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CFP: NeMLA Panel on Children's Periodicals--Digital and Otherwise
by Patrick Cox 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

Panel: “Fun With a Purpose”: Periodical Pedagogy and Early Edutainment 43nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) March 15-18, 2012 Rochester, New York – Hyatt Rochester Host Institution: St. John Fisher College Panel Description: Children’s periodicals published in the US over the last 300 years provide a wealth of textual and visual insight into US culture, pedagogy, and conceptions of childhood. The movement of traditional paper magazines to websites, and the appearance of periodicals with entirely digital existences, both enrich and complicate this genre. This panel will engage with this under-examined body of texts in their most salient mode: as pedagogy. Children’s magazines have been used as instructional tools with subject matter spanning literacy, manners, morality, crafts, citizenship, “mental hygiene,” and beyond, transmitting enduring lessons in an ephemeral format. By packaging their lessons in an entertaining and disposable blend of fiction, non-fiction, images, activities, games, jokes, and riddles, these magazines can be considered a print medium precursor to “edutainment” or, as the motto of *Highlights for Children* calls it, “Fun with a purpose.” This panel is open to explorations of particular mechanisms, contents, and contexts of periodical pedagogy past and present, including examinations of child-readers’ participation in, subversion against, or re-creation of, that pedagogy. Possible topics from all disciplines may include: - histories or analysis of particular children’s periodicals - pedagogies in periodicals (ideological, curricular, religious, etc.) - convergences of traditional magazines and digital media - pedagogy, periodicals, and power - magazines produced by children - fiction and poetry in magazines - use of periodicals in classrooms - transnational periodicals - accidental pedagogy - production, distribution, and circulation of pedagogy - cross-cultural comparisons of periodical pedagogy - marginalia and ephemera - pedagogy in the home (or doctor’s office waiting room) - periodical pedagogy as pop culture - children’s responses to and uses of magazines Please send 500-word abstracts to Patrick Cox at ptcox(a)camden.rutgers.edu by Sept 30. Thanks. -- Patrick Cox PhD Student 2010-2011 David K. Sengstack Fellow Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/ 2010 ChLA Hannah Beiter Graduate Student Research Award Recipient https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies <https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies> http://camden-rutgers.academia.edu/PatrickTCox/Blog "In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer." --Albert Camus "Don't let your studies interfere with your education." --Colonel Henry Rutgers "the jUdges of nOrmalitY are present everywhere." --Foucault, of course

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urlte.am to back up URL shorteners
by gus andrews 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

So here's a project which should be tremendously useful to Internet researchers, just announced by Jason Scott, a "rogue archivist activist": URLTE.AM. The project will apparently be making backups of every URL coded for by a URL shortener, thereby keeping track when links go dead and expire. Between this and archive.org, a lot less Internet history should be lost. >From the description at urlte.am: "Welcome to the URLTeam website. The URLTeam is the ArchiveTeam subcommittee on URL shorteners. We believe that they pose a serious threat to the internet's integrity. If one of them dies, gets hacked or sells out, millions of links will stop working. Thus we preemptively release backups, because URL shorteners are too busy to make backups themselves. Releases Every 6 months or so we release a torrent of all backed up files. When a new torrent is released, you can simply delete the old torrent and download the new files to the same location. Your BitTorrent client will figure out which files have changed and will redownload them, even if you weren't finished yet on the previous torrent. The latest torrent was released on May 31th, 2011: urlteam.torrent - List of files - Readme The next release is planned around December 2011. Data format All data files in the torrent are simple text files compressed using LZMA2/xz. The text file format is very simple: Each line contains one mapping in the following format: Shortcode, pipe (Ascii 0x7C), long URL, line feed (Ascii 0x10). The file is sorted by shortcodes using the following order: Shorter shortcodes come before longer ones Decimal digits Lowercase letters Uppercase letters ASCII value Depending on the URL shortener there might be multiple long URLs for one shortcode. There are some tools for working with the files on GitHub. Q&A Can you do a backup of shortener XY please? Maybe. Some shorteners are very fast at banning scrapers which makes it impossible to do a backup in an efficient way. Contact us and we will look into it. What about 301Works.org? They help URL shorteners with backups. Unfortunately they rely on the cooperation of URL shorteners, and many of the biggest URL shorteners refuse to cooperate. Furthermore, they don't plan on releasing any data files to the public. We do however greatly value their work and when selecting which URL shorteners we will scrape next we concentrate especially on those that don't cooperate with 301Works. Since March 2011 we are actively uploading data from non-cooperating shorteners to the 301Works archive. While those files are not available for download (they contain the same data as our torrents anyway) you can watch our progress here. I like what you do. Can I help? Sure thing. We can always use people who help with scraping. Or programmers. We could also use a fast server with lots of space for storing the data and seeding the torrents. Anyhow, if you want to help, please contact us. What's with all those weird directory and file names in the torrent? It's hard to organize that stuff into files so that each individual file is only a few hundred megabytes in size. Because we want to accomodate people with inferior operating systems we also need to assume a case insensitive file system." Gillian "Gus" Andrews Postdoctoral Fellow, Google Academic Research Grant Anthropology in Education Teachers College, Columbia University http://gandre.ws

