Active Audience Research Articles

Digital storytelling and audience engagement in cultural heritage management: A collaborative model based on the Digital City of Thessaloniki

Abstract Cities are complex, networked and continuously changing social ecosystems, shaped and transformed through the interaction of different interests and ambitions. They are linked to places, where various aspects of past events are projected and expressed by means of personal memories and narrations (urban memory), representing a promise for future: a vision of freedom, creativity, opportunity and prosperity. At the same time, technology is currently promoting unprecedented changes in urban areas, which are often marked as smart city developments. This paper studies the history of cultural and creative industries, bringing forward the dedicated digital storytelling strategies that promote active audience engagement in urban cultural heritage. A collaborative model is proposed and analyzed (in multiple perspectives), aiming at providing an integrated manner for heritage documentation, management and dissemination. The development deals with the Digital City of Thessaloniki, Greece, a big city, not a boundless one, rich in culture, but with rather poor heritage management mechanisms. The research focuses on theoretical and practical aspects for the citizens’ collection and interpretation of “digital heritage” documents (artifacts, places, etc.), resulting in a model that fuels audience engagement and collaboration of cultural organizations. Model-design is validated through state-of-the-art review and formative evaluation processes (both qualitative and quantitative), with an associated SWOT analysis that points out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Although the proposed methodology has been adapted to the needs of a particular (digital) city, the current paper goes beyond a case study, as it brings forward novel technological and methodological guidelines, which could be successfully deployed in districts with similar cultural, geographical, and technical features.

Do Real-time Interactions Increase Audience Satisfaction for Online Live Video Streaming Service? - The Case of AfreecaTV in Korea

People’s behavior of multimedia consumption is now changing from passive watching to active or interactive watching. After opening of AfreecaTV, a leading Korean online personal broadcasting service, broadcasting jockeys broadcast their multimedia content, such as videos, shows, sports games and online games, with their own comments. The key feature distinguishing Afreeca TV from traditional broadcasting services is the interactivity between broadcasting jockeys and the audience. This paper tries to examine whether this interactivity could be interpreted as a new powerful viewing motive inducing the audience to choose a certain AfreecaTV channel by applying the uses and gratifications theory. Broadcasting jockey interaction was identified as an important factor that affects audience activity and satisfaction. Real-time interactions with both other audience members of the same interest was also found to be a critical factor in inducing audience to watch online live video streaming services. Along with the self-motivation to interact with other members of the audience, the effort of broadcasting jockeys to interact with audiences could play a critical role in increasing the audience’s motivation to viewing AfreecaTV.

Information management in interactive and non-interactive suspenseful storytelling

Suspense is one key feature in modern storytelling. One of the mechanisms to deliver a suspenseful experience to an audience is by means of controlling the information provided. The media, however, has a very strong impact on what kind of information can be delivered and how. Moreover, modern storytelling is usually conveyed interactively, in such a way that the audience is also part of the story. In this paper, we experiment and analyse the different impact of information management in interactive and non-interactive storytelling. We report on an experiment measuring the reported perceived amusement in interactive and non-interactive versions of a potentially suspenseful story, and we provide evidence that a passive, non-interactive audience usually prefers less information than an active interactive audience. The study provides informed insight on how these results could be used in real scenarios to deliver appropriate levels of information to enhance the perception of suspense.

Performers and an active audience: Movement in music production and perception

Musical communication involves performance and perception processes, both of which engage the sensorimotor system. In much of the performance science literature, however, musical communication is conceptualized as a one-way trajectory from active performer to passive listener, minimizing the contribution of the listener and the collaborative nature of communication. In this paper, we discuss how movement contributes to 1) music performance, through sound production, interperformer coordination, and visual expressivity, and 2) music perception, through the simulation of observed gestures, activation of crossmodal associations, and induction of overt synchronized responses. Embodied music cognition, which treats musical communication as a process of dynamic interaction between individuals, and emphasizes the role of the physical body in mediating between environmental stimuli and subjective experiences, provides a background for our discussion. We conclude the paper with a discussion of how ongoing technological developments are simultaneously enhancing our ability to study musical communication (e.g., via integration of optical motion capture and mobile eye tracking) and, by introducing means of performing music that do not rely on human movement, challenging our understanding of how music and movement relate.

