Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies

The  Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies is a useful hub for scholars and researchers interested in "questions emerging at the intersections of religion, the internet and new, social and mobile media" to meet.

Founded in 2010, the site includes an extensive (500-plus items) bibliography resting heavily on the convenient shoulders of Google Scholar as well as a Scholars Index of around 200 members from around the world. The Index is comprised of the list of members with individual links to brief bio and affiliation info. Expertise tags are liberally applied to these profiles. Art Bamford's expertise lies with media ecology, orality, literacy, music recording technology, music production technology, and Stevie Wonder. Good stuff. 

A nice feature is the News section which is updated on a regular basis. I notice there is a submission today.  The submission before that was 4 days previous and that seems to be about the pace.  The most recent stories feature a gospel app development contest being encouraged by the Mormon Church, a columnist from the Times-Gazette.com calling the Bible "God's Facebook," and a 3-D game developed by the American Bible Society. It looks like these news items are intended to be crowd-sourced but it's pretty much the same few folks posting.

The site is clean and attractive, pushing all the latest related books, even jobs in the field.  The blog section offers more extended (compared to the posts in News) reflections on current research, but these articles are still quite brief. The site is informative and happening, but not time-consuming, especially for lurkers.

That's my little tour of the site. Did I mention it's "located" at Texas A&M University where it was launched with the help of their Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture.

Website Feature: Journalists's Resource

I thought I'd check out Journalist's Resource, a project of the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, since it was named (with 25 others)  “Best Free Reference Web Site 2013” by the American Library Association. I was not disappointed. While the site is for practitioners, it is rich in research, research journalists need on the topics they are reporting on. By extension, non-journalists interested in wading deeper into an issue are welcome as well:

We invite all those interested in policy and public affairs to use the site’s materials. No registration is required; the materials are free and are under a Creative Commons license. Our open-access project is designed to provide state-of-knowledge information on topics of public interest. In an era of information overload, we hope you’ll see us as a useful tool that condenses quality information from authoritative sources and presents it succinctly. - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

We invite all those interested in policy and public affairs to use the site’s materials. No registration is required; the materials are free and are under a Creative Commons license. Our open-access project is designed to provide state-of-knowledge information on topics of public interest. In an era of information overload, we hope you’ll see us as a useful tool that condenses quality information from authoritative sources and presents it succinctly. ...Establishing and promoting the concept of “knowledge-based reporting” animates the project; the philosophy is articulated in the new book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, by Tom Patterson, our research director. Many of the nation’s top journalism educators and thinkers have been promoting the idea of bringing journalism closer to the research world — both to meet the profession’s social mission and to ensure its high value in an increasingly crowded marketplace — and our site strives to provide a structure for accomplishing this.

Establishing and promoting the concept of “knowledge-based reporting” animates the project; the philosophy is articulated in the new book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, by Tom Patterson, our research director. Many of the nation’s top journalism educators and thinkers have been promoting the idea of bringing journalism closer to the research world — both to meet the profession’s social mission and to ensure its high value in an increasingly crowded marketplace — and our site strives to provide a structure for accomplishing this. Our project has been partnering with the New York Times, for example, to help create more research-related resources for readers. We also actively foster the improvement of Wikipedia pages relating to policy topics. - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.UFIkxch7.dpuf

The meat of the website is the “Studies Database” which can be key-word searched or one can browse the list of topics in the following areas: economics (banks, jobs, real estate), environment (food, climate change, pollution) government (budget, infrastructure, Congress), international (human rights, globalization, China), politics (elections, digital democracy, campaign finance), and society (race, education, internet). Searches will produce research articles from academic journals, some of which are otherwise behind pay walls. A research roundup piece on Twitter, Politics and the Public provides articles from Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Social Science Computer Review, Duke Law & Technology Review, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Microsoft Research, Pew Internet and American Life Project, various society conference papers, and so on. 

The site also has the beginnings of a rich syllabus section, only nine so far, all addressing coverage skills (business reporting, political reporting, science reporting, etc.) but they may add critical journalism and media studies related syllabi in the future. 

