As part of National Public Radio's site relaunch in July came a new free-text policy for transcripts. More than 80,000 transcripts are now available going back to May 2005 (they used to charge for them). Observes Susanne Bjorner, writing in The CyberSkeptics Guide to Internet Research (October 2009), "NPR says that transcripts are 'largely accurate' but acknowledges that there may be some spelling or grammatical errors and that, in some cases the text may not align perfectly with the audio" Some random testing on her part "indicates that available transcripts are indexed by every word, making the backfile a major new free source for research in news, business, and culture."
NPR transcripts are also available at LexisNexis (see previous post) but you may want to go straight to the horse's mouth from now on.
Authors: Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, and Michelle M Garrison, PhD
Abstract Objective The goal was to quantify television viewing in day care settingsand to investigate the characteristics of programs that predictviewing.
Methods A telephone survey of licensed child care programs in Michigan,Washington, Florida, and Massachusetts was performed. The frequencyand quantity of television viewing for infants, toddlers, andpreschool-aged children were assessed.
Results With the exception of infants, children in home-based childcare programs were exposed to significantly more televisionon an average day than were children in center-based programs(infants: 0.2 vs 0 hours; toddlers: 1.6 vs 0.1 hours; preschool-agedchildren: 2.4 vs 0.4 hours). In a regression analysis of dailytelevision time for preschool-aged children in child care, center-basedprograms were found to have an average of 1.84 fewer hours oftelevision each day, controlling for the other covariates. Significanteffect modification was found, in that the impact of home-basedversus center-based child care programs differed somewhat dependingon educational levels for staff members; having a 2- or 4-yearcollege degree was associated with 1.41 fewer hours of televisionper day in home-based programs, but no impact of staff educationon television use was observed in center-based programs.
Here's list of top Journalism blogs from a new Journalism blog, Journalism Journeyman, on the scene. Of course all the sites that are included on the list are promoting this blog, including yours truly.
Never before have so many tools been available to analyze and clarify digital influence. The 2009 Digital Influence in News and Politics Report leverages these tools to measure the influence of those best-in-class media companies in the digital sphere.
Sparxoo evaluated over 100 news and politics media outlets (from the New York Times to the Daily Beast to NPR) in a comprehensive study of content, social and multimedia influence.
The Report crowns CNN as the #1 digital influencer, followed by The New York Times (a pleasant surprise for “The Gray Lady”). The Digital Influencer in News and Politics Report confirms and debunks many of the long-held media myths perpetuated by marketers, brand managers and other business leaders. It is through these findings that we can re-align the media compass to find tomorrow’s true north.
A few journals to cross my desk with themed issues, all available as e-journals on library homepage:
Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (Volume 37, Number2). Scholars, educators, and activists contribute to this special issue on Media Literacy in a journal that is always in the media vanguard.
Journalism (Volume 10, Number 5, October 2009) is devoted to Newswork, the work that journalists, i.e. newsworkers do in a time when 'journalists are expected to do more with less time, fewer resources, and fewer colleagues" to quote issue editors Mark Deuze and TimothyMajoribanks.
Continuing the theme of newswork, the Fall 2009 Nieman Reports (Volume 63, Number 3) is devoted to social media, Let's Talk: Journalism and Social Media, with articles on the roleof blogs, tweets, Facebook, etc. in today's news business.
Communication Research Trends (Volume 28, Number 3, 2009) features the topic, Children's Rights and the Media, guest edited by Katharine Heintz. The issue includes an extensive bibliography of resources on the topic.
