Latin American Newspapers in World News Archive

Historic electronic newspaper files continue to arrive at Penn! The latest such addition to the Penn Library website:

World News Archive (Latin American Newspapers preliminary release)

Latin American Newspapers represents the initial result of the partnership between the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and Readex, a division of NewsBank, to systematically create an extensive Web-based collection--World News Archive--of international newspapers. On completion, Latin American Newspapers will include approximately 35 fully searchable newspapers printed throughout this region in the 19th and 20th centuries. This preliminary release provides more than 60,000 pages of El Mercurio, an important Spanish-language paper published in Santiago, including 3,000 issues printed between 1914 and 1922.

About World News Archive: Working with Readex, a division of NewsBank, CRL and its partner institutions (including Penn) expect to add three new collections to the WNA over the next eighteen months. The three collections are: African Newspapers, Slavic & East European Newspapers, and South Asian Newspapers.

Along with the recently released Latin American Newspapers, these three new historical collections will make more newspapers from the world’s regions available to the CRL community electronically. Guided by charter participants and the WNA advisory committee, CRL will select the content of these new collections from the international newspapers long collected and preserved in paper and microform by CRL and participating member libraries.

Communication in the Field, Baseball, that is...

So naturally I'm thinking about baseball today here in Philadelphia, so I thought I'd look for some communication scholarship on the subject. I crossed search several social science databases including Communication Abstracts and found a fair amount to choose from. This 2002 article from the Journal of Sport and Social Issues (Volume 26, Number 4) jumped out at me. I've selected to feature it in honor of two Phillie Latino heroes, Carlos Ruiz and Pedro Feliz, both instrumental in securing the World Championship for Philly. It's called Who's the Man? Sammy Sosa, Latinos, and Televisual Redefinitions of the "American" Pastime, by Jane Juffer.

Abstract
Latino and Latin American baseball players have expanded the boundaries of the "American pastime," asserting their ethnic and national identities even while being accepted as representatives of the sport most closely aligned with a white United States identity.
This redefinition is achieved in part via cable and satellite technologies that carry images of Latinos to homes throughout the United States at a time when the Latino population is growing and becoming more dispersed raising the possibility that baseball will lessen racism and xenophobia. However media coverage is at times nostalgic for a more bounded sense of home and nation and often emphasizes players' individual mobility, erasing the economic and political conditions that have brought Latin American players to the United States. The author shows how these tensions play out in Chicago superstation WGN's coverage of Cubs star Sammy Sosa, who has emerged as a national hero in both the U.S. and the Dominican Republic.

The article is available from Sage's Full Text Collection, from the Penn Libraries homepage.

Latin American Public opinion at Latinobarometers

From the Penn Library website, a resource for Latin American public opinion:

The Latinobarometers are annual public opinion polls conducted in several Latin American countries, 1995 to present. The 2006 Latinobarometer covered these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Dominican Republic. The Latinobarometers are designed to complement the other Global Barometer polling projects in African and East Asia.

Latinobarometers typically ask several dozen questions to reveal opinions, attitudes and behavior of 1000 adult residents in each country. A special focus of the Latinobarometers is democracy and democratic consolidation, and individual years also have central themes.

Additional information on the Latinobarometers is provided at the Latinobarometro web site. However, the data sets are not available for free at the website, go through the UPenn Library page for access to those. Each data file is provided in SPSS save format and therefore requires SPSS or other statistical processing software. Data files with PDF-format codebooks are provided in ZIP archive files as delivered by the vendor. PDF-format codebooks are also provided separately as a reference source.

Themed issues on TVIII, language and discrimination, and coloniality

The Journal of Language and Social Psychology (Volume 26, Number 2, June 2007) titled Communication, Language, and Discrimination and edited by Richard Clement features articles that aim to draw attention to "current conceptualizations of the links between language and discrimination, delineate communicative features related to discrimination, focus on the experience of victims of discrimination, and outline measures that may contribute to thwarting discriminatory practices or limiting their impact" (writes Itesh Sachdev in the issue's Prologue).


New Review of Film and Television Studies (Volume 5, Number 1, April 2007) is devoted to "TVIII." What is TVIII? "TVI generally refers to the origins of the medium (beginning in the 1930s), a time that John Ellis (2000) has defined as a period of ‘scarcity’ because of its lack of consumer choice. TVII refers to the changes in technologies and institutional structures that took place in the 1980s (deregulation, the introduction of cable and satellite and so on), or what Ellis describes as a period of ‘availability’. TVIII therefore labels television’s present state and beyond; a time of increased fragmentation consumer interactivity and global market economies—what Ellis defines as ‘choice’. As Jane Roscoe has recently put it (2004): Content is more dispersed across… platforms, and our engagement with it is more fleeting. Our experience of contemporary media is fragmented rather than unified or centralised. Instead of our viewing habits being controlled by the ‘flow’ of schedules, our viewing is now clustered around events, and through technologies such as personal video recorders, DVDs, and subscription television services. Choice is the buzzword…" (Issue editors Glen Greeber and Matt Hills in the editorial introduction).


A double issue of Cultural Studies (Volume 21, Numbers 2-3, March/May 2007) is on the subject of coloniality. The issue, edited by Walter D. Mignola is titled Globalization and the De-Colonial Option. Kicking off the issue is "the seminal article by Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano, published at the beginning of the 90s, when the dust of a crumbling Soviet Union was still in everybody eyes. At the beginning of this century [2002], Arturo Escobar (an anthropologist from Columbia current residing in the US) wrote a critical review of what he called ‘the modernity/coloniality research program’." This article follows the one by Quijano. The rest of the issue reflects the research and publications of those participating in the project that continues to meet yearly and exchange research and views, as reported by W.D. Mignolo in the issu'es introduction, Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking). The 500+ page issue is divided into five sections: I The Emergence of An-Other Paradigm, II (De)Colonization of Knowledges and of Beings, III The Colonial Nation-States and the Imperial Racial Matrix, IV (De)Coloniality at Large, and V On Empires and colonial/Imperial Differences.