Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gen Zers And Millennials Are Still Big Fans Of Books – Even If They Don’T Call Themselves ‘Readers’, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Identifying with an activity is different from actually doing it. For example, 49% of Americans play video games, but only 10% identify as gamers. According to a recent survey we conducted, there’s also a small gap between reading activity and identity for younger readers: 61% of Generation Z and millennials have read a print book, e-book or audiobook in the past 12 months, but only 57% identify as readers.

And yet there was a puzzling aspect of our results: The 43% of Gen Z and millennials who didn’t identify as readers actually said they read more print books per month …

Gen Z And Millennials Have An Unlikely Love Affair With Their Local Libraries, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

A phone fixation may seem at odds with an attraction to books. But the latter may offer a much-needed reprieve from the former. In our recent study of American Gen Z and millennials, we discovered that 92% of them check social media daily; 25% of them check multiple times per hour. Yet in that same nationally representative study, we also found that Gen Z and millennials are still visiting libraries at a healthy clip, with 54% of Gen Zers and millennials trekking to their local library in 2022. Our findings reinforce 2017 data from the Pew Research Center, which showed …

Digital Public Library Ecosystem 2023, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Digital Public Library Ecosystem is the network of digital book collection and circulation specifically through public libraries. Digital book collection and circulation have never been more important than they are today. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans has read an ebook in the last 12 months. Audiobook listening is also high; nearly 1 in 4 Americans has listened to an audiobook in that same time period. Libraries are one way in which readers gain access to ebooks and audiobooks. Despite this, a holistic view of the digital library ecosystem is largely opaque. Three factors contribute to current confusion about the …

Gen Z And Millennials How They Use Public Libraries And Identify Through Media Use, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Gen Z and millennials have some surprising attitudes and behaviors regarding media consumption and library use. 54% of Gen Z and millennials visited a physical library within a twelve-month period. Libraries attract even Gen Z and millennials who don’t identify as readers. This report examines Gen Z and millennials' book-related behaviors (such as borrowing, buying, downloading and socializing) and and how media use shapes Gen Z and millennials' identity claims as Readers, Gamers, Fans and Writers. The report is intended for specialists such as librarians and book publishers, and broad public audiences.

Duets And Deadness, Josh Epstein

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Short-form essay on teaching The Waste Land in relation to sound and media.

Romanticism’S Fellow Creatures, Alastair Hunt, Ron Broglio, Katey Castellanos, Mario-Ortiz Robles

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This panel opens up innovative ways of thinking about Romanticism and “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” Over the last couple of decades, the crisis in human relations with animals has deteriorated to the point that it has become increasingly recognized as a constitutive part of the global environmental crisis. Like the climate crisis, the “animal crisis” originates with the emergence of the industrial form of capitalism in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century. Appreciation of this historical constellation can and should become the basis of a renewed Romantic animal studies. However, reading Romanticism as …

Building A Humanities-Focused Creative Industries Minor At Portland State University, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

"Building a Humanities-Centered Creative Industries Minor at Portland State University" is a presentation made by Kathi Inman Berens representing collective work by Berens, Dr. Rachel Noorda and Dr. Susan Kirtley (all of Portland State; see slide 2). Identifies opportunities for a humanities-focused minor in creative industries instruction in the U.S., using Ooligan Press of the PSU Book Publishing Master's program as a curricular model of experiential learning.

Special Issue Introduction: Writing Infrastructure, Sarah Read, Jordan Frith

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is the introduction to the second of two Communication and Design Quarterly special issues focused on conceptualizations of infrastructure. While there are more continuities than differences between the themes and methodologies of articles in the first and second issues, this second issue leans towards articles that have taken up infrastructure as it pertains to writing and rhetoric. This introduction frames the value of infrastructure as a metaphor for making visible how writing and rhetoric structure and enact much of our world, especially for writing pedagogy. In addition, this article concludes by introducing the six contributions in this issue.

The Many Moving Parts Behind Brandon Sanderson’S Record-Breaking Kickstarter Campaign, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The creation and fulfillment of Sanderson’s Kickstarter relies on a crack team managing massive amounts of data as well as all aspects of production. Sanderson had been running a multi-million-dollar, mid-sized publishing company well before his March 1, 2022 Kickstarter shot north of $28 million in two weeks, making it the biggest campaign—for now—in Kickstarter history.

Among The Bedouins, A Knife Is Never Just A Knife: On Nourishment, Betrayal, And Finding Family Histories, Diana Abu-Jaber

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is an essay about family relationships from the perspective of a fiction writer, written in the context of the author's book, Fencing with the King.

Publishing In The Pacific Northwest, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda, Nathalie Op De Beeck

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Overview of how 11 Pacific Northwest booksellers survