When one thinks of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, fear and horror are not terms normally associated with this iconic American cartoon character; however, the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine turns animated bodies (cartoons) into bodies the player fears. In this game family friendly cartoon characters are transformed into figures of fear. Furthermore, Bendy and the Ink Machine does this by making the bending of Black bodies visible through what I call the gameic gaze. The transformation from family friendly into fear happens through the resistive gaze, the gameic gaze, which lingers on the bending of the diegetic cartoons. Bendy and the Ink Machine actualizes the historical contorting of the Black body starting in slavery and continued by the entertainment industry through bending. Bending and the Ink Machine makes the minstrel origins of cartoons visible through the gameic gaze.

American Sign Language (ASL) has grown to be the 3rd largest enrolled secondary language course in the United States, and colleges and universities seek to identify effective assessment methods for this visual-based language. Although much research exists on sign language e-learning programs, asynchronous video feedback, and sign recognition software, very few studies have been conducted on using technology to as a method of assessment for sign language courses. The purpose of this hermeneutical, phenomenological, qualitative study was to document the lived experiences of students using the electronic assessment tool, GoReact, in courses. The conceptual framework was guided by engagement theory to address the student creation of sign language videos and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning to address the effectiveness of instructor-created assessment videos. Study participants were 6 students enrolled at a state college in the southeastern United States. Data were collected through interviews with ASL students in the semester before completing their associate degrees and analyzed using inductive coding analysis. Participants highlighted intuitiveness and customizability as positive perceptions of assignment completion, and video-based feedback from instructors as a positive feature of GoReact. Participants' negative perceptions included technical issues and low-quality stimuli, and inconsistencies in instructors' use of the tools. The findings of this study can influence positive social change by exploring the use of GoReact to improve the assessment and education of ASL interpreter students to better serve the deaf and people with hearing disabilities.

MyFoundationsLab (MFL) was implemented to complement math instruction and increase student performance in developmental/transitional algebra courses. However, student learning outcomes at the college under study demonstrated that some students were still unsuccessful in passing their math course (i.e., Summer 2015:30%, Fall 2015: 27.2%, Spring 2016: 41.6%). The problem addressed in this study explored the learning experiences of students, via a faculty lens, who were unsuccessful in their math course instructionally supported by MFL. Bandura's theory of reciprocal determinism, the technology acceptance model, and the ARCS model of motivational design were used in this qualitative case study to examine the perceptions of 4 faculty regarding student experiences with MFL; faculty were selected through purposeful sampling. The research question explored faculty perceptions of students who failed math while using MFL in addition to the overall learning experiences of students in using the learning system. The major themes that resulted from data analysis through semistructured interviews were student challenges with technology, learning barriers that students experienced, and faculty teaching influences. The emerging project was a faculty professional development seminar emphasizing teaching strategies that supported MFL instruction and faculty in-class teaching. The findings of the study can positively impact social change through affording students positive learning experiences that encourage them to persist in college and ultimately contribute to the economic growth of their communities.

This is a critical history of how film criticism and theory have engaged with the issue of race and ethnicity, carried out from a historical materialist position – adopting the Neo-Marxian orthodoxy of Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson, and a concern with class politics. Those theories are used to question the postmodern and poststructuralist assumptions that connect race-related film criticism, racial discourse and racial politics, with a view to better serve the field’s political objectives. Criticism promises to deliver – via the intermediate desire for cultural democracy in the mass media – on the ultimate promise of social justice. How well is that battle being fought? Tracking the development of the field’s different theoretical models, this project examines how each of them defines the ideological function of films. Racerelated film criticism can be divided into First and Second generations, distinct in how each understands cinematic racism to operate through different theories of textual operations. First Generation theory consists of positive image analyses and stereotype studies, but Second Generation scholarship eschews its empiricism, incorporating paradigms of discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Within the field’s progression, theoretical contradictions exist which induce a move towards historical materialism and class-based analysis. Among them is the continued assumption of an autonomous subject in the tradition of Western humanism, which runs counter to the social constructivism and notion of split subjectivities inherent in postmodern theory. By connecting that subject to the authentic, critical and unified subject posited in Adorno and Jameson’s writings about cinema, I argue for historical materialism and considerations of the Culture Industry as the means to study mass media and racial ideology. The final theory section proffers a re-reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and demonstrates how film and media studies have misappropriated it as a poststructuralist theory, when he is actually more in line with the Frankfurt School. The case study examines how the star discourse of actor Keanu Reeves, whose ethnic ambiguity is often attributed to his inscrutable persona and a diagnosis of postmodern symptoms. That view overlooks a unified, modernist subjectivity on Reeves’s part.

