Virginia Kuhn | University of Southern California (original) (raw)

Videos by Virginia Kuhn

This vignette explores representations of time and the current times' impact on representation. T... more This vignette explores representations of time and the current times' impact on representation. This piece was published in The Cine-Files: A Scholarly Journal of Film Studies, in a special issue I co-edited titled: Cinematic Writing: An Emergent Taxonomy
See the accompanying text and all citations at: http://www.thecine-files.com/images-in-of-and-time_issue11/

This video was published as part of a collection I co-edited with Victor Vitanza called MoMLA: Fr... more This video was published as part of a collection I co-edited with Victor Vitanza called MoMLA: From Gallery to Webtext (2013). The collection came from a 2012 MLA panel; each video was reviewed and revised both internally (among ourselves) and externally (among Kairos reviewers) before publication.

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An overview of open access scholarship, particularly focused on an edited collection published 5/... more An overview of open access scholarship, particularly focused on an edited collection published 5/7/2021 called Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities.

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PUBLICATIONS by Virginia Kuhn

Montage AV Zeitschrift fur Theorie und Gesckichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, 2020

Originally published in 2012, this article, which I’ve lightly edited, is no less useful in a con... more Originally published in 2012, this article, which I’ve lightly edited, is no less useful in a contemporary context given its emphasis on remix as a path to digital literacy. Indeed, if the events of the recent past have revealed anything, it is that the world’s communication technologies have outpaced the media literacy necessary to decode their messages. From deliberate misinformation (fake news), election hacking and data breaches, to identity theft and screen addiction, a more robust form of literacy is vital to define on both a conceptual and practical level. It should be no surprise that as people began getting their news from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, sites that depend on user recommendations which are easily manipulated, false information became easy to spread by those with enough data savvy.

The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities, 2021

In this chapter, I argue that we ought to be focused on both the production and consumption of re... more In this chapter, I argue that we ought to be focused on both the production and consumption of remix video--that which uses words, sounds and images--rather than simply using words to write about these extra-textual registers of meaning.

foreword, 2020

This is the foreword I wrote for the English version of Maria-Giulia Dondero's book published by ... more This is the foreword I wrote for the English version of Maria-Giulia Dondero's book published by Springer (originally published in French) as part of the series, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis (series editor Alessandro Sarti).

electronic book review, 2019

This review of Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins... more This review of Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, co-authored by Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, is itself a collaboration between Virginia Kuhn and Betsy Sullivan. Both approaches, to the review and the book here under consideration, capture the importance of community in creating and sustaining the art of Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press.

Writing about Screen Media, edited by Lisa Patti, 2020

In this chapter I call for explicit attention to the formal qualities of the critical essay itsel... more In this chapter I call for explicit attention to the formal qualities of the critical essay itself, as well as to the form of the media being reviewed. Verbal language remains the main critical mode; as such, I focus on the rhetorical use of text on the page, on screen, and in video. Reviewing and revising our critical structures can push back against some of the logocentrism and linearity of current institutional modes, encouraging polyvocality and a respect for alternative ways of knowing. Screen literacy requires the ability to both consume and produce meaning; writing with media is key to writing about it.

The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 2018

This essay argues for considering remix—defined as artifacts that employ the semiotic registers o... more This essay argues for considering remix—defined as artifacts that employ the semiotic registers of word, sound and image—as an emergent and vital form of cultural expression and communication. After tracing the ways in which the Trump administration has appropriated the language of the liberal left, using strategies employed by those with progressive political agendas, the specific affordances of remix are highlighted. These features—its polyvocality, its embrace of history, its focus on medium specificity and its accessibility—are potentialities of the form, even as they are not always activated. Taking examples from recent documentary films that make extensive use of archival foot-age, I maintain that remix can aid communication across difference and contribute to media literacy.

The Cine-Files, 2016

Full issue available at: http://issue011.thecine-files.com/ This issue of The Cine-Files emerged... more Full issue available at: http://issue011.thecine-files.com/
This issue of The Cine-Files emerged from a year-long collaboration focused on the possibilities of the video essay. It was initially sparked by a series of sessions at University College Cork (UCC), where Vicki Callahan was in residence as a Fulbright scholar, and quickly expanded to transatlantic venues. The conversations included faculty and graduate students at multiple universities, across numerous classes, and located on two continents. There were multiple points of entry: hands-on workshops, Skype sessions, a RealtimeBoard of curated work and resources, a shared Scalar book with works in progress and spaces for feedback, and a variety of shared documents on the possibilities of the form.

