Samovars and quills: the representation of bureaucracy in mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature

Russian literature of the nineteenth century provides a valuable insight into the character of Russian society during the period. The figure of the bureaucrat, and of bureaucracy more generally, looms large in works that appeared during Russia’s golden age of literature. The idea that Russian public life was distorted by a stifling lack of initiative and high levels of corruption amongst officials was a common theme in all forms of belles-lettres. This article examines a series of literary works by major authors—ranging from Gogol and Herzen to Turgenev and Tolstoi—and suggests that each of them had their own particular insight into the problem. For most leading writers, bureaucracy was more than simply a political and administrative phenomenon: it was also rooted in more far-reaching issues relating both to Russia’s distinctive history in particular and more universal philosophical problems in general.     

以图画为本位的文学--图画书的演变史

中国原创图画书开始走向世界,但中国图画书的历史可能比西方更早。图画书本质上是一种出版现象,在中西方不同文化背景中有不同的呈现方式。中西方图画书同源于儿童读物的插图,随着出版科技的进步和读图时代的到来,从“出版热”逐渐形成“文学热”,从“文字的儿童读物”演化为“图画书的儿童文学”,在新世纪交流融合中发展为儿童文学的典型样式——绘本。中国原创图画书的复兴有其深刻的历史文化背景和深厚的民族文学传统,建设中国特色的图画书评价标准和理论体系应该提上议事日程。     

Solutions Journalism

The media contribute to compassion fatigue—or public apathy toward human tragedy—in part by failing to present solutions to the social problems ubiquitous in today’s conflict-based news coverage. Some journalists have attempted to address this issue through a style of news labeled solutions journalism. This experiment tests the effects of this increasingly popular approach. Results revealed that discussing an effective solution to a social problem in a news story caused readers to feel less negative and to report more favorable attitudes toward the news article and toward solutions to the problem than when no solution or an ineffective solution was mentioned. Reading about an effective solution did not, however, impact on readers’ behavioral intentions or actual behaviors. This suggests that solution-based journalism might mitigate some harmful effects of negative, conflict-based news, but might not inspire action.     

Crossing the Channel: Publishing Translated German Fiction in the UK

In a review of Hans Fallada’s novel Alone in Berlin—finally translated into English after 62 years—Sam Jordison stated, “[I]t’s an important book that no English writer could have written—and so another resounding argument for the importance of taking in translations. It makes me wonder what else we’ve been missing.” Translated fiction plays a minimal role in the UK. Scholars are increasingly directing their attention towards this deficit. This paper will consider the culture of translation in the UK and Ireland, with a particular focus on translated German fiction.

     

Storying the digital professional: how online screening shifts the primary site and authorship of workers’ career stories

Employers’ use of online information increases the communicative demands and complexity of employability. For employers, gathering online information for personnel selection—a process called cybervetting—supplements or augments existing information acquisition processes. For workers, cybervetting’s extractive processes require considering potential and possible career stories employers might construct. Workers increasingly need to engage in prospective and retrospective storying to communicate and maintain employability and employment. Drawing on exemplars from employers’ reports, this essay highlights: (a) how employers report assembling and making sense of workers’ information during personnel selection; (b) the limitations of existing employability strategies; as well as (c) the increased and unequally distributed uncertainty and risk; and (d) the associated and different work expected of workers as the primary site and authorship of career stories shift.     

On the Use of Beats-Per-Minute and Interbeat Interval in the Analysis of Cardiac Responses to Mediated Messages

The measurement of an individual’s heart rate has many relevant theoretical implications for communication research. However, there are reasons to believe that the most common way of reporting cardiac response—beats per minute (BPM)—might not be appropriate for all methodological situations. This article presents an overview of the historical use of cardiac activity within communication research, and provides a summary of the current conceptualizations of attention and resource allocation. To fully understand the difference between BPM and interbeat interval (IBI)—an alternate method for reporting cardiac response—a comparative analysis was performed on a data set from a previously published study. This article concludes with a set of suggestions that researchers may want to consider when utilizing BPM or IBI within communication research.     

Pre-Revolutionary Russian Photography at the New York Public Library: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

This article is an introduction to the New York Public Library’s pre-revolutionary Russian and Eastern European photographic albums. It also provides a checklist of these albums. The checklist is an especially rich source for Russian architecture, art, and science and provides documentation for a variety of places in the center and provinces of the Russian Empire. Some of the most significant albums are those once owned by the Romanovs and by George Kennan the elder, America’s first Russian expert.     