I was wondering this very question posed in the FAQ: Can I suggest a study? "Definitely. If you know of scholarly material that meets our research criteria, send it to... Also, if you feel that material that we’ve included doesn’t meet these standards or if better research on a similar topic is available, feedback is always appreciated."

As we are wont to bemoan the level of the discourse in our media culture this initiative offers some hope for raising the bar a little. It is also a much needed bridge for journalism scholars and practicing journalists to cross from both directions.

We invite all those interested in policy and public affairs to use the site’s materials. No registration is required; the materials are free and are under a Creative Commons license. Our open-access project is designed to provide state-of-knowledge information on topics of public interest. In an era of information overload, we hope you’ll see us as a useful tool that condenses quality information from authoritative sources and presents it succinctly. - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

We invite all those interested in policy and public affairs to use the site’s materials. No registration is required; the materials are free and are under a Creative Commons license. Our open-access project is designed to provide state-of-knowledge information on topics of public interest. In an era of information overload, we hope you’ll see us as a useful tool that condenses quality information from authoritative sources and presents it succinctly. - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

Based at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, the Journalist’s Resource project examines news topics through a research lens; we focus on surfacing scholarly materials that may be relevant to other media practitioners, bloggers, educators, students and general readers. The American Library Association named it a “Best Free Reference Web Site 2013.” - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

American Library Association named it a “Best Free Reference Web Site 2013.” - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

American Library Association named it a “Best Free Reference Web Site 2013.” - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

American Library Association named it a “Best Free Reference Web Site 2013.” - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

American Library Association named it a “Best Free Reference Web Site 2013.” - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/about#sthash.gMmiM669.dpuf

Shorenstein Center

Shorenstein Center

Shorenstein Center

Shorenstein Center

Middle East and Islamic Resources from CRL

The latest issue of the Center for Research Libraries' online publication, Focus on Global Resources, features Middle East and Islamic scholarly source material available from CRL. Articles showcase research using Turkish newspapers, recent efforts to document the "Arab Spring" revolution, and how new technologies, specifically Archive-It, a web-crawling utility, are being used to capture the Middle East web.

CRL is an international consortium of research libraries that jointly collects and preserves newspapers, journals, and other archive materials. A large percentage of their acquisitions are from outside the United States, with major emphasis on the developing world. Member institutions provide students, faculty, and other researchers access to the collection through Interlibrary Loan and electronic delivery.

Digital Methods Initiative

Folks interested in research methods for studying the Internet can check out The Digital Methods Initiative, an Amsterdam-based group of new media scholars who have been developing tools and techniques for this increasingly massive undertaking since 1999.

The Digital Methods Initiative is directed by Richard Rogers (who paid the Annenberg School an extended visit last year).

The website is a hub of many of "the tools and scripts that we use to study the web in particular," as explained in the site's About section. Such tools and methods

"have been made to extend the research into the blogosphere, online newssphere, discussion lists and forums, folksonomies as well as search engine behavior. These tools include scripts to scrape web, blog, news, image and social bookmarking search engines, as well as simple analytical machines that output data sets as well as graphical visualizations....For example, how to study Internet censorship (by using proxies)? How to study information inclusion and exclusion (by interrogating robot.txt exclusion policies)? How to study surfer pathways (using measures of 'related sites')? How to study site reputation (by hyperlink analysis)? How to study a site's search engine placement over time (by storing and querying within engine results)?Additionally the Digital Methods Initiative provides views on the value of visualization. How to output the results of the analyses (in ranked lists, in cluster graphs, in line graphs, in clouds, on maps)? Which visualizations communicate findings? Which visualizations embed critical ways of seeing?"

You can also add their blog to your reading stream for updates on research, lecture slides, and course announcements.

