Narrative Video Research Articles

The Adventures of Ms. Meta: The female superhero and her cultural importance

Abstract William Moulton Marston, inspired by his wife and beliefs, created a female superhero in 1941, seeking to address how the feminine archetype in western society ‘lacks force, strength and power’, and that ‘women’s strong qualities have become despised’. Wonder Woman was the result, and the character has achieved iconic status in popular culture seven decades later. While there is a wealth of research examining the representation of the female superhero and how this speaks to perceptions of femininity across the past 70 years, its focus is the prevalence of stereotypical over authentic depictions, and the harmful effects of this on society. However, the existing cultural impact and importance of female superheroes to readers of all genders cannot be ignored; to do so is to the detriment of both fans and scholars of comics. My research combines the platform of digital media with the artistic styles and narrative themes of comics, culminating in a narrative video game that brings together original comic pages, texts and animated sequences. The game tells the story of Meta Woman, a self-created superhero, from her first appearance in the ‘we can do it!’ 1940s, her reinventions as Miss Meta in the aftermath of the Comics Code of the 1950s, Ms Meta in the liberated 1970s and beyond, concluding in the present day. By cross-references comic representations of women with fan experience and stories of women from each era, the game showcases the power of female superheroes, and makes them relevant to each user’s life and experiences.

Screenwriting and authorial control in narrative video games

Abstract Film and television screenwriters who are accustomed to working in a linear, noninteractive mode of storytelling may find themselves struggling to communicate a coherent progression of plot, character and theme when tasked with providing multiple avenues for video game player narrative input. This may be especially problematic when writing single-player role-playing video games (RPGs), which have always permitted a certain co-authorial relationship between a game’s screenwriters and its players, due to the branching-path narrative complexity and performative or emergent gameplay possibilities that are hallmarks of the genre. Using a case study of the linear game, The Last of Us, in contrast to an analysis of the open-world role-playing games Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 3, I will examine reasons why a screenwriter may find himself or herself knowingly ceding narrative control to players due to reasons that relate to a player’s engagement with ideas of co-authorship.

Validation of Educational Tools for Use in a Human Papillomavirus Intervention Study

Purpose: The aim of this study is to report the process used to validate an educational Human Papillomavirus (HPV) pamphlet and a HPV video to use in a HPV intervention study for women of color to increase HPV knowledge, health beliefs, health behaviors and intention to use the HPV vaccine for themselves or members of the family. Methods: Fifteen women enrolled in a two part, two hour methodological pilot study to validate the appearance, content and readability of the educational pamphlet and video. Quantitative data was determined women completing two 4-pont Likert type questionnaires consisting of 10 items each. The qualitative data was retrieved with the use of a semi-structure interview. Results: Greater than 86% of the participants indicated that both educational tools were acceptable in appearance, content and readability/ understanding. Participants' responses suggested a change in the pamphlet color and use of more colored illustrations as well as condensing the video narrative with bulleted summary pages after each scene. Conclusion: The tools were well received by the participants. Next steps were identified toward revision. A HPV pamphlet and an HPV video were validated for use in a future intervention study. Future Considerations: More educational pamphlets identifying validation process for use in intervention studies for targeted high risk populations.

Effects of a pain self-management intervention combining written and video elements on health-related quality of life among people with different levels of education.

Combining written and video material could increase the impact of health education for people with less education, but more evidence is needed about the impact of combined materials in different formats, especially in the context of chronic pain self-management. This study tested the impact of combining written information about self-managing chronic joint pain, which used language at a high reading level, with a DVD containing narrative video material presented directly by patients, using language at a lower reading level. Physical and mental health-related quality of life (36-Item Short Form Health Survey) was measured among 107 men with hemophilia before and 6 months after being randomly assigned to receive an information booklet alone or the booklet plus the DVD. Analysis of covariance was used to compare health outcomes between randomized groups at follow-up, using the baseline measures as covariates, with stratified analyses for groups with different levels of education. The DVD significantly improved mental health-related quality of life among those with only high school education. Video material could therefore supplement written information to increase its impact on groups with less education, and combined interventions of this type could help to achieve health benefits for disadvantaged groups who are most in need of intervention.

