Open Textbook Guide

Digital Light by Cubitt, Sean; Daniel Palmer; Nathaniel Tkacz (eds.) Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. It provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms. Contributions include considerations of image-oriented software and file formats; screen technologies; projection and urban screen surfaces; histories of computer graphics, 2D and 3D image editing software, photography and cinematic art; and transformations of light-based art resulting from the distributed architectures of the internet and the logic of the database. With essays by Alvy Ray Smith, Sean Cubitt, Terry Flaxton, Stephen Jones, Carolyn L. Kane, Scott McQuire, Daniel Palmer, Cathryn Vasseleu, Darren Tofts and Jon Ippolito.

Exploring Movie Construction and Production by John Reich Exploring Movie Construction & Production contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production. The discussion covers theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing. Important terminology is defined and types of analysis are discussed and demonstrated. An extended example of how a movie description reflects the setting, narrative structure, or directing style is used throughout the book to illustrate building blocks of each theme. This approach to film instruction and analysis has proved beneficial to increasing students’ learning, while enhancing the creativity and critical thinking of the student.

Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West by Darling-Wolf, Fabienne Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.

Media Studies 101 ~ A Creative Commons Textbook by Media Texthack Group This text is beta v1 of the Media 101 Text – a collaboratively curated text for media and communication studies students in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific.

Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication by University of Minnesota Libraries (Adapted by) .Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, will support an engaging and interesting course experience for students that will not only show them the powerful social, political and economic forces will affect the future of media technology, but will challenge students to do their part in shaping that future.

Understanding New Media Art Understanding New Media Art is an OER for introductory college art and art history courses that builds on scholarship in the field to propose a long historical context for the technologies and ideas related to New Media Art in the 21st century.