Educating tomorrow’s media workers: television instruction at American institutions of higher learning, 1945–1960

This paper explores the rise of programs in television instruction in the USA during broadcasting’s postwar expansion period. Beginning in professional schools, television training entered the university first through extension school courses, then in full degree programs. This transition to institutions of higher learning entailed key shifts in demographics, pedagogical orientation, and legitimation strategies, while embroiling television in larger struggles over the shifting boundaries of the postwar humanities. Studying the education of early television workers, I argue, raises key questions about processes of worker professionalization vital for developing research on media industries and media labor.     

‘I came like the thunder and I vanish like the wind’: exploring genre repertoire and document work in the Assemblea operai e studenti of 1969

This paper will examine a suite of documents generated within one Italian post-war social movement as a means to explore four assertions: (a) that the common practice of addressing the printed word generated by social movements primarily as bearers of linguistic and conceptual content (‘texts’) too often comes at the price of ignoring certain fundamental matters of which the materiality of these documents can inform us; (b) that, connected to this, the lenses of genre and genre repertoire offer important means of deepening our readings not only of the content of social movement documents, but also the broader context of their production and use; (c) used with care, understandings of genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents can likewise inform the efforts of those working—in the community, in the history and heritage professions, and at the intersection of all three—to preserve and manage such documents; (d) reflections upon genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents may also contribute to the ongoing development of a critical information studies.     

Reality Bites: An Investigation of the Genre of Reality Television and Its Relationship to Viewers’ Body Image

Utilizing a unique methodological approach, this study investigated subtypes of reality television (RTV) to study the influence of exposure to RTV on body image (body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness) as compared a more traditional weekly report of RTV viewing. Young adults (N = 472) completed online surveys measuring their exposure to RTV and perceptions of their own body image. Four types of RTV were uncovered. Regression analyses using these 4 factors demonstrated that exposure to competition-based RTV shows (e.g., Dancing with the Stars) predicted increased body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness. On the other hand, the weekly self-report of RTV viewing did not reveal any relationships between weekly exposure to RTV and body image. These findings underline the need for cultivation-based media studies that include program-based measures of genre-specific media exposure, especially when seeking to capture media effects related to RTV.     

A new normal? Competing national cultural discourses and workers’ constructions of identity and meaningful work in Norway

We examine how conceptions of identity and meaningful work are influenced by a nation's changing economic and political environment. We collected research in Norway – a country with a rich economy that has heavily relied upon oil production since the 1980s. Yet depleting oil resources are prompting an economic transformation. Twenty-seven interviews and a thematic analysis revealed how Norwegian workers safeguarded their traditional, collective workplace values, yet were simultaneously confronted with modern – more masculinized – workplace performances ushered in with the oil era. We contribute to theory by suggesting that work's meaningfulness is constructed by competing national cultural discourses that evolve over time. These discourses become narratives that citizens draw upon to evaluate work and to negotiate their personal and professional identities.     

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.     

Document–document similarity approaches and science mapping: Experimental comparison of five approaches

This paper treats document–document similarity approaches in the context of science mapping. Five approaches, involving nine methods, are compared experimentally. We compare text-based approaches, the citation-based bibliographic coupling approach, and approaches that combine text-based approaches and bibliographic coupling. Forty-three articles, published in the journal Information Retrieval, are used as test documents. We investigate how well the approaches agree with a ground truth subject classification of the test documents, when the complete linkage method is used, and under two types of similarities, first-order and second-order. The results show that it is possible to achieve a very good approximation of the classification by means of automatic grouping of articles. One text-only method and one combination method, under second-order similarities in both cases, give rise to cluster solutions that to a large extent agree with the classification.     

American political rhetoric and the jeremiad tradition: Presidential nomination acceptance addresses, 1960–1976

The nomination acceptance addresses of recent presidential candidates constitute a significant aspect of an American political ritual. These addresses might be termed a “modern jeremiad”; because they conform to the jeremiad tradition in American rhetoric. Like the Puritan jeremiad which was central to a religious ritual, the modern jeremiad continues to function rhetorically as a means for interpreting the meaning of America's past and unifying the audience around a shared vision of America's future.     

Views from the Margins: News Coverage of Women in Abortion Protests, 1960–2006

This study links two traditionally marginalized groups in media coverage: women and protesters. Both have generally been found to be underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream news coverage. Employing a content analysis of abortion protest coverage over 46 years, this study assesses the impact of protesters' goals and tactics on the proportion of women in news coverage. Results indicate that female mentions were more likely to appear when protesters supported the status quo and when protesters were treated more favorably in coverage. Overall, however, the focus on men as sources over women as sources remained quite apparent. Implications for news treatment of women in protest coverage are discussed.     