Clive Thompson reports on the Stanford Study of Writing headed by writing and rhetoric professor Andrea Lunsford who collected student writing samples from 2001 to 2006--emails, blog entries, class assignments, journal entries, formal essays and i-chats--and came to the conclusion that writing among young people is alive and well, in fact, she thinks we are in the midst of a literacy revolution "the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." Describes Thompson, writing for Wired Magazine:
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom-life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up. It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the student’s were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
...It's also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis--from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15, 000-word videogamewalkthroughs--has given them a chance to write enormously long an complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others. --Wired Magazine, Sept 2009, p. 48
African Telecommunication/ICT Indicators 2008: At a Crossroads (International Telecommunication Union, 2008). "African Telecommunication Indicators has been published eight times spanning a period of 18 years. At the time the first edition was published, there were only 8.6 million telephone subscribers in Africa, mostly located in the North African countries and South Africa. At that time, Norway had more telephone subscribers than all of Sub-Saharan Africa. Mobile communications were virtually non-existent, with only six networks in operation, and beyond Mauritius and South Africa, there were none in Sub-Saharan Africa. Not one African country was connected to the Internet in 1990....Today, the situation is radically different, with all African countries having mobile networks in operation and connections to the Internet. Growth has defied predictions. For example, the 2004 edition of African Telecommunication Indicators forecast three different scenarios for the number of mobile subscribers in Africa by 2010. The most optimistic scenario of 200 million by 2010 was almost reached in 2006 and exceeded by over 60 million subscribers at the end of 2007.Although it is tempting to get excited about the ICT growth in Africa, the stakes have risen. The milestones by which success is measured are changing. Two decades ago, achieving a teledensity of one per one hundred inhabitants represented a major milestone, but today’s benchmarks of achievement are much higher. The rest of the world has forged ahead with technologies. While Africa has made impressive gains, it remains far behind other regions in ICT access." --from the Introduction REF HE8461 A373 2008
The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages, edited by Paul Lunde (University of California Press, 2009). "Lavishly illustrated encyclopedia surveys the history and development of code making and code breaking in all areas of culture and society-from hieroglyphs and runes to DNA, the Zodiac Killer, The Da Vinci Code, graffiti, and beyond. Beginning with the first codes, including those found in the natural world and among ancient peoples, the book casts a wide net, exploring secret societies, codes of war, codes of the underworld, commerce, human behavior, and civilization itself. Editor Paul Lunde and group of specialists have compiled the most comprehensive and complete collection of codes available. Visually stunning and packed with fascinating details..."(Publisher's description) REF Z 103 B66 2009
Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research, edited by Donal Carbaugh and Patrice M. Buzzanell (Routledge, 2010). The editors ask contributing scholars to respond to the question, "What makes your research distinctively communication research?" Among the scholars to address this question are our own Drs. Joseph Cappella and Robert Hornik, "The Importance of Communication Science in Addressing Core Problems in Public Health." REF P91.3 D57 2010
Encyclopedia of Journalism, edited by Christopher H. Sterling (SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009). Presents "a current and comprehensive analysis on all aspects of journalism—including the trends, issues, concepts, individuals, institutions, media outlets, and events that go into making journalism a pivotal part of contemporary media. While emphasizing American journalism, a significant amount of space will be devoted to discussing print, broadcast and additional modes of journalism in other countries as well, including their impact on America and vice versa.Coverage will ranges from country essays surveying the development and current state of journalism, to entries focused on specific types of print publications and broadcast programs (offering specific examples), as well as specific media markets, to entries that survey important people and programs within historical and analytical treatments of such familiar journalistic types as the television anchor, or television news magazine programs. Especially important are the encyclopedia’s attention to the changing technologies of journalism, legal and ethical issues, education and training for journalism, the processes and routines of journalism, ownership and industry economics, and the audiences for news. The first four volumes contain entries ranging in length from 800 to 3,500 words, arranged by topic from A to Z...The fifth volume provides reprinted documents of importance to journalism past and present...The sixth volume contains an extensive annotated bibliography on all aspects of journalism, as well as multiple indexes."--Publisher's description PN4728.E48 2009
Encyclopedia of Television Law Shows: Factual and Fictional Series about Judges, Lawyers and the Courtroom, 1948-2008, by Hal Erickson (McFarland, 2009). PN1992.8 J87E53
Food in the Movies, by Steve Zimmerman (McFarland, 2009). "This expanded and revised edition details 400 food scenes, in addition to the 400 films reviewed for the first edition, and an introduction tracing the technical, artistic and cultural forces that contributed to the emergence of food films as a new genre—originated by such films as Tampopo, Babette’s Feast and more recently by films like Mostly Martha, No Reservations and Ratatouille. A filmography is included as an appendix." --Publishers description PN1995.9F65Z56 2010
Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, edited by Annette N. Markham and Nancy K. Baym (SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009). Presents distinctive and divergent viewpoints on how to think about and conduct qualitative Internet research. "Some of the most basic principles of qualitative research are clearly and soberly examined in light of Internet research." --Steve Jones, University of Illinois at Chicago ZA4228 I57 2009
Terrorism in American Cinema: An Analytical Filmography, 1960-2008, by Robert Cettl (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2009). "Analytical filmography of American terrorist films establishes terrorist cinema as a unique subgenre with distinct thematic narrative and stylistic trends. It covers all major American films dealing with terrorism, from Otto Preminger's "Exodus" (1960) to Ridley Scott's "Body of Lies" (2008)." --Publisher's website PN1995.9 T46C48 2009
Handbook of Statistics is now available online to the Penn Community. The Handbook devotes single volumes to a specific topic in statistics. Special emphasis is placed upon applications-oriented techniques, with the applied statistician as the primary reading audience. Seven Penn authors have contributed to this handbook series. Topics covered include:
Bayesian Thinking, Modeling & Computation
Robust Inference
Bioenvironmental & Public Health Statistics
Sample Surveys: Design
Computational Statistics
Sample Surveys: Inference and Analysis
Design & Analysis of Experiments
Sampling
Econometrics
Signal Processing & its Applications
Environmental Statistics
Statistical Methods in Biological & Medical Sciences
I've written here about Media Cloud before, but thought I'd revisit since the August 4 New York Times profile. To review with the assessment of NYT writer Patricia Cohen, Media Cloud "tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousand of web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database atmediacloud.org will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events--from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections--and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered...the findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage." Harvard law professor, YochaiBenkler, sees Media Cloud as the "next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying," as opposed to the fairly exhausted method of link analysis which can only track what sites people click on and infer influence from that.
