<p>“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs. </p><p> I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.</p><p> In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.</p><p> Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.</p><p> These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.</p> / Dissertation

U.S. advertisers spent over $2 billion on sporting events in 2014 directing advertisements towards consumers through digital devices used such as televisions, computers, smartphones, and tablets. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to identify motivation factors that predict the intention to view sports content on digital devices. Knowing such factors is important for advertisers to prioritize distribution channels. Uses and gratification theory formed the theoretical framework for the study. The methodology adapted a survey that encapsulated 9 motives. The research questions examined what motives influenced sports viewership, what motives predicted the intention to view specific sports content, and the differences in viewing intention across sports content types. Data were collected through a survey administered to a qualified random sample of U.S. respondents with 525 responses received. Data were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis to group the questions into motivation factors, multiple linear regression to determine the significance of these factors in predicting viewership intent, and nonparametric Friedman testing to determine what demographics influenced viewership. Findings included: (a) 8 factors explained 76% of the variance; (b) 8 motives were significant in predicting viewership intention, with Escape (β = .714) ranking the highest; and (c) younger viewers had a greater intent to consume content on digital devices other than television, with smartphones (M = .73) ranking the highest. Social change benefits include: (a) sports content providers and advertisers could target the right content and advertisement to maximize viewership retention and revenue, and (b) users could view their desired sports content on their chosen device.

The growth of YouTube has resulted in the industrialization of a platform that redefines mainstream success. Success measures such as endorsements and viewership are serving as motivational factors for YouTubers. YouTubers and brands want more views, but are those motivations effecting perception? While much research has focused on the effects that YouTube has on the brand, this study focuses on the effects that the brand has on the YouTuber. It also determines whether viewership affects YouTuber perception and whether it‟s a success measure worth using. Using the constructs of the source credibility theory, this study assessed the main effect of brand endorsement and viewership on perceived expertise and trustworthiness of YouTubers. After conducting an online experiment, findings suggest that non-brand endorsed YouTubers possess higher-rated expertise and trustworthiness. While viewership did not make a difference in perceived expertise, it did result in higher-rated trustworthiness when a YouTuber possesses lower viewership.

This work represents the research of television audience of news programs in Czech Republic during the years 2008 to 2013 in order to capture the possible preference for specific viewers areas of economic events, or information. For the needs of econometric time-series analysis is assembled basic model, which is individually applied to a total of five time series of news programs. Econometric estimates suggest that key events increasing viewership of Czech news programs are riots and demonstrations in the territory of Czech Republic, with a positive effect on the ratings of up to 4.1%, or home catastrophic events that increase viewership up by 4.6%. The world macroeconomic events showed the negative effect of up to 2.4% for viewership of television news.

Spurred by the rapid influence of social media in the news industry, an increased number of TV news stations have started assigning dedicated social media journalists (SMJ) in newsrooms to monitor, gather, verify, share news, and engage with audiences on the streams of social media. Consequently, drawing on the diffusion of innovation theory, the present study probes into TV journalists’ perceptions of the implications of the role of this new type of TV professionals in the identity and profession of journalism, the quality of news pertaining to the verification of misinformation, and the news audiences’ attractions and viewership by capitalizing on audience engagement affordances. Moreover, based on an online survey delivered primarily via LinkedIn to a broad spectrum of TV journalists consisting of broadcast, website, and social media journalists in three varied regions of the world—the U.S, Western Europe, and the Middle East—the study demonstrates some concerns about the effects on the code of ethics of journalism. However, most of the surveyed journalists believed that the role of social media journalists SMJ is consistent with the general principles tethered to the professional identity of journalists. Additionally, the study underlines the weight of this role to verify information gleaned from social media before being used in TV news and asserts the significance of engaging with TV audiences to increase the news viewership and enhance their attractions. Accordingly, the study argues that espousing the role of SMJ has become an inevitable fashion in social media-embedded newsrooms. However, the research documents that many TV news channels have broadcast misinformation spread on social media. Furthermore, it unfolds that far less attention has been paid in many TV newsrooms to the potentially positive and beneficial utility of the role of SMJ concerning audience engagement. It signals that a lack of time, tools, strategy, and training causes the dilution of the role quality of SMJ, thereby suggesting that news channels can aggressively tap into this role if these obstacles are conquered. Finally, since research on this concern is still scant at its initial stage, the study shows some venues for future studies in this direction.