NYPL: Service Successes and Financial Struggles as Branches Meet Neighborhood Needs

Free access to technology, help for immigrants, a safe space for kids—NYPL Branch libraries play an increasingly important role. But funding hasn’t kept up. Will the lack of support undermine a critical civic resource? This publication is based on an ongoing project looking at the potential for New York’s libraries to fill a critical gap in New York City’s civic infrastructure, as well as the challenges and difficult choices the library systems face.     

基于上下文语义的网络议程设置研究——以红黄蓝事件为例

基于共现分析的网络议程设置研究从认知心理学的角度出发,分析媒体议程与公众议程网络,更加贴近回答李普曼所说的“我们脑海中的图景”,但该方法只能体现议程网络中关键词间的显性关系。本文提出通过基于上下文语义的word2vec模型,测度网络议程设置中关键词隐性关系的研究方法。以“红黄蓝事件”为例,揭示党媒、都市类媒体、商业媒体、知乎意见领袖以及公众的议程网络及其相似度。研究发现,知乎意见领袖对公众议程的影响程度最大,其议程主要是对事件背后因果关系的梳理以及对策建议的提供。在媒体方面,党媒和都市类媒体报道基本一致,且二者对公众的影响均高于商业媒体。本研究是对现有网络议程设置研究的补充,对议程设置的本土化研究有一定的启示。     

Lost in Translation or Lost in Publishing: Introduction of World Literature in Early Modern Bulgarian Publishing via Russian Language Editions

Bulgarian book publishing starts developing as commercial system as early as the second half of nineteenth century. With the increasing of competition after the Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878, as main problem the lack of texts for publishing emerges. The Bulgarian literature was still too young to provide texts for the publishers with the required quality and quantity. That’s why the publisher’s main goal remains the translation of popular (in any sense of meaning) foreign authors. In relation with this policy two main problems emerged—the lack of translators from the main European and World languages and appearance of many intellectuals who pretended to have good Russian language skills. This resulted in Russian book editions of world literature being the main source for Bulgarian translations. The paper focuses on to the process of retransmission and republishing of texts from language to language and from place to place. Interesting conclusions are made on how the publishing market strategies affect readers and their perception of the most popular titles of world literature. The main thesis is that the language skills (or lack of skills) of the translator are important for the reader’s perception of the text but the publisher’s choice of foreign editions through the mediation of second country’s publishing system had critical importance for the perception of Bulgarian readers of classical and popular examples of Western literature.     

Writing the History of Humanity: The Role of Museums in Defining Origins and Ancestors in a Transnational World

This article explores the question of how transnational audiences experience anthropology exhibitions in particular, and the natural history museum overall. Of interest are the ways in which natural history museums reconcile anthropological notions of humanity's shared evolutionary history—in particular, African origins accounts—with visitors' complex cultural identities. Through case studies of British, American, and Kenyan museum audiences, this research probed the cultural preconceptions that museum visitors bring to the museum and use to interpret their evolutionary heritage. The research took special notice of audiences of African descent, and their experiences in origins exhibitions and the natural history museums that house them. The article aims to draw connections between natural history museums and the dynamic ways in which museum visitors make meaning. As museums play an increasing role in the transnational homogenization of cultures, human origins exhibitions are increasingly challenged to communicate an evolutionary prehistory that we collectively share, while validating the cultural histories that make us unique.     

Fake News

The crisis in Ukraine has accentuated the position of Russian television as the government’s strongest asset in its information warfare. The internet, however, allows other players to challenge the Kremlin’s narrative by providing counter-narratives and debunking distorted information and fake images. Accounting for the new media ecology—through which strategic narratives are created and interpreted, this article scrutinizes the narratives of allegedly fake news on Channel One, perceiving the fabricated stories as extreme projections of Russia’s strategic narratives, and the attempts of the Ukrainian fact-checking website Stopfake.org to counter the Russian narrative by refuting misinformation and exposing misleading images about Ukraine. Secondly, it analyses how Twitter users judged the veracity of these news stories and contributed to the perpetuation of strategic narratives.     

At Hospitality's Threshold: From Social Inclusion to Exilic Education

Abstract Describing actual museum‐wide events developed for the culturally charged arena of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, this article explores the philosophical and pedagogical double binds that have brought multiculturalism to a political impasse. Museums have strived to be valued resources in an increasingly diverse society. In aspiring to broaden their audience base, their work has shifted from developing educational policies that are “object‐centered” to those that are “community‐centered” — a change of strategy affecting everything from programs to exhibit design. Children's museums — distinct (if not marginalized) from the serious work of the traditional art or ethnographic or natural history museum — know and indeed say in their very name — “children's museum” — that they are for the sake of someone and not about something. They have always already been attuned to the visitor at the threshold.     

