Journalism, Communications and New Media

This dissertation applies to the study of adaptation principles of rhetoric, transtextual analysis and visual semiotics. It posits that adaptations are imitations-with-variations and that rather than existing in binary, one-to-one correspondence with their models, adaptations and their models accrue semiosis, forming large “megatexts.” These megatexts are composed of networks of associations that have meaning and change according to their contexts. Adaptation analysis becomes a matter of reading associations and textual linkages, or “reading through” the accrued texts. Eurhythmatic analysis, an analytical strategy drawn from both ancient and modern rhetoric, accounts for these variations while emphasizing the material contexts out of which variations emerge. This project uses these rhetorical strategies to address issues particular to new media adaptations, such as the nature of authorial ethos and identity in a marketplace of competing adaptations and collaborative creation. It exa...

This dissertation applies to the study of adaptation principles of rhetoric, transtextual analysis and visual semiotics. It posits that adaptations are imitations-with-variations and that rather than existing in binary, one-to-one correspondence with their models, adaptations and their models accrue semiosis, forming large "megatexts." These megatexts are composed of networks of associations that have meaning and change according to their contexts. Adaptation analysis becomes a matter of reading associations and textual linkages, or "reading through" the accrued texts. Eurhythmatic analysis, an analytical strategy drawn from both ancient and modern rhetoric, accounts for these variations while emphasizing the material contexts out of which variations emerge. This project uses these rhetorical strategies to address issues particular to new media adaptations, such as the nature of authorial ethos and identity in a marketplace of competing adaptations and collaborative creation. It examines the process of rhetorical identification that occurs in video game adaptations which ostensibly claim the same model, yet vie for legitimacy-children squabbling for the birthright of the recognized heir. Finally, this thesis examines the new adaptive possibilities opened up by the DVD anthologizing process whereby diverse texts are brought under a titular umbrella. These texts and the navigational overlays designed to constrain and control them, blur the otherwise clear boundaries between adaptation and model, between inside and out. In transtextual terms, this distinctive adaptive form is an internal hypertext, or an adaptation situated on the threshold that distinguishes the paratext from the hypertext. iv Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my committee. Specifically I want to thank Dr. Andrew McMurry for his steady hand, quiet confidence and guidance-a calm port in often stormy seas. Thanks to Dr. Randy Harris for his invaluable suggestions and insight as well as his unflinching "tough love." I would like to think that my soul has been salvaged by the process. And thanks to Dr. Neil Randall for his early lead, encouragement, and unwavering support throughout my graduate studies. Thanks to Dr. Murray and Kathy McArthur, who always knew what to say to keep me going and always had my back. Thanks also to Dr. Michael MacDonald for steering me away from perilous theoretical shores early on, his career advice, and frequent morale boosts. Thanks also to Dr. Glenn Stillar who first inspired me and Dr. John North, who gave me a chance when no one else would consider me. Thanks to Dr. Mike Truscello and Karl Wierzbicki for sharing in the insanity. Thanks to Dale Wallin-a quiet centre in a tempestuous world. Someday I hope to live up to the example you set me every day. Finally and most importantly, unbounded thanks to Josephine, Celeste, and Sophie Graham for their constant faith in me. I could have never done this work without them beside me. v Dedication To Barbara and Tim: "gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair/As star-beams among twilight trees," "lovely ministers" who have always guided my feet. vi Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii Acknowledgement…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….....iv Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1-The Major Players: An Overview of Adaptation Theory……………………………………………………………….8 Chapter 2-Adaptive Accrual: How Hyper-and Hypotexts become Megatexts…………………………………………………..51 Chapter 3-Eurhythmia: Reading "Adaptations as Adaptations"…………………………………………………………………85 Chapter 4-Ethos, Authorship and the New Media Adaptation…………………………………………………………………..110 Chapter 5-Eurhythmatic Analysis of the Video Game Adaptations of Lord of the Rings………………………………………146 Chapter 6-From Narrative to Stasis: Paratextually Decoding the New Media Adaptation……………………………………182 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..243 7 film they overlay, but at the same time, directly involve and control users' experiences with that underlying text by means of their interactive elements. The goal of the project then, is to initially explore past and current approaches to adaptation theory and then propose a perspective drawn from rhetorical principles that provides for a profound growth of semiosis among and through adaptive additions. Rather than picking out two individual flowers from a vast field of genetically related blooms, eurhythmia attempts to take into account the whole field and demonstrate what the relations between texts mean for the audiences who engage with adaptations. An audience's sense of the field of associations of Lord of the Rings will vary with their awareness of the larger family, and which member they met first. If my first awareness of the text was Ralph Bakshi's 1978 Lord of the Rings, each encounter with the large Rings family will alter and expand my experience with the text, but not erase it, even if another supplants it as my primary experience. In other words, when we approach successive adaptations, we must see them as we would a large family: with dissonance and harmony between them, some more alike than others. But with each member of the family one meets, the impression of the whole is slightly altered. As the family accrues members, so do they accrue a larger narrative-a total network of signification. Adaptation studies would do well to account for this growth of megatexts for it is the relationships between these blooms, the cross-pollinations that give the adaptation process its rich allure. 8 Chapter 1 The Major Players: An Overview of Adaptation Theory The analysis of adaptation is not unique to the twentieth century. Eighteenth century Europe witnessed a wave of personal, critical and aesthetic mania over Richardson's Pamela that would have made J.K. Rowling jealous. Pamela found her way into every conceivable aesthetic media: operas, dramas, parodies (no less than Fielding's Shamela, among countless others), paintings, patchwork screens, fans, even garments all constituted an adaptation tsunami (Turner 1994, 71). But the mass dissemination of film and subsequent new media manifestations have given birth to an increasing concern about the integrity, motives, and aesthetics of the practices of appropriating and reconstituting earlier art forms. As films and television grew more significant to popular culture and increasingly became the primary lens through which people perceived reality and themselves, the voices of the artistic and critical community felt compelled to comment on and critique the proliferation of adaptation. Predictably, the earliest commentators arose from the literary community who, in general, were agreed that film was a lower form of art than literature, incapable of transforming the nuance, subtly, and interiority of language because of the seemingly literal, objective, and exterior appearance of the image. These critics proliferated under the banner of narratology, with the seminal 1968 text written by George Bluestone, Novels into Film, or even such recent texts as Seymour Chatman's essay "What Novels can Do that Films Can't (and Vice Versa)." These significant literary figures, often against their own protestations, became 9 entrapped in contentions of the purity of origins and the responsibility of the adaptation to the model. Running a parallel course to the literary-leaning narratologists, structuralists and semioticians also began to pay attention to the impact of adaptation. Yet their interest in the field is often indirect; Roland Barthes denies the very privileged assumptions of any discussion of adaptation (with its source and derivation), subsuming it under the rubric of intertextuality and subjecting it to the structural and persuasive power of myth. Christian Metz, on the other hand, is interested in the interface between the adaptation and desire, addressing the impossibility of a satisfactory adaptation. Throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties, Metz's form of psychoanalytic film semiotics dominated the critical discourses, yet in the early nineties, new branches of theory began to influence adaptive debates. Primarily, there arose a renewed concern in cultural studies as to adaptation's significant impact in bridging high and popular cultures. Marxist writers such as Robert B. Ray emerged as significant theoretical voices, while, in a parallel development, social semioticians such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leween, drawing on functional linguistics, cultural studies, and gestalt theories of art (largely derived from the work of Rudolf Arnheim), turned to fields of study long neglected and began to map systems of meaning emergent from visual and auditory expression, analogous to those in linguistic expression. Back in film studies, rhetoric, particularly Bakhtinian rhetoric, was born from the interface of film with popular culture and the growing pressure to clarify genres and new textualities. Robert Stam, who based his early work on examinations of cinematic reflexivity, found himself addressing adaptation as a matter of course. While he initially

