Deep Mediations

Deep Mediations
Author: Karen Redrobe
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1452962944
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The preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studies For decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies. The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities

The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities
Author: James O’Sullivan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2022-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350232130
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities reconsiders key debates, methods, possibilities, and failings from across the digital humanities, offering a timely interrogation of the present and future of the arts and humanities in the digital age. Comprising 43 essays from some of the field's leading scholars and practitioners, this comprehensive collection examines, among its many subjects, the emergence and ongoing development of DH, postcolonial digital humanities, feminist digital humanities, race and DH, multilingual digital humanities, media studies as DH, the failings of DH, critical digital humanities, the future of text encoding, cultural analytics, natural language processing, open access and digital publishing, digital cultural heritage, archiving and editing, sustainability, DH pedagogy, labour, artificial intelligence, the cultural economy, and the role of the digital humanities in climate change. The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities: Surveys key contemporary debates within DH, focusing on pressing issues of perspective, methodology, access, capacity, and sustainability. Reconsiders and reimagines the past, present, and future of the digital humanities. Features an intuitive structure which divides topics across five sections: “Perspectives & Polemics”, “Methods, Tools & Techniques”, “Public Digital Humanities”, “Institutional Contexts”, and “DH Futures”. Comprehensive in scope and accessibility written, this book is essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners working across the digital humanities and wider arts and humanities. Featuring contributions from pre-eminent scholars and radical thinkers both established and emerging, The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities should long serve as a roadmap through the myriad formulations, methodologies, opportunities, and limitations of DH. Comprehensive in its scope, pithy in style yet forensic in its scholarship, this book is essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners working across the digital humanities, whatever DH might be, and whatever DH might become.

Distant Viewing

Distant Viewing
Author: Taylor Arnold
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262375176
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A new theory and methodology for the application of computer vision methods to the computational analysis of collected, digitized visual materials, called “distant viewing.” Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images presents a new theory and methodology for the computational analysis of digital images, offering a lively, constructive critique of computer vision that you can actually use. What does it mean to say that computer vision “understands” visual inputs? Annotations never capture a whole image. The way digital images convey information requires what researchers Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton call “distant viewing”—a play on the well-known term “distant reading” from computational literary analysis. Recognizing computer vision’s limitations, Arnold and Tilton’s spirited examination makes the technical exciting by applying distant viewing to the sitcoms Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, movie posters and other popular forms of advertising, and Dorothea Lange’s photography. In the tradition of visual culture studies and computer vision, Distant Viewing’s interdisciplinary perspective encompasses film and media studies, visual semiotics, and the sciences to create a playful, accessible guide for an international audience working in digital humanities, data science, media studies, and visual culture studies.

Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery

Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery
Author: Parisa Vaziri
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2023-12-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1452970203
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Rethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Incomplete

Incomplete
Author: Dr. Alix Beeston
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520381483
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This field-defining collection establishes unfinished film projects—abandoned, interrupted, lost, or open-ended—as rich and underappreciated resources for feminist film and media studies. In deeply researched and creatively conceived chapters, scholars join with film practitioners in approaching the unfinished film as an ideal site for revealing the lived experiences, practical conditions, and institutional realities of women's film production across historical periods and national borders. Incomplete recovers projects and practices marginalized in film industries and scholarship alike, while also showing how feminist filmmakers have cultivated incompletion as an aesthetic strategy. Objects of loss and of possibility, incomplete films raise profound historiographical and ethical questions about the always unfinished project of film history, film spectatorship, and film studies.

Death by Laughter

Death by Laughter
Author: Maggie Hennefeld
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 634
Release: 2024-03-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 023155981X
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Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression. Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.

The Lure of the Image

The Lure of the Image
Author: Daniel Morgan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520344278
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The Lure of the Image shows how a close study of camera movement challenges key assumptions underlying a wide range of debates within cinema and media studies. Highlighting the shifting intersection of point of view and camera position, Daniel Morgan draws on a range of theoretical arguments and detailed analyses across cinemas to reimagine the relation between spectator and camera—and between camera and film world. With sustained accounts of how the camera moves in films by Fritz Lang, Guru Dutt, Max Ophuls, and Terrence Malick and in contemporary digital technologies, The Lure of the Image exposes the persistent fantasy that we move with the camera within the world of the film and examines the ways that filmmakers have exploited this fantasy. In so doing, Morgan provides a more flexible account of camera movement, one that enables a fuller understanding of the political and ethical stakes entailed by this key component of cinematic style.

The Life of The Lord Jesus Christ

The Life of The Lord Jesus Christ
Author: Johann Peter Lange
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2022-04-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3752591579
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Reprint of the original, first published in 1864.