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CfP: Journal of Communication special issue "Social Media and Political Change"
by Tom Boellstorff 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

Dear all: I was asked to post this CfP for a special issue of the Journal of Communication special issue on "Social Media and Political Change." The link with details is below! All the best, Tom Boellstorff >> Dear Dr. Boellstorff: I'm a fan of your "Coming of Age in Second Life" book and have used it in my classes. I'm editing a special issue of the Journal of Communication. The theme for the issue is "Social Media and Political Change", and our call for papers is here and I've pasted it below as well: >> >> http://faculty.washington.edu/pnhoward/publishing/jofcspecialissue.html >> >> I'm eager to have some submissions from anthropologists, working internationally, on some of the same questions tackled in communication research. If you, your colleagues or the students working with you are developing manuscripts on these themes I'd welcome your submissions. As you may know, this is the flagship journal for the discipline and one of the few with crossover appeal. If know of any advanced graduate students with good observations from relevant field sites please do share the link--a pub in this journal could be appealing because it would open up another large chunk of the academic job "market" to them. Please let me know if I can tell you more about our plans for the special issue, and feel free to forward this across your professional network. >> Sincerely, >> Phil >> Dr. Philip N. Howard >> Associate Professor >> Department of Communication >> Jackson School of International Studies >> Information School >> University of Washington tom boellstorff + professor department of anthropology + university of california, irvine editor-in-chief + american anthropologist http://www.anthro.uci.edu/faculty_bios/boellstorff/boellstorff.php

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The Mood of Information
by Andy 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

Hi, is it possible for the below to go out on the mailing list? Many thanks and best, Andy Hello AOIR-folk! My new book has arrived in shiny hardback and is now available for purchase. It is somewhat enigmatically titled "The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising". The blurb on the back says: "The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather than the more familiar approach of symbolic representation. At the heart of this book is an aspiration to better understand contemporary and nascent forms of commercial solicitation predicated on the commodification of experience and subjectivity. In assessing novel forms of advertising that involve tracking users’ web browsing activity over a period of time, this book seeks to grasp and explicate key trends within the media and advertising industries along with the technocultural, legal, regulatory and political environment online behavioural advertising operates within. Situated within contemporary scholarly debate and interest in recursive media that involves intensification of discourses of feedback, personalization, recommendation, co-production, constructivism and the preempting of intent, this book represents a departure from textual criticism of advertising to one based on exposition of networked means of inferring preferences, desires and orientations that reflect ways of being, or moods of information." Mark Poster reviewed it, commenting: "The confusing yet omnipresent world of digital media require analysis of specific sites and types of content. One could do no better than turn to Andrew McStay's The Mood of Information to learn about some fascinating yet troubling developments in the region of "behavioural advertising," the tracking of marketing activities by consumers. I endorse this volume for those interested in the reconfiguration of privacy that its topic explores." If your interest is piqued, the link to the publisher's page is: http://tinyurl.com/3bhjn8t The introductory chapter is available from http://tinyurl.com/6jm9om8 Do also drop me a line at mcstay(a)bangor.ac.uk if you're looking at similar sorts of stuff and would like to get together on a project. Best, Andy