Mediating the Mill: Steel Production in Film counters opinions by film scholars and critics who often see films that represent steel production and its spaces as failed aesthetic projects or as dull propaganda or educational films, and who undervalue the importance of the specificity of the steel mills and the industry represented in them. It argues that such films are aesthetically and historically rich texts for film and history, but that they can only be interpreted as such when their historical and industrial specificity is returned to or brought alongside the film texts. Using the work of Siegfried Kracauer and film and history scholars, it argues that such films can be read as artifacts of collectively held understandings, imaginings, and affects. In particular, it argues that films representing steel production provide unique insight into collectively held responses to macroeconomic events in the 20th century--from monopoly capital's consolidation and the introduction of Fordism and Taylorism, to the Keynesian compromise, to the Cold War "consensus," to the breakdown of Fordism and introduction of global overproduction, and finally to neoliberalism. Using the work of Frederic Jameson, it interprets these films as cognitive maps of steel production from subjective position within antagonisms of class and economic control. Indeed, it argues that 20th century steel production was a subject uniquely able to bring forth cognitive maps, due to the difficulty of representing it as a coherent industrial process. When filmmakers "mapped" the process, they created cognitive (and affective) maps that tell us more about the provisional acts of representation, and what drives and informs them, than about what or who is represented. Finally, it argues that this cognitive and affective work can only be grasped by close attention to the films' aesthetics, which always also allows for `suggestive indeterminacy' and polyvalent readings, especially due to the striking material world made spectacular on film. This examination of steel production in film also expands the category of industrial film to include documentaries, animated educational films, experimental films, and popular fiction films. As such, this dissertation is made up of case studies of four sets of films of steel production and its spaces. The first set, state-sponsored social documentaries of the 1930s, includes films by Joris Ivens, Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, and Willard Van Dyke and considers how these filmmakers differently imagined the state's role in steel production in this period. The second, mid-twentieth-century sponsored films, includes films made for US Steel and other steel firms from the 1930s through 1960s, and places these films into the context of public relations as an attempt to shape how workers and the public viewed corporate interests. The third, experimental films of the 1970s, focuses on films by Hollis Frampton and Richard Serra that consider the difficulties of connecting the film artist's perspective with that of the steel worker as the western steel industry began to draw down its workforce and as economic change split the middle class. The concluding chapter examines popular dystopian Hollywood films of the late twentieth century as part of a broader shift in the US to a neoliberal economy that left little room for workers. Despite the breadth of my chapters, this dissertation draws on the work of Walter Benjamin in understanding catastrophe as the line connecting the chapters, but also in following the potential when a mass art turned its attention to the massed workers and mass spectacles of steel production.

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Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 82-84). / How different, in a precise sense, is The New York Times from Fox News? Or - Fox from NPR, NPR from CNN, CNN from Breitbart? If we think of news organizations as producers of language, as "speakers" - how similar or different are the voices? This question of the distance between news sources is fundamental to concerns about fragmentation and polarization in the news ecosystem. A number of studies have measured the proximity between outlets in terms of overlap at the level of audience, and then defined content-level differences in terms of the underlying audience composition - for example, the fraction of the readership who have shared content from particular political candidates. The "content graph" of the news ecosystem - the set of similarities and differences at the level of the actual coverage - is often assumed to be tightly linked to the "audience graph"; and the two are even defined in terms of each other. / How exactly do these two systems interact, though? In many ways, our knowledge of the content graph is less precise than knowledge about the audience graph, which in some ways is simpler to measure. A rich line of work has studied the coverage of specific issues in news content, and recent work has started to systematically survey the content produced by a range of outlets, often by way of unsupervised approaches that characterize differences at the level of topic. Building on this, I attempt to precisely quantify the relative similarities among major media organizations from a standpoint of textual discriminabiliy, focusing on a corpus of 1.2 million article headlines from 15 major US news outlets, extracted from an archive of 73 million links posted on Twitter over a 625-day period running from the beginning of 2017 through the summer of 2018. / I formulate the question as a supervised learning problem, in which classifiers are presented with a headline and trained to identify the outlet that produced it. This training objective is used to induce high-quality distributed representations of headlines, and also makes it possible to measure the degree to which different outlets produce similar and dissimilar content. I then contextualize these language-level similarities against two backdrops. First, I examine the degree to which similarities at the level of headlines correlate with similarities at the level of audiences - with specific focus on sites of misalignment, where outlets "speak" in ways that don't match the typical patterns of other outlets that share similar audiences. / Among the news organizations considered in this study, the Associated Press and The Hill are the two most "misaligned" outlets, and we can perhaps look to specific portions of their content as a signal for the types of topics, styles, and stances that might be effective at permeating across axes of political and cultural difference. Second - I study headlines as a historical process. How stable are the linguistic profiles of major news organizations, and to what degree have they evolved into new configurations? I find significant changes over first 18 months of the Trump presidency, with BuzzFeed doubling down on "quiz" articles; Huffington Post moving away from lifestyle content and towards political reporting; The Daily Kos becoming less exclusively focused on politics; and Fox shifting towards a kind of "tabloid" style, with a focus on violent crime, personal misfortune, and socially-charged political issues. / David McClure. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 133-141). / Hybrid Living Materials (HLMs) are formed by combining living and non-living materials such that the new material takes on the properties of both. Yet, the integrated control of both material and biological properties and their interactions remains challenging due to the complexity of natural constructs and the lack of standardized infrastructure to control biological function in 3D space. The state of the art remains limited in its range of scale and application scope. We seek to extend the conventions used for the digital design and fabrication of human-made structural materials to harness valuable biotic functionalities-such as sense, response, growth, metabolization, and even adaptation-to enable a diverse new class of multifunctional materials. This thesis establishes a generalizable framework and technical workflow for the creation of HLMs. / The approach integrates (i) computational design, (ii) digital fabrication, and (iii) synthetic biology to generate materials that are programmed to host and template engineered bacterial cells. Specifically, this research employs a multimaterial 3D printing platform in combination with newly developed biochemical signaling resins and volumetric modeling tools to produce additively manufactured objects containing high resolution bioactive diffusion gradients. Computer aided design (CAD) tools allow multiple genetic regulatory signals to be precisely positioned within the cured architectures of these printed shapes. When combined with hydrogel immobilization methods to sustain E. coli and facilitate biosignal transmission on these objects, this approach achieves spatial genetic regulatory control of engineered cells across complex geometries and produces functional hybrid-living materials. / Importantly, the HLM fabrication platform achieves living constructs of up to half a meter in length, and accurate simulation of executable biological patterning and outputs. The platform provides design and fabrication tools that advance the merger between digital manufacturing and biological engineering for a unique level of control and repeatability over spatially-varying material properties and cellular function. Thus, the methodology, hardware, and computational design space established provide an entry point for designers, engineers, and scientists to mediate bacterial functionalities with material technology for broad application. / by Rachel Soo Hoo Smith. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

