This is a gentle introduction to the Kappa Coefficient, a commonly used statistic for measuring reliability between two raters who are applying nominal codes or category labels to qualitative data. This was created for grad students in the Humanities and has been used in both course and workshop settings.

Slides accompanying a panel representing the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein project to build a digital scholarly variorum edition that updates, bridges, and intersects multiple divergent editions of Frankenstein, including the manuscript notebook drafts of 1816, the 1818, 1823, and 1831 print editions, as well as the handwritten notes in the…[Read more]

This paper examines the aural conceptions of futuristic dystopias in episodes of The Twilight Zone, focusing on one specific episode, season five’s “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You.” I examine how the music director of CBS conceived of the future, aurally representing these episodes as having an affinity with the premise of Brave New World by re…[Read more]

English title: “Transmedia Storytelling in the narrative universe of ‘Game of Thrones'” — This essay’s aim is to briefly introduce the concept of Transmedia Storytelling and to provide a showcase analysis and review of the serial TV narrative of GAME OF THRONES in order to show how a television series’ narrative universe, driven by both producers…[Read more]

Young Adult dark romance is often more questioning than its adult counterpart; different, less constraining commercial imperatives are perhaps at work, or readers’ expectations less fixed. This chapter will show how, woven into a sensitive coming-of-age narrative of first love and familial problems, Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver trilogy performs a f…[Read more]

De Larrabeiti’s Borribles children’s/young adult fantasy trilogy was written and published between 1976 and 1986, a period of huge political, social and economic change in the UK. Set in London, it tells the story of Borribles, a group of children who have had a ‘bad start’ in life and become Borrible; ‘wild’ children with pointed ears who can nev…[Read more]

This paper seeks to examine whether daemons (which take the shape of animals) and familiar animals indicate the social class of characters in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. Both series of books for young people were started at a time when neo-liberal politics were at the forefront of government, both in the late years of John Major’s C…[Read more]

This paper discusses approaches to pedagogy outlined in three series of books for children and young adults. By the end of the presentation, I hope to have outlined what the education systems in these novels says about the culture and society presented in these books. The books are: JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Jonathan Stroud’s Bar…[Read more]

This draft handout accompanied in-class discussion and instruction. There are two key objectives: 1) to model the practices of critical note taking, including close reading, connection making, and question asking; and 2) to document the first assigned reading from Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit. This handout covers the first three c…[Read more]

Legion, one of the most recent iterations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) on television, takes an unconventional road to remediating the 1960s as a cultural period.

This CSTOnline blog post takes a look at the current resurgence of science fiction on television, and discusses these recent trends along the example of The Expanse, an adaptation of the successful space opera penned by scifi author James S. A. Corey.

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

While written assignments are typically growing in length in line with the ever-expanding volume of resources available to student writers, platforms like Twitter demand more succinct approaches to writing and offer a range of non-traditional stylistic options in its toolbar. Perhaps the twessay is the haiku of the essay genre: short but with a…[Read more]

“The thesis investigates the case of the modern Television drama series FlashForward and sets out to chart the employment of concepts of Collective Memory Studies in the narrative in order to reflect upon the ways of how social perceptions of the past and Collective Memory are remediated in the course of the narrative.
To achieve that goal, the…[Read more]