Analyzing the active audience: Reluctant, reactive, fearful, or lazy? Forms and motives of participation in mainstream journalism

Participation has become a key issue in contemporary journalism studies, yet research on how the participatory space is being appropriated by users is rather limited. This article attempts a methodological contribution by offering a way to analyze participatory journalism in reference to variant participatory affordances enabling different levels of creative effort, control, and editorial permeability. To do so, it understands participation as the active involvement of users, and makes an analytical connection among technological affordances, motivations, and contextual factors. The article offers empirical evidence challenging both cyber-optimist and cyber-pessimist assumptions about participation. Drawing on insights from a web-based survey, it is argued that the ‘reluctant audience’ paradigm may be interpreted in terms of the ‘lazy audience’ and the ‘fearful audience’, which seem to coexist along with the ‘reactive audience’.

Analisis Penggunaan Internet Sebagai Referensi Mahasiswa Stain Curup (Studi Manfaat dan Dampak Media Massa)

This study is a study focused on finding meaning towards the behavior of internet usage as reference of STAIN Curup students. In line with the concept of an active audience, this research would focus on the internet as a mass media. With the advancement of information technology and mass media, providing various facilities in accessing information especially through the internet. STAIN Curup students are required to keep updating their knowledge and information especially with regard to their studies. This need is what makes the student must continue to add the supporting reference study. In addition to books, print journals and modules, the internet becomes one of the reference sources used by students. Therefore, it needs to be studied further about how the use of internet as a reference STAIN Curup students? how is the impact of internet use as a reference of STAIN Curup students?
 To answer the problems, this research uses the uses and gratifications theory and the moderate effect model, which is expected to give meaning and peel the phenomenon of internet usage on the students. In line with the uses and gratifications theory, satisfaction will arise if needs are met. In this case, the satisfaction of internet usage as reference of student is seen from the functioning of mass media, among others: information function, entertainment function, persuasion function, cultural transmission function and social inheritance, correlation function (linking). While the impact of internet use as a reference of students, among others, cognitive impact, affective impact, and behavioral impact. The impact of internet usage is also supported by individual factors; such as selective attention, selective perception, and selective retention, motivation and knowledge, beliefs, opinions, values, and needs, persuasion, personality and adjustment. And social factors, among others; age, sex, education and training, occupation and income, religion, residence.

Fantasy and its Suspension in an Age of Awkwardness: Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back

Abstract The paper examines the way Vermes’s bestseller and its cinematic adaptation, Look Who’s Back, are structured in analogy to Lacan’s notion of the fundamental fantasy, i. e., the framework within which subjects organize their desire in relation to the Other or to the Other’s desire. Employing mainly Adam Kotsko’s terms of awkwardness and sociopathy, I argue that the characters in the novel and the film and the implied and actual audiences constitute Hitler, the narrator and protagonist, as a fantasmatic awkward-sociopath big Other. Hitler is portrayed both as a ludicrous representation of an unsettling and awkward social order, that cannot implement clear and definite norms, and as a cynical sociopath who is incapable not only of overcoming this order but also of fixing it by making it ‘whole’ and consistent again. Discussing major differences between the novel and the film, I examine the ways audiences may fall and avoid falling into the trap of the novel’s and the film’s fantasy. This interpretation contributes simultaneously to the assessment of Hitler’s specific portrayal in Look Who’s Back and the critical exploration of his emblematic representation in our contemporary culture as well as its reasons and effects.

Virtual Trauma: Prospects for Automediality

Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes...

Social Media in Australian Federal Elections: Comparing the 2013 and 2016 Campaigns

Against a backdrop of substantial and persistent disruption in Australian federal politics, this article examines the uses of Twitter in campaigning in the 2013 and 2016 federal elections. We comprehensively tracked the tweets posted by, and directed at, all candidates during the final 2 weeks of these campaigns, and compare patterns in candidate and audience activity across the two elections. This documents considerable shifts in campaigning strategies, electorate responses, and central themes of the debate from 2013 to 2016; we show that these shifts are in line with the changing electoral fortunes of Australia’s major party blocs during an exceptionally tumultuous period in federal politics.

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

“Two Birds with One Stone”: Transmedia Serialisation in <em>Twin Peaks</em>

“Two Birds with One Stone”: Transmedia Serialisation in <em>Twin Peaks</em>

Making music in early childhood: A study of the formats of participation

This paper presents research carried out in a kindergarten in Catalonia with the aim of studying the different kinds of musical activity that take place during one school day. This is an ethnographic study where the researcher became an extra teacher in a group of one to two-year-olds and interacted with them musically. The methodology is based in a participatory observation approach and data are collected via video-recordings, field notes and a daily exchange of impressions and reflections with the teacher. The results show four different kinds of participation that determine the type of musical activity carried out when children are placed in the spotlight: (a) active audience, (b) performer pointer (c) performer proof with expert, and (d) performer proof without expert.