The essays represented here—both textual and video—are but a portion of what was produced as a result of the collaborative effort. While these pieces fall under the category of the “video essay,” differing approaches guided their construction. Unsurprisingly then, the videos vary greatly both in form as well as content. For example, while some works address specific historical or theoretical concerns in film and media, others speak to the expansion of the creative palette with essays that comment on how the form itself spurred a reflective turn, offered a new venue for personal expression, or presented the video as one component in a multimedia piece. Time and again, the boundaries between theory and practice and the creative and critical were challenged in exciting and unexpected ways. Indeed, in the only exclusively text-based essay included here, Jools Gilson explores these shifting boundaries and the processes of discovery gained by adding the video essay to her creative writing class.

Although there are many overlaps, the video essays featured here fall into three types: Videographic Criticism, Digital Argument, and the MEmorial. This emergent taxonomy is exemplified in the first three videos, each of which provide a brief description of the process or issues at stake in the category.

This essay explores the ways in which the protagonist of the 2011 film, Sucker Punch is simultane... more This essay explores the ways in which the protagonist of the 2011 film, Sucker Punch is simultaneously victimized and liberated vis-à-vis the intrusion of game sequences at key moments. The game world is also turned on its misogynist ear, as it becomes the instantiation of lead character Babydoll’s imagination, while simultaneously raising and dashing the voyeuristic promise of her objectification. Forced to “dance for her dinner,” Babydoll’s material body complies, but only as she mentally transports herself to a fantastic world of quests, a world in which she and her sisters prevail in the face of incredible odds. This double simultaneous action not only defiles the narrative structure of the film, it subverts the first person position of a game mechanic, denying the player rewards on both fronts.
At first glance, the storyline of Sucker Punch feels like the same old misogynistic film. A mother dies leaving her two daughters in the hands of an abusive, disinherited stepfather who terrorizes them: the younger one is killed, the older one, Babydoll, is consigned to a mental institution where she retreats to an alternate reality and envisions her escape. Scantily dressed girls populate this world, and their time is spent either doing household chores or in dance rehearsals with their dance mistress cum madam. However, by breaking the narrative structure of the film at key moments, Sucker Punch becomes a craftily feminist text, one which is all the more potent in that it attracts the very audience for a misogynist film.

The practice of extracting knowledge from large volumes of video data suffers from a problem of v... more The practice of extracting knowledge from large volumes of video data suffers from a problem of variety. Security, military, and commercial identification and retrieval are well-traveled paths for identifying very particular objects or people found in recorded footage, yet there are extremely few established technology solutions and use cases for understanding what large-scale video collections can help us discover about contemporary culture and history. This dearth is not due to a lack of imagination on the part of researchers; rather, we contend that in order to grow a common set of instruments, measures, and procedural methods, there is a need for a common gateway into content and analytics for cultural and historical experts to utilize. The Video Analysis Tableau (VAT), formerly the LSVA, is a research project aimed at establishing a software workbench for video analysis, annotation, and visualization, using both current and experimental discovery methods and built on the Medici framework/interface. The VAT employs a host of algorithms for machine reading, in addition to spaces for user generated tagging and annotation.

Easy and efficient access to large amounts of data has become an essential aspect of our everyday... more Easy and efficient access to large amounts of data has become an essential aspect of our everyday life. In this paper we investigate possibilities of supporting information representation through the combined use of multiple modalities of perceptions such as sight, touch and kinesthetics. We present a theoretical framework to analyze these approaches and exemplify our findings with case studies of three emergent projects. The results are a contribution to a larger discussion of multimodal information representation at the intersection of theory and practice.

Digital media, deployed in the service of real world issues, have the potential to foster the typ... more Digital media, deployed in the service of real world issues, have the potential to foster the type of collaborative learning needed to prepare for the dynamic, interconnected world of the 21st century. In this article, we describe a project in which two university-level classes, one in new media and one in global health, were combined in order to improve the learning experience of each. While studying the complexities of global health can illuminate issues surrounding large-scale digital literacy in a globally networked world, working with multiple digital tools can prepare students for the complexity of a career in the field of global health.

