research

Most people who read this blog know me professionally, which is to say, digitally. And, digitally speaking, I talk about my research, but not as rigorously as I do in person. I’m developing my reading list for my exams now, which means I’m doing a lot of big and small preliminary thinking about “who I [...]

The truism goes: “Those who can’t (insert creative skill)…(insert presumably less creative skill).” Like most sayings, it’s both simplistic, harsh and somewhat true. Those can’t or won’t: do/teach, paint/curate, film/critique. I blog and research about web series — most of them independent — but I have never tried to make one, or a piece of [...]

Screengrabs of the homepage for American Cybercast, a late nighties web show network (orange outline mine) I’ve been researching for an article on web programming, and I’ve found tons of interesting gems! I’d already known “webisodic programming” had dated back to 1995, and I’m well aware the Internet repeats itself. But what old newspaper and [...]

I’d originally planned to do reams and reams of reading on this, and an extensive literature review, but I’m so busy writing, curating, filming, editing and researching other things I won’t get to it for another year, and I don’t want to cite some theories and miss others. Eventually I will have to do a [...]

So I found out yesterday I’ll be going to the SCMS — Society of Cinema and Media Studies — conference in Los Angeles next year. This is somewhat exciting news because it would be my first conference with a significant group of film and television scholars. Yay. But going to conference is sometimes fraught. Scholars [...]

So at this point I’ve conducted around two dozen interviews with nearly thirty individuals working in the market for original (mostly scripted) web shows. It’s been fun! I still have much more to learn, but, being an academic, have already started writing. It’s what we do. Here is the first full paper I’ve written on [...]

My first academic article has been published! The article, published in First Monday, titled, “Real Vlogs: The Rules and Meanings of Online Personal Videos,” looks at how users on YouTube talk about what vlogs are “real” or authentic, and “fake” or inauthentic. Here’s the abstract: This paper explores what the “rules” of vlogging (video blogging) are: the [...]

I saw Precious Wednesday (it’s accomplished, bound for Oscar greatness), but I’ll hold off on film criticism and instead talk about what I think the film means, and what I think it does for black cinema, a field I’m still learning about, so I would love comments and suggestions. My thrust is simple: Precious is [...]

UPDATE: For updated web series info, click the web series page. What is a web series? To anyone in the industry right now, this post will be elementary. Apologies in advance. But I think for academics and maybe aspiring producers, this might be useful. I’ve had a bunch of hits on my old primer, but [...]

I’ve been incredibly busy of late with various projects (lectures, editing documentaries, freelance and academic articles) and haven’t had time to post. Nevertheless I did want to give a couple scholarly updates. First is really just a class assignment — click for report — on Jason Mittell’s Genre and Television. Mittell’s is a remarkably well-researched [...]