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Goldsmiths MA/MSc in Creating Social Media
by dan mcquillan 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

announcing the new Goldsmiths MA/MSc in Creating Social Media : http://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-creating-social-media/ "What does social media look like after recent events in Japan, North Africa and the UK? What will you create? This unique theory/practice programme combines computing and cultural studies to provide you with the practical and critical skills to shape the future of social media. The MA/MSc is a collaborative theory/practice programme across the Department of Computing and the Centre for Cultural Studies, and is part of the newly launched Centre for Creative and Social Technologies. Based on global examples, you will explore the technological and intellectual questions that have risen to prominence with the social web. You will critique existing approaches and tools, and plan, develop, hack and implement ground-breaking applications and campaigns. You will not only analyse: you will create. New social media platforms, at their best, develop new online forms of connecting, relating, sharing and competing. Effective and innovative social media creation, therefore, involves deep theoretical and practical knowledge of both software development and social processes." feel free to pass on my details as first point of contact. many thanks dan Dr. Dan McQuillan Lecturer in Creative & Social Computing Goldsmiths, university of London http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/staff/d-mcquillan/ MA/MSc developers blog: http://macreatingsocialmedia.wordpress.com/

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New Zealand Discourse Conference - 5-7 December 2011
by Philippa Smith 08 Jun '11

08 Jun '11

Apologies for cross posting but I am aware that there are many discourse analysts who have an interest in Internet research too. This is a great opportunity to visit New Zealand for the exchange of intellectual ideas as well as a chance to see the country! Keynote speakers are Teun A.van Dijk, Pompeu Fabra University, and Monica Heller University of Toronto, Canada. Call for submissions ends June 30 2011. See: www.aut.ac.nz/nzdc3 Kind regards Philippa Smith Institute of Culture, Discourse & Communication AUT University Auckland NEW ZEALAND 3rd New Zealand Discourse Conference “Engaging with Discourse Analysis” 5-7 December 2011 AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand Call for papers Following the successful New Zealand Discourse Conferences in 2007 and 2009, submissions for the 3rd New Zealand Discourse Conference are invited from academics and others interested in a discourse analysis approach to understanding the social world. Keynote speakers Teun A. van Dijk Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain Monica Heller University of Toronto, Canada Themes The conference organisers invite submissions that focus on discourse analysis to address theoretical, methodological or empirical research issues in a variety of themes including, but not limited to: Community and health Gender and diversity Education and learning Globalisation and development Finance and capital Ideology, power and knowledge Culture and identity Media Marketing and consumption Place, space and time Public policy and the state Practice and praxis Professions and institutions Language and communication Work, management and organisation Science and technology Conference options There are three options for conference inclusion: presentations, workshops and symposia. Please see the appropriate guidelines below and make your submission by 30th June 2011. Submission guidelines Submissions are accepted on the basis that at least one presenter must register and attend the conference. Co-presenters are encouraged, but they must also be registered for the day of their presentation. If there are multiple presenters for one paper, it is important that the presentation time is strictly adhered to. Presentations Please submit an abstract which should be no more than 300 words in length and a maximum of four keywords. Each presentation will be allocated a 30 minute time slot, 20 minutes for presentation followed by 10 minutes for discussion. Workshop Conference workshops provide an opportunity to explore discourse analysis in a practical workshop mode. The number of workshop slots is limited. A 500 word abstract plus a reference list should be submitted for consideration. Workshops will only proceed if they attract a minimum of 10 participants. The time for each workshop is 90 minutes. Symposium A symposium is an integrated, interactive engagement between two or more presenters and the audience. The focus of the discussion should be a clearly identified theme that reflects an emerging issue in discourse studies. Participants will make individual or collaborative presentations linking their perspectives to the theme, with ample opportunity for discussion. A nominated person will moderate the discussion. Symposia should be designed to run for 90 minutes including at least 45 minutes for discussion. Proposals for symposia are to be presented in a 500 word abstract for the symposium as a whole and will be evaluated against the following criteria: • the relationship of the topic to the conference focus on discourse analysis • the range of expertise and/or points of view represented by the presenter(s) Please submit abstracts by email before 30th June 2011 to nzdc(a)aut.ac.nz Send your submission as a separate Word document and include in the body of the email, the title of the paper and the details of a contact author, phone and email address.