The Importance of Ethnographic Film/Video/Multimedia in the Development and Assessment of Anthropological Understanding

This descriptive account of a project from 2002-2003 entitled ‘Visual technologies and their assessment in undergraduate teaching and learning’ originated as presentation to the IUAES conference at Manchester University, 5-10 Aug 2013, to the panel ‘Establishing academic standards of evaluation for non-literary forms of representation in anthropology’. It presents findings based on a range of practical experiences in teaching and research over the past thirty years. During that time, I have pondered questions such as whether or not we should define ethnographic film, and what the criteria for ethnographic as opposed to documentary and/or art film should be. This account draws on the website and other the results of funded research into the assessment of undergraduate video and multimedia projects to discuss these issues and to argue for the importance of including narrative video projects for undergraduate assessment as well as the now ubiquitous power-point presentations.

Communicating Breast Cancer Screening With Young Women: An Experimental Test of Didactic and Narrative Messages Using Video and Infographics

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death around the world. Mortality from breast cancer can be reduced if the cancer is detected early enough. It is important to find effective communication that encourages early detection of breast cancer. This study aimed to measure differences between narrative and didactic communication on breast cancer awareness, knowledge of appropriate diagnostic exams, attitude toward breast self-exam, and intention to screen for breast cancer through a breast self-exam. It further aimed to test whether any differences in outcomes were associated with the format used to deliver the communication: video or infographic. The effects of the communication strategies were tested using an experimental design with a control group and four experimental groups: narrative video, didactic video, narrative infographic, or didactic infographic. A total of 194 Italian-speaking women ages 18–30 years completed questionnaires before and after exposure. Positive increases were found for all outcome variables after exposure to any communication strategy tested. The didactic message delivered in video format had the most positive effect on awareness and knowledge, whereas the narrative video message had the most positive effect on attitude and intention. For both message types, videos had a more positive influence than infographics when communicating breast cancer information for this audience. This was the first study of message effects of breast cancer communication with Italian-speaking young women. Further research is warranted to understand how to maximize communication strategies so that they are the most effective in influencing behaviors and if these results are consistent with other linguistic populations.

The “Other” Woman in Contemporary Television Drama: Analyzing Intersectional Representation on Bones

This essay theorizes intersectional representation as a strategic device used in twenty-first century television narrative by examining the generically “Other” woman in television drama. This character is often racially, ethnically, economically and sexually “othered”. She appears on numerous broadcast television programs, and yet remains relatively invisible in cultural discourses of television. I offer a critical reading of the intersectional representation used on FOX’s series Bones as a means of exposing how intersectional imagery functions to re-center identity politics on White, heteronormative, middle-class values. That these images remain largely invisible in academic discussions of race, ethnicity, sexuality and class on television while appearing frequently in the most economically successful television narratives speaks to the complexity of intersectional identity politics in contemporary media studies.

Screencasting for Enhanced Teaching and Learning in Blended and Online Creative Writing Classes

Screencasting is a technology that enables the user to record screen activity on video while also capturing audio or video narration of the lecturer demonstrating that screen activity. This technology has improved over the years, and has now become streamlined enough to be integrated easily in popular learning platforms like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle. The technology’s high usability factor and the varieties of screencasting software now available as open source makes screencasting appealing to writing instructors, not only as a means to improve teaching, but also as a tool for students to create and engage with multimedia texts that facilitate the acquisition of contemporary literacy skills. In the United States, the National Council of Teachers of English proposes that 21st century definitions of literacy must, among other things, include the ability of writers and readers to analyze, create, and interact with multimedia texts and to gain proficiency with the use of modern technologies. I argue that screencasting is a practical and creative technology that can be used for a variety of purposes: to address 21st century literacy requirements in writing classes, to improve teaching effectiveness in both online and “flipped classroom” learning, and to enhance the instructor’s social presence in online learning environments. I give examples from my own teaching experience using Camtasia and ScreenFlow software, as well as review some popular applications of screencasting technology currently in use in academic environments.

Remembering the Age of Iron

Over the past few years we have witnessed a minor cultural phenomenon in China, with the production and enthusiastic reception nationwide of several television dramas about Chinese workers in the socialist decades. Set in the industrial plants of Liaoning in China’s northeast, once the industrial powerhouse of the socialist nation, these drama series centre on the dramatic transformation in workers’ experiences from 1949 to the start of economic reforms. In this paper I explore these series, asking: what does the smallscale production but enthusiastic reception of this genre tell us about the contemporary cultural politics of class? This paper addresses this question by (1) highlighting the key aspects of workers’ experiences with socialism as depicted in these television narratives; (2) considering the creative agenda of Gao Mantang, the script writer of the most successful industrial-themed television series; and (3) identifying some crucial ways in which the subjectivity of workers and other social groups in contemporary Chinese society intersect to shape the cultural politics of class. This discussion shows that television dramas have indeed become the basis of a widely accessible public forum that helps forge a renewed appreciation of the moral integrity of China’s working class, vent a widespread sense of injustice, and foster a certain degree of solidarity between workers and other social classes. At the same time, while television dramas about workers may hold significant potential for mobilising public support for the working class and advocating workers’ interests, this discussion also suggests that so far this potential has not been fully exploited.

