New Venture in Scholarly Publishing: International Journal of Communication

IJoC

Launching Fall 2006

A NEW VENTURE IN COMMUNICATION SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION

International Journal of Communication

Editors Manuel Castells and Larry Gross

Published by

The Annenberg Center for Communication University of Southern California

This e-journal is:

• Free

• Online only

• Multimedia

• Interdisciplinary

• Adhering to the highest standards of peer review

• Engaging established and emerging scholars from around the world

The International Journal of Communication welcomes contributions that come from and speak to the many disciplines and approaches, meeting at the crossroads that is communication study.

Submit articles or subscribe to journal email updates now at: ijoc.annenberg.edu

EDITORIAL BOARD (in formation)

Editors:

Manuel Castells, USC Annenberg

Larry Gross, USC Annenberg

Associate Editors:

Jennings Bryant, U. of Alabama

Susan Douglas, U. of Michigan

Oscar Gandy, Annenberg/U. of Pennsylvania

Kathleen Jamieson, Annenberg/U. of Pennsylvania

Robin Mansell, London School of Economics

Alexander Piscitelli, U. of Buenos Aires

Marshall Scott Poole, Texas A&M

N. Bhaskara Rao, Centre for Media Studies, New Delhi

Ellen Seiter, USC Cinema-Television

Book Review Editors: (more to come)

Gustavo Cardoso, U. of Lisbon

Josh Kun, USC Annenberg

Jack Linchuan Qiu, Chinese U. of Hong Kong

Advisory Editors:

Sandra Ball-Rokeach, USC Annenberg

Svetlana Balmayeva, Liberal Arts U. of Yekaterinburg

Howard S. Becker, San Francisco

Pablo Boczkowski, Northwestern U.

William Dutton, Oxford U.

Richard Dyer, U. of Warwick

Dilip Gaonkar, Northwestern U.

Trudy Govier, U. of Lethbridge

Larry Grossberg, U. of North Carolina

James Hamilton, Duke U.

Steve Jones, U. of Illinois-Chicago

Elihu Katz, Annenberg/U. of Pennsylvania

Douglas Kellner, UCLA

Marwan Kraidy, American U.Robert

McChesney, U. of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana

Toby Miller, UC Riverside

William Mitchell, MIT

Peter Monge, USC Annenberg

Thomas Nakayama, Arizona State U.

Horace Newcomb, U. of Georgia

Dana Polan, NYU

Adam Powell, USC Engineering

Monroe Price, Annenberg/U. of Pennsylvania

Michael Renov, USC Cinema-Television

Michael Schudson, UC San Diego

John Thompson, Cambridge U.

Ingrid Volkmer, U. of Otago

Simon Wilkie, USC Communication Law and Policy

Barbie Zelizer, Annenberg/U. of Pennsylvania

Yuezhi Zhao, Simon Fraser U.

Three cheers for RLG's Archivegrid

The Research Libraries Group has recently launched an amazing database of historical archives called Archivegrid. Arhivegrid provides search access to thousands of archives and special collections worldwide as more and more institutions contribute their holdings. Participants include the International Institute of Social History (IISH), American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, BBC Written Archives Centre, CBS News, United Nations, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Library of Congress, as well as hundreds of historical societies, college and university archives, and museum archives (ranging from the Fogg Art Museum to the National Museum of Roller Skating).

I decided to play around with Archivegrid and do a few searches. I started with names. Searching on George Gerbner led me to the Dell Hymes Papers (1965-1985) at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. A search on Elihu Katz linked me to the Henry R. Cassirer Papers (1936-2005) at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. (Cassirer, I learned, was a CBS executive and these papers document his life and career, particularly his work at CBS in the 1940s and his long association with UNESCO.) I threw Robert Louis Shayon's name into the engine and got quite a few hits, one to the University of Iowa's National Citizens Committee for Broadcast Papers. I paired "public service announcements" with "children" and found an interesting entry: "Correspondence and subject files relating to television commercials for food products aimed at children, 1975-1978" at the New York State Archives. A search on Radio Free Europe turns up 170 items. For folks doing thorough historical research this is a good archive to keep in mind for a lot of primary source material that otherwise flies under the radar.

In its launch/publicity mode Archivegrid has been free to all. That is likely to change very soon but it will be available to member institutions of the Research Libraries Group. Lucky for us Penn is a member!

Introducing MIT World

MIT World is a free, open streaming media web site of the most significant public events at The Massachusetts institute of Technology. A project of the Professional Education Programs at MIT's School of Engineering, it features recent speakers and guests from across its campus and around the world. Sure there are a lot of lectures of the mission control/robotics stripe but you'll also browse into guests like Robert Pinksy who visited this past February. Speakers lecture on a wide variety of topics in diverse fields of Architecture, Biotechnology, History, National Security, and Media, to name a few. For instance, this past Spring (March 8) Henry Jenkins, MIT Professor of Humanities and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program, moderated TV's New Economics with panelists David Poltrack and Jorge Schement.

Videos can be streamed on-demand to a computer, but cannot be downloaded, edited or duplicated.

CommQuotes: Philip Roth

CommQuotes will be a regular feature of the blog, a monthly affair I'm thinking but I like this quote so much I just might let it reign longer. So often it's novelists, poets, and artists who offer the keenest insights on the subject of communication. This passage comes from Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which manages to be both a deep and page-turning read--always nice when that happens. The cool picture is Kyle Cassidy's (of course). Looks like a North Jersey perspective with New York looming in the background, perfect accompaniment for a Roth quote. But I cannot tell a lie (which is a lie)...actually, according to Kyle, that's Philly in the background taken during the 2000 Republican National Convention.

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right in not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that, well, lucky you."

--Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Web Capture at MINERVA

The Library of Congress has launched a website to explain its program to capture and archive select, historically important websites for future historians. LOC's MINERVA Web Archiving Project already has archives of digital primary source materials for Elections 2000 and 2002, September 11, the 107th Congress, and Hurricane Katrina. The project will expand to include the crisis in Darfur, the Supreme Court, the Papal transition, US Congressional sites, Election 2004, Iraq 2003, the 2002 Winter Olympic games, and September 11 remembrance. The meaning of the acronym for MINERVA is: Mapping the INternet Electronic Resources Virtual Archive.