In recent years a number of important studies have emerged that focus on the lives of the human agents who operated in the early-modern book trade. This marks a scholarly shift away from the technologies of book production towards the figures who operated, profited from, and helped to shape, print technologies and their related products. In this critical movement the identities of printers, publishers, and booksellers have come to matter, both in terms of our understanding of what constitutes ‘print culture,’ and in efforts to narrativise the history of the book. However, although scholars have become increasingly familiar with a critical vocabulary that links early-modern print with textual transience, and the archive with paradigms associated with absence, disputation, and authenticity, biographies related to the lives of book-trade professionals have tended to privilege the representational stability of the documentary evidence we use to reconstruct past lives. This thesis aims to address this critical vacuum by analysing the life and career of one highly controversial, although critically neglected, 17th-century printer, Henry Hills (c. 1625-1688/9). By drawing together methodologies associated with bibliography, the history of the book, and the study of literatures, the thesis seeks to self-reflexively respond to the absences, doublings, missing or fabricated texts, revisions, accretions, and amendments that seem to mark, and have come to shape, the story of Hills’ life. Theories and approaches associated with the materiality of early-modern lives, critical biography, and the archive are used to fully explore the way Hills functioned both in his own time and after as a metonymic figure who has been actively written and rewritten with different historically specific agendas in mind. Ideas of elusiveness, how his contemporaries struggled to represent Hills, and the problem of locating him in the documentary evidence, are also investigated. In the process this thesis casts new light not only on Hills but on the 17th-century printing trade and the printer as a cultural emblem, 17th-century history and culture, and the way we research lives in the early modern period. Each of the chapters of this thesis discusses archival sources that critical biography and bibliography have traditionally looked to for biographical details of Hills’ life. These include a Particular Baptist confession-cum-conversion account entitled The Prodigal Returned, said to have been composed by Hills in 1651 while he served a prison sentence in the Fleet for adultery. I also discuss three accounts of Hills’ high-profile conversion to Catholicism in the mid-1680s, which were authored between 1684 and 1733. The thesis provides a detailed analysis of a conspiracy story, first published in 1697, which posthumously cast Hills as a key player in a bibliographical scandal that is said to have taken place in 1649. I also pay close attention to Hills’ last will and testament, a document that spawned a number of very public legal contestations amongst members of the Hills family. Through a close, historicised reading of these materials, this thesis adds new discussions of the way in which Hills was read and contested by his contemporaries, later historians, and bibliographers, and throughout I retain a sense of the highly mediated nature of the evidence we use to reconstruct Hills biographically, while stressing his importance in the cultural imagination of the period.

In my photographic work, I contrast natural and man-made objects abstracted by manipulation of scale. Details of the objects are blown up to proportions larger than life. By distorting the scale, I aim to allow the audience to view the image out of context, enabling the viewer to see it for its aesthetic value rather than the object's functional purpose.

Today, both the way a story is told and how long the viewer's attention can be held are often as important as the story itself. This study shows how online media sets new standards for narrative and continues some print traditions. This study focuses on the dialogue between print and online media. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of this dialogue through story length, readability, shovelware and story packaging shows the numerous effects the Internet has had on news media content.

The first developmental stages of advertising in traditional media Jakub Kesl Abstract Diploma thesis "The first developmental stages of advertising in traditional media" deals with the commercial use of media in its first forms and handles the evolution of advertising communication in conjunction with the development of media. Traditional media - print, radio and television in the period starting with emergence of these media until the point of establishment of advertising as their more or less apparent part were selected as a purpose of this study. This thesis tries to answer following questions:  How did the advertising in traditional media in the first moments of its existence form and evolve?  How did the first developmental stages of media advertising look like?  What was the reaction of the audience to new forms of media advertising?  How did enter of advertising into the media influence them and their contents or how did the media influence the ads? Attention is paid to forms of impact of advertising to media and their contents and forms of impact of media on advertising, and describes the types and forms of commercial messages in traditional media in its infancy. The work is primarily concerned with the first stages of development of advertising in the countries, where the development of print,...