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The problem of this research is to discover viewer response to the television series, "Roots," as revealed through newspapers and magazines published from December, 1976, to June 20, 1977. Thirty-seven articles and 134 interviewee responses were analyzed. The responses with the highest frequency of occurrence in the sample provided eight major categories (listed in the order of highest to lowest frequency of response): inaccuracy/oversimplification, increased awareness, future race relations, white guilt, black anger, future prime time television programming, black pride, and sadness. The predominant appeal of "Roots" was to the emotions of the viewers. Despite the criticism of inaccuracy and/or oversimplification, "Roots" was a timely presentation relating to a current social concern with justice and heritage.

The main topic of this thesis is the functioning of the public service media, especially public service television broadcasters. After general definitions of the basic terms associated with this topic, the thesis highlights the differences between the media in the private and the public sectors, and characterizes the public service media in the previously selected European countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic. The choice of these particular states was based on their different economic, political and media systems. The history, the development and the crisis of the Greek public service media are subjected to a thorough analysis. Regarding the inclusion of the historical context the thesis moves onto the crisis which occurred in June 2013 due to inconsistent government interferences in the media field, which led to a suspension of the transmission of the Greek public broadcaster ERT. The practical part is dedicated to a detailed analysis of the viewership of the Greek television, focusing on the period before, during and after the crisis had occurred. The main objective of the thesis is to point out whether the government interferences had influenced the viewership of the Greek television.

With the rising popularity of Mary's mother, St. Anne, Birth of the Virgin images proliferated at the beginning of the sixteenth century. However, these images have not been analyzed in great depth by any previous art historical scholarship. This thesis indicates the broader significance of these images by considering Birth of the Virgin compositions by Jan de Beer, Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, and Adriaen van Overbeke. First, this thesis considers how these artists derived iconography from Robert Campin to connect Mary's nativity to the birth of her son. Thus, the artists invite the viewer to witness the significance and purity of both babies. Next, I argue that the sacrificial imagery of these panels cultivates a sacerdotal space, in which midwives become pseudo-priests and everyday objects are conflated with ritual material culture. These panels, which draw upon Old and New Testament covenants, present Mary as co-sacrifice, indicating a sixteenth-century expansion of the Virgin's co-redemptive role alongside Christ. The paintings emphasize the beginnings of the Virgin's life to explore the life-giving quality of mankind's redemption. Finally, I explore the viewership possibilities of these paintings for a lay audience, who could interpret their own experiences with birth through these images. Many of the objects in the artworks bear similarities not only to priestly objects but also to the material culture associated with birth. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the important role that Birth of the Virgin images played in interpreting the role of the Virgin Mary and her mother Anne in increasingly affective piety. The subject matter was a way to explore the doctrinal implications of Mary's sacrificial, life-giving power even as it invited viewers to frame their own day-to-day experiences with childbirth in more religious terms.

Today, the video game industry is larger than the sports and film industries combined, and the largest streaming platform Twitch with an average of 2.8 million concurrent viewers offers the possibility for gaming and non-gaming brands to market their products. Estimating streamers’ viewership is central in these marketing campaigns, but no large-scale studies have been conducted to predict viewership previously. This paper evaluates three different machine learning algorithms with regard to the three different error metrics MAE, MAPE and RMSE; and presents novel features for predicting viewership. Different models are chosen through recursive feature elimination using k-fold cross-validation with respect to both MAE and MAPE separately. The models are evaluated on an independent test and show promising results, on par with manual expert predictions. None of the models can be said to be significantly better than another. XGBoost optimized for MAPE obtained the lowest MAE error score of 282.54 and lowest MAPE error score of 41.36% on the test set, in comparison to expert predictions with 288.06 MAE and 83.05% MAPE. Furthermore, the study illustrates the importance of past viewership and streamer variety to predict future viewership.