This three-part study characterizes the widespread implementation of telehealth during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving us insight into the role of telehealth as we enter a stage of "new normal" health care delivery in the United States. Objective: The COVID-19 Telehealth Impact Study was designed to describe the natural experiment of telehealth adoption during the pandemic. Using a large claims data stream and surveys of providers and patients, we studied telehealth in all 50 states to inform health care leaders. Design, setting, and participants: In March 2020, the MITRE Corporation and Mayo Clinic founded the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition (C19HCC), to respond to the pandemic. We report trends using a dataset of over 2 billion health care claims covering over 50% of private insurance activity in the United States (January 2019-December 2020), along with key elements from our provider survey (July-August 2020) and patient survey (November 2020-February 2021). Main outcomes and measures: There was rapid and widespread adoption of telehealth in the Spring 2020 with over 12 million telehealth claims in April 2020, accounting for 49.4% of total health care claims. Providers and patients expressed high levels of satisfaction with the telehealth. Seventyfive percent of providers indicated that telehealth enabled them to provide a quality care. Eightyfour percent of patients agreed that quality of their telehealth visit was good. Key points for the reader to consider are listed in Table 1. Key points Key points Considerations Question How can our experience of rapid telehealth adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic guide us to enlightened policy decisions for a "new normal" of medical practice. Findings This three-part study including claims data analysis and surveys of providers and patients documents widespread innovations and adoption of telehealth across clinical domains during the COVID-19 pandemic. Providers and patients perceived high levels of satisfaction and expectations to continue to use telehealth in the future. Meaning Payers and providers should maintain high levels of telehealth access during the next year to allow best practices to emerge and to enable a full assessment of telehealth value.

In December 1916, the Canadian cargo ship S.S. Mount Temple sailed from Montreal towards London.  In her hold stood 40 horses, ready to be sent to the warfront in France; on the decks above a mixture of Navy men and civilians hitching a ride.  Packed next to the horses, swathed in a coat of white plaster and linen, were 22 crates filled with hundreds of dinosaur bones unearthed by Charles Sternberg from quarries in Alberta’s badlands. They were headed for the halls of the British Museum, but before she reached England the German warship SMS Möwe captured the Mount Temple.  Misreading a signal from a Canadian passenger, the Germans fired on the ship and sunk it on 6 December 1916.  The bones rest on the floor of the Atlantic, and are unlikely to ever be brought to the surface. 

The sinking of the Mount Temple serves as an example of the power of war on the international trade of culture and scientific development.  This paper argues that the First World War took place during an auspicious time for palaeontological acquisition, and that the conflict’s effect on historical institutions prevented them from expanding their storerooms and exhibitions.  It contrasts that European sparsity with an exploration into the boom in freelance palaeontology happening in the West – because many young Canadian palaeontologists were sent to war before their American colleagues, a cottage industry sprung up north of the border for American “diggers”. Through correspondence between Sternberg and the British Museum, we learn how war affected the transfer of trans-national environmental knowledge.