The Impact of Branded Celebrity, Volume 2: The Power of Media Branding, 2014

This chapter from the 2014 two-volume series, Star Power: The Impact of Branded Celebrity (edited... more This chapter from the 2014 two-volume series, Star Power: The Impact of Branded Celebrity (edited by Aaron Barlow), examines the cross platform work of JayZ via his Black album, Fade to Black, the documentary about the rapper's "last" performance, and Decoded, the book in which he explains his view of hip-hop. Combined, these media account for a type of lettered orality that have helped to galvanize JayZ's brand.

ACM Proceeding XSEDE '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment Article No. 21, Jul 15, 2014

In this paper we describe our efforts at establishing a software workbench for video analysis, an... more In this paper we describe our efforts at establishing a software workbench for video analysis, annotation, and visualization, using both current and experimental discovery methods. This project builds upon our previous research with video and image analysis, and joins the emergent field of cultural analytics in the digital humanities. Moving image media is particularly ripe for computational analysis given its increasing ubiquity in contemporary culture. Hoping to make video more legible as a big data format, we employ visual media in the public domain and we focus on crowd-sourced annotation, aural and visual analysis and visualization of extracted image data. Our goal is to fill in existing gaps for asking cultural questions about video archives using computers, we also experiment with transformative methods in video research and analysis. Our long term goal is to allow researchers to move with agility from textual description and collection management, to manual inspection, to automated analysis, to visualization of discrete films as well as whole collections.

Computers and Composition Online, Jun 2014

Introduction by Mary Hocks and Jentery Sayers At the 2012 Computers and Writing conference, a... more Introduction
by Mary Hocks and Jentery Sayers

At the 2012 Computers and Writing conference, a panel of academics came together and embarked upon a series of lighting round talks, broadly focused on the topic, "Hacking the Classroom." The organizers, Virginia Kuhn and Jentery Sayers, chose this topic because it resonates with the growing practice of hacking academia by turning the critical gaze inward, rethinking institutional structures and practices, and revising them to foster new social relationships, pedagogies, and modes of inquiry.

With hacking in mind, the panelists—who hailed from disparate institutions, professional positions, and disciplines—engaged the following questions: When, where, and why do classrooms in higher ed need to be hacked? How might we hack them? And under what assumptions?

Each panelist provided particular examples of their own hacking practices as well as aspirations to hack the classroom at their respective institutions, while addressing some obstacles, enthusiasms, and curiosities encountered along the way (including the panelists' own skepticism about the current ubiquity of "hacking"). Since the conference, the panelists revised their presentations into this collection of multimodal pieces, designed and edited by Jentery Sayers, with co-designing by Virginia Kuhn and co-editing by Mary Hocks. The eight pieces included here not only demonstrate how hacking is variously imagined and received across disciplines; they also give everyone involved a sense of possible next steps toward institutional critique and a feeling of camaraderie during the transition.

The immediate context for this current piece comes from Hacking the Academy, an edited, crowdsourced collection resulting from a call for contributions submitted within one week at the end of May 2010. Although an edited version appeared in 2013 from University of Michigan Press, the inspirational models continue to be available at the original Hacking the Academy site, which offers a flurry of manifestos and best practices for hacking academic institutional structures, scholarship, and teaching practices. Similarly, this collection is inspired by THATCamp, the rapidly growing cluster of unconferences for humanities and technologies in which conference agendas are created, developed, and enacted by participants more or less on the fly.

Hacking the academy through unconferences and unconventional scholarly communications fosters possibility and camaraderie while also subverting certain expectations of work and learning in the academy. In this collection, understandings of hacking emerged from earlier subversions, too. For example, Kuhn and Vitanza's "From Gallery to Webtext" (which offers a curated session of synchronous new media projects) subverted the traditional conference presentation and later appeared in a manifesto issue of the journal, Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Another manifesto—A Manifesto for Critical Media, by Eric Faden—called practitioners to teach media studies and production "by critically engaging film, video, and new media on their own ground and with new media's own tools, techniques, and technologies." Elsewhere, in 2004, Anne Wysocki simply re-defined new media in a theory-pedagogy context as attending to its own materiality and means of production. All of these inspirational statements and manifestos exemplify some of hacking’s core values: constructivist collaboration, collective learning, critique enacted through media, and an emphasis on the situated relevance of learning moments. Indeed, the crucial need for adaptable means that allow practitioners to move critically inside and out of academic structures created the kairos for this collection of classroom hacks.

