American Consumer Culture: Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965

This summer Penn Libraries added to its digital collections, American Consumer Culture: Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965, a rich trove of market research reports and supporting documents of Ernest Dichter, “the era’s foremost consumer analyst and market research pioneer,” and his Institute for Motivational Research. These materials derive from research commissioned by advertising agencies and global businesses from around the world. “Immensely influential, Dichter’s Freud-inspired studies put the consumer “on the couch” and emphasised the unconscious motives behind consumer behaviour. The Institute of Motivational Research employed trained social scientists and used established methodologies to conduct psychological research. Dichter’s career reached its peak after Vance Packard’s bestselling exposé The Hidden Persuaders (1957) presented Dichter as a mastermind manipulator who could exploit the emotions of consumers for the benefit of any advertising agency or big brand.” –from the Archive’s Nature and Scope section

With this resource communication students (as well as researchers of consumer culture, marketing, advertising, and psychology) can not only access final reports and pilot studies for the great campaigns of advertising’s golden age, but also peer behind the scenes via proposals and letters back and forth between the Institute and its clients. The campaigns under scrutiny cover a wide range of industries—automobiles,cleaning products, electronics, energy and utilities, food and drink, hair and beauty, personal products, tobacco, toys and games, and more.  Research on communication industries are also in the mix--advertising itself, broadcasting, media and publishing, and motion pictures. That the Institute employed a variety of research methods, some in their early stages of development, is especially appealing to social scientists who are able to isolate methods (interview, focus group, case studies, test, questionnaire, and diary) regardless of products or brands by a simple key word search strategy. Of course, one can also search the archive by titles, brand names, companies, and commissioners. Searches can be restricted by industries, document types (letters, reports, etc.), or language.  Bear in mind the scope of this resource is not limited to the United States as Dichter had offices in Paris, Rome, Zurich, and Frankfurt.

I did a brand search on Volvo and retrieved two reports from 1969: Why Does an American Buy a Volvo? A proposal For a Motivation Research Study; and How To Make It Even Better—A Motivation Study of Ten New Opportunities for Marketing Volvo in the USA.  Keywords assigned to the latter report are: automobile, marketing, car, brand choice, reputation, price, pricing, word-of-mouth advertising, corporate image, market segmentation, symbolism, name.

Political campaigns also called on Dichter and his people so I thought I'd try a quick “anywhere” search on the word “presidential.”  29 results appeared including reports on what can be done to make more Americans vote (1952), the personality characteristics of undecided voters (1969), and FDR’s radio history (1945) which contains a table illustrating the parallel between the number of radio sets in use and the number of ballots cast in presidential elections from 1920-1940. 

This is really an interesting resource to browse (check out the Ad Gallery) and if you are going in for something specific you may be richly rewarded without having to travel to the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington where Dichter's papers reside.

 

Communication Source

There’s a new database on the block, EBSCO’s Communication Source. It will seem like an old friend because it looks exactly like Communication and Mass Media Complete (CMMC) and Communication Abstracts (CA) if you were used to those. For the most part, Communication Source is just a combination of these two. No learning curve! 

As most of you know, Penn carried subscriptions to both CMMC and CA when they were owned by different companies (EBSCO and Sage Publications respectively). After EBSCO bought Communication Abstracts it was possible to search the two at once since they were on the same platform. Now, however, it’s even easier because there is only one file, Communication Source.

As for new material, there are 160 journal titles in Source that are not in CMMC or CA, many of them on the linguistic side but there are also these, to name a few: Arab Media & Society, Central European Journal of Communication, Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics, Global Media Journal: German Edition, Iowa Journal of Communication, Javnost: The Public, Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies, Public Communication Review, Signs and Society. A full coverage list is available here.

Communication Source is the premier research database for the field offering abstracts and indexing as well as full-text content from publications worldwide pertaining to communication, linguistics, rhetoric and discourse, speech-language disorders, media and cultural studies. It covers both academic and industry/trade literature.  

Content Includes:

• Active full text for more than 600 journals
• Indexing and abstracting for over 1,000 core titles
• Subject-specific, browsable thesaurus featuring 4,528 preferred and 8,528 non-preferred terms
• Coverage dating back to 1915

Indexing of Open Access Journals in Communication

The latest issue of Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian (Jan-March 2014) features research targeted directly at our field,  Open Access Journals in Communication Studies: Indexing in Five Commercial Databases by Sonia Poulin and Robert Tomaszewski. The five databases the authors look at are: Communication Abstracts, Communication and Mass Media Complete (CMMC), Web of Science, Scopus, and EBSCO's Academic Search Complete.

