Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

This project functions as an examination of the folkloristic question of the generic category of the “fake”, “fictitious”, or “invented” legend. Using The Blair Witch Project (1999) motion picture as an example text, case study, and vehicle for this exploration, this project engages with historical folkloristic discourses of authenticity, extant taxonomies of legendry and legend performance contexts, and the novel category of the “folkloresque” system of folkloric popular culture allusion. These domains are examined in order to reimagine an allegedly “fake” legend complex (the marketing campaign surrounding The Blair Witch Project's initial premiere) as nevertheless engaged in certain critical contexts of folkloresque legend performance – namely, process and participation. These contexts, this project ultimately argues, serve in part as public platforms through which the generic boundaries of “fake” legend texts (like The Blair Witch Project) are generically reinforced or renegotiated by emic interlocutors through a pronounced reliance on commensurately folkloric rhetoric, performances, and other processes.

Committee: Merrill Kaplan (Advisor); Amy Shuman (Committee Member); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member); Dorothy Noyes (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Film Studies; Folklore; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

The makers of commercial popular culture often incorporate folklore into their works. Although their definition of folklore is generally restricted to pre-modern narratives and beliefs that form only a small part of what folklore is, their works relate to traditional content in a more expansive way. This dissertation examines a contemporary television genre that not only incorporates traditional content but, I argue, functions as folklore in its own right by negotiating truth and belief, constructing social Others, and, at the meta-level, constituting an archive. Since the 1990s, serial narratives in which everyday people investigate and solve supernatural disturbances in a procedural format have become a mainstay of North American television and streaming media. Such programs, including The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have generally lacked a cohesive genre designation. I argue for “supernatural procedural” as the genre's preferred term and trace its history from predecessors in Victorian-era occult detective fiction to early forms in 1970s television, through solidification in the 1990s into its current permutations. I outline conventions that include, among others, realistic worldbuilding, a blend of episodic and serial storytelling, and, notably, a tendency to engage with folklore. Employing an approach blending folkloristics and popular culture studies, I argue that specific characteristics of the supernatural procedural allow series to function as televisual folklore: folklore not just adapted by, but actually occurring within the television medium. This emphasis contributes to newer avenues in folklore studies, which has only recently begun seriously analyzing television, and popular culture studies, where folkloristic perspectives are often overlooked. This work considers the abovementioned series at length alongside subsequent programs like Supernatural and Grimm, using supporting analysis from Lucifer, Evil, SurrealEstate, and Wellington Pa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dorothy Noyes (Advisor); Angus Fletcher (Committee Member); Merrill Kaplan (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Folklore; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, Mass Communication (Communication)

Transmedia is the practice of spreading content over multiple delivery channels to create a more immersive experience for the audience. In a transmedia project, the sum of its parts is always bigger than each individual part, but each individual part, while creating its own unique contribution to the overall project, also has to contain the key premises of the main story. This study explains what transmedia is and how transmedia content creators translate their concept and/or idea for a story into a storyworld for multiple platforms. This exploratory case study research focuses on transmedia content creation in independent production as it expands narrative structures from film to other media, guided by the assessment of audience engagement, as a type of approach to storytelling (narrative or documentary). The study examines organic transmedia story content and audience engagement in four projects: Zenith, Body/Mind/Change, Question Bridge, and The Deeper They Bury Me. Formal in-depth interviews were used as a data-gathering tool for case study evidence, on the premise that interviews are key to uncovering a participant's motives and techniques for executing them. The point was to learn about story development from the practical strategies of the four selected transmedia creators. The data were divided into two groups: 1) story structure as determined by creators and 2) the likelihood of audience engagement. Textual Analysis was used to look at the story content of the selected projects and to analyze audience engagement. All the projects demonstrate that using multiple platforms expands the dimensions of the story. Each project was different, had a different approach, and required different details in the incubation and production phases.

Committee: Joseph Slade (Committee Chair); Roger Cooper (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Film Studies; Mass Media; Multimedia Communications

Bachelor of Science of Media Arts and Studies (BSC), Ohio University, 2017, Media Arts and Studies

MOLOCH is a game about internal struggles between passive content consent and critical views in systems where digging deeper can lead to darker truths. A top-down 3D game with simple directional movement puzzles, MOLOCH places us behind a desk as a shift manager in a dystopian company. Throughout the game, the player will be confronted with the binary of efficiency vs morality. The game encourages us to increasingly hurry our managed workers, but is the company's goal and corporate approval worth the amoral work we force? Are we ok with the system's tactics aimed at keeping us complacent? MOLOCH takes inspiration from Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis and from the German Expressionism art movement at-large. Increasing anxiety over the networked world's discordant relationships between humanity and the physical world and the rise of social inauthenticity and near endemic individual alienation highlight the intentions of MOLOCH (Klaas, 2016). Adapting a rich history of prior art is critical to the tonal and thematic success of MOLOCH. David Freeman, designer and writer, states that one of the keys to creating a rich world is through adding history (Freeman, 2003). Adding backstory to MOLOCH through ancillary materials, and injecting the sentiments of Metropolis facilitates a rich history. The precise adaptation necessary for analytical success spans visual and audial assets as well; without proper signifiers the tone of the game will be lost due to a lack of thematic cohesion. This aspect will be accomplished through continual examination and inspiration of prior art.