Video narratives to assess student teachers’ competence as new teachers

In teacher education programmes, written portfolios or text-based self-evaluations are generally used to document the development of student teachers’ competence. However, such approaches do no justice to the complex nature of teaching as they tend to lead to evidence in which teacher competencies are disconnected and removed from the actual teaching practice. In one postgraduate teacher education programme, video narratives were evaluated as a valid way to assess student teachers’ teaching competencies, promoting connections amongst different competencies, situating these in practice and showing their development over time. Data were gathered from self-reports of both teacher educators and student teachers as well as student teachers’ completed video narratives. Most student teachers succeeded in meeting the set criteria for the video narrative assignment with connected video clips and text frames. However, student teachers also came up with only a few video episodes and loosely connected clips, reflections and other sources. Although most of the students during the programme did explicitly reflect upon their personal development towards becoming a teacher, almost none of them explicitly connected these ideas to their long-term development. We conclude that video narratives show potential to be used as a valid assessment of student teachers’ teaching competence. Yet, structured guidance as well as ill-structured assignments are needed in framing assessment of student teachers in teacher preparation: the former to clarify the aims, format and criteria and the latter to enable student teachers to reflect on their teaching in a personally, meaningful way.

Tourism News: Construção da Notícia e Narrativa Televisiva de Destinos Turísticos

Tourism News: Construção da Notícia e Narrativa Televisiva de Destinos Turísticos

You Are What You Eat. Television narratives between hedonism and self-control

Television programming has experienced a recent influx of shows which focus on food and diet. The discursive forms employed by the media converge on an axis of hedonism/self-control: on the one hand, the increased construction of a culture of desire and fantasy relating to the consumption of food (Food Porn), on the other a neo-liberal discourse on the privatization of the individual’s responsibility towards their own body and health by virtue of media spectacularization of self-empowerment and self-governance.

American Stroke Association Stroke Council Update

This report represents the Spring 2015 update of the Stroke Council. Much has happened in the last 12 months, and we want to particularly focus on the major developments in acute stroke therapy and their implications, progress in the American Stroke Association (ASA)/American Heart Association (AHA) quality initiatives and tiered systems of stroke care, and the approval of a new code for the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS). Each Stroke Council Update starts with restating our 2020 Goals: to improve the cardiovascular health of all Americans by 20% while reducing deaths from cardiovascular diseases and stroke by 20%. In December 2014, we had further evidence that our efforts are bearing fruits. In 2011, stroke fell from the number 3 to the number 4 cause of death in the United States, and in December, stroke fell from number 4 to number 5. This development, which reflects the continued decrease in age-adjusted mortality rates for stroke, is a remarkable testament to concerted educational and public health efforts to control blood pressure, decrease tobacco use, appropriately treat atrial fibrillation, educate the public about stroke warning signs, and improve and standardize the neurocritical care of stroke patients. Yet, it is sobering that the actual number of strokes continues to increase as the population ages because the incidence of stroke increases markedly with age. Stroke remains the second leading cause of death worldwide and one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. That is why the ASA/AHA is partnering with the World Stroke Organization and World Health Organization to take best practices and apply them worldwide. We have accomplished much but have more to do. The International Stroke Conference Scientific Sessions and Pre-conference meetings in Nashville was a great success with 4341 attendees, the largest number of attendees ever. The quality of the …

Telefantasy Tower Blocks: Space, Place and Social Realism Shake-ups in Misfits

This article considers the ways in which British youth telefantasy Misfits (E4, 2009–13) takes up and makes strange urban spaces familiar from social-realist narratives. Filmed on the sprawling East London estate, Thamesmead, the programme chronicles a group of young offenders who are given powers by a freak storm, turning them into ‘ASBO superheroes’. Misfits depends on its British urban landscapes for the assertion of its ‘authenticity’ within British youth television, using spaces and landscapes familiar from urban youth exploitation cinema and television's narratives of the underclass. After situating the series within existing cultural discourses and recent developments in social-realist representations, the article explores how Misfits disrupts what have become signifiers for the ‘real’ – the brutalism of housing estates, the grey of the concrete and sky – by making them strange, turning them into telefantasy. The series presents the estate as an uncanny place: the domestic, social-realist world shifted into a fantastical space by the storm. Through close analysis, this article explores how the familiar spaces become skewed and unsettling to match our protagonists' isolation, shifting bodies and scrambled sense of self.

