Applied Media Studies

In the age of the maker movement, hackathons and do-it-yourself participatory culture, the boundaries between digital media theory and production have dissolved. Multidisciplinary humanities labs have sprung up around the globe, generating new forms of hands-on, critical, and creative work. The scholars, artists, and scientists behind these projects are inventing new ways of doing media studies teaching and research, developing innovative techniques through experimental practice. Featuring leading scholar-makers with years of experience creating applied media projects, this book presents behind-the-scenes stories, detailed case studies, and candid interviews with contributors. They describe projects such as reverse-engineering Spotify algorithms, building new mobile media networks in low-resource settings, hashtag activism, community-based locative storytelling app creation, collaborative and participatory design of medical media interfaces, and invention of new platforms for multimodal, transmedia storytelling. Readers will find practical advice and conceptual frameworks that prepare them to launch their own hands-on, participatory media projects using twenty-first-century tools and methods.

Kirsten Ostherr is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is a media scholar and health researcher, and author of Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (2013) and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005), and co-editor of Science/Animation (2016). She is the director and co-founder of the Medical Futures Lab. Her current research is on information and communication technologies in medicine, patient narratives, and the role of simulation as a mediator between human and technological forms of medical expertise.