Handbook of Communication History

The latest volume in the ICA Handbook Series, The Handbook of Communication History, as well as the ICA interest group, Communication History formed as recently as 2007, reflects the growing attention of scholars in the field to the history of communication history and research. Edited by Peter Simonson, Janice Peck, Robert T. Craig, and John Johkson, Jr., The Handbook "addresses central ideas, social practices, and media of communication as they have developed across time, cultures, and world geographical regions. It attends to both the varieties of communication in world history and the historical investigation of those forms in communication and media studies. The Handbook editors view communication as encompassing patterns, processes, and performances of social interaction, symbolic production, material exchange, institutional formation, social praxis, and discourse. As such, the history of communication cuts across social, cultural, intellectual, political, technological, institutional, and economic history."--publisher's description

The title is available in Annenberg Reference at P90. H2933 2012.

Book Feature: Critical Introduction to George Gerbner

Media scholar Michael Morgan has written a critical overview of the work of his former mentor and colleague:  George Gerbner: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory (Peter Lang, 2012). 

This under-200 page textbook of sorts succinctly maps the trajectory of one of the field's founding fathers--beginning with research from  pre-Cultural Indicators times when he developed his model for communication, looked at confession magazines not only for content patterns but institutional practices, and gathered and analyzed representations of mental illness in the media. He also  studied mass communication's relation to education, a concern going back to his dissertation days. One can trace how his early work morphed into what would be his opus, Cultural Indicators, a sprawling "long-term, integrated, and cumulative analysis of (1) media institutions, (2) dominant message patterns, and (3) audience images and conceptions."  No one is better situated to walk us through the evolution of this project, stopping for lessons in message system analysis, institutional process analysis, cultivation analysis, mean world syndrome, and mainstreaming, than Dr. Morgan who was there, actively so, when it all went down. The volume includes a useful 11-page bibliography. 

It was nice to see The Annenberg School's George Gerbner Archive acknowledged; we are certainly grateful for Dr. Morgan's donations to the Archive as well as a few corrections in documentation details which he generously sent our way in the course of his work.

Out of the Question: Women, Media, and the Art of Inquiry

Out of the Question: Women, Media, and the Art of Inquiry is a new 38-minute documentary by award-winning filmmaker Naomi McCormack. It charts the careers of five women and their experiences as researchers and audience members for the new media of their era. The film provides a compelling window into gendered cultures of work, media, and the social sciences in 1940s America and raises questions of ongoing significance about them.

The film is also supported by a website (still a little under construction) that includes teaching resources as well as new research on pioneering women in communication and media studies.