Each contribution included here creates and enacts a type of hacking practice while highlighting or reflecting on its own materiality and construction. Hacking spaces—the physical, digital, and personal spaces of classrooms—and deconstructing normative assumptions about those spaces are constant themes across these eight pieces. The contributions also hack the act of writing—as code, as soundscape, as remix, as process log, as video, as image. The referenced assignments hack popular understandings of literacy by emphasizing multiple semiotic modes, production over products, context over content, and reflective awareness over expertise. Scholarly products and content expertise are often the primary expectations of academic literacies. In response, this collection of classroom hacks encourages forms of intensive learning conducive to tinkering, experimenting, iteration, and productive discomfort.

“Hacking the Classroom: Eight Perspectives" offers numerous ideas for reflexive teaching and pedagogical practice. These contributions also complicate the concept of hacking, and in particular Kuhn, Losh, and Yergeau offer provocative lists of norms and assumptions about hacking. However, the authors do not expect these eight perspectives to cohere, and the collection does not suggest that hacking classrooms should be understood uniformly across settings. On the contrary, the authors hope readers will note the discontinuities and overlaps across the eight pieces, prompting further dialogue about the culture, materials, and construction of classrooms in the near future.

Table of Contents

"The Year of Computational Thinking," by Jim Brown
"Sonic Literacy: Resonance and Reflection," by Mary Hocks
"We Need to Talk," by Aimée Knight
"Hacking My Head," by Virginia Kuhn
"Remixing Spaces and Texts," by Viola Lasmana
"Ten Principles for a Hacktivist Pedagogy," by Elizabeth Losh
"git commit -m 'The Classroom,'" by Jentery Sayers
"Disability Hacktivism," by Melanie Yergeau
Jentery Sayers encoded this page in valid HTML5. All source files are available at GitHub.
"

Academe, Jan 2013

This is a piece about my 2005 digital dissertation and the associated challenges it poses to issu... more This is a piece about my 2005 digital dissertation and the associated challenges it poses to issues of formatting, archiving and fair use.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Mar 13, 2012

The affordances of digital technologies increase the available semiotic resources through which o... more The affordances of digital technologies increase the available semiotic resources through which one may speak. In this context, video remix becomes a rich avenue for communication and expression in ways that have heretofore been the province of big media. Yet recent attempts to categorize remix are limiting, mainly as a result of their reliance on the visual arts and cinema theory as the gauge by which remix is measured. A more valuable view of remix is as a digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make claims and provides evidence to support those claims. After exploring the roots of contemporary notions of orality, literacy, narrative and rhetoric, I turn to examples of marginalized, disparate artifacts that are already in danger of neglect in the burgeoning history of remix. In examining these pieces in terms of remix theory to date, a more expansive view is warranted. An approach based on digital argument is capable of accounting for the rhetorical strategies of the formal elements of remixes while still attending to the specificity of the discourse communities from which they arise. This effort intervenes in current conversations and sparks enhancement of its concepts to shape the mediascape.

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Montage AV Zeitschrift fur Theorie und Gesckichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, 2020

The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities, 2021

foreword, 2020

electronic book review, 2019

Writing about Screen Media, edited by Lisa Patti, 2020

The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 2018

The Cine-Files, 2016

The Impact of Branded Celebrity, Volume 2: The Power of Media Branding, 2014

ACM Proceeding XSEDE '14 Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment Article No. 21, Jul 15, 2014

Computers and Composition Online, Jun 2014

Introduction by Mary Hocks and Jentery Sayers At the 2012 Computers and Writing conference, a... more Introduction
by Mary Hocks and Jentery Sayers

Table of Contents

Academe, Jan 2013

Transformative Works and Cultures, Mar 13, 2012

Cybertext Yearbook 2013: HighWired Redux, Sep 2013

In 1984, Michel de Certeau, writing about the practices of everyday life, exposed us to a differe... more In 1984, Michel de Certeau, writing about the practices of everyday life, exposed us to a different way of thinking about our movements through (and our relationships with) the city as the center of cultural activity. While governments, institutions, and other structures of power designed the city according to particular strategies, for de Certeau it was the "tactical" movements of "passers by" that gave meaning to spaces and places of the city: that is, the walkers, wanderers, and window-shoppers created new paths through and new uses for the cityscape.

