Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive

Good news on the database front, Penn Libraries has just signed on to the Entertainment IndustryMagazine Archive. It sits in the Proquest suite of databases that you are already familiar with if you search key social science databases (Sociological Abstracts, IBSS, etc.), Digital Dissertations, or any of the historical newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. so it will be easy to get find as well as combine with broader searching.

EIMA covers core US and UK trade magazines in film, music, broadcasting and theater. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews. I guess the biggest omission in this collection is Rolling Stone. That being said:

This database includes several trade magazines which have effectively provided the main historical record for their subject areas throughout the 20th century, such as Variety (1905-2000), Billboard (1894-2000), Broadcasting (1931-2000) and The Stage (1880-2000). Although these titles focus primarily on film, music, TV/radio and theatre respectively, they have between them covered the full range of popular entertainments throughout their history, from music halls, circuses and fairs to jukeboxes, gambling machines and computer games.

For students of popular music, the UK music press titles New Musical Express (1946-2000) and Melody Maker (1926-2000) are equally invaluable sources: from their origins as trade papers for working musicians, they grew into mass-circulation weeklies in the 1960s, and pioneered serious rock journalism in the late 1960s and 70s. A selection of more specialist magazines give in-depth coverage of musical genres and eras, such as 'British Invasion' pop (Rave, 1964-70), reggae, African and Caribbean music (The Beat, 1982-2000), or the rave scene (Mixmag, 1983-2000).

Bringing these titles together in a single database gives researchers the opportunity to find comprehensive information on specific films, plays, theaters, actors, directors, TV series, film studios, musicians, genres, record labels, subcultures and youth movements. The inclusion of consumer and fan magazines such as Picturegoer (1911-1960), American Film (1975-1992) and Musician (1976-1999) means that a single search can bring back industry news items, features on technological breakthroughs and in-depth interviews with major artists, together with photographs and illustrations, gossip columns, listings, reviews, charts and statistics. Items such as advertisements, covers and short reviews of films, music singles or other works have been treated as separate documents with accurately-captured titles in order to help researchers find all the relevant material for their search topic.  --Proquest description

Introducing Metamedia

Check out a new site, Metamedia, on the Annenberg Library homepage (in the section Visual/Multimedia).
 
Here you will find over 600 movies about communication as it is situated in some form of media--television, radio, the telephone, photographs, the internet, recorded music, etc. These are movies in which media (including codes of communication) are central or catalytic to the story and/or main characters in the story represent media practitioners, professional or amateur. Metamedia includes fictional films as well as documentaries. And it includes world cinema as well as Hollywood.

The site also includes a Discussion Board for readers to makes comments and suggestions. The site can be a sort of community project. The current list of films is by no means complete so I look forward to urgings for must-adds, why isn't _________ on the list???

Access to films featured in Metamedia varies. If the entry includes a link to VCat, that means it's available at Penn--usually Van Pelt or Annenberg though there are a few other movie collections on campus. The list also includes titles that we don't have at Penn, in which case there will be a link to IMBD or a website that sells (or at least has more information about) the title.

I think the site is fairly easy to tool around in. There are 51 topical areas if you are looking for specific themes or genres. You may be looking for only documentaries, or only movies about radio, or you want to get out of the United States (click on World). Here are the topics: Advertising * Art * Biography * Cartoons/Animation * Celebrity * Children/Youth * Communication disorders * Communication-General * Computers/New Media * Consumerism *Copyright/Intellectual property * Crime * Disaster/Risk communication * Documentary * Election campaigns * Environmental communication * Film/Filmmaking * Free Speech/Censorship * Gaming * Health communication * Information Interview * Journalism * Language * Mass media * Media-Amateur/Grassroots *Media ethics * Media violence * Minorities-Racial/Ethnic * Minorities-Sexual * Music/Recording industry * Newspapers * Non-Verbal communication / Photography * Political communication * Pornography * Privacy/Surveillance * Public relations/Persuasion * Public space  * Religion * Radio * Representation * Sports * Supernatural communication * Telephonic Communication * Television * War * World * Women/Gender * Writing/Publishing

November CommQuote

In honor of recent election and looking forward to the upcoming Inaugural speech, a fascinating article from Smithsonian.com provides this month's quote.  The whole article is as interesting as this blurb (guarantee) and our own Kathleen Hall Jamieson chimes in as well. The article is titled A Brief History of the Teleprompter: How a makeshift show business memory aid became the centerpiece of modern political campaigning, by Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian.com, October 23, 2012.

"Perhaps more than any other technological advance—more than the touch-screen voting booth, the automated campaign phone call or even the slick TV attack ad—the teleprompter continues to define our political age.

The device started out in 1948 as a roll of butcher paper rigged up inside half of a suitcase. Actor Fred Barton Jr., a Broadway veteran, was nervous. “For those that had been either in theater or the movies, the transition to television was difficult, because there was a much greater need for memorizing lines,” says Christopher Sterling, a media historian at George Washington University. “At the time, there was a lot more live television, which many people today tend to forget.” Instead of memorizing the same batch of lines over the course of months, Barton was now expected to memorize new lines on a weekly or even daily basis. Cue cards were sometimes used, but relying on unsteady stagehands to flip between them could sometimes cause catastrophic delays.