Introducing the George Gerbner Archive

The Annenberg Library is pleased to announce the opening of the George Gerbner Archive to communications students and researchers at Penn and around the world. George Gerbner was the second dean of The Annenberg School for Communication from 1964-1989 and one of the pioneering founders of the field of Communication as a scholarly pursuit. As Joseph Turow, the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication, writing for Americana in 2006 explains:

[George]Gerbner believed it was crucial to understand the social impact of these mass-produced daydreams [television fiction] because they likely influenced the hierarchy of values as they developed in our minds, particularly in the minds of young people. The key was not to dwell on the positive or negative aspects of individual television shows, movies or songs. Instead, Gerbner insisted, because popular culture is mass-produced, it should be analyzed as a system of industrially patterned, rather than idiosyncratic or artistic, messages. With the "message system" as a central concept, communication research should pursue three fundamental goals: explore the forces that shape the pattern of messages; examine the overall nature of those message patterns; and understand the social roles or functions that those patterns play in society.
-- Industrial Folklore George Gerbner's (Tele)Vision, Americana, Summer 2006

The George Gerbner Archive consists of personal correspondence, research and administrative materials, reports, publications, news clippings, photographs, and memorabilia related to George Gerbner (1916-2006) and his work as a world-renowned media scholar and dean of the Annenberg School. The collection is rich in material concerning the Cultural Indicators Project, Gerbner’s pioneering analysis of television violence and cultivation theory, and the Cultural Environment Movement, a media advocacy organization founded by Gerbner in 1991.

The collection was donated to the Annenberg School in 2006 by Gerbner’s sons, John and Thomas. The collection reflects Gerbner’s prodigious research agenda and leadership as a scholar, administrator, and activist over a period of four decades. The collection consists of the following series: Biography, Cultural Indicators Project, Cultural Environmental Movement, Publications, Correspondence, Instructional Materials, Clippings, Photographs, Unpublished Materials, and Secondary Publications.

Appointments can be made to view materials that are not available online by contacting the Annenberg Library.

Copyright and Creativity in Communication Research

Annenberg alumnus Bill Herman ('09, now teaching in the Film and Media Department at Hunter College), drafted the report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Fair Use and Academic Freedom of the International Communication Association titled: Clipping Our Own Wings: Copyright and Creativity in Communication Research. Way to go Committee, and especially our Bill!

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Communication scholars need access to copyrighted material, need to make unlicensed uses of them in order to do their research, and often—especially within the United States—have the legal right to do so. But all too often they find themselves thwarted.

A survey of communication scholars’ practices, conducted by the Ad Hoc Committee on Fair Use and Academic Freedom in the International Communication Association (ICA), reveals that copyright ignorance and misunderstanding hamper distribution of finished work, derail work in progress, and most seriously, lead communication researchers simply to avoid certain kinds of research altogether.

Nearly half the respondents express a lack of confidence about their copyright knowledge in relation to their research. Nearly a third avoided research subjects or questions and a full fifth abandoned research already under way because of copyright concerns. In addition, many ICA members have faced resistance from publishers, editors, and university administrators when seeking to include copyrighted works in their research. Scholars are sometimes forced to seek copyright holders’ permission to discuss or criticize copyrighted works. Such permission seeking puts copyright holders in a position to exercise veto power over the publication of research, especially research that deals with contemporary or popular media.

These results demonstrate that scholars in communication frequently encounter confusion, fear, and frustration around the unlicensed use of copyrighted material. These problems, driven largely by misinformation and gatekeeper conservatism, inhibit researchers’ ability both to conduct rigorous analyses and to develop creative methodologies for the digital age.

Communication scholars can benefit by developing best practices standards for the most ample and flexible copyright exemption permitting unlicensed use of copyrighted materials: fair use. While non-U.S. members will not be able to apply this doctrine directly to work done outside the United States, having this interpretation established for U.S. scholars will expand opportunities within a large area of communication research, encourage international scholars to explore their own nations’ copyright exemptions, and provide an important benchmark for non-U.S. scholars looking for models as copyright reform proceeds.

Introducing Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that provides new and evolving tools to quantitatively examine the news media as an information ecosystem. Newly launched the Project's objectives are ambitious. They are:

• Develop an open database of the topics of all stories from thousands of sources
• Build lightweight, interactive tools that allow casual users to easily ask the database questions
• Publish open APIs that give other researchers full access to the database
• Publish the code for the system under a free software license
• Publish our own research using the database, including studies on media signatures, meme propagation, and geographic attention profiles

From the March 11 press release:

Researching the nature of news, and media information flows, has always faced a difficult challenge: there is so much produced by so many outlets that it is hard to monitor it all. Researchers have used painstaking manual content analysis to understand mass media. On the web, the explosion of citizen media makes such an approach far more difficult and less comprehensive. By automatically downloading, processing, and querying the full text of thousands of outlets, Media Cloud will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media
trends.