‘Authoring’ terrorism in Aziz Saâdallah’s Le Temps du terrorisme

This essay explores how the Moroccan film Le Temps du terrorisme uses the frame of the artistic/creative process to stage a study of religious fanaticism and its tragic consequences. Drawing on melorealism, the filmmaker uses tropes of comedy and farce already familiar to his theatre and television audiences, but he also layers his text with self-reflexive strategies of direct address and narrator as witness. These devices work to bridge the distance between fiction and reality, and author and audience. As filmmaker, Aziz Saâdallah forges a personal relationship between artist and viewer and carves out a space for a dialectics of the artistic process: demanding an active audience, posing questions and forcing the viewer to think. He thus seeks to raise debate across a wide range of spectators and poses complex questions of responsibility, tolerance and the role of artistic expression in the present-day times of terrorism.

Mining the Box: Adaptation, Nostalgia and Generation X

This article identifies the television to film phenomenon by cataloguing contemporary films adapted from popular television shows of the 1960s and 1970s. This trend is located within the context of Generation X and considered within the framework of nostalgia and Linda Hutcheon’s (2006) conception of adaptation. The history of re-visiting existing texts in screen culture is explored, and the distinction between remakes and adaptation is determined. The specificity of the television format is discussed, as are aspects of audience engagement with television in terms of identity and identification. Acknowledging television as the collective experience that binds Generation X, the broader trend for nostalgic engagement with the past is shown to be an impetus for the trend in contemporary films and further shown to provide an opportunity for active audience reflexivity. Get Smart (2008) and The Avengers (1998) are discussed in terms of such reflexivity; and issues of gender are highlighted to demonstrate the role of filmic adaptations in contemporary negotiations of past and present ideals. In doing so, this article confirms the socio-cultural significance of the television to film phenomenon beyond industrial considerations, and posits the critical appeal of mining the box.

Особливості й умови діяльності книжкових видавництв України у сучасному медіап

In the information society the status of information is changing: this main value of global civilization becomes an important resource of socio- economic, technological and cultural development. The rapid development of virtual technologies and the growing number of Internet users in Ukraine and in the world causes the new challenges to communication of each organization. The book publishers are also obliged to respond to these processes. However, the works devoted directly to publishers’ communication in the modern media space are still lacking in Ukraine. The objective of the article is to clarify peculiarities and conditions of the activities of Ukrainian book publishers in today’s media space which is an important issue today. It is analyzed the literature and sources on this issue and it is ascertained the theoretical and practical possibilities to take into account the trends in the world of modern media in the PR-activity of book publishers. Also the prospects for further scientific study and practical use of PR-communications in the activity of publishers are determined. The analysis of current changes in the modern information space allows us to trace the general tendencies: the new subject and object areas are formed; the number of subjects is expanded; the new formats of interaction within the system of communications of the organization and in society as a whole are created. That means that publishing house’s PR-communications are complicated by the emergence of new elements, such as active audience, social networks as communication channels, promotions on the Internet and others. PR communication in the Internet space is the most effective and inexpensive tool for interaction of publishers with active audiences. Thus, the activation of PR communication in the modern media space is associated with the emergence of the latest information technologies, online media as well as development of Internet. The use of online channels of Internet for communication with the target audience of publishing organizations has certain advantages over traditional media. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the information saturation of media space, which complicates the way of PR-messages of book publishers to the reader.