Bringing a Small Academic Library Back from the Brink

Abstract

When Villa Madonna College moved from Covington to Crestview Hills, Kentucky in 1968 to become Thomas More College, the designers of the new campus knew that the library would be a vital component of academic success for future students. As Thomas More transitioned from “College” to “University” in 2018, the library had unfortunately endured a long slow decline. With a recent renaming to the “Benedictine Library” in 2017, administration knew that more substantial changes were needed. In April 2018, the library started a new course with the 16^th Library Director in institutional history. This column illustrates the ambitious first two years of the new library administration, and details the work completed in the library’s “digital modernization plan”.     

I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke: One Culture Via Apps and Global Advertising

Global cultures are merging into one culture. What has been a difference in cultures that has existed for several millennia may be gone by the end of this century, possibly much sooner. Okay, you might be thinking, how? Ah, there’s the rub! For in order that multiple cultures will disappear, languages must merge, religions must disappear, governments must change, and all the other elements that constitute unique cultures must melt together into a singular pull-down menu bar or an easily updated app-driven hand-held (if not much smaller) device. So much of that is already happening that it is hard to claim much insight with much certainty. This article seeks to examine the roles of each—culture, applications, and advertising—in the change in the way we, as individuals, shift our own societies, our own communication. Yes, that’s a lot to cover in these few pages. Let’s consider this as adding to the multitude of researchers struggling with might be best described as a start in the conversation.     

Alice Goes to Russia

The article concerns translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Russian. The authors outline the history of publishing Russian translations of the work. They also discuss how Russian translators handled some difficult aspects of the work: parodies, nonsense, puns, and the social milieu in which Alice moved. A selected bibliography is included.     

THE CHANGING TENOR OF QUESTIONING OVER TIME

This paper uses a single question form—the negative interrogative—as a window into the increasing aggressiveness of American journalists and hence the increasingly adversarial relationship between press and state in the United States. The negative interrogative in English is a type of yes/no interrogative (e.g., “Isn't it …”, “Don't you …”) often understood as asserting rather than merely seeking information. Its frequency in the construction of yes/no questions is an index of the propensity for journalists to depart from a formally neutral posture and express a point of view on the subject of inquiry. Previous quantitative research documented their growing use in US presidential news conferences since the 1950s, with the Nixon Administration as an historical turning point. Here we incorporate a more nuanced qualitative analysis of single cases in use. Beyond their growing frequency, negative interrogatives were increasingly mobilized to raise substantively adversarial matters, increasingly prefaced by adversarial assertions, and increasingly likely to treat such prefaces as presuppositionally given. Together these trends indicate journalists' growing willingness to highlight administration problems and failings and to hold Presidents to account, with Presidents since Nixon facing a harsher climate of journalistic questioning than did their predecessors.     

“Salúd,Amigos”: Negotiating Border History in Rural and Farm Radio of the Rio Grande Valley

The southernmost area of Texas, known as the Rio Grande Valley, is largely absent from histories of early radio. The social, political, and economic history of the Valley from 1848 to the 1950s prompts the authors to approach the region’s broadcast history from the context of rural and farm radio. The papers of broadcaster Bradford Smith, housed at the Margaret H. McAllen Memorial Archives at the Museum of South Texas History, provide an entryway for Valley radio to become part of the larger body of rural and farm radio scholarship. Smith’s radio reports emphasize the centrality of localism for remote communities, and they provide competing narratives about the region’s modern identity and its Mexican roots.     

Information Flow in the 21st Century: The Dynamics of Agenda-Uptake

Although the theory of agenda-setting is a pillar of political communication research, understanding the dynamics of public attention remains an important challenge as the communication system becomes increasingly fragmented. The development of ideologically oriented niche media and the ability of the mainstream media to carefully track the interests of their audience suggest that both public interest and niche media attention to an issue could affect the mainstream media’s agenda itself. We develop and test the theory of agenda-uptake to isolate when mainstream media influences both public and niche media attention to issues and when public interest and niche media attention influence the mainstream media to cover an issue. Analyzing mainstream and niche media coverage along with Google Trends individual search data for 4 issues in 2008, we provide evidence that the dynamics of agenda-uptake are crucial to understanding the character and content of the information environment in the 21st century.