Provocations on the pleasures of archived paper

Digital formats are often popularly imagined to spell the ‘end’ of paper. In this essay I pose a series of questions about the importance of materiality for how researchers understand and work with archived paper documents. Drawing examples from research among literary papers and personal correspondence, I highlight the ways in which paper traditionally ‘disappears’ from the researcher’s view and ask whether the conditions of the digital turn may in fact provide for a return to ‘thinking through paper’.     

Talk of saying,showing, gesturing,and feeling in Wittgenstein and Vygotsky

I have a number of interlocking concerns in this paper. Primarily, I want to highlight the practical importance of introducing new and different words into the ways of talking we employ in conducting our social lives together—and why it is that some forms of talk (talk of feeling and feelings, for instance) are much more difficult for us to employ than others. For although we clearly do influence other people's behavior (and our own) with words, we are still so fixated upon the idea of words as arbitrary ‘forms’ representing states of affairs, that we find it difficult to talk of our words in this way, especially of them as having an influence on our own conduct as thinkers and speakers, as listeners, readers, and writers and so on. We can better understand our words as functioning in this way, I suggest, if we see them primarily as having a relational function, that is, as working to relate us both to each other and to our surroundings in direct, immediate, and practical ways. Both Wittgenstein and Vygotsky discuss this gestural, nonrepresentational, function of words in coming to a grasp of people's psychological nature. Thus my aim in the paper is to explore what they claim is involved, practically, in drawing each other's (and our own) attention to the more embodied, less cognitive, aspects of our own activities in the world, and to bring to attention the power of our embodied ‘voices’ in doing this.     

High‐impact papers from China,Japan, India,and Korea

This paper compares ‘high‐impact’ papers from China, Japan, India and Korea in 2012, together with papers from these countries in Cell, Nature, and Science (CNS) from 2010 to 2012. China leads on ‘highly cited’ and ‘hot’ papers in 2012, while Japan has the highest number in CNS (653), followed by China (471), Korea (131) and India (83). Although China published more high‐impact papers in 2012, papers published in CNS were at a relatively low level, which appears to show that while some of the research in China is at a relatively high level, this is not entirely reflected in the number of papers in these ‘elite’ journals.     

Fueling and delinking from energy coloniality in Puerto Rico

In September 2017, Hurricane María rattled Puerto Rico and its Caribbean neighbors. To study this US colony’s post-hurricane crises, long-time histories and present experiences with what I call ‘energy coloniality’ and ‘energy privilege’ must be foregrounded. This approach allows for an understanding of this unnatural disaster as just one of countless systemic colonial and neoliberal entwined cruelties, driven by disaster capitalism. Informed by fieldwork and years of ‘e-advocacy,’ I critique four rhetorical problems that shape everyday and extraordinary emergencies in Puerto Rico. While I focus on this archipelago, hegemonic emergency discourses are widespread and linked to what I term the ‘emergency manager effect.’ This shock doctrine outcome is constituted by neoliberal and colonial governance and discourses, whereby undemocratically appointed overseers manage local places and peoples, who are perceived as anachronistic and incapable of solving problems independently. Delinking from these exploitative strategies and systems requires intervening in the entanglements of energy coloniality, energy privilege, and neoliberalism, as reckless extractivism continues to disproportionately target frontline communities.     

Reclaiming erased lives: archives,records and memories in post-war Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora

In this paper, based on conventional and digital ethnography, I first identify three dominant research areas relating to the issues of destruction, use and abuse of archives and records in post-war Bosnia, and discuss their legal, political and ethical dimensions. I then go on to present two ethnographies describing how survivors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide in Bosnia and in the Bosnian refugee diaspora perceive, experience and deal with missing personal records and material evidence of their histories, as well as how they (re)create their own archives and memories, and in the process reassert their ‘erased’ identities in both real and cyber space. This paper also describes how contemporary technologies—including biomedical technology and information and communication technology—impact the reconstruction of individual and collective identities in shattered Bosnian families and communities in the aftermath of genocide. The ethnographies described point to the novel contribution that these technologies have made to re-humanising both those who perished and the survivors of the war in Bosnia.     

