“Freedom Edition”: Considering Sony Pictures and The Interview

Culture Digitally is a community of scholars, originally convened by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With generous support from the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through a wide range of projects and collaborations, including a scholarly blog and periodic workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig on Twitter.

This is the latest in the series of Culture Digitally’s “dialogues.” On occasion, we invite two or more participants to engage in an intellectual back-and-forth, on a point of interest that emerges from discussions at our meetings, around blog posts, or based on evident, shared interests. In these dialogues, scholars are encouraged to grapple with contemporary issues in media, but to do so quite a bit faster than the glacial pace of publishing typically allows. We imagine them as the digital equivalent of the scholarly exchange of letters between pre-eminent scientists. The thinking is meant to be raw and provocative, a chance for the dialogue participants to prod each other beyond their own certainties.

The scholars in this dialogue were convened by Joshua Braun in response to the recent public and media discourse surrounding the security breach at Sony Pictures Entertainment and its film, The Interview.     

Racial Disparities in Sleep: Associations With Discrimination Among Ethnic/Racial Minority Adolescents

This study investigates the same-day associations between discrimination and sleep among 350 adolescents ages 13–15 (M = 14.29, SD = 0.65; Asian = 41%, Black = 22%, Latinx = 37%). Assessing sleep duration, sleep onset latency, and wake minutes after sleep onset using wrist actigraphy, Black adolescents slept 35 min less than Asian and 36 min less than Latinx youth. Black adolescents suffered the most wake minutes after sleep onset, followed by Latinx and Asian youth. Latinx youth reported the highest levels of sleep disturbance, whereas Asian youth reported the highest levels of daytime dysfunction. Daily discrimination was associated with lower levels of same-night sleep onset latency, more sleep disturbance, more next-day daytime dysfunction, and higher next-day daytime sleepiness.     

The Rosarium Project: A case of merging traditional reference librarian skills with digital humanities technology

ABSTRACT

The role of the reference librarian has changed considerably over the past thirty years. Today reference librarians spend as much time on public relations as on answering reference questions and more time solving log-in issues than on helping with research. Despite this, there is still a role for reference librarians to play using their research and curation skills. That role involves the digital humanities, particularly text encoding projects following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI). One such TEI project is the Rosarium Project, which curates online popular materials about roses.     

Twenty-First Century Literacy: A Matter of Scale from Micro to Mega

Twenty-first century technologies require educators to look for new ways to teach literacy skills. Current communication methods are combinations of traditional and newer, network-driven forms. This article describes the changes twenty-first century technologies cause in the perception of time, size, distance, audience, and available data, and offers suggestions for teaching with these differences in mind.     

Depressive symptoms in and type of classroom placement for adolescents with LD

This study investigated the relationship of depressive symptomatology to type of classroom placement in a sample of adolescents with learning disabilities who attended an urban public high school. Fifty-two students, half of whom were in self-contained classrooms and half of whom were in general education classrooms with resource room, self-rated their depressive symptoms. Their guidance counselors also rated these students' depressive symptoms. Self-ratings of depression did not differ depending on classroom placement. Guidance counselors rated students with learning disabilities who were in general education classrooms as more depressed than students placed in self-contained classes.     

Development of a Virtual Technology Coach to Support Technology Integration for K-12 Educators

In an effort to develop a virtual technology coach for K-12 educators, this article analyzed survey results from sixty teachers with regards to specific resources that a technology coach could provide within a virtual environment. A virtual technology coach was proposed as a possible solution to provide continual professional development for teachers to support their technology integration efforts. Results indicate that the Collaboration, Discussion, Learning, and Sharing resources of a virtual technology coach are considered valuable. This finding appears to corroborate the importance of developing a professional learning community to promote effective and sustained technology integration strategies among teachers. In addition, these virtual technology coaching attributes are identified in current education coaching (NETS*C) standards pointing to a potential support structure for schools and school districts implementing the NETS*C standards.