But the main reason I bring up Media Cloud again, and this article in particular, is that the article mentions some other media trackers on the block, namely MemeTracker (from Cornell University).
MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.
Click into their website to see a colorful graph showing the frequency of the top 50 quotes in the news and blogs over time, during the U.S. presidential election. These findings come from a paper by the creators of MemeTracker that, according to the NYT, "was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work."
Searcher Magazine does a series on user-generated content and this month's installment is on citizen journalism. As author Nicholas Tomaiuolo points out, CitJ, is also referred to as open source, grassroots, networked or distributed journalism, so you have a compliment of key words to keep in mind if you're searching this trend in databases. The full article is available at the ASC Library (see me) but Information Today (publisher) provides a handy list of the urls appearing in the article at its website.
These URLs appear in the article: UCONTENT: CITIZEN JOURNALISM by Nicholas Tomaiuolo Instruction Librarian, Central Connecticut State University Searcher, the Magazine for Database Professionals Vol. 17, No. 9 • October 2009
The September 24 issue of The Economist devotes a section to mobile phones in developing countries. The multi-article report is called Mobile Marvels: A Special Report on Telecoms in Emerging Markets. The Economist is available from Penn Libraries' E-Resources. In the report: The mother of invention: How a luxury item became a tool of global development Up, up and Huawei: Huge strides in China Beyond voice: New uses for mobile phones Internet for the masses: Mobile-phone access will soon be universal; the next task is to do the same for the internet
Sarah Nardi's comment on the virtual lives of Japanese youth in the November/December (#86) Adbusterson The Virtual/Natural World:
"In his seventh book, Last Child in the Woods, journalist Richard Louv speaks to a young boy who sums up the sentiment of younger generations with one sentence: "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are." Louv cites several studies-one shows children are better able to identify Japanese cartoon characters than common animals and plants; another reports that the radius from the home which children were able to roam freely was nine times greater in 1970 than today -as evidence of a nature deficit disorder. He argues that disconnecting children from the natural world, through overwrought parenting, urbanization and a reliance on electronic distraction, has resulted in generations of children prone to obesity, depression and attention deficit disorder. Their intellectual, creative and even physical development is stymied by a sedentary existence. Far from striking out into nature and discovering the world and themselves, they are leashed to their home by cords-seemingly as umbilical as they are electrical."--Sarah Nardi
IZI-Datenbank.deIZI-Datenbank.de is the literature database of the International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI). This international bilingual (English/German) database gathers research on
* children's television * youth television * educational television
The IZI documentation center researches, collects, and uses controlled vocabulary for indexing internationally relevant sources (books, journal articles, university publications, research reports, conference papers and grey literature).
The database is updated regularly. A search for our own Dr. Amy Jordan results in 25 documents ranging from 1992 to 2008, more hits than the search I did on her name in EBSCO's Communication and Mass Media Complete (12 hits). For students and researchers of children and youth television, this database should definitely not be overlooked. Some of the best things in life are open source!
The Benton Foundation is a private foundation in existence since 1948 that works in the areas of public policy, specifically serving the public interest in the media and telecommunications arena. Current priorities include Current priorities include: "promoting a vision and policy alternatives for the digital age in which the benefit to the public is paramount; raising awareness among funders and nonprofits on their stake in critical policy issues; enabling communities and nonprofits to produce diverse and locally responsive media content."
They are worth pointing out on a library resource blog because their site is resource rich. Homepage sections includes Recent Headlines (free, daily summaries of articles on telecommunications policy), Policy Initiatives (on such topics as media ownership, affordable broadband, and other communication legislation), digital Beat Blog (Charles Benton and others' take on communications policy), and Community Media (the foundations work in educating nonprofits in this area) and more.
The Library and Topics sections are full of annual reports, research papers, news articles, and postings on a variety of topics in the areas of advertising, broadcasting, cable, children and media, community media, cyberwarfare and cybersecurity, digital content, digital divide, diversity, elections and media, emergency communication, energy and climate, FCC reform, health and media, indecency regulation, internet/broadband, journalism, labor, localism, media ownership, satellite, spectrum, telecom, violence, and wireless.
Great news! Duke University's TV commercial collections spanning from the 1940s to the present, have gone online.From the website:
"The AdViews digital collection provides access to thousands of historic commercials created for clients or acquired by the D'Arcy Masius Benton and Bowles advertising agency or its predecessor during the 1950s - 1980s. All of the commercials held in the DMBB Archives will be digitized, allowing students and researchers access to a wide range of vintage brand advertising from the first four decades of mainstream commercial television."
Ads can be searched by keywords, company name, product, and by date. There are also broader categories to browse such as "Health and Beauty," "Transportation and Travel," "Food and Beverage," among others.
Note: To view the ads one needs to open them in iTunes. That appears to be the only option.
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