Calibrating the tilted scale: (re)constructing fairness in fair wage discourse

Guided by the practical question, ‘What is a fair wage?’, this paper takes a culture-centered approach to the discursive construction of a fair wage in the context of industrialized labor. Specifically, this study juxtaposes discursive constructions within (a) corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications concerning wage policies and practices and (b) industrial workers’ narratives about their experiences with wages. Thus, I demonstrate a mutually constitutive process in which the meaning of ‘fair wage’ results from and reifies the structures of supply chain labor. Specifically, I explore how wage fairness is understood in the context of legal and government mandates, international organizations’ recommendations, and the issue of labor sustainability. The culture-centered emphasis of the study explores the possibility of bringing alternative voices to mainstream articulations of labor rights.     

Is open access affordable? Why current models do not work and why we need internet‐era transformation of scholarly communications

Progress to open access (OA) has stalled, with perhaps 20% of new papers ‘born‐free’, and half of all versions of record pay‐walled; why? In this paper, I review the last 12 months: librarians showing muscle in negotiations, publishers’ Read and Publish deals, and funders determined to force change with initiatives like Plan S. I conclude that these efforts will not work. For example, flipping to supply‐side business models, such as article processing charges, simply flips the pay‐wall to a ‘play‐wall’ to the disadvantage of authors without financial support. I argue that the focus on OA makes us miss the bigger problem: today’s scholarly communications is unaffordable with today’s budgets. OA is not the problem, the publishing process is the problem. To solve it, I propose using the principles of digital transformation to reinvent publishing as a two‐step process where articles are published first as preprints, and then, journal editors invite authors to submit only papers that ‘succeed’ to peer review. This would reduce costs significantly, opening a sustainable pathway for scholarly publishing and OA. The catalyst for this change is for the reputation economy to accept preprints as it does articles in minor journals today.     

Principles for archival information services in the public domain

In 2010, in response to the Australian Government’s November 2009 apology to Forgotten Australians and former child migrants, a scoping study was undertaken by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) to assess the options for a national ‘Find and Connect’ service to allow people to locate and access relevant records and have recourse to support services. The scoping study noted that Pathways, a web-based public knowledge space and a product of the Victorian ‘Who Am I?’ research project, was a community-based information resource without equal in the out-of-home care sector in Australia or indeed internationally. The scoping team made the observation that Pathways, due to its quality of content and coherent structure, appeared to be based on a set of principles and wondered what they were. In response the research team set about articulating the principles that underpinned their approach to archival documentation and the use of digital technologies – principles that had emerged through more than two decades of public domain, archive-focussed projects. This paper presents those ten principles and discusses them within the context of Pathways and the ‘Who Am I?’ project. The principles played a key role in FaCHSIA adopting Pathways as the model for the national Find and Connect database and web resource, launched on 15 November 2011. The principles underpin community knowledge building in the fourth or pluralised dimension of the Records Continuum. The paper ultimately argues that all stakeholders (all people and organisations connected with records) should have the ability to contribute to the utilisation of those records through the improvement of documentation and that some archival systems do have a duty of care to ensure they can inter-operate with community-generated knowledge.     

‘NO WAR THIS YEAR’

The London Daily Express proclaimed the maxim ‘No War this Year’ on its front pages as late as 7 August 1939. Newspaper historian Stephen Koss has suggested that the ‘no war’ slogan was a ‘delusion’ on the part of the proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook. Berlin chief correspondent, R. Selkirk Panton, was instrumental in ensuring that the policy line was observed through both his news stories and opinion pieces throughout 1938 and 1939. This paper aims to explore the extent to which Panton shared his employer's views, as well as tracing the divergent path of the Express from the rest of Fleet Street and Panton's position as a political outsider within the ‘foreign press colony’ of Berlin. Through the examination of several key stories during the last year before the outbreak of war, in his copy and personal correspondence, a critical evaluation of how Panton negotiated the space between the policy of the paper and the European crises on which he reported can be achieved.     