TITLE: Phenomenon of disability and its image in the print media AUTHOR: Lenka Opočenská DEPARTMENT: Department of Special Education SUPERVISOR: Mgr. Lenka Felcmanová ABSTRACT: The thesis "The phenomenon of disability and its image in the print media" aims to find out how periodicals framed chosen topic of disabilities in one year. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with the typology of models of disability and the definition of disability from different perspectives. The third chapter provides an overview of how the media shape the attitudes of society. The research section concentrates on how the media has framed newspaper articles and whether terminology changes were reflected in the media. KEYWORDS: Disability, models of disability, attitudes, framing, print media

The Diploma Thesis named Social and Political Role of the Revue Parliament (1921-1936) and its Position on the Media Market during the First Republic in Czechoslovakia describes the role of the revue Parliament on the media market in the First Republic in Czechoslovakia. It introduces the period of the First Republic as time of alignment and stabilization of the new country based on democratic principles which were mirrored also in the then media creation. That was characterized by extensive diversity although having been subject to a censorship - in which numerous journals with various specializations and ideological values were finding their place. The Parliament, which I focused on, was significant by being published in the homonymous institution and specialized primarily in sociopolitical topics. It is obvious from its content that it set itself the task to defend an independent position of the republic and to introduce the public to its law and political culture. Whereas the lack of materials about the journal I decided to define it completely. Primarily I used the journal itself and archival materials of the National Archives. I focused on figures who were creating this journal, on the frequence of its publishing, organization and financial matters and especially on the analysis of its...

While news media coverage of political protest is by no means a new topic of research for media scholars, few studies have attempted to unpack how and why protesters and protests have been legitimised within news media coverage, rather than covered with the expectation of violence occurring (Halloran et al. 1970), marginalised (Gitlin 1980), cast as threats to the social order (McLeod 1995), or denied the status of legitimate political players (Shoemaker 1984). This research project is an attempt to do just that. Therefore, this dissertation examines whether newspapers from the United Kingdom and United States accorded the opposition movement against then president Hosni Mubarak with favourable news coverage during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. A content analysis of 611 newspaper articles from both British and American publications was conducted to determine whether the anti-Mubarak opposition was covered favourably, in addition to revealing what other dominant themes were present within the reporting. This study revealed that the anti-Mubarak opposition protesters were covered favourably by an overwhelming margin within both British (65 percent) and American (66 percent) newspaper articles, and put a particular emphasis on the political motivations galvanising the protests. Conversely, then-president Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian government, and the Egyptian police and security services were portrayed as repressive actors within the reporting on the revolution. Furthermore, the anti-Mubarak opposition was featured most frequently as the first source within the reporting from either nation's newspapers. Another dominant theme emerging from the content analysis, and that was subsequently examined within the empirical chapters of this project, was that geopolitical considerations were frequently included within coverage from both British (60 percent) and American (76 percent) newspapers. Few studies have attempted to assess the prominence and role of geopolitics within the reporting of international politics (Myers et al. 1996). In summation, this research project questions the normative assumptions made about the relationship between the news media and protesters being antagonistic, and to understand how and why protest is granted legitimacy within media coverage of political crises.

Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a professional scientific and medical community was coming into being. Exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere became important elements in the consolidation of scientific authority. Studies exploring Victorian scientific authority have tended to focus on professional journals and organs of middle-class culture; this thesis takes a new approach in exploring how this authority is reflected and negotiated across the content of the popular mass-market periodicals which provided leisure reading for working- and lower-class men and women. It uses as examples Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Reynolds's Miscellany and the Family Herald. The readers of these publications were consumers of scientific information, participants in popularised science and beneficiaries and subjects of new research, but were increasingly excluded from the formal processes of developing scientific theory and practice. Examining representations of anatomy and of mesmerism, health advice and theories of class and gender, the thesis argues for an expanded understanding of mass-market periodicals as communicators of scientific ideas, showing how such material widely informs the content of these publications from fiction to jokes to full-length factual articles. However, the role of the periodicals is much wider than simply the transmission of received ideas, and the thesis reveals a plurality of positions with regard to science and medicine within the popular press. The periodicals engage with modern science in complex and varied ways, accepting, modifying and challenging scientific theories and methods from different positions. The form of the periodical is key, presenting multiple sources of knowledge and ways in which readers may be invited to respond. Chambers's broad support for scientific progress is informed by its useful knowledge identity but tempered by its founding editor's own ambivalent relationship to the scientific establishment. The Herald, influenced by both the periodical's commercial character and its editor's adherence to a spiritual, anti-materialist view of existence, is strongly resistant to modern science, while Reynolds's incorporates it alongside other forms of knowledge in its aim to educate, entertain and empower readers from a socialist perspective.