Dreams in American Television Narratives: From Dallas to Buffy. CynthiaBurkhead. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. xi + 172 pp. $110 cloth. $29.95 paper.

Dreams in American Television Narratives: From Dallas to Buffy. CynthiaBurkhead. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. xi + 172 pp. $110 cloth. $29.95 paper.

Interactive Narrative Planning in The Best Laid Plans

The Best Laid Plans is an interactive narrative video game that uses cognitive-inspired fast planning techniques to generate stories with conflict during play. Players alternate between acting out a plan and seeing that plan thwarted by non-player characters. The Glaive narrative planner combines causal-link-based computational models of narrative with the speed of fast heuristic search techniques to adapt the story each time the player attempts a new plan.

HBO's Girls: gender, generation, and quality television

The HBO series Girls, created by and starring filmmaker Lena Dunham, has been praised for revealing the uncertainties and contradictions produced by the apparent independence of many contemporary young women. It has also been condemned for focusing on girls who use that independence for self-indulgent complaint and celebrate their own objectification. Both feminist and not-so-feminist responses to its promotion, and to the subsequent success of the series, have debated its generationalized gender politics and its narratives about socioeconomic privilege and insecurity. Debating whether Girls has something new and vital to say about girls has thus taken up now longstanding refrains about ‘postfeminism’ and ‘girl power’. This essay considers this controversy, evidently anticipated by the series' producers and argues that understanding Girls requires situating it within HBO's stable of ‘quality’ but controversial original programming, within which Girls' provocative version of feminist girlhood serves as part of its ‘quality’ manipulation of popular conventions for narrative television.

Encountering the ‘Other’: Interpreting Student Experiences of a Multi-Sensory Museum Exhibition

The Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at secondary school students, this long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging, as well as dialogue about racism, through an interactive, immersive museum experience. This paper describes a multi-method research project, which included narrative interviews, focus groups and video diaries with 47 Year 11–12 students from three secondary schools in Victoria, Australia, and discusses each method's contribution to an overall empirical understanding of the installation's impact on students' experiences. Emerging findings suggest the ways in which the exhibition space supports students to encounter and engage with individual stories and experiences, thus moving beyond an abstract tolerance of cultural diversity by unsettling the self and destabilising stereotyped and prejudiced interpretations of the ‘other’. The paper concludes by discussing the potential for triangulated qualitative approaches to provide rich emic perspectives on multi-sensory exhibitions.

The Influence of Audio-Only Character Narration on Character and Narrative Engagement

Using the Showtime crime drama Dexter (2006–2013), this posttest-only experimental design revealed that narration by the title character (i.e., Dexter Morgan) was significantly associated with more parasocial relationship (PSR) interaction than no narration. The influence of narration was examined while controlling for biological sex, evaluation of the narrating character's motive, evaluation of the narrating character, and previous exposure to the stimulus program. Favorable evaluations of the narrating character predicted more identification and PSR interaction with him. Women were more transported into the stimulus program than men. Findings are discussed in terms of the growing use of character narration in narrative television, Auter's (1992) experimental evaluation of audiovisual narration in a situation comedy, and the limitations of using a morally ambiguous narrator.

Lost in the Myst?: Narrative Video Gaming Decreases Self-Reported Propensity for Spiritual/Religious Experience

Based on the proposition that the visual “what you see is what you get” environment of video games may undermine ability/motivation for mental simulation/internal narrative, we hypothesized that exposure to virtual gaming would lead to decreased propensity for spiritual/religious experience. Fifty-six Canadian undergraduates moderately interested in gaming completed measures of propensity for unitive (focus on connectedness) and numinous (focus on presence of Other) experiences online, and again following a randomly assigned virtual or text-based narrative gaming session. Self-reported unitive and numinous propensities both declined significantly following the virtual gaming session as expected. Mystical propensity declined following the text-based session as well, but numinous propensity tended to increase in this condition. Virtual gaming offers an absorbing “escape” narrative with comparatively little “in the head” effort that appears to diminish—at least temporarily—the propensity for spiritual/religious experience, which is predicated upon a sustained internal narrative involving the Unseen.