As If

As If Robert Shaughnessy A couple of years ago I travelled from Canterbury to Nottingham to see Propeller's Pocket Dream. This is, as the company's publicity describes it, "a sixty-minute version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, especially devised for young audiences," one that aimed to "create a relaxed and engaging atmosphere… as well as encouraging the young audience to give an open and uninhibited response." As I am currently engaged in research into the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of Relaxed Performance, I was naturally interested to see how this might work. Relaxed Performance (or RP), for those unfamiliar with the term, is something that has begun to be offered by many theaters in the UK in recent years; designed primarily though not exclusively for young persons with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and their carers, an RP is one in which the usual protocols of audience behavior, and, sometimes, aspects of the show itself, will be adjusted to accommodate the needs of the condition. Thus, audience members are free to move about, to enter and leave the auditorium as necessary, and to make noise—this might well involve vociferous and blunt commentary on the show itself—and lighting and sound levels are adjusted to reflect autistic sensitivities. The idea is that RP encourages participation in an activity by a group that is habitually excluded from it, or that excludes itself from it; the understanding is that non-autistic, or, to use the terminology, neurotypical as opposed to neurodivergent, members of an RP show accept behavior that in usual circumstances would be censured or suppressed (Kempe).1 I had already seen Pocket Dream in Canterbury three weeks earlier, and knew what to expect: a fast-paced, cartoonish, sometimes puerile, genially enjoyable production, staged in a chalk circle with costume rails, tea chests, stepladders and assorted percussion, delivered by an all-male cast of six. A glance at the cast list confirmed a dramatis personae totaling [End Page 37] thirteen, with lovers, mechanicals and principal fairies, but no Egeus, no Philostrate, no Theseus and no Hippolyta. This will be interesting when they get to Pyramus and Thisbe, I thought; with the entire cast fully occupied as mechanicals, who will play their play audience? The solution lay in the co-option of us, the actual audience. In Canterbury, the actors came out of role and ushered two willing juveniles to step onto the stage, one male and one female, one Theseus and one Hippolyta. And because this was a Propeller show, Quince stated, handing out the costumes, they were cast across gender: a top hat for the girl Theseus, a feather boa for the boy Hippolyta. Their task was simply to sit at the top of the stepladders and watch, applaud, and, at the end of the mechanicals' play, rejoin the audience. In Canterbury, this is exactly what the two volunteers, grinning broadly throughout, did. This, in Nottingham, is when things went, if not exactly wrong, then certainly not according to plan. Two volunteers, one boy, one girl, piped up straight away. The first sign of trouble was when Quince announced the cross-dressing business: there was no way, Propeller rules or not, that this boy was going to play a girl, nor this girl a boy. This was not ideal, but less disruptive than what happened next. Perched on his stepladder, this Theseus was under no illusions as to whom was now the real star of the show—and it wasn't Darrell Brockis as Bottom. The mechanicals' play was thus subjected to a running accompaniment of the kind of observations, insults and jokes that eight-year-old boys find hilarious: that's not a real sword, this is boring, you can't act, and so on. At first, the actors took this in good spirit and sportingly seemed to enjoy the game, but it wasn't long before they, and Brockis in particular, appeared to be struggling to conceal what I sensed was genuine irritation, as the boy's incessant and forceful interventions threatened to derail not only the play-within-the-play but the performance itself. Brockis eventually managed to silence his tormentor, and the play coasted to...

Probable Impossibilities: Historical Romance Readers Talk Back

Probable Impossibilities:Historical Romance Readers Talk Back Suzanne Keen (bio) I take as my starting point Phelan's conception of narrative progression: "the synthesis of textual dynamics and readerly dynamics" (12). I accept Phelan's claim that "[t]extual dynamics are the internal processes by which narratives move from beginning through middle to ending, and readerly dynamics are the corresponding cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses of the audience to those textual dynamics" (13). The responses of readers are hard to get at, but collaboration between rhetorical narrative theory that admits a role for audiences (narrative, authorial, and actual) and reader research is desirable. To illuminate the bridging "interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments" (13) enacted by readers in response to narrative encoding, I consider a small sampling of the copious social media and paratextual evidence of readerly dynamics in responses to Diana Gabaldon's as yet unfinished time-slip historical romance sequence, the Outlander novels (1990–2014).1 My response underscores the efficacy of Phelan's model by showing that it illuminates the vital role of audiences of [End Page 127] narratives quite different from those he presents (passing a fundamental test for a proposed theory, which should work as well to account for popular as for scholarly readerships). If, as Phelan argues, the authorial audience has attributes "assigned by the author but on the basis of the author's assumptions about likely readers," then the author's communication with her diverse actual readers (in this case, by means of her blog and through her published commentary, The Outlandish Companion) highlights some of those assumptions. Some methodological challenges arise from a commitment to considering readerly dynamics that allows actual audiences onto Phelan's chart. Gabaldon's readers are legion: she commands a worldwide audience for books that have sold more than twenty million copies and have been translated into thirty-eight languages.2 The New York Times bestselling novels have received a boost from their adaptation into a popular Starz television series. Though most of Gabaldon's readers are presumed to be women, the millions of viewers of her television series include many men: the series premiere, "Sassenach," drew equal proportions of men and women in the strongest multiplatform debut of a new series in the history of the network (West).3 With a potential authorial audience of that scale, we must assume recruitment from an actual audience of great diversity. Authorial audience members, as inferred from among other data points on her Website and those reproduced in The Outlandish Companion (369–95), enjoy reading very lengthy novels (9,073 paperback pages so far), sustain interest in a fiction delivered serially, and tolerate fairly long gaps between installments—though potentially they require the "methadone" of Gabaldon's book recommendations to tide them over (571–77). Whether they read for the sex scenes, for the historical reconstructions of events, because they find eighteenth-century medicine fascinating, or simply to follow familiar characters, can and must vary. That Gabaldon engages with her readers shows in her acknowledgement of "… the Readers, who both instigated this book and supplied me with a great deal of its content by asking questions, suggesting Things They Would Like to Know, and providing all sorts of interesting miscellanea" (Outlandish Companion v). Though Gabaldon tries to teach these readers about the error of presentism (343), their responses include passionate presentist denunciations of her representational choices, which (valuing plausibility and verisimilitude) she defends as influenced by the historical period and not under her own control at all (129, 191, 341).4 The author [End Page 128] meets her readers more than partway, blithely admitting minor errors and oversights caught by readers (136, 374), but she stoutly defends her rights as a maker. Rather than joining in the self-deprecating assessment of Gabaldon readers as Obsessenachs, who turn to fan sites to endure Droughtlander periods between novels, I suggest that Gabaldon's real audience talks back and the real author engages with them, within limits. The fictional world of Outlander consists on the one hand of a rigorously researched eighteenth century (with persuasively rendered locations and episodes in the Scottish Highlands, Paris, the Caribbean, coastal and mountain colonial North Carolina, and...