Video is exploding as a means of communication and expression, and the resultant archives are mas... more Video is exploding as a means of communication and expression, and the resultant archives are massive, disconnected datasets. Thus, scholars' ability to research this crucial aspect of contemporary culture is severely hamstrung by limitations in semantic image retrieval, incomplete metadata, and the lack of a precise understanding of the actual content of any given archive. Our aim in the Large Scale Video Analytics (LSVA) project is to address obstacles in both image-retrieval and research that uses extreme-scale archives of video data that employs a human-machine hybrid process for analyzing moving images. We propose an approach that 1) places more interpretive power in the hands of the human user through novel visualizations of video data, and 2) uses a customized on-demand configuration that enables iterative queries.

FCW Federal Computer Week

xix þ 426 pp. ISBN 978-1-909254-25-1. £14.95 (paperback).

Open Book Publishers, Apr 1, 2021

Faculty members who work in digital media or digital humanities should be prepared to make explic... more Faculty members who work in digital media or digital humanities should be prepared to make explicit the results, theoretical underpinnings, and intellectual rigor of their work. MLA Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion, 2012. 1 'This is a hobby. Don't let it distract you from the real work'. This wellintentioned warning issued by one of my graduate advisors came at the end of a workshop we'd just finished on digitizing video from tape. It was 2004 and YouTube did not yet exist but I was determined to get images into my work, sensing it would enrich my doctoral research significantly, even if I couldn't articulate exactly how and why at the time: on the one hand, my research was (and remains) engaged with issues of power and privilege. I investigate structural issues around race and gender-both very visual concerns-and the ways that they inform and are informed by the technologies used for communication and expression. This made it vital to actuate my argument with images. On the other hand, power differentials and structural inequities function best, and sometimes only, when they are invisible. In this light, any attempt to uncover power via the presumed literality or indexicality of visual media, by its very nature, undermines the complexities of power structures; the camera is not objective, nor are its photographic outputs comprehensive, and so the use of images must be carefully considered.

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an overview of our efforts in facilitating humanities research... more ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an overview of our efforts in facilitating humanities research in a supercomputing environment. We discuss some of the challenges related to adapting a humanities research workflow on High Performance Computing (HPC) resources and also present an overview of the design of Large Scale Video Analytics (LSVA) project that will be deployed on Gordon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC).

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 2013

Open Book Publishers, 2021

Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book. Adèle Kreager performed the copy-editing a... more Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book. Adèle Kreager performed the copy-editing and proofreading. The author performed the indexing. Anna Gatti designed the cover using InDesign. The image is by Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve (1507), sourced from Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer_-_Adam_and_Eve_(Prado)_2FXD.jpg. The cover was produced in InDesign using Fontin (titles) and Calibri (text body) fonts. Luca Baffa typeset the book in InDesign. The..

Routledge eBooks, May 1, 2018

Global Health Action, May 2, 2013

Transformative Works and Cultures, Mar 15, 2012

Open Book Publishers, Dec 20, 2012

Routledge eBooks, Jul 30, 2019

Open Book Publishers, Apr 1, 2021

Virginia Kuhn began this collection several years before its publication, enlisting the help of K... more Virginia Kuhn began this collection several years before its publication, enlisting the help of Kathie Gosset as co-editor. Both realized their time was limited, but they also felt the need for this collection quite strongly. Just when Kathie's schedule made her continuing involvement untenable, Virginia was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer making the whole enterprise seem doomed to remain incomplete. With Virginia's strong recovery, the addition of Anke Finger, one of the collection's authors, as co-editor, the patience of our contributors and the good will of this Press, we are proud to see this collection come to fruition. Over the course of shaping this project into a book, a number of colleagues and institutions have been immensely supportive. Virginia would like to thank Kathie Gossett, the value of whose early work molding the volume cannot be overstated. Her chapter, co-authored with Liza Potts, is a vital addition to this collection. Virginia would also like to thank her colleagues and graduate students whose careful thinking, pedagogical excellence and collegiality have provided a sounding board and intellectual home for the many years since she defended her own digital dissertation in 2005. Anke Finger would like to thank the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut for their generous support of this book project. She is immensely grateful to all graduate students who have embarked on explorations within digital scholarship, and who worked towards making Digital Humanities and Media Studies a lasting initiative, together with many colleagues within and beyond UConn. The creativity and curiosity have been and continue to be enormously inspiring; the same is the case for everyone involved with this volume, the contributors and, most particularly, Virginia Kuhn. May the final product inspire more cutting-edge work in the future. viii Shaping the Digital Dissertation We would also like to thank Alessandra Tosi and the team from Open Book Publishers, who made this process a transparent and ethical one. Their professionalism and warmth demonstrate that excellence and humanity are not mutually exclusive; rather they serve each other. We extend our particular gratitude to Adèle Kreager for her careful, insightful and prompt editing; Adèle made the process quite painless during what is an unprecedented moment in human history.