ABSTRACT
This study investigates the degree of indexing of gold open access (OA) journals within the field of communication studies in five major commercial bibliographical databases commonly subscribed to by academic libraries and used by researchers and students. Results of the study indicate that 32 percent of the 147 gold OA journals identified were indexed in the five target databases. The communication studies databases provided the most complete indexing, while among the multidisciplinary databases, Scopus provided more coverage, compared to Academic Search Complete and Web of Science.

Undercover Reporting Database

Undercover Reporting: Deception for Journalism's Sake: A Database 
is "a collaboration with NYU Libraries [that] collects many decades of high-impact, sometimes controversial, mostly U.S.-generated journalism that used undercover techniques. It grows out of the research for [Brooke Kroeger's] Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception which argues that much of the valuable journalism since before the U.S. Civil War has emerged from investigations that employed subterfuge to expose wrong. It asserts that undercover work, though sometimes criticized as deceptive or unethical, embodies a central tenet of good reporting--to extract significant information or expose hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public's attention. The site, designed as a resource for scholars, student researchers and journalists, collects some of the best investigative work going back almost two centuries." --website

This unique resource collects a substantial amount of coverage--articles from major and not-so-major news publications, along with books, film, and television. In addition to author/reporter, date, and publication, the database is organized around thematic clusters--issues such as prisons, migrant workers, the Welfare system, gender, class,and many more. One can also filter searches by journalistic method (posed as, undercover, disguised, lived as, worked as). The database strives where it can for a deeper history than the last few decades. For example, there is a cluster called "Antebellum Undercover," which provides full-text articles of undercover reportage (1854-75) from the New York Tribune based on the work of journalists who headed South prior to the Civil War.  

This is a really interesting resource. Kudos to the NYU Libraries for getting the database to this point and for its future development. They welcome suggestions for new material as they plan to "deepen and internationalize" the collection. 

Citing Data--Current Practice, Policy, and Technology

The U.S. CODATA and the Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) has just published a new  75-page report: Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data, appearing in the CODATA open access journal Data Science Journal. 

Explains Paul F. Uhlir, Director of BRDI, "the report discusses the current state of data citation policies and practices, its supporting infrastructure, a set of guiding principles for implementing data citation, challenges to implementation of good data citation practices, and open research questions." 

Chapters include: Defining the Concepts and Characteristics of Data, Emerging Principles for Data Citation, The Existing Institutional Infrastructures for Data Citation, The Technical Infrastructure, and The Socio-Cultural Dimension. And if you're really into this topic there is a hefty bibliography to peruse.

Out of Cite... follows their first report published in 2012, For Attribution-Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards.

Media Industries Research--Business Press and Trade Journal Resources

The resource environment keeps improving for the study of media industries from an historical perspective. Penn's recent subscription to the  Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive, which covers core US and UK trade magazines in film, music, broadcasting and theater from the early 1900s forward, comes to mind. (See blog post from November 2012). Last year saw the addition of the Vogue Archive whose pages, because its editors always had their eye on more than fashion, have much to contribute to media industry studies.  There is also the admirable open access Media History Digital Library's Lantern database of digitized classic media periodicals in the public domain which I described here this past August.

In addition to these, I was reminded of the solid offerings of trade journals of the last few decades that we rely on Dow Jones Factiva and EBSCO's Communication and Mass Media Complete serving up to us, when I ran across this article in the current Communication, Culture & Critique by Kenton T. Wilkinson and Patrick F. Merle called The Merits and Challenges of Using Business Press and Trade Journal Reports in Academic Research on Media Industries.

ABSTRACT
This article argues that media researchers should pay closer attention to the benefits and potential pitfalls of using business press and industry trade journal reports to inform academic research. To date, the use of these secondary sources in scholarly research concerning media industries has received little interest, as demonstrated in a preliminary examination of how academic literature and research methods textbooks treat the business press and trade journal reports. The authors call for a dialogue on this significant oversight, and offer suggestions for how researchers might begin addressing it as media across the globe grow in scope and influence during the 21st century.