The development of recordkeeping systems in the British Empire and Commonwealth, 1870s–1960s

¹ 1. Use of the term ‘recordkeeping’ should not be taken as an endorsement of the Records Continuum as elaborated by Frank Upward and his collaborators. View all notesThis essay demonstrates that initiatives in the imperial periphery, not least in Western Australia, played a significant role in the development of recordkeeping systems in the British Empire and Commonwealth. Local circumstances, including the adequacy of local revenues and the availability of skilled staff, played their part in shaping the systems. Nonetheless, there are overarching patterns. The need to maintain security provided a potent driver for the creation of confidential registries. The need to carry out basic functions influenced the design of recordkeeping systems far more than any shared ‘imperial imaginary’. The diverging work patterns of colonial capitals and of district administrations tended to produce distinct recordkeeping systems. The development of integrated registry systems may have played a part in the development of the Secretariat as an institution of colonial government.     

Early aqueous dispersion paints: Portuguese artists’ use of polyvinyl acetate, 1960s–1990s

Abstract

The ageing of poly(vinyl acetate), PVAc, paints was assessed in works by Ângelo de Sousa and Joaquim Rodrigo. The materials and techniques of the artists were studied through interviews and by chemical analysis. They were both using PVAc in 1961, preparing their own paints by mixing commercial PVAc emulsions with selected colorants. It is shown that in most cases the emulsion employed was based on a PVAc homopolymer and that the paints are in good condition with no signs of deterioration. Finally, this study allowed a comparison to be made between paint samples aged naturally and those aged under artificial conditions. This means that these artificially aged samples may be used as reference materials for PVAc paintings. Both sets exhibit molecular infrared fingerprints that are undistinguishable from an unaged PVAc, suggesting little chemical degradation over 50 years of natural ageing.     

Now you’re playing with audience power: the work of watching games

As electronic sports (e-sports)—the configuration of competitive videogaming as spectator sport—surges in popularity, industry organizations such as Major League Gaming (MLG) continue to experiment with techniques for capturing, and capitalizing on, the work of watching play. This article critically considers these techniques of “audiencing” by comparing observations of two MLG tournaments, in 2008 and 2012, situating them within broader cultural, technological, and economic transformations in the competitive gaming landscape. Even as games continue to be lauded as “participatory” media, this account shows a shift within some e-sports contexts towards rebuilding, rather than blurring, the boundaries between content producers and audiences.     

“This is the Whiteman’s Law”: Aboriginal resistance,bureaucratic change and the Census of Canada, 1830–2006

Census information of some form has been collected in Canada since the 1611 census of New France. Aboriginal people, identified or not, have been included in these enumerations. The collection of this information has had a profound impact on Aboriginal people and has been an element that has shaped their relationship with the dominant society. In response, Canadian Aboriginal people have often resisted and refused to co-operate with census takers and their masters. This article is an examination of this phenomenon focused on the censuses conducted in the post-Confederation period to the present. A census is made to collect information on populations and individuals that can then be used to configure and shape social and political relations between those being enumerated and the creators of the census. However, the human objects of the census are not just passive integers and they have resisted its creation in a number of ways, including being “missing” when the census is taken, refusing to answer the questions posed by enumerators or even driving them off Aboriginal territory. A census identifies elements of the social order and attempts to set them in their “proper” place and those who do not wish to be part of that order may refuse to take part. Archivists and historians must understand that the knowledge gained in a census is bound with the conditions of own creation. This has been noted by contemporary Aboriginal researchers who often state that the archival record of their people often distorts history and reflects the ideas and superficial observations of their Euro-Canadian creators. Changes to the Census of Canada since 1981, have increased the participation rate and therefore changed the nature of the record.

The Formation of Swedish Media Studies, 1960–1980

Around 1960, the politics of the emerging media society in Sweden tended to fixate the formative functions of mass communication. The monopoly of public service broadcast media, press subsidies and new tendencies in film policy were some of the issues around which uncertainty prevailed. New methods to provide reliable data were sought by politicians, since empirical facts were required as arguments for an updated media policy. This article examines the different ways that the field of media studies was introduced in Sweden between 1960 and 1980. We argue that Swedish academic media studies departed from, and emerged within, a rather diffuse borderland between industry, politics and academia. The formation of national media research in Sweden can partly be seen as an effect of politicians and the media industry wanting to be better informed on issues such as media influence, media ownership and the habits and composition of the media audience.