June CommQuote

Here in Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a wonderful physical description of advertising--in the process of being created, in this case, on a billboard. At first I was disoriented because James Tansey's thoughts are elsewhere (welcome to Virginia Woolf) and suddenly the circus literally unfolds. He's on a walk with Mrs. Ramsay:

...He felt many things, something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons which he could not give. He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable of anything and saw himself--but what was she looking at? At a man pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening red and blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals, lions, tigers...Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read out how it...'will visit this town.' It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like that - his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago.

"Let us all go!" she cried, moving on, as if all those riders and horses had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity. 

"Let's go," he said, repeating her word, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince. "Let's all go to the circus."  
--p. 11, Harcourt edition, 1955

2013 Sage Knowledge eBook Collection

I'm reposting this recent entry in Library News by Lauris Olson, Penn Libraries' Social Sciences Collections Coordinator. Notice his shoutout to our own Paul Messaris, author of the very popular  (according to circulation data) Visual Persuasion.

With the recent purchase of the 2013 SAGE Knowledge Complete Collection, the Penn Libraries have made a major e-book collection purchase to support instruction and research in the social sciences and beyond.

SAGE Knowledge brings more than 2,700 SAGE eBooks, eHandbooks, and eReference works to Penn readers - the complete SAGE Knowledge collection from its beginning through its 2013 releases. Subject areas covered by the collection include Education, Business and Management, Sociology, Media and Communication, Counseling and Psychotherapy, Health and Social Care, Psychology, Politics and International Relations, Criminology, and Geography.

SAGE publications are very popular among Penn readers. Among the 1,372 SAGE Knowledge titles we own in print, 147 titles may be found in Penn Libraries course-reserve or reference locations. Several titles have been often-borrowed:

• Visual Persuasion: the Role of Images in Advertising / Paul Messaris. (1997) 195 times borrowed.
• Economic Development Finance / Karl F Seidman. (2005) 131 times borrowed.
• Public Communication Campaigns / Ronald E. Rice, Charles K. Atkin, editors. (2001, 3rd ed) 70 times borrowed.
• Questions of Cultural Identity / edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. (2011) 68 times borrowed.
• Consensus building handbook: a Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement / editors, Lawrence Susskind, Sarah McKearnan, Jennifer Thomas-Larmer. (1999) 63 times borrowed.

Other print titles represented in the SAGE Knowledge collection have been frequently borrowed through BorrowDirect, including:

• Handbook of Material Culture / Christopher Tilley et al., eds. (2006) 4 times requested in 2012.
• SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism / Royston Greenwood et al., eds. (2008) 3 times requested in 2012.
• Knowing Capitalism / Nigel Thrift. (2005) 3 times requested in 2012.

A particular strength of SAGE Knowledge reflects the press's emphasis on methodology, reflected in these works:

• Encyclopedia of Research Design (2010)
• Running Behavioral Studies with Human Participants: A Practical Guide (2013)

The list of award-winning works (from CHOICE, Library Journal, ALA, etc.)  demonstrates the breadth of the SAGE Knowledge collection:

• 21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook (2010)
  
• Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage (2012)
  
• Encyclopedia of Counseling: Changes and Challenges for Counseling in the 21st Century (2008)
  
• Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (2010)
  
• Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience (2009)
  
• Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education (2012)
  
• Encyclopedia of Education Law (2008)
  
• Encyclopedia of Educational Reform and Dissent (2010)
  
• Encyclopedia of Gender and Society (2009)
  
• Encyclopedia of Geography (2010)
  
• Encyclopedia of Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent (2009)
  
• Encyclopedia of Global Studies (2012)
  
• Encyclopedia of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (2010)
  
• The Encyclopedia of Housing (2nd ed, 2012)
  
• Encyclopedia of Human Relationships (2009)
  
• Encyclopedia of Identity (2010)
  
• Encyclopedia of Journalism (2009)
  
• Encyclopedia of New Venture Management (2012)
  
• Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society (2009)
  