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Fwd: Ethical Inquiry through Video Game Play and Design: A Symposium
by Lois Scheidt 06 Jun '11

06 Jun '11

May be of interest. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Assoc for Practical & Prof Ethics <appe(a)indiana.edu> Date: Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 1:31 PM Subject: Ethical Inquiry through Video Game Play and Design: A Symposium To: APPE_NEWS(a)listserv.indiana.edu Ethical Inquiry through Video Game Play and Design: A Symposium Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics DePauw University October 10-12, 2011 A growing number of designers and critics have demonstrated that games can mediate ethical inquiry through the simulation of moral choice and consequence. This concept of games as models for moral problems has motivated a search for ethical criteria that might guide the design and analysis of video games. The symposium will consider the claims that video games might serve as a platform for ethical inquiry, that they offer a new means of investigating social relations between human beings, and that their interactive capabilities allow them to act as mirrors for self-examination. How do video games promote ethical positions? Can they enhance our ethical sensibility by simulating moral problems? Should simulated experience reinforce the ethical principles of real experience, or should it, as play, be allowed to transgress them? Invited Speakers Peter Molyneux has been creating video games for three decades, and invented the “god game” with Populous in 1989. As founder of Lionhead Studios, now a subsidiary of Microsoft Game Studios, he has developed a number of innovative and popular games that incorporate moral choice as a central aspect of play, including Black & White, Fable, and The Movies. Michael Abbott is Associate Professor of Theater at Wabash College, where he has led the effort to add the video game Portal to the core curriculum. He writes lively and informed commentary on video game culture on his blog, The Brainy Gamer (http://www.brainygamer.com/) Edward Castronova is Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University, where he established the Synthetic Worlds Initiative, a production team focused on creating online games to foster the teaching of political economy, history, and literature. His books include Exodus to the Virtual World and Synthetic Worlds. He blogs at Terra Nova (http://terranova.blogs.com) John Gosney is Faculty Liaison for Learning Technologies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where he also teaches literature and American studies courses using novel pedagogies integrating computer gaming. His publications include Beyond Reality: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming. Kathy Vrabeck has been a president at both Electronic Arts and Activision. She has also headed the digital division at Legendary Pictures, a partner in the production of films including The Dark Knight and Inception. She currently serves on the boards of Zeebo, Inc. and GeekChicDaily (http://www.geekchicdaily.com/) Call for Proposals We invite 250-word proposals for presentations addressing any ethical dimension of video games. We especially encourage perspectives on the potential for games to pose moral dilemmas and foster sharper ethical awareness. The proposal deadline is August 1, 2011. Seating and accommodations are limited. Registration is $75. Please direct inquires and proposals to Harry Brown at hbrown(a)depauw.edu. -- Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Candidate - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com CV: http://www.loisscheidt.com/cv.html Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com FOIA Counter-Narrative: Walker, Wisconsin, Madison, Maddow, Tea Party, Obama

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Learn to Use DiscoverText to Gather and Classify Electronic Text - Free Webinar Noon Tuesday EST
by stu＠texifter.com 06 Jun '11

06 Jun '11

Learn to Use DiscoverText to Gather and Classify Electronic Text Free Webinar Tuesday at 12:00 PM EST To register: [1]https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/137847889 This Webinar introduces new and existing DiscoverText users to the basic document ingest, search & code features, takes your questions, and demonstrates our newest tool, a machine-learning classifier that is currently in beta testing. This is also a chance to preview our "New Navigation" and advanced filters. DiscoverText's latest additions to our "Do it Yourself" platform can be easily trained to perform customized mood, sentiment and topic classification. Any custom classification scheme or topic model can be created and implemented by the user. Automatic classifications can then be set as document filters with adjustable thresholds. For those following the trajectory of this software, this new set of functionalities represents a leap forward. You can also generate tag clouds and drill into the most frequently occurring terms or use advanced search and use combinations of text and metadata filters to create "buckets" of text. Next week we are launching v2 of our tag cloud tool which will give users considerable flexibility to build the visualization that best represent their discoveries and inferences. The system makes it possible to capture, share and crowd source text data analysis in novel ways. For example, you can collect text content off Facebook, Twitter & YouTube, as well as other social media or RSS feeds. Dataset owners can assign their "peers" to coding tasks. It is simple to measure the reliability of two or more coder's choices. Crowd sourcing with 50 coders is no problem. A distinctive feature of DiscoverText and its free, open source pre-cursor CAT, is the ability to adjudicate coder choices for training purposes or to report validity by code, coder or project. This technique allows researchers to report validity scores (% valid) alongside reliability measures (Fleiss' Kappa). So, please join us Tuesday June 7 at 12:00 PM EST (Noon) for an interactive Webinar. Find out why sorting thousands of items from social media, email and electronic document repositories is easier than ever. Participants in the Webinar will be invited to become beta testers of the new classification application. ~Stu -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman [2]http://people.umass.edu/stu Editor, JITP [3]www.jitp.net Director, QDAP-UMass [4]http://www.umass.edu/qdap Founder and CEO, Texifter [5]http://www.texifter.com References 1. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/137847889 2. http://people.umass.edu/stu 3. http://www.jitp.net/ 4. http://www.umass.edu/qdap 5. http://www.texifter.com/