Rights in Data Handbook

As John Wilks and Alec Christie, editors of the RIGHTS IN DATA HANDBOOK, explain, there has been a lot of attention focused on data privacy and data protection (indeed their team at DLA Piper issued a handbook on the subject in March of last year, Data Protection Laws of the World Handbook), but "the issue of IP rights in data and databases has traditionally received almost no attention." The RIGHTS Handbook (January 2013 edition) is here to fill the gap.

This handbook provides a high-level summary, with links to relevant sources of  the different types of protection which are available for data and databases in 12 key global jurisdictions. For each jurisdiction we consider three categories of  database which may benefit from protection: original databases, databases in which investment has been made, and confidential databases. --Introduction

Besides the three categories of databases for each global jurisdiction, Significant Recent Cases relating to database rights are cited as well as Upcoming Legislative Changes. Each area of jurisdiction concludes with "Top Tips for Database Owners"--obviously useful for potential database owners but interesting as well to outsiders (academics dare we say?) looking to get a sense of what the issues are comparatively. 

Digital Microfilm for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News

Here's where Penn Libraries' newspaper e-resources stand with two important local papers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. Can you say options? You can find the Philadelphia Inquirer in both Lexis Nexis from 1994 to the present and in Newsbank from 1981 to the present. As for the Philadelphia Daily News, Lexis Nexis offers 1994 to the present while Newsbank goes back to1978 up to the present. Both Lexis Nexis and Newsbank are solid search engines so for most searching you can go with your favorite platform (Newsbank has pretty maps!) unless your query requires complicated search strings. In that case Lexis-Nexis would be the better choice as it allows for more complicated boolean logic.

But what if you want to see either title as they appeared as hand held newspapers? You want to see pictures or ads or where a certain story appeared on the page and what was next to it.  Here Lexis-Nexis and Newsbank can't deliver other than giving page numbers and article word counts. Before this month your option would be the Penn Libraries microfilm collection which for The Inquirer goes back to 1969 and runs to the present (we keep the newspaper for three months until the film comes in); same deal for the Daily News except the film only goes back to 1990.

Here's the news.  Now, thanks to Proquest Digital Microfilm, both The Inquirer and the Daily News are available in digital facsimile for recent years, 2010 -2012.  Look for holdings to expand all the way back like other titles from Proquest do, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal --but I'm not promising anything.

Speaking of the digital page turning experience as opposed to extracted text only newspaper files, don't forget the often overlooked Library PressDisplay (NewspaperDirect) which features the last 60 days of over 200 newspapers from 55 countries.  It includes the Philadelphia Daily News but not the The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

A Mountain of Tweets at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress just put out a White Paper on the status of their Twitter Archive which was started in 2010 with tweets from 2006-10, and continues with a streaming operation set up for tweets post 2010 to the present.We're talking 170 billion tweets so far, with a growth rate of 140 tweets harvested per day.

While they have received over 400 serious research requests they are not yet ready to provide research access to the archive.  Explains the paper: "Currently, executing a single search of just the fixed 2006-2010 archive on the Library’s systems could take 24 hours.  This is an inadequate situation in which to begin offering access to researchers, as it so severely limits the number of possible searches."  It's no easy problem to solve, either as it will take an extensive infrastructure overhaul of their servers which is cost-prohibitive for a public institution such as theirs.  In the meantime, they are developing a "basic level of access that can be implemented while archival access technologies catch up"--which doesn't tell us a whole lot but it will be interesting to follow for sure. 

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

All Things SSRN

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a world wide collaborative of over 169,000 authors and more than 1.3 million users that is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. It is composed of a number of specialized research networks in the social sciences. Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and full text papers from scholars around the world. SSRN encourages readers to communicate directly with other subscribers and authors concerning their own and other's research.

SSRN supports the Open Access movement. All scholars may submit papers for free, and author-submitted content is downloadable at no charge by users world-wide.

SSRN is a network of networks, that is, it is divided into specialized areas including cognitive science, information systems, marketing, negotiations, poltical science, and social science. What you may not realize is SSRN includes the humanities as well (classics, English & American literature, and philosophy research networks).

If you are interested in submitting your own work to SSRN there are instructions on the site complete with a video demo.