La recherche documentée dans ce mémoire de thèse de doctorat entend proposer une voie complémentaire à l'éducation aux médias telle qu'elle se pratique actuellement dans les établissements d'enseignement du secondaire et du supérieur. Pour ce faire, nous avons exploré la piste d'un champ théorique et pratique, d'origine anglo-saxonne et germanique, que l'on nomme Archéologie des media. Il s'est agi de proposer un cadre théorique interdisciplinaire incluant cette discipline afin d'en proposer une première transposition didactique, mise en œuvre à travers des ateliers et des dispositifs originaux. Leur conception et leur évaluation, appuyées sur une méthodologie de recherche orientée par la conception, ont été au cœur de ce travail. / This research aims to explore alternative ways to practice media education as we do in middle school, hight school and university. It explores an original field, recently discovered in France, called media archaeology. In this work, we have built a theorical and multidisciplinary frame including media archaeology in order to propose, for the first time, its didactic transposition for secondary education. Thus, we conveived and evaluated workshops, helped by a design-based research methodology.

One of the most important outstanding problems with the hydrometallurgy of copper is the low temperature leaching of chalcopyrite. In this thesis, a fundamental study at low temperature was undertaken in order to establish a mechanism, which is consistent with the data obtained in an extensive study of the kinetics of dissolution of several chalcopyrite concentrates. It will be demonstrated that enhanced rates of dissolution can be achieved at ambient temperatures by the application of controlled potentials in the range 560-650 mV, depending on the concentration of chloride ions. However, control of the potential by the use of electrochemical or chemical oxidation of iron(II) or copper(I) ions is ineffective unless carried out in the presence of dissolved oxygen. The rates of dissolution are approximately constant for up to 80% dissolution for sized fractions of the concentrates with an activation of energy of about 75 kJ mole-1. Chalcopyrite from different sources appears to dissolve at approximately the same rate which is largely independent of the iron and copper ion concentrations, the acidity and chloride ion concentration but depends in some cases on the presence of additives such as fine pyrite or silver ions. Based on the results of these leaching experiments and detailed mineralogical analyses of the residues, a mechanism involving non-oxidative dissolution of the mineral coupled to oxidation of the product hydrogen sulfide will be proposed. The latter reaction is shown to occur predominantly by a copper ion – catalyzed reaction with dissolved oxygen. The results of an independent study of the kinetics of this reaction will be presented which will demonstrate that the rates are consistent with those obtained for the dissolution of the mineral. The possible involvement of a covellite-like surface layer on the chalcopyrite under some conditions will also be discussed as it relates to the mechanism. It will also be shown that fine pyrite particles can also act as a catalyst surface for the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide. This mechanism is consistent with the mineralogy which confirmed the formation of secondary sulfur which is not associated with chalcopyrite but is associated with fine pyrite if present. A comparison of this mechanism with that proposed in other more limited studies of the dissolution of chalcopyrite under similar conditions in sulfate solutions has been made.