Barton went to Irving Kahn, a vice president at 20th Century Fox studios, with the idea of connecting cue cards in a motorized scroll, so he could rely on prompts without risking an on-screen blunder. Kahn brought in his employee Hubert Schlafly, an electrical engineer and director of television research, and asked him if it could be done. “I said it was a piece of cake,” Mr. Schlafly told the Stamford Advocate in 2008. Using half of a suitcase as an outer shell for his new device, he rigged up a series of belts, pulleys and a motor to turn a scroll of butcher paper that displayed an actor’s lines in half-inch letters. The paper was turned gradually, as controlled by a stagehand, while the words were read.

On April 21, 1949, Schlalfly submitted a patent application for his “television prompting apparatus,” and in the tradition of offstage “prompters” who had been relied upon to feed forgotten lines to actors, he called his device the TelePrompTer. When the application was approved, the New York Times noted that it “coaches television actors into letter-perfect delivery of their lines and permits news commentators to simulate prodigious feats of memory.” It may have seemed unlikely at the time, but a new political age was born."

After Broadband: Imagining Hyperconnected Furtures

I'm reposting this Wharton School Press Release from the end of last month.  The 25-page report is at the link below.

“After Broadband” Report Released

Wharton Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics Kevin Werbach, a co-organizer of the After Broadband workshop

Now that broadband Internet access is widely available in the United States, what comes next? What business models and policy initiatives will help move beyond broadband to a hyperconnected world? To tackle these questions, the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) are pleased to announce the release of After Broadband: Imagining Hyperconnected Futures, a report based on a high-level experts workshop earlier this year, at http://afterbroadband.com.

“Broadband today suffers from a failure of the imagination. We won’t get the networks needed to support tomorrow’s applications until we envision what those applications will be,” said Wharton professor Kevin Werbach, a co-organizer.

The day-long workshop brought together business leaders, researchers, technical experts, entrepreneurs, and futurists at Wharton’s San Francisco campus for a deep dive into eight specific domains: Management, Operations and Analytics; Communications and Collaboration; Education and Learning; Commerce, Identity and Security; Health, Well-Being and Life Management; Creation and Production; Social, Home and Community Life; and Entertainment. Guided by expert IFTF facilitators, the participants developed scenarios and identified six critical challenges that must be addressed.

“IFTF was delighted to collaborate with the Wharton School on this event where experts vigorously debated both the technical and social implications of a broad range of futures such as adaptive software defined networks, fragmented special function Internet Protocol networks, isolated large geographic internets, embedded and mobile swarm networks, linked supercomputing clouds, and the spiraling cyber security arms race,” said Mike Liebhold, co-organizer and IFTF Distinguished Fellow. “We hope this report serves to elevate and support the public discourse on the future of our communications systems.”

The workshop report, written by IFTF Distinguished Fellow Richard Adler and based on the contributions of over 40 leading experts, offers insights on topics including:

• The deployment of gigabit connections

• Mobile broadband and wireless sensor networks

• Big data and the cloud

• The tidal waves of streaming video and social networking

• Changes in user behavior and interfaces

The After Broadband website at http://afterbroadband.com includes a downloadable version of the report, materials from the workshop, and video interviews with selected participants. “Broadband is a critical foundation for both business and daily life as we move deeper into the 21st century,” said Werbach. “This report is one of the first to offer an independent, forward-looking perspective on where we’re going and how to get there.”

Social Influnce Special Retrospective Issue

The journal Social Influence has put out a special online edition in honor of this election season featuring a selection of articles from previous issues exploring the psychological processes at work in a variety of aspects of individual and social persuasion "focusing on the many ways in which our political outlooks and decisions can be deliberately shaped." Penn doesn't currently subscribe to this journal but we will beginning 2013. In the meantime, you can email me if you want to get your hands on any of these articles--if my promotional link is still working I can share; if not there is always our trusty InterLibrary Loan.

Presidential Election Online Special Issue
When My Country Is at War: Issue Importance & Interpersonal Influence Lead Iraq War Attitudes to Cluster within Social Networks by Jerry G. Cullum, Bradley M. Okdie, Helen C. Harton (Vol. 6:4, 2011, 231-248).

Attitudes to Cluster within Social Networks by Jerry G. Cullum, Bradley M. Okdie & Helen C. Harton (Vol. 6:4, 2011, 231-248).

Motives for Social Influence after Social Change: Are New Majorities Power Hungry? by P. Niels Christensen, Radmila Prislin, Elizabeth Jacobs (Vol. 4:3, 2009, 200-215).

How “Undocumented Workers” & “Illegal Aliens” Affect Prejudice toward Mexican Immigrants by Matthew R. Pearson M.S. (Vol. 5:2, 2010, 118-132).

Status Quo Framing Increases Support for Torture by Christian S. Crandall, Scott Eidelman, Linda J. Skitka, G. Scott Morgan (Vol. 4:1, 2009, 1-10).

Right-wing Face, Left-wing Faces: The Matching Effect in the Realm of Political Persuasion by Nicoletta Cavazza, Anna Rita Graziani, Alessandra Serpe, Sandro Rubichi (Vol. 5:1, 2010, 1-22)

The Persuasiveness of the Straw Man Rhetorical Technique by George Y. Bizer, Shirel M. Kozak, Leigh Ann Holterman (Vol. 4:3, 2009, 216-230).

Boasting, Burnishing & Burying in the Eyes of the Perceivers by Nurit Tal-Or (Vol. 3:3, 2008, 202-222).

Why I Am Less Persuaded Than You: Intuitive Understanding of the Psychology of Persuasion by Karen M. Douglas, Robbie M. Sutton, Sofia Stathi (Vol. 5:2, 2010, 133-148).