric, and poetics.