Cette thèse traite de la question de l’authenticité des photographies d’identité, partie intégrante des documents nécessaires lors d’un contrôle d’accès. Alors que les moyens de reproduction sophistiqués sont accessibles au grand public, de nouvelles méthodes / techniques doivent empêcher toute falsification / reproduction non autorisée de la photographie d’identité. Cette thèse propose une méthode de hachage pour l’authentification de photographies d’identité, robuste à l’impression-lecture. Ce travail met ainsi l’accent sur les effets de la numérisation au niveau de hachage. L’algorithme mis au point procède à une réduction de dimension, basée sur l’analyse en composantes indépendantes (ICA). Dans la phase d’apprentissage, le sous-espace de projection est obtenu en appliquant l’ICA puis réduit selon une stratégie de sélection entropique originale. Dans l’étape d’extraction, les coefficients obtenus après projection de l’image d’identité sur le sous-espace sont quantifiés et binarisés pour obtenir la valeur de hachage. L’étude révèle les effets du bruit de balayage intervenant lors de la numérisation des photographies d’identité sur les valeurs de hachage et montre que la méthode proposée est robuste à l’attaque d’impression-lecture. L’approche suivie en se focalisant sur le hachage robuste d’une classe restreinte d’images (d’identité) se distingue des approches classiques qui adressent une image quelconque / This thesis addresses the question of the authenticity of identity photographs, part of the documents required in controlled access. Since sophisticated means of reproduction are publicly available, new methods / techniques should prevent tampering and unauthorized reproduction of the photograph. This thesis proposes a hashing method for the authentication of the identity photographs, robust to print-and-scan. This study focuses also on the effects of digitization at hash level. The developed algorithm performs a dimension reduction, based on independent component analysis (ICA). In the learning stage, the subspace projection is obtained by applying ICA and then reduced according to an original entropic selection strategy. In the extraction stage, the coefficients obtained after projecting the identity image on the subspace are quantified and binarized to obtain the hash value. The study reveals the effects of the scanning noise on the hash values of the identity photographs and shows that the proposed method is robust to the print-and-scan attack. The approach focusing on robust hashing of a restricted class of images (identity) differs from classical approaches that address any image

Refugee adult language learners in the United States need alphabetic print literacy in English in order to successfully integrate into their adoptive societies and find meaningful employment. Accurate spelling and word recognition are important for completing forms about medical history, school paperwork, job applications, and social benefits. To aid in their integration, adult refugees are often enrolled in English courses targeted to those with low levels of education and alphabetic print literacy. However, many leave without having achieved a level of print literacy necessary for economic or social purposes. Current teaching approaches for alphabetic print literacy are either social- (Bigelow & Vinogradov, 2011) or skills-based (Burt, Peyton,& Adams, 2003; Haverson & Haynes, 1982) approaches. They are ineffective for meeting student learning needs within the six-month time frame for self-sufficiency imposed by U.S. refugee resettlement (U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, 2015). The purpose of this project was to see if using two principles of implicit learning: variability and complexity, would help low literate refugee English learners enrolled in English classes to accurately spell and perceive words in their curriculum. Specifically, the use of high variability visual input was contrasted with high and low linguistic complexity. Stimuli with high visual variability and low linguistic complexity proved the right combination for successful word learning for this population.