But it gets even better because SSRN now has a very cool free app for iPhone and iPad users which enables you to search the Archive's over 260,000 papers (and growing) from anywhere. Papers can be emailed or viewed directely on your device. iPad users can download documents and annotate, etc. as well.

If you can't get enough of SSRN, you can also subscribe to their twitter feed (twitter @ ssrn) and their blog.

ASC Library Mobile

Good news for all comm junkies on the go...the Annenberg Library now has its own mobile access page.
Using this site you can check our hours, search Franklin and VCat, use the handy Penn Text article finder, or access Blackboard and RefWorks much more easily from your mobile devices. Just bookmark the site from the link on the Annenberg Library homepage. In addition, there's a mobile friendly app for EBSCOhosts databases which now not only includes Communication & Mass Media Complete, but also Communication Abstracts. Other mobile friendly databases to search on the train or a park bench are Lexis-Nexis Academic, Scopus, and for health communication folks, Medline Plus. The list of mobile friendly databases will no doubt be growing and I'll try to keep up with good ones to add. Notice too, that your favorite library blog, Commpilings, does not go unrepresented on the page, so no excuse for not being up on the latest (5) posts!

American Film Scripts Online

Introducing a new addition to Penn Libraries e-resources: American Film Scripts Online. ASO contains over a thousand American movie scripts from 1903 to 2006. Many scripts carry additional detailed, fielded information on scenes and characters in the scripts. The database includes facsimile images for over half of the collection. Most of the scripts have never been published before and are available nowhere else online.

Scripts were selected by a team of film librarians and scholars. Selection factors include if the film or screenplay won a major award, if the film was critically acclaimed, or the screenplay has historical or sociological significance. The panel tried to build specific clusters based around genres such as Film Noir, Silent Movies of the 1920's, and key writers. Where possible, shooting scripts selected rather than draft scripts.

There is advanced searching capability for this relatively small database so it's easy to get around, including inside the scripts to search on words and phrases. My search on the the phrase "train robbery" turned up five scripts. You can try something more imaginative.

Introducing Oxford Bibliographies Online: Communication

"GPS for scholars," as it likes to refer to itself, Oxford Bibliographies Online offers literature guides prepared by subject experts in a variety of fields including Communication. Additional subject modules Penn subscribes to are Atlantic History, Biblical Studies, Buddhism, Classics, Criminology, Hinduism, International Relations, Islamic Studies, Medieval Studies, Philosophy, Public Health, Renaissance and Reformation, Social Work, and Victorian Literature. Other modules are due out later in the year, including Cinema Studies and Anthropology.

OBO sees itself as a remedy for information overload which is everywhere, including academia.

Traditional bibliographies and the online abstracting & indexing services that emerged out of them are no help here. These tools suited research needs when we were in information scarcity culture, but in information overload culture these unfiltered lists of everything published lose their value—they’ve simply become too large to be meaningful. Users do not know exactly why a citation showed up in their search results, they do not know how it fits in the history of scholarship, and they have no indication which resources are of high scholarly quality and which are less reliable. In the end, the white noise of information overload culture yields the same results as the lack of content in our previous information scarcity culture: research paralysis. We don’t need unfiltered lists of citations. Today’s challenge is to build a resource that guides scholarly research through the growing mass of unqualified academic output, offering selective annotated research paths that are insightful, increase productivity, and raise the level of quality in new scholarship. --Letter from the Publisher

OBO claims that each article included in their guides receives multiple peer reviews as well as editorial board vetting. What's very nice about this world of essential texts that OBO is carving out for students and researchers is that every cited item links to full-text. Also promised are frequent updates so that these modules represent where the field is currently at, at least in theory. The Communication module is edited by Patricia Moy (University of Washington). There are over 50 members on the editorial board, including three Annenberg grads, Yariv Tsfati (University of Haifa), Matthew Carlson (Saint Louis University), and Brian Southwell (University of Minnesota). Over 60 subject areas are covered in this edition and more (with additional Annenberg editorial representation) are slated to be added in Fall 2011 and Spring 2012. This product is so new I don't have a personal feel with it yet but I am looking forward to getting to know it. I certainly applaud the initiative because we are all drowning if we are not sifting and sifting takes time. OBO is not only doing the sifting but has assigned the task to proven experts.