‘Othering’ the archive—from exile to inclusion and heritage dignity: the case of Palestinian archival memory

This paper seeks to address, from the critical perspectives of cultural heritage discourse, the issues at stake in critically apprehending the archive as both a technology of disinheritance and one of potential inclusion and re-inheritance. The first section draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said and other critics whose work has sought to address the marginalizing capacity of dominant European/North American archival and cultural–museological institutions. The remainder of the paper grounds these conceptual–ethical issues in the context of Palestinian cultural politics and memory-work. This critical framework is used not only to draw out the absences and silences in archives and cultural institutions, and the epistemological and ‘real’ violences at play in what Derrida characterises as ‘archive trauma’, but responds to Said’s call to ‘re-read’ the colonial archive ‘contrapuntally’ in order to create an ‘othering’ of dominant archival discourse. What is needed to provoke such an ‘othering’ is a commitment to rethink the archive in terms of alternative understandings of ‘hospitality’, ‘memory-work’ and what Derrida has referred to as ‘heritage dignity’. This strategy is capable of apprehending in greater depth the moral-ethical ‘debts’ and ‘duties’ and the operational ‘responses’ and ‘responsibilities’ towards ‘inclusion’ and towards full recognition of those constituencies which have been disenfranchised or exiled outside the realms of dominant cultural–institutional discourse.     

The moderating role of cultural orientation in explaining temporal orientation of self-referencing

A psychological process called self-referencing justifies the use of ‘you’ statements in advertisements; the more an individual relates an ad to him/herself, the greater the likelihood of recall and favorable evaluation. Self-referencing can be differentiated based on the temporal dimension of the self being activated while processing advertisements: when people remember themselves in the past they engage in retrospective self-referencing whereas they engage in anticipatory self-referencing when imagining themselves in the future. The current study examined the moderating role of consumers’ cultural background (i.e. long-term vs. short-term orientation) on the effects of temporal orientation of self-referencing. A corollary of this premise is that the match between cultural time orientation and the type of self-referencing activated by an ad will increase the extent of viewers’ self-referencing as well as advertising effectiveness. Further, this study confirmed a mediating role of self-referencing in explaining the match effects. The findings inform the extant literature on self-referencing and also provide managerial implications for international advertising practitioners.     

Multilingual Mix in Hong Kong Advertising,Pre- and Post-1997

The paper examines the historical change in linguistic practice of Hong Kong advertising through the decolonization period and attempts to make sense of it from a local-and-global point of view beyond the conventional national-functionalist perspective. It is found that the prominent patterns of language mixing in the advertising of Hong Kong are not only ‘Standard Written Chinese mixed with English’, but also ‘Standard Written Chinese mixed with both English and Cantonese’. The embedded elements of both English and Cantonese in the Chinese advertisements can take the form of a word, a phrase and/or a full clause and can serve both informational and involving functions. Finally, it is argued that multilingual mix in Hong Kong advertising is a phenomenon constantly emerging in the multicultural process of globalization and that being able to mix different languages or varieties of languages for effective communication should be an aspect of linguistic competence highly valued in the age of globalization and localization.     

Delineating responsibility,decisions and compromises: a frame analysis of the fast food industry’s online CSR communication

This paper uses a frame analysis method to highlight the ways in which the quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry – or fast food restaurant industry – uses official websites to communicate messages about nutrition and health to consumers and other relevant publics, especially using the language of corporate social responsibility. In the context of the increasing association of QSR industry food to the obesity epidemic in the U.S.A., several large fast-food chains have developed elaborate communication strategies to address the health concerns among the general public of their foods. Using a frame analysis method, I demonstrate that the industry consistently draws on metaphors of ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘personal choice’ in choosing healthy food, while establishing the primary role of moderation and exercise in preventing obesity. As a contribution to the field of PR, this emic frame analysis features an integrative approach that combines both message features in context with message intention. I also discuss practical applications of the study findings.     