Database problems of maritime transport industry on high load platform

The article says about distributed and high load systems, common problems and common instructions for solving such problems as denormalization, replication and sharding of transport and maritime aspects. The analysis of strengths and weaknesses of technology for the transport field of activity was carried out. A fragment of the code for sampling optimization is given. Conclusions about the global use of industry technology are made. When your current infrastructure starts to show the first signs that it is no longer cope with the load and if you have a 128 MB VPS - for you, it can be 10 requests per second. For corporations, it can be 10,000 requests. There is a need for scaling and optimizing the infrastructure. Maritime office needs a good monitoring system. It will help determine the very moment when it's time to scale. Stable systems for monitoring and tracking server performance trends: Munin, Zabbix, Nagios. What usually happens when the high load point is approached: slow or infinite loading of pages; random errors; broken connections from the Web server; partial loading of content (for example, there is no part of the image), and a decrease in audience activity. This direction is very modern and promising for the transport industry.

Rhetorical Ways of Covering Up Speculations and Hypotheses, or Why Empirical Investigations of Real Readers Matter

Rhetorical Ways of Covering Up Speculations and Hypotheses, or Why Empirical Investigations of Real Readers Matter Jan Alber (bio) I want to thank James Phelan and John V. Knapp for giving me the opportunity to respond to the former's target essay. A couple of years ago, I had the honor of spending some time at Ohio State University under the auspices of Project Narrative. During my stay there, I had various discussions with [End Page 34] Phelan, and was extremely impressed by his interactions with others. It took me a while to figure out that the way in which he engages with other people's opinions or projects closely correlates with his rhetorical theory of narrative: he is always interested in finding out what exactly it is that others are trying to do, and he then takes things from there. I also sat in on one of his classes on rhetorical narratology, and I really liked the way in which he encouraged his students to ask critical questions concerning his approach, to which he then responded. Despite this positive impression, I have some problems with his written work. In my response, I will zoom in on the confidence with which he talks about the intentions of the implied author (i.e., "the stream-lined version of the actual author responsible for the construction of the narrative" that Phelan recently transformed into "the author" [10–11]) as well as the reactions of both the authorial audience (i.e., "the author's hypothesized audience" that shares his or her values [10]) and the actual (flesh-and-blood) audience. I do not take issue with Phelan's highly interesting readings of, say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), or David Small's Stitches (2009) but rather with his politics of speaking for others. He does not only think that he is for some reason entitled to speak for the author and several different readers; his permanent references to alleged authorial intentions and reactions of audiences also create the impression that his interpretations are quasi-objective investigations. Finally, I will say a few words about his definition of the term "narrative," which, at least to my mind, produces counterintuitive results. On pages 29–31 of his target essay, Phelan discusses an "implausible" passage from Huckleberry Finn that "communicates the outlandish outcomes of Jim's imagination" (34). In addition, he explains to his readers why Twain is doing what he is doing, and he also tells them how Twain's audiences react. The main problem is how does he know these things? For me, such passages are highly problematic because they presuppose that Phelan has (for some unspecified reason) direct access to authors and their audiences. However, since there is no way of ever knowing whether Phelan "gets it right," formulations such as "Twain wants to do A, and he effectively draws on B, C, and D, to accomplish A" and "audiences are willing to overlook the implausibility because doing so enables entertainment" (31) serve to cover up the fact that we are here only confronted with Phelan's opinions, intuitions, speculations, or hypotheses. His analyses do not at [End Page 35] all lack in terms of quality or clarity; rather, Phelan's terminology elevates his subjective impressions to seemingly objective statements about what is "really" going on between authors and their audiences. However, we simply do not know whether his intuitions have anything to do with what Twain had in mind or with how ideal or real audiences react. Since readers can never be sure that they have formed correct hypotheses about the implied author's intentions, I want to follow instead David Herman's slightly more modest proposal to move beyond the "compartmentalized intentionality" of the implied author—that is, beyond an approach that is grounded in a view of intentions as inner, mental objects—and toward "an approach of narrative understanding that more fully and more openly grounds stories in intentional systems, that acknowledges the extent to which the process of interpretation hinges on making defeasible (= possibly wrong) inferences about communicative intentions" (244). This proposal closely correlates with the idea that intentions are distributed...