• Encyclopedia of Political Theory (2010)
  
• Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication (2010)
  
• Encyclopedia of Social Networks (2011)
  
• Encyclopedia of Sports Management and Marketing (2011)
  
• Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine (2011)
  
• Encyclopedia of Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment, & Recovery (2009)
  
• Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide (2012)
  
• Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology (2012). Volume 1 and Volume 2
  
• International Encyclopedia of Political Science (2011)
  
• Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations: A Reference Handbook (2010)
  
• The Pen and the Sword: Press, War, and Terror in the 21st Century / Calvin Exoo (2010)
  
• The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics (2009)
  The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encylopedia (2012)

The SAGE Knowledge platform delivers fulltext in chapter-level HTML and PDF formats, with stable URLs for individual chapters. We expect to add to Franklin, the Penn Libraries catalog, individual titles in this collection soon. We are considering ways in which we may continue to build our SAGE Knowledge holdings through future acquisitions. Please contact us for additional information regarding the Penn Libraries' new SAGE Knowledge collection.

Global Information Technology Report 2013

Just out, the World Economic Forum's The Global Information Technology Report 2013: Growth and Jobs in a Hyperconnected World.

Since 2002 this annual report has "accompanied and monitored ICT advances over the last decade as well as raising awareness of the importance of ICT diffusion and usage for long-term competitiveness and societal well-being."

The Report includes its much touted and anticipated Networked Readiness Index. More on this from the Executive summary: 

"In terms of the results (see the Networked Readiness Index Rankings provided on page xix), two groups of economies dominate the NRI: Northern European economies and the so-called Asian Tigers. Among the Northern European countries, four out of the five Nordic economies featured in the NRI—Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (in rank order)—continue to feature in the top 10. Iceland, the last of the Nordics, is not too far behind, at 17th place. The performance of this group in terms of readiness is particularly outstanding. All five Nordics feature in the top 10 of this subindex. Within this subindex, on the infrastructure and digital content pillar, four countries occupy the top
positions. As highlighted in the previous edition and in this Report, the gap between those countries and the ones in the Southern and Eastern parts of Europe is profound. A second group of economies that posts a remarkable performance are the Asian Tigers: Singapore, Taiwan (China), the Republic of Korea, and Hong Kong SAR. All boast outstanding business and innovation environments that are consistently ranked among the most conducive in the world. The Tigers also stand out for their governments’ leadership in promoting the digital agenda, and the impact of ICTs on society tends to be larger in these economies."

This is a huge report, 384 pages worth of detailed country by country data.  The Readiness Index is quite detailed with a variety of factors feeding into the ranking. These include efficiency of legal systems for resolving disputes, intellectual property protection, electricity production, mobile network coverage, cellular and broadband tariffs, quality of math and science education, adult literacy rates, households with personal computers, business to business computer usage and many more. 

Communication Inside the Bubble of the Automobile

A recent Semiotica (Issue 191, Aug 2012) has a themed section on communicative behaviors and the automobile. From the framing piece (Meaning and Motion: Sharing the Car, Sharing the Drive) that leads off:

"The papers of this issue are informed primarily by the insights and analytical approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA), in particular for studying the multimodal nature of social interaction, for example, as represented in a recent collection in this journal (Stivers and Sidnell 2005b). In their analyses, the authors in this special issue address a range of “semiotic modalities” (see Stivers and Sidnell 2005a: 1), including verbal (language), and visuospatial and embodied modalities of gesture, gaze, body postural position and movement, facial expression, and available resources (e.g., objects) and features of car as a material setting. The papers therefore draw on the cumulative insights and approaches of over three decades of research on interaction as embodied and occurring relative to its material and spatial surrounds (especially after Goodwin 1981; e.g., see McIlvenny et al. 2009), across a huge range of both everyday and work settings (e.g., courtrooms and police work, classrooms and other sites of instruction, surgery and medical and health consultations, meetings, research fieldwork, control centers, and collaborative professional work)...The primary data for each of the papers for this issue are video/audio recordings of real-life driving journeys, from which the authors have made detailed transcriptions and taken stills. Analyses are informed by ethnographic detail. The recordings have been made across a number of countries (France, Israel, Australia, the UK, Finland, and the USA). The recordings capture people from a rich variety of different nationalities (in addition to the above, people from Norway and Slovenia), and represent individual drivers, families, friends, work colleagues, children, and teenagers. The papers therefore provide a rich selection of studies of everyday life inside the car. Together they begin to reveal something of the working and order of a particular activity site, and even about specific social relations and groupings (such as family, etc.), as they are situated and realized moment-to-moment (Goodwin 2007)."