East,west, communication,and theory: Searching for the meaning of searching for Asian communication theories

This paper begins with a discussion of the concept of ‘Asia’, the cultural differences and similarities between Asia and the West, and what constructing an ‘Asian communication theory’ means. It then examines the background against which the current stage is set for Asian commication research, and the intricate changes in approaching theory building in the community.     

Reuters,Propaganda-inspired News,and the Australian Press During the First World War

This paper examines the role of the London-based international news agency, Reuters, in transmitting propaganda-inspired news to Australia during the First World War as well as the take-up of such news by the Australian press. It explores how the propaganda function was understood within Reuters and how this function changed during the course of the war. It focuses on Reuters’ establishment, in March 1917, of a special British Empire ‘supplementary’ news service designed to unite the Empire behind the war effort. The paper explains Reuters’ success in Australia which arose, in large part, from its partnership with the United Cable Service, an Australian agency managed by Keith Murdoch.     

Operational,not theoretical: A critique of the current paradigm in development communication

It has been more than 20 years since Everett Rogers first outlined the elements of the ‘new’, ‘Another Development’, ‘plurality’ paradigm of development. This paradigm was later radicalized and extended by Jan Servaes, who called it ‘multiplicity’. While the paradigm was developed in response to the shortcomings of the earlier modernization paradigm, policy makers in Third World countries continue to use the recommendations of the older paradigm.

This paper suggests that the failure of the new paradigm to replace the older one may be due to its own contradictions and inconsistencies. The paper presents the various elements of this paradigm and then critically evaluates them. It discusses why the conceptualizations in the new paradigm are not always useful, and notes that while some of the voices being used in it may be new, the ideas are really quite old. The overall purpose of the paper is to initiate a systematic critique of the new paradigm—a task the authors feel is long neglected.     

Academic authors,scholarly publishing,and open access in Australia

This paper briefly describes the rapidly changing research evaluation and funding landscape in Australian universities, specifically in relation to open access and institutional repositories. Recent announcements indicate that funding and evaluation bodies are becoming increasingly concerned that publicly funded research be made publicly available. The paper then reports a survey of all levels of academic staff plus research students at one Australian university, conducted in May 2006, prior to the introduction of an institutional repository. The survey, in line with previously reported surveys, found that while there was a high level of engagement with scholarly publishing, there was a low level of awareness of, or concern with, either open access (‘green’ or ‘gold’) or the roles repositories can play in increasing accessibility of research. Practically, this indicates that much work needs to be done within this university to increase knowledge of, and change behaviours with regard to, open access and repositories if the university and its academics are to make the most of new funding requirements and research evaluation processes.     

档案编研的创造性转化和创新性发展——以“我是档案迷”丛书为例

苏州市工商档案管理中心编辑“我是档案迷”系列丛书之前建立了档案的“未成年人观”,丛书可读、可玩、可品。编研与业务工作相结合、注重集体智慧的发挥、善于合作等做法值得借鉴。幻化、活化、趣化是对编研内容创造性转化的主要方式,编研内容的拓展化、服务对象的定制化、影响力的宽泛性和持久性是编研创新性发展的主要体现。     

‘What a setting for a mystery’: Yaddo, the Yaddo records, and the memory of place

‘Yaddo’, recalled composer Aaron Copland, ‘became so much a part of my life that I tend to forget how strange the name sounds to those not familiar with it.’ By its very delineation, vagary of purpose, and posture of cloistered withdrawal, Yaddo is defined by a meticulously cultivated and carefully guarded tradition of community and cultural identity; one that was carefully preserved (and, in turn was informed by) the formation of an archive. My point of query centers on the particular consequences of the bond between historical trace and physical place being severed (as perhaps it always must be) when the very materiality that informs an institution’s ‘memory’ is irrevocably distanced.