Open Book Publishers, Dec 1, 2012

ABSTRACT In this paper we describe our efforts at establishing a software workbench for video ana... more ABSTRACT In this paper we describe our efforts at establishing a software workbench for video analysis, annotation, and visualization, using both current and experimental discovery methods. This project builds upon our previous research with video and image analysis, and joins the emergent field of cultural analytics in the digital humanities. Moving image media is particularly ripe for computational analysis given its increasing ubiquity in contemporary culture. Hoping to make video more legible as a big data format, we employ visual media in the public domain and we focus on crowd-sourced annotation, aural and visual analysis and visualization of extracted image data. Our goal is to fill in existing gaps for asking cultural questions about video archives using computers, we also experiment with transformative methods in video research and analysis. Our long term goal is to allow researchers to move with agility from textual description and collection management, to manual inspection, to automated analysis, to visualization of discrete films as well as whole collections.

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2023

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Anastasia Salter's syllabus for a co... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Anastasia Salter's syllabus for a course on interactive narrative, published in Syllabus, approaches interactivity both creatively and critically, focusing on narrative structure as well as technological infrastructure. Each unit includes a mini-project created with a different tool—namely, Twine, Scratch, and Inform 7. These units culminate in the creation of a final project, a multimedia interactive narrative, which has clearly articulated goals and outcomes. The use of freeware and easy-to-learn tools makes this a viable approach for those who lack access to expensive production tools and who do not have advanced media skills. Although designed for upper-level classes in game design, the syllabus emphasizes the conceptual aspect of game mechanics and interactivity, making the syllabus customizable as it forms a bridge between analysis and production.

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This assignment is meant to teach studen... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This assignment is meant to teach students about the doctrine of fair use by using the video essay. It is activist in nature, as Suzanne Scott frames her classroom efforts as generating not only these video essays but also a code of best practices for exercising fair use in media making. It is incumbent upon multimodal authors to understand the four tenets of fair use and to advance their own fair-use claims, which are deliberate and defensible. Scott's approach puts transformation at the fore, allowing students to deeply understand their rights and obligations. Current copyright law did not anticipate the digital, and many digital scholars feel it is unethical to neglect issues of fair use in the classroom since it governs who may speak with media and who will be silenced. Additional context can be found in Scott's article "Teaching Transformativity/Transformative Teaching: Fair Use and the Video Essay."

Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Topics in Knowledge Production, 2021

YouTube and Music: Online Culture and Everyday Life, 2023

Despite its ubiquity and ongoing proliferation on YouTube, the lyric video—i.e. a professional or... more Despite its ubiquity and ongoing proliferation on YouTube, the lyric video—i.e. a professional or prosumer-produced clip that places lyrical text onscreen alongside a music track—remains curiously overlooked in both journalistic and scholarly discourse. In this chapter, therefore, Carol Vernallis, Laura McLaren, Virginia Kuhn, and Martin P. Rossouw team up to put under the spotlight aspects and appeals of the lyric video as one of YouTube’s most preeminent musical genres. With special emphasis on the diffuse, remediated nature of the lyric video, the chapter rounds up and plays up some of its most intriguing qualities: the genre’s refusal of quick-and-easy definitions; its prosumer roots and intermedial affinities; its imbrications with the YouTube ecology; its uses of kinetic typography and expressive screen space; and its manifestations from ‘official releases’ to mesmerizing fanmade mashups. The chapter concludes that, by virtue of their synaesthetic fusion of image, sound, and text, lyric videos are about much more than words. They allow us to attend to music in a manner that is richly textured and audio(-verbo-)visual in every way.

Key Terms: lyric video; typography; music video; audiovisual; aesthetics; YouTube; mashup