Committee: Novak Beth (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Film Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

This dissertation argues that the serial publication of fictional narrative in the nineteenth century provoked Victorian audiences to consume more media associated with the story they craved, thus materially proliferating the already expansive commercial storyworld. I assert that serial publication of fiction fundamentally affects reception, and that the space between installments opens up the possibility for Victorian readers' continued involvement with narrative through what I call adaptive reading practices. For this dissertation, adaptive reading practices include reading penny press continuations of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), attending dramatic adaptations staged during serialization of James Malcolm Rymer's Sweeney Todd (1846-47), perusing illustrations of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Eleanor's Victory (1863), and purchasing merchandise inspired by the media events of George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894). All of the novels included in this project were originally published in serial, and the adaptations in the same and different media that followed their publication constitute a proliferating form of seriality in which the audience continues their involvement with the storyworld, particularly with fictional characters. I contend that the proliferation of the story over time implies that fictional worlds are proceeding in parallel to the recipient's own real life, and that serial iteration affords unique opportunities for cultivating and developing fictional character over time. Whereas popular characters in vast serials are often seen as “flat” or stock characters, this dissertation argues that the persistence of characters across textual boundaries presents opportunities for the audience to fill in complex psychological inner lives in the gaps between the character's serial appearances. The pay-off of this dissertation lies not only in the revelation of the ways that readers can turn into creators (as the penny press adaptors of middle class f (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sean O'Sullivan (Advisor); Robyn Warhol (Committee Member); Amanpal Garcha (Committee Member); Jill Galvan (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Literacy; Literature; Mass Media

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, Theatre

All Things Shining is an experimental, intermedial, dramatic which I wrote, directed, and produced at The Ohio State University in spring quarter of 2012. The play's experimental nature is derived from its incorporation a number of theatrical styles that interest me as a theatre artist. In bringing together these different approaches, I wanted to create a unique theatre experience. The intermedial nature of the play is defined by its use of media as storytelling elements. The term “intermedial” is used liberally to describe a convergence of media that creates a co-relationship between media, and the mutual influence between the media leads to a redefinition of the media that are affecting each other. Intermediality in the context of my work is a method for incorporating media in a way that makes them essential elements of telling the story of the play. As the primary designer, I utilized video projections, lighting effects, and sound design elements to create an environment on stage, which fully engages the actors and the audience. I refer to this effect as the immersive atmosphere of the play. The production was staged in the Experimental Movement and Media Arts (EMMA) Lab located in the Motion Capture Suite at The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). This document records the creation and production process of the project. The concept for this project focused on a lone spaceman, Matt Simon, facing his own mortality in the dramatic present of the play. The present narrative is intercut with pivotal and interrelated events from his past, illustrated through flashbacks that led him to the present. The present timeline is set aboard Matt's disabled spacecraft, Proteus, in the orbit of the planet Mars. It is the not too distant future, the year 2051, and Matt is heading up the manned mission to Mars. This play is a tragic, spiritual portrayal of hope in the face of inevitability. It was important that specific science fiction conventions and the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jimmy Bohr (Advisor); Janet Parrott (Committee Member); Maureen Ryan (Committee Member) Subjects: Theater

PHD, Kent State University, 2012, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies

This study looked at the potential relationship that may exist between students' intelligence strengths, in particular their spatial and kinesthetic strengths, and their combined cognitive and metacognitive levels of interaction with a CD-ROM storybook. The multiple intelligence strengths of a sample of students, measured via the MIDAS/My Young Child (Shearer, 1994-2002) was correlated with their levels of interactions with the CD-ROM storybook as measured by the researcher's adaptation of a rubric used by Labbo & Kuhn (2000). It was predicted that correlational analysis would show different measures of positive relationships between all intelligence strengths but a higher positive relationship between both the spatial intelligence strength and combined cognitive and metacognitive levels of interaction with the CD-ROM storybook and also between kinesthetic intelligence strength and combined cognitive and metacognitive levels of interaction with the CD-ROM storybook. Results appeared to demonstrate that it was the unique student intelligence profile as an entity, as opposed to particular and individual intelligence strengths, in relation to the content of the storybook that was more informative concerning potential relationships at work.

Committee: Timothy Rasinski PhD (Committee Co-Chair); William Kist PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Carolyn Brodie PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Early Childhood Education; Education; Educational Software; Educational Technology; Elementary Education; Instructional Design; Library Science; Literacy; Multimedia Communications; Pedagogy; Preschool Education; Psychological Tests; Psychology; Reading Instruction; Te

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2011, American Culture Studies/Communication

Although seen as an emergent area of study, the history of video games shows that the medium has had a longevity that speaks to its status as a major cultural force, not only within American society but also globally. Much of video game production has been influenced by cinema, and perhaps nowhere is this seen more directly than in the topic of games based on movies. Functioning as franchise expansion, spaces for play, and story development, film-to-game translations have been a significant component of video game titles since the early days of the medium. As the technological possibilities of hardware development continued in both the film and video game industries, issues of media convergence and divergence between film and video games have grown in importance. This dissertation looks at the ways that this connection was established and has changed by looking at the relationship between film and video games in terms of economics, aesthetics, and narrative. Beginning in the 1970s, or roughly at the time of the second generation of home gaming consoles, and continuing to the release of the most recent consoles in 2005, it traces major areas of intersection between films and video games by identifying key titles and companies to consider both how and why the prevalence of video games has happened and continues to grow in power. By looking at a wide variety of games – those found in arcades; on home consoles and home computers; for portable devices included dedicated gaming units, cell phones, and other personal digital assistants; and games that exist in other forms, such as those found in web browsers or as bonus features on digital video discs – this dissertation illuminates a complex history that intertwines technological development, economic forces, and aesthetic considerations of visual and narrative design.

Committee: Ronald Shields PhD (Committee Chair); Donald Callen PhD (Committee Member); Lisa Alexander PhD (Committee Member); Margaret Yacobucci PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Cinematography; Communication; Comparative; Film Studies; Mass Media; Motion Pictures; Multimedia Communications