All 'Metatheatre' is Not Created Equal: The Knight of the Burning Pestle, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Navigation of the Spectrum of Dramatic Representation

All 'Metatheatre' is Not Created Equal:The Knight of the Burning Pestle, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Navigation of the Spectrum of Dramatic Representation Nathaniel C. Leonard CITIZEN … and now you call your play The London Merchant. Down with your title, boy, down with your title! Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle Induction, 8–9 QUINCE Marry, our play is The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.2.9–11 Both Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595) use the comic presentation of a play as a central element in their overall dramatic plots, but to meaningfully different ends. Beaumont's play stages an intruding audience that frames and shapes the play's narrative and places one of its own members in a starring role, while Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals" serve as a low comic subplot through the preparation of their own play that they in turn present to the protagonists of the central romantic plot and which acts as a coda for the play as a whole. But what are the formal functions that these seemingly similar, but also clearly distinct, dramatic techniques fulfill? And, perhaps more importantly, how are we, as readers or viewers of early modern English drama, meant to understand and discuss those techniques? The standard answer to such questions in the current critical conversation has been to begin by labeling such techniques as "metatheatrical." The problem with this easy label is that, [End Page 49] since the term's coining by Lionel Abel in 1960, it has become a catch-all for reflexive dramaturgy with regard to both genre and technique. The term has become so ubiquitous that it can be applied to almost any play, early modern or otherwise. Many critical discussions use metatheatre to connect a series of reflexive dramatic strategies—like soliloquy, chorus, dumbshow, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue—and assume that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. But, as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Knight of the Burning Pestle demonstrate, metatheatrical tropes have the ability to generate a variety of efficacies and representational logics based on how those reflexive strategies are utilized. Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle's theatricalization of the actual audience through the introduction of the Citizen, the Citizen's Wife, and Rafe collapses the easy distinction between audience and performance. Knight uses this metatheatrical intervention early in the plot to generate competing fictional worlds, which are effectively inset within the performance of the audience and represent competing generic logics. Midsummer, on the other hand, uses the parallels between scenes to evoke the metatheatrical, which consistently asks the viewer to re-imagine their relationship to the staged action and to live performance more generally. The "tragical mirth" (Shakespeare 5.1.57) of the play-within asks the viewer to reevaluate their categorization of Midsummer as simply a comedy, instead suggesting that a play's position in a genre or between genres has as much to do with its execution in performance as its plot. In order to discuss these issues in Knight and Midsummer, this essay will elaborate on some of the specific dramaturgical ramifications of the metatheatrical by exploring the term's slippery nature and offering a working definition of the term. In addition, this article will propose an alternative strategy for describing the devices under the aegis of metatheatre by positing an approach to naming and distinguishing between the layers of dramatic representation generated by metatheatre and other similar techniques. In order to describe this spectrum of dramatic layering, I use Robert Weimann's concepts of locus and platea as a starting point for distinguishing between these representational strata. Weimann's terminology, based on the representational structure of medieval theater, offers a solid foundation for new terminology that will allow for a more specific and nuanced discussion of metatheatrical structure and dramatic texts more generally. In order to begin this process, I will introduce two new terms...