Today's launch allows a first view into some of what is possible on the Media Cloud platform. At http://www.mediacloud.org you can generate simple charts of media coverage across ources and countries. The actual capabilities of the system are much greater, and the Media
Cloud team is actively looking for other researchers who will bring their own questions as the tools are further developed. Ultimately, Media Cloud will provide open APIs that can support variety of lines of inquiry.

Visit the Media Cloud site, try the visualizations, share your research ideas with the team, and sign up for the Media Cloud mailing list to hear about functionality enhancements and other project developments.

Academic Research and Communications Policy

The International Journal of Communication (Volume 2, 2008) devotes a special section to Academic Research and Communications Policy. Monroe Price and Stefaan Verhulst begin the section with an Introduction followed by: The Academic and the Policy Maker, by Peng Hwa Ang; Policy Research in an Evidence-Averse Environment, by Sandra Braman; Research In Government Agency Decisions — Observations About the FCC, by Daniel L. Brenner; Academic Research and Its Limited Impact on Telecommunications Policy Making, by Rob Frieden; Comparative Media Law Research and Its Impact on Policy, by Stefaan G. Verhulst and Monroe E. Price; and The Role of Academic Research in Media Policy Making: The Case Study of Hong Kong, by Mei Ning Yan.

International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media

The International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media (formerly the UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen) was established in 1997 by The Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research, Nordicom Göteborg University Sweden). Financed by the Swedish government and UNESCO, its website is a must-bookmark for anyone interested in research on children and media. "The Clearinghouse informs various groups of users about research on children, young people and media, with special attention to media violence research and practices regarding media education and children’s/young people’s participation in the media measures, activities and research concerning children’s and young people’s media environment." (website)

A centerpiece of Clearinghouse activities is their yearbook. Children, Media and Consumption is this year's offering (currently on order for ASC Reference).

Their current newsletter, News on Children, Youth and Media in the World, is available as well as an archive of all previous issues going back to its inception in 1997.

Introducing SSRC's Media Research Hub

It's always worthwhile keeping an eye out on what the Social Science Resource Council is up to. The New York-based research organization focuses on a wide range of public policy issues and has recently built up momentum in the area of media research and media reform largely through the efforts of their "Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Sphere" program. Seeking to insure that debates about media ownership, broadband access, digital broadcasting, community media and other crucial infrastructures of public life are shaped by high quality research and an understanding and consideration of the public interest, the Necessary Knowledge program takes a four pronged approach to connecting the academic and advocacy communities through a Collaborative Grants Program, the Data Consortium, Global Networking and Capacity Building, and the Media Research Hub.

Principal activities represented on the Research Hub are:

• The Resource Database, a community-editable tool for mapping and navigating the media and communications field


• The Data Consortium for Media and Communications Policy, which works to expand access to datasets about the media and communications environment


• The Collaborative Grants project, which includes research fellowship competitions and mechanisms for signaling research needs within the community

Most ambitious are the Data Consortium's goals which are organized around the following objectives:

• Improve educational and other non-profit access to commercially-produced datasets, especially through cooperation with commercial data providers
• Facilitate projects that address persistent data gaps in our understanding of the public sphere
• Expand researcher engagement with datasets, in part by collecting and disseminating information about the uses and terms of access of different datasets
• Advocate for the principle that public policy should be based on publicly-available data

The program is run in partnership with the Center for International Media Action (CIMA) and the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University.

But back to the Media Research Hub! Tool around in it, appreciate it not only for what it is but for what it can become. Get involved if you have resources to share, a profile to add, etc. The system is designed to accommodate community editing with minimal moderation. If you would like to get even more involved, feel free to write Joe Karaganis, Necessary Knowledge's Program Director, with questions or suggestions.