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Free Digital Edition - Per Mollerup's PowerNotes
by Ken Friedman 06 Jun '11

06 Jun '11

Dear Colleagues, The International Institute for Information Design and Swinburne University of Technology Faculty of Design have released a free digital edition of PowerNotes by Per Mollerup. In a world that suffers from cognitive overload, too much and too badly organized information, simplicity is more important than ever. PowerNotes presents simple, but powerful, principles for planning, design, and delivery of slide presentations. Download available at this URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/191214 Media release with description appears below. Ken Friedman Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | kenfriedman(a)groupwise.swin.edu.au | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design -- Improve presentations with PowerNotes Professor Per Mollerup has produced a guide to help presenters create professional looking slide presentations. PowerNotes covers the planning, design and delivery of a slide presentation and offers practical tips for improving presentations. "We've all endured mediocre visual presentations in classrooms, lectures and conferences with presenters delivering slide presentations that bear all the hallmarks of poor design thinking." Mollerup said. "The fact behind this sad state of affairs is that many professional lecturers and other speakers have never come to terms with slide presentations based on software like PowerPoint and Keynote. According to Mollerup, most presenters give presentations that don't make the most of the educational potential of the speech-plus-visuals format. "They give presentations where the visual part is not coordinated with the spoken part, in fact where the visual part is directly counterproductive to the spoken part. As a result, they don't present themselves and their subject to their best." Mollerup said that once you understand the rules, you can bend them. "Professional opera singers sometimes turn their back to the audience, sometimes lie down, or even eat, while singing. In the same way, skilled presenters occasionally bend some of the otherwise sensible recommendations presented in PowerNotes. That is their professional prerogative, earned by talent and practice, lots of practice. Everybody should learn the rules before breaking them." -- Per Mollerup is Professor of Communication Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. He has written a number of books on design including: Marks of Excellence, the history and taxonomy of Trademarks; Collapsibles, A Design Album of Space-Saving Objects and Wayshowing, A Guide to Environmental Signage, Principles and Practices.

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Reminder: Call for videos for the third issue of Audiovisual Thinking
by Inge Ejbye Sørensen 06 Jun '11

06 Jun '11

Reminder: Call for videos for the third issue of Audiovisual Thinking Please note that June 15th 2011 is the deadline of the call for videos for the third issue of the online journal Audiovisual Thinking (www.audiovisualthinking.org) the world's first journal of academic videos. We welcome videos on the theme of 'The real, the virtual and the digital' as well as Reflections, 'opinion’ or ‘reflective’ audiovisual pieces. What is Audiovisual Thinking? Audiovisual Thinking is a pioneering forum where academics, practitioners and educators can articulate, conceptualize and disseminate their research about audiovisuality and audiovisual culture through video. International in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, the purpose of Audiovisual Thinking is to develop and promote academic thinking in and about all aspects of audiovisuality and audiovisual culture. Advised by a board of leading academics and thinkers in the fields of audiovisuality, communication and the media and hosted by Copenhagen University, the journal seeks to set the standard for academic audiovisual essays now and in the future. Video submissions are welcome from all fields of study and, as one would expect, the main criteria for submissions are that the discussion and thinking are conveyed through audiovisual means. The third call for videos closes on June 15th 2011! For more information, watching academics videos and submitting your own, please visit the website www.audiovisualthinking.com or contact the editors: Inge (on behalf of the editorial board) inges(a)hum.ku.dk

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