What’s next?: the LGBTQ video game archive

This essay describes the author’s new project: a digital archive documenting the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) content in video games. The LGBTQ game archive covers approximately 30 decades of game content at present, and nearly 500 games. This essay describes the project’s origins, the methods used to research the game content, and some initial findings. Finally, some particular surprises from the project are discussed, which point to areas for future LGBTQ games research.     

Writing from the archive: Henry Garnet’s powder-plot letters and archival communication

Through a reading of the archived letters of Henry Garnet (1555–1606), Superior of the Jesuit order in England and suspected Gunpowder plotter, this article investigates the nature of the archive in relation to narrative theory. Figuring the archive as one of the number of narrating voices accrued by the individual record, I argue that models of communication such as those put forward by Roman Jakobson, Wayne C. Booth and Seymour Chatman afford useful insights into the ways in which power is inscribed and reinscribed in the record through successive acts of reading and rewriting.

Metadata as a machine for feeling in Germaine Greer’s archive

ABSTRACT

What happens when a human coder meets a machine one? This article explores this question with reference to the archive of Professor Germaine Greer: Australian-born feminist, performer, scholar, and professional controversialist. It does so by staging two very different data encounters with the 70,000-word finding aid for the print journalism series, a key component of Greer’s archive. The first encounter is archivist’s creation of the finding aid; the second, archivist and literary scholar’s interpretation of this archival metadata using sentiment analysis. Interrogating these activities side-by-side opens up a productive middle ground between humanities scholars and computer technicians, between historians and archivists, between the hand made and the machine made.

This article argues that sentiment analysis offers a new and highly productive method of interrogating archival metadata, and that, as a method which privileges emotive understandings of content, it is particularly appropriate to the study of feminist archives like Greer’s. It also argues that these kinds of detailed finding aids are new datasets that reward analysis in their own right, and particularly when considered in dialogue with—rather than simply used as straightforward navigational tools for—the ‘original’ archival content.     

The Global South’s Participation in the International Community of Communication Scholars: From an Eastern European Point of View

In this paper, we present the Eastern European (EE) region as part of the Global South with all its disadvantages, and we will argue that “Sovietization” of the region is, in many respects, similar to the colonization of different world regions. We also show that the disadvantages of the region still exist after the transition, and EE has an especially low contribution to communication and media studies (CMS). With a brief bibliometric analysis in CMS, the paper demonstrates that a strong bias holds against EE authors and editorial board members in leading periodicals in CMS, and at least 95% of EE research remains unnoticed by international scholars. We further argue that this phenomenon is obviously harmful to the field of CMS. This paper not only points out the general difficulties Eastern European communication scholars might face when trying to make their research internationally visible, but it also snatches at the chance to introduce a novel, a respected but internationally yet unnoticed Easter European (Hungarian) communication theory, namely, the Participation Theory of Communication.     

Article’s scientific prestige: Measuring the impact of individual articles in the web of science

We performed a citation analysis on the Web of Science publications consisting of more than 63 million articles and over a billion citations on 254 subjects from 1981 to 2020. We proposed the Article’s Scientific Prestige (ASP) metric and compared this metric to number of citations (#Cit) and journal grade in measuring the scientific impact of individual articles in the large-scale hierarchical and multi-disciplined citation network. In contrast to #Cit, ASP, that is computed based on the eigenvector centrality, considers both direct and indirect citations, and provides steady-state evaluation cross different disciplines. We found that ASP and #Cit are not aligned for most articles, with a growing mismatch amongst the less cited articles. While both metrics are reliable for evaluating the prestige of articles such as Nobel Prize winning articles, ASP tends to provide more persuasive rankings than #Cit when the articles are not highly cited. The journal grade, that is eventually determined by a few highly cited articles, is unable to properly reflect the scientific impact of individual articles. The number of references and coauthors are less relevant to scientific impact, but subjects do make a difference.     

The possibility of using the Google Patents search tool in patentometric analysis (based on the example of the world’s largest innovative companies)

The possibility of using the Google Patents search tool in patentometric analysis based on the world largest innovative companies is substantiated. Of these companies, the dynamics of issued patents for 2-year intervals over a 10-year period (2001?C2010) were analyzed; with this method it was possible to classify these companies according to their patent activity. It is shown that along with the very high patent activity (from 1.0 to 1.2 mln patents in 10 years) of the Sony, Samsung Electronics, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Siemens companies, 76% of the most innovative companies of the world that are included in the TOP-50 Business Week 2010 have very low patent activities (from 0 to 0.2 mln patents in 10 years). The conclusion is that most patent active innovation companies have stably growing or established dynamics of patent activity.     

Amazon’s Day One in China: The Role of Amazon’s Kindle in China

After the long-standing effort and negotiations, Amazon finally released its two Kindle products in China since it entered China 9 years ago. Some say Kindle as it plays as a Catfish would stir up China’s e-book reading market, while the others say Kindle has missed the best timing to enter the market. The article describes the Kindle’s current status in China digital publishing arena, exploring the consistent Amazon strategies in China e-commerce market, and analyzing its threats and opportunities coming from four aspects in the long run, policy, content, willingness-to-pay and competition.     

Recording ‘a very particular Custom’: tattoos and the archive

This paper investigates the describing, dissemination and archiving of records, which have previously not been well described by archives. It asks if new methods of accessing the archive may be used to improve understandings of such records. Specifically, this paper will investigate the records created about tattoos in the nineteenth century following the European exploration of Polynesia, and the transmission of tattoos to the West. The ways in which this indigenous cultural practice was interpreted and recorded are discussed with reference to the records created. Tattoos are inherently physical records, which do not survive beyond the lifespan of their owner. The archiving process for tattoos has thus relied on preserving representations of the tattoo. This paper will ask what these representations of tattoos actually provide evidence of and will use two case studies to examine how records about tattoos have been archived. Finally, it is suggested that a more holistic understanding of tattooing records may be achieved through new ways of describing and classifying records, such as folksonomy.     

Muslim Women’s Use of Internet Media in the Process of Acculturation in the United States

This study examines how Muslim women use Internet-based media in the process of acculturation in the United States. Grounded theory methodology (Glaser, 1992) and Sam and Berry’s (2006) model of acculturation were used as theoretical and analytical frameworks. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 Muslim women to learn about their media use and experiences in forming and maintaining relationships in the United States. Educational opportunities were an emerging theme in the determining factors of immigrating to the United States. The data indicated that Muslim women use a variety of Internet-based media such as Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Viber for communicating with family and friends locally and abroad. A majority of the participants reported that social media allowed them to express a part of their identities. The data suggests that the participants attained the level of acculturation defined as integration. The participants use these media to build and create relationships in their new communities. The combined relationships the participants maintain both locally and abroad seem to play a role in the creation of balance in their lives, which allows them to thrive in their new communities, at school, and at work.     

UAE’s Publishing Industry: A Vision of an Avant-Garde Nation

This article outlines in detail the ten strategic goals that the UAE publishing industry has identified to lead a comprehensive transformation of the industry and to cement its position as a regional leader. The main goals revolve around building regional and global partnerships, developing a global publishing hub, improving legal framework for the all the stakeholders of the industry, building quality Arabic content for local and regional readers, supporting educational publishing, launching initiatives to encourage reading for pleasure, improving distribution networks and retail, transforming libraries, and instilling a sense of pride and understanding of local culture while supporting creative talents and skills. Also, this article will share information about some leading initiatives being implemented in Sharjah and the United Arab Emirates, and future initiatives to be implemented to achieve the ten goals.     

‘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.