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Description
"YouTube Shakespeares" is a study of Shakespeare online videos and the people who create, upload, and view them on YouTube. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this work is a remix of theories and methodologies from literary, performance, (social) media, fan, and Internet studies that expands the field of Shakespeare studies. This dissertation explores the role of YouTube users and their activities, the expansion of literary research methods onto digital media venues, YouTube as site of Shakespeare performance, and YouTube Shakespeares' fan communities. It analyzes a broad array of Shakespeare visual performances including professional and user-generated mashups, remixes, film clips, auditions, and high school performances. A rich avenue for the study of people's viewing and reception of Shakespeare, YouTube tests the (un)limitations of Shakespeare adaptation. This work explores the ethical implications of researching performances that include human subjects, arguing that their presence frequently complicates common concepts of public and private identities. Although YouTube is a "published" forum for social interactivity and video repository, this work urges digital humanities scholars to recognize and honor the human users entailed in the videos not as text, but as human subjects. Shifting the study focus to human subjects demands a revision of research methods and publications protocols as the researcher repositions herself into the role of virtual ethnographer. "YouTube Shakespeares" develops its own ethics-based, online research method, which includes seeking Institutional Board Review approval and online interviews. The second half of the dissertation shifts from methodology to theorizing YouTube Shakespeares' performance spaces as analogs to the interactive and imaginary areas of Shakespeare's early modern theatre. Additionally, this work argues that YouTube Shakespeares' creators and commentators are fans. "YouTube Shakespeares" is one of the first Shakespeare-centric studies to employ fan studies as a critical lens to explore the cultural significance and etiquette of people's online Shakespeare performance activities. The work ends with a conversation about the issues of ephemerality, obsolescence, and concerns about the instability of digital and online materials, noting the risk of evidentiary loss of research materials is far outweighed by a scholarly critical registration of YouTube in the genealogy of Shakespeare performance.
ContributorsFazel, Valerie Margaret (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
“Digital Shakespeares” is a study of the ways that Shakespearean theaters and festivals are incorporating digital media into their marketing and performance practices at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The project integrates Shakespeare studies, performance studies, and digital media and internet studies to explore how digital media are integral to the practices of four North American and British Shakespearean performance institutions: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford (Canada) Festival. Through an analysis of their performance and marketing practices, I argue that digital media present an opportunity to reevaluate concepts of performance and relevance, and explore the implications such reevaluations have on the future of Shakespearean performance. The project addresses institutions’ digital media practices through the lens of four concepts—access, marketing, education, and performance—to conclude that theaters and festivals are finding it necessary to adopt practices from multiple media to stay viable in today’s online attention economy. The first chapter considers the issue of access, exploring the influence of social media on audience-institution interactions as theaters and festivals establish online presences on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Chapter two argues that theaters and festivals incorporate digital media into their outreach through poaching the practices of other media and cultural institutions as they strive to become relevant to their online audiences by appealing through the newness of digital media. Chapter three focuses on two digital educational outreach programs, the Globe’s Playing Shakespeare and the RSC’s Young Shakespeare Nation, to understand how each institution seeks to employ digital media to make their educational audiences life-long lovers of Shakespearean performance. Throughout the final chapter, I analyze potential models for incorporating digital media into Shakespearean performance, both in performances that bring digital media onto the stage and in performances that use social media as the platform for dramatic performance. Ultimately, I argue digital media have become an integral part of the practices Shakespearean performance institutions use to establish and sustain their cultural relevance with modern audiences, while raising questions regarding the implications of those practices in an increasingly globalized world.
ContributorsWay, Geoffrey (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Lehmann, Courtney (Committee member) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
A primary need of Forensic science is to individualize missing persons that cannot be identified after death. With the use of advanced technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implant chips can drastically improve digital tracking and enable robust biological and legal identification. In this paper, I will discuss applications between different microchip technologies and indicate reasons why the RFID chip is more useful for forensic science. My results state that an RFID chip is significantly more capable of integrating a mass volume of background information, and can utilize implanted individuals’ DNA profiles to decrease the missing persons database backlogs. Since today’s society uses a lot of digital devices that can ultimately identify people by simple posts or geolocation, Forensic Science can harness that data as an advantage to help serve justice for the public in giving loved ones closure.
ContributorsChastain, Hope Natasha (Author) / Kanthswamy, Sree (Thesis director) / Oldt, Robert (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
The need to draw a more explicit connection between literature and the daily lives of students has become an increasingly pressing issue. Preeminent literary scholars have long argued that the design of many undergraduate classrooms only engages the student with literature to a degree that, long term, does not produce habits of criticism that engage students with wider contexts of conflict. The yield instead primarily takes place in a classroom. Leading scholars tend to draw connections of value between the work they are teaching and the lives of students by focusing on how they negotiate specific power discourses. However, placing an emphasis on having habits of criticism function regarding specific biases in contexts restricts the kinds of conflict students are prepared to negotiate. To encourage a habit of critical thinking in undergraduate students that can be applied to any context of conflict and bias, a vocabulary on language failure should be taught and analyzed through its implications in origin myths that explain and justify division. Language failure, or the failure of symbols to represent subjects in their full capacity, is a concept and theory introduced by Kenneth Burke to examine conflict at a conceivable root. Burke suggests that language failure is the core of misrepresentation and conflict and is inevitably the result of any ‘identification’, or selection of meaning that is assigned to symbols. Identifications are selections of meaning and conceptions of value that organize bodies towards a social purpose, under a limited perspective. The danger of language failure is present when it goes unacknowledged. In identifications, the repercussions of language failure continually complicate, divide and propagate in discourse; assumptions about the validity of identifications encourage more complex ‘blind-spots’ and misrepresentations that exclude populations and have violent potentials. The more complex the layering of association between identifications becomes, the more obscured their foundational failure, their nature of non-innateness, is, faced as truth, affective as justice. The ‘affective’ foundation behind these powerful associations and assumptions is myth. Origin myth, or a narrative that explains the beginning of some worldly phenomena, founds, and adapts to the needs of culture and society. Teaching students to regard risks of language use as being foundational in their cultural thought, their criticism, and their communication, enriches their capability to negotiate and participate ambivalently in conflicts faced during their daily lives.
ContributorsNewcomb, Lily R. (Author) / Jensen, Kyle (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021