Here are the articles:

Meaning in motion: Sharing the car, sharing the drive

Haddington, Pentti / Nevile, Maurice / Keisanen, Tiina

What it means to change lanes: Actions, emotions and wayfinding in the family car

Laurier, Eric / Brown, Barry / Hayden, Lorimer

Movement in action: Initiating social navigation in cars

Haddington, Pentti

Interaction as distraction in driving: A body of evidence

Nevile, Maurice

“Uh-oh, we were going there”: Environmentally occasioned noticings of trouble in in-car interaction

Keisanen, Tiina

Talking and driving: Multiactivity in the car

Mondada, Lorenza

Car talk: Integrating texts, bodies, and changing landscapes

 Goodwin, Marjorie Harness / Goodwin, Charles

The eyes have it: Technologies of automobility in sign language

Keating, Elizabeth / Mirus, Gene

Inhabiting the family-car: Children-passengers and parents-drivers on the school run

Noy, Chaim

News Site Feature: News Americas

Along the lines of  AllAfrica, NewsAmericas is a news aggregating, producing, and distributing site for Caribbean, South and Central American readers.

From About NewsAmericas:
News Americas aims to be the HuffPo of the Americas! It was created to give writers from this region and with an interest in this region a platform to showcase Top News from this region and their individual countries – including business, sports and entertainment news, as well share independent and radical opinions and lifestyle and travel features.

The site includes links to pertinent articles from outside the region as well (New York Times, Miami Herald). It sports a Breaking News ticker and RSS feed option.

Russell Sage Foundation e-books on Project MUSE

From Penn Libraries New & Noteworthy:

"The Penn Libraries welcomes Project MUSE as a new e-book provider through the acquisition of more than 150 Russell Sage Foundation e-books. 

Project MUSE has been a dependable platform for humanities and social sciences e-journals since its founding by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1995. The platform added e-book collections from university presses and scholarly societies in 2012 and recently permitted libraries to acquire e-books as individual purchases. 

The Russell Sage Foundation, founded in 1907, has been the principal American foundation devoted exclusively to research in the social sciences, looking especially to strengthen methods, data, and theory as a means of improving social policies. The Foundation's current publishing program focus on cultural contact, the future of work, immigration, and social inequality. The Foundation also publishes the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology. 

Penn usage of Russell Sage Foundation books is remarkable. At any given time, one-quarter to one-half of Russell Sage Foundation print copies will be charged out to Penn readers. Of the 150-plus e-book titles acquired, print counterparts have been borrowed an average of 7.3 times. 35 of the titles have been borrowed 10 or more times. Russell Sage Foundation titles frequently appear in faculty course reserve requests. The e-book format will provide these in-demand materials to multiple readers around the clock. 

We hope to continue acquiring Russell Sage Foundation e-books as they appear in Project MUSE."

From this batch you might want to "check out": 
Dialogue Across Difference: Practice, Theory, and Research on Intergroup Dialogue (their most recent title, 2013)
The broken table: the Detroit Newspaper Strike and the state of American labor (2012)

Unveiling inequality: a world-historical perspective  (2012)

Still connected : family and friends in America since 1970 (2011)

Who gets represented? (2011)

The handbook of research synthesis and meta-analysis (2009)

Democracy, inequality, and representation: a comparative perspective (2008)

Designing democratic government: making institutions work  (2008)