Writing Radio History as it Happens: The Challenges and Opportunities of Collecting Podcast Histories

This essay reflects on the challenges and opportunities of researching and documenting contemporaneous digital radio histories. It discusses the implications of preservation-minded research into newly forming production cultures and practices around digital radio and podcasting. Moreover, this piece reflects on the current efforts being conducted to construct, document, and analyze new and emerging industrial and cultural formations within and around podcasting.     

Academic Librarian Burnout: A Survey Using the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI)

Abstract

In the Spring of 2018, the authors administered the highly validated and reliable Copenhagen Burnout Inventory work-related sub-scale to 1,628 academic librarians employed within the United States. Academic librarians reported a total work-related burnout score of 49.6. Overall, female participants who were 35–44?years of age reported the highest levels of work-related burnout with males and older individuals reporting the lowest levels of work-related burnout. This study also revealed some interesting information about non-binary/third-gender librarians that suggests further research is warranted.     

New Economy Narrative?: A Comparative Analysis of Technology and Economic Recovery in the Business Press

ABSTRACT

Recently, terms such as the “fourth industrial revolution”, or the “second machine age”, have been used both in the business press and by academics to describe the current era of technological development. Embedded in these catchphrases is an assumption about the role of technology in the economy, who it serves, and the outcomes it provides. Communication scholars have long studied how the economy and technology are independently framed in the media, but little work has focused on how these terms are framed together. Understanding how the media frames technology’s role in the economy, and how those frames change over time, is necessary to fully analyze the role of technology in today’s society. This paper conducts a comparative frame analysis of the business press in two recent periods heavily influenced by technological development: 1992–1998 and 2010–2016. Results of this frame analysis show that a positive Growth frame was the most popular frame used in both periods. Overall coverage of technology’s role in the economy has dropped significantly since 1992. The 2010–2016 period saw a notable drop in positive Market Disruption frames but an increase in positive Social Recomposition and Employment frames.     

Surprise,Hurt, and Anger as Emotional Responses to Expectancy Violations Following Feedback Messages

ABSTRACT

Using expectancy violations theory, this study examined how the communication of unexpected feedback messages evoke emotional responses. A convenience sample (N = 309) reported instances of unexpected feedback within the last month. Results showed that receipt of the feedback message types were considered moderate-to-high violations. Violation expectedness and valence were negatively associated with the emotional responses, but violation importance was positively associated with the emotional responses. Finally, hurt and anger (but not surprise) were positively linked to perceptions of relational damage between the message sender and receiver. Taken together, our study demonstrates that expectancy violations are connected to emotions and relational outcomes.     

The Interpretation of Dreams: Ladson-Billings,Freud, and Derrida

This study provides a critical and close reading of The Dreamkeepers (1994), by Gloria Ladson-Billings. The paper focuses primarily on the gendered nature of “being a teacher” and “being a student” as revealed in the dreamkeeper text, while maintaining its engagement with race and culture as it is manifested in the United States context. It considers the remarkable double-voicedness of the dreamkeeper text through a Derridean understanding of dreams, memory, perception, and writing. The study concludes by inviting teachers and teacher educators to reflect upon their personal teaching images via continual engagement with the social codes that structure pedagogical relationships.     

Governing knowledge in the scientific community: Exploring the role of retractions in biomedicine

Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While research errors are as relevant to the knowledge economy as defects are to the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal “defective” or false knowledge are poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate one such institution - the system of scientific retractions. We analyze the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972-2006 and comparing with a matched control sample in order to identify the correlates, timing, and causal impact of scientific retractions. This effort provides insight into the workings of a distributed, peer-based system for the governance of validity in scientific knowledge. Our findings suggest that attention is a key predictor of retraction - retracted articles arise most frequently among highly-cited articles. The retraction system is expeditious in uncovering knowledge that is ever determined to be false (the mean time to retraction is less than two years) and democratic (retraction is not systematically affected by author prominence). Lastly, retraction causes an immediate, severe, and long-lived decline in future citations. Conditional on the obvious limitation that we cannot measure the absolute amount of false science in circulation, these results support the view that distributed governance systems can be designed to uncover false knowledge relatively swiftly and to mitigate the costs that false knowledge for future generations of producers.     

Community-Building in a Diverse Setting

Research demonstrates that community-building in schools is an integral aspect of student success. Based on a foundation of research findings related to the importance of implementing community-building into all aspects of a school, community-building activities, including five specific classroom strategies (parent visits class to tell about child, weekly newsletter with interactive activities, bi-monthly open-house hour where children explain school work to parents, Valentine letters filled with true compliments, and a cultural celebration unit focused on Africa), were implemented in an urban magnet school. This school was moving toward racial integration as well as implementation of a Montessori education program. As predicted from research information, incorporating community-building strategies geared at creating a welcoming climate, at improving faculty interaction, at fostering collaborative classrooms, and towards on-going and open teacher/parent communication and collaboration resulted in positive outcomes in what could have otherwise been a difficult, negative or unproductive situation.