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.