Professional and Technical Communication in a Web 2.0 World

This article reports on results of a nationwide survey of alumni in professional and technical communication. It presents a series of snapshots from the results, including the types of texts written and valued, where those types are written, with and for whom, and with what technologies. A range of implications are explored.     

Characterizing University Library Use of Social Media: A Case Study of Twitter and Facebook from Australia

The work presented here characterise the engagement of one university library with two social media platforms popular with academic libraries. The collected data are analysed to identify the forms of Twitter and Facebook activity that engage library stakeholders in social media conversations. Associations were observed between: i) directed tweets from the library and mentions of the library by others on Twitter; and ii) comments from the library and comments from others on Facebook. Three broad classes of Twitter user interacting with the library were revealed: i) accounts strongly linked to the library with multiple to/from tweets; ii) those weakly linked to the library with, typically, a single tweet; and iii) those indirectly linked to the library through tweets mentioning the library and sent by other users. Two divergent forms of Facebook interaction with the library were highlighted: i) a library post generating a large sequence of comments, typically in response to a competition/challenge; and ii) a library post with no comments, typically a photo post or a post inviting readers to click a link to find out more about an event/service. The work presented here is an initial investigation that provides useful insights, and offers a methodology for future research.     

The Impact of David Bearman on Modern Archival Thinking: An Essay of Personal Reflection and Critique

This essay is a preliminary assessment of David Bearman as the leading archival thinker of the late twentieth century. Bearman has revolutionized thinking in archival circles around the world by offering a defence of traditional archival notions of provenance, evidence, recordness, and contextuality that equals the noblest statements of a Hilary Jenkinson, and by positing a relevant, dynamic, engaged future for archivists to transform the Information Age into a Record-Keeping Age. The essay is both a personal reflection and critical analysis. There are three main themes: an assessment of Bearman's ideas and their overall importance to general archival theory; a more specific exposition of the nature and importance of the University of Pittsburgh Project and of where Bearman sees that its results are leading archivists and their profession and institutions in future; and a critique of some of the implications, if not the conscious intentions, of his ideas and methods that seem to exclude the cultural, historical, and heritage dimensions and uses of archives, public or private. The overall aim of the essay is to push the archival discourse to the next stage by challenging and constructively critiquing as well as extolling the work of this archival pioneer.     

The Warren Cup: Highlighting Hidden Histories

Contemporary artists and art galleries have been more active than museums in representing gay and lesbian culture in public spaces in recent decades. However same‐sex relationships have a long history that is reflected in the collections of museums that have material from the classical world. The culture of ancient Greece and Rome was less inhibited about the representation of sexual acts than many nineteenth‐century museums would have liked. Objects with frank images of sexual acts were discreetly censored or hidden away in secret cabinets. This article draws on one object as a case study, a Roman silver cup dated to the early years of the first century AD acquired by the British Museum in 1999. The cup is decorated with beautifully realised scenes in relief decoration which show two pairs of males engaged in love‐making, each pair consisting of one older male and a youth. The object could never have been acquired or publicly displayed earlier in the twentieth century. The vessel known as the Warren Cup (after a previous owner) provides a provocative stimulus for debate about male‐to‐male lovemaking. Discussion of the meaning of the scenes, and the possible reasons why they were represented on such a high‐status object, generates more questions than answers. This uncertainty contributes to the power of this object to open up debate. This article will raise questions for educators and students to consider about the Cup, an object which society has only recently ceased to regard as pornographic or obscene.     

Being Subjective about Autistic Thinking and Learning to Learn

In this paper, we discuss the deviant pattern of the development of thinking in autism and outline our thesis that the problem with autistic memory is in developing a personal episodic memory, and that this difficulty arises because of a deficit in the development of an experiencing self, which we have termed (after Brewer, 1986) an ‘ego‐self. We discuss constraints which we suggest result in learnable thinking skills remaining domain specific: difficulties with (i) language, (ii) coding, storage and retrieval of information and (iii) the role of emotions. We discuss what ‘improving the thinking’ of individuals with autism would entail and draw implications regarding fundamental requirements and caveats of teaching thinking for all individuals.