Digital Media Foundations

Fully-updated and comprehensive, this second edition is a creative and practical introduction to the field of digital media for future designers, artists, and media professionals. It addresses the evolution of the field, its connections with traditional media, up-to-date developments, and possibilities for future directions. Logically organized and thoughtfully illustrated, it provides a welcoming guide to this emerging discipline. Describing each medium in detail, chapters trace their history, evolution and potential applications. The book also explains important, relevant technologies - such as digitizing tablets, cloud storage, and 3D printers - as well as new and emerging media like augmented and virtual reality. With a focus on concepts and creative possibilities, the text's software-neutral exercises provide hands-on experiences with each of the media. The book also examines legal, ethical, and technical issues in digital media, explores career possibilities, and features profiles of pioneers and digital media professionals. Digital Media Foundations is an ideal resource for students, new professionals, and instructors involved in fields of graphic and visual arts, design, and the history of art and design.

Fuses design fundamentals and software training into one cohesive book! The only book to teach Bauhaus design principles alongside basic digital tools of Adobe's Creative Suite, including the recently released Adobe CS4 Addresses the growing trend of compressing design fundamentals and design software into the same course in universities and design trade schools. Lessons are timed to be used in 50-minute class sessions. Digital Foundations uses formal exercises of the Bauhaus to teach the Adobe Creative Suite. All students of digital design and production—whether learning in a classroom or on their own—need to understand the basic principles of design in order to implement them using current software. Far too often design is left out of books that teach software. Consequently, the design software training exercise is often a lost opportunity for visual learning. Digital Foundations reinvigorates software training by integrating Bauhaus design exercises into tutorials fusing design fundamentals and core Adobe Creative Suite methodologies. The result is a cohesive learning experience. Design topics and principles include: Composition; Symmetry and Asymmetry; Gestalt; Appropriation; The Bauhaus Basic Course Approach; Color Theory; The Grid; Scale, Hierarchy and Collage; Tonal Range; Elements of Motion. Digital Foundations is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA, the professional association for design.

This book is a creative and practical introduction to the field of digital media for future designers, artists, and media professionals. It addresses the evolution of the field, its connections with traditional media, up-to-date developments, and possibilities for future directions. Logically organized and thoughtfully illustrated, it provides a welcoming guide to this emerging discipline. Describing each medium in detail, chapters trace their history, evolution, and potential applications. The book also explains important, relevant technologies—such as digitizing tablets, cloud storage, and 3-D printers—as well as new and emerging media like augmented and virtual reality. With a focus on concepts and creative possibilities, the text’s software-neutral exercises provide hands-on experiences with each of the media. The book also examines legal, ethical, and technical issues in digital media, explores career possibilities, and features profiles of pioneers and digital media professionals. Digital Media Foundations is an ideal resource for students, new professionals, and instructors involved in fields of graphic and visual arts, design, and the history of art and design.

Making Media takes the media production process and deconstructs it into its most basic components. Students will learn the basic concepts of media production: frame, sound, light, time, motion, sequencing, etc., and be able to apply them to any medium they choose. They will also become well grounded in the digital work environment and the tools required to produce media in the digital age. The companion Web site provides interactive exercises for each chapter, allowing students to explore the process of media production. The text is heavily illustrated and complete with sidebar discussions of pertinent issues.

Key words, chapter highlights, and chapter summaries make it easy to identify core concepts of each chapter --

How are widely popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram transforming how teachers teach, how kids learn, and the very foundations of education? What controversies surround the integration of social media in students' lives? The past decade has brought increased access to new media, and with this, new opportunities and challenges for education. In this book, leading scholars from education, law, communications, sociology, and cultural studies explore the digital transformation now taking place in a variety of educational contexts. The contributors examine such topics as social media usage in schools, online youth communities, and distance learning in developing countries; the disruption of existing educational models of how knowledge is created and shared; privacy; accreditation; and the tension between the new ease of sharing and copyright laws. Case studies examine teaching media in K-12 schools and at universities; tuition-free, open education powered by social media, as practiced by University of the People; new financial models for higher education; the benefits and challenges of MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses); social media and teacher education; and the civic and individual advantages of teens' participatory play.

Making Media: Foundations of Sound and Image Production takes the media production process and deconstructs it into its most basic components. Students will learn the basic concepts of media production – frame, sound, light, time, motion, and sequencing – and be able to apply them to any medium they choose, from film and television to fine art and online applications. They will also become well-grounded in the digital work environment and the tools required to produce media in today’s digital environment. This new fourth edition is completely updated and includes a new chapter on the production process and production safety; information on current trends in production, exhibition, and distribution; and much more. New topics include virtual and augmented reality, the use of drones and new practices interactive media. The text is also fully illustrated and includes sidebar discussions of pertinent issues throughout. The companion website has been completely revamped with interactive exercises for each chapter, allowing students to explore the process of media production.

Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies lays down foundations for the analysis of media, information, and information technology in 21st century information society, as well as introducing the theoretical and empirical tools necessary for the critical study of media and information. Christian Fuchs shows the role classical critical theory can play for analyzing the information society and the information economy, as well as analyzing the role of the media and the information economy in economic development, the new imperialism, and the new economic crisis. The book critically discusses transformations of the Internet (‘web 2.0’), introduces the notion of alternative media as critical media, and shows the critical role media and information technology can play in contemporary society. This book provides an excellent introduction to the study of media, information technology, and information society, making it a valuable reference tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects such as Media Studies, Sociology of Media, Social Theory, and New Media.

This intuitive yet rigourous introduction derives the core results of digital communication from first principles. Theory, rather than industry standards, motivates the engineering approaches, and key results are stated with all the required assumptions. The book emphasizes the geometric view, opening with the inner product, the matched filter for its computation, Parseval's theorem, the sampling theorem as an orthonormal expansion, the isometry between passband signals and their baseband representation, and the spectral-efficiency optimality of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Subsequent chapters address noise, hypothesis testing, Gaussian stochastic processes, and the sufficiency of the matched filter outputs. Uniquely, there is a treatment of white noise without generalized functions, and of the power spectral density without artificial random jitters and random phases in the analysis of QAM. This systematic and insightful book, with over 300 exercises, is ideal for graduate courses in digital communication, and for anyone asking 'why' and not just 'how'.

Provides academics, journalists, and general readers with bird's-eye view of data-driven practices and their impact in politics and media.