News Frontier Database

Columbia Journalism Review has just launched a new initiative called The News Frontier Database which it boasts on its homepage as:

...a searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country. Featuring originally reported profiles and extensive data sets on each outlet, the NFDB is a tool for those who study or pursue online journalism, a window into that world for the uninitiated, and, like any journalistic product, a means by which to shed light on an important topic. We plan to build the NFDB into the most comprehensive resource of its kind.

Right now the site is more potential than anything else, a promising shell that will build up quickly. So far, for instance, under Arts and Culture there are only five outlets listed; under Education there are none. Once populated however, one can envision the usefulness of being able to search online news outlets by location, affiliation, staff and volunteer sizes, subject categories and business models.

Criteria for news organization inclusion are stated as follows:(1) Digital news sites included in the NFDB should be primarily devoted to original reporting and content production. (2) With rare exceptions, the outlet should have at least one full-time employee. (3) The digital news site should be something other than the web arm of a legacy media entity. (There’s no doubt that some of the most important online journalism is being produced by the websites of newspapers and other legacy media, but this database is devoted to a new kind of publication.) (4) The digital news site should be making a serious effort to sustain its work financially, whether that be through advertising, grants, or other revenue sources. (The language and spirit of this last criterion borrow from the work of Michele McLellan.)

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

Remember, however meagerly we go about our daily lives, the Library of Congress is relentlessly building its digital tower of historical newspapers. Just this past week it uploaded a new batch of titles into Chronicling America, bringing its current total number of pages to 3.1 million, 414 newspapers from 23 states between 1899-1922. Chronicling America newspapers can be searched with words or phrases; or, for a broader, more regional approach, once can search by one or more states. Of course, this being the Library of Congress, this database is an open web resource, available to all, no UPenn status required.

Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open-Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

An excellent piece of content analysis on the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), by Kalev Leetaru (Cline Center for Democracy) from latest issue of Studies in Intelligence (Volume 54, Number 1, March 2010).

The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

Kalev Leetaru

ABSTRACT
For nearly 70 years, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) monitored the world’s airwaves and other news outlets, transcribing and translating selected contents into English and in the process creating a multi-million page historical archive of the global news media. Yet, FBIS material has not been widely utilized in the academic content analysis community, perhaps because relatively little is known about the scope of the content that is digitally available to researchers in this field. This article, researched and written by a specialist in the field, contains a brief overview of the service — reestablished as the Open Source Center in 2004 — and a statistical examination of the unclassified FBIS material produced from July 1993 through July 2004 — a period during which FBIS produced and distributed CDs of its selected material. Examined are language preferences, distribution of monitored sources, and topical and geographic emphases. The author examines the output of a similar service provided by the British Broadcasting Service (BBC), known as the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB). Its digital files permit the tracing of coverage trends from January 1979 through December 2008 and invite comparison with FBIS efforts.

Introducing Ethnographic Video Online

A new resource just added to the Penn Libraries homepage, Ethnographic Video Online, provides access to a collection of over 1,000 films for the study of study of human culture and behavior, covering every region of the world, and featuring the work of many of the most influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century. EVO Iicludes interviews, previously unreleased raw footage, field notes, study guides, and more. Thematic areas such as language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, and sex, gender, and family roles can all be studied cross-culturally.

Database features include:

• uniquely powerful browse and search capabilities enabled by Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing™
• multiple points of access—browses, searches, thumbnail images, transcripts — allowing you to find your point of interest in hundreds of hours of video within seconds
• synchronized, searchable transcripts
• video clip-making tools
• annotated playlists—you can make, annotate, and share playlists for course or individual use, and you can include links to materials or resources outside of the collection to make this your one-stop resource
• high quality, licensed, in-copyright material plus newsreel and other valuable footage
• the ability to create synchronized annotations and multi-media presentations
• an embeddable video player and playlist for use on a class Web site, library home page, or an electronic syllabus—lets you drive usage and deliver content to users where and when they need it without instructions or countless screens and clicks
• streaming, quickly accessible online video at 400 and 800 kbps with no delays and no special equipment (just Flash and a browser)

Media Cloud, MemeTracker, and PEJ

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 at mediacloud.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, Yochai Benkler, 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."

J. Leskovec, L. Backstrom, J. Kleinberg. Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle. ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2009.

Another news-coverage index cited in the NYT piece is the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks leading media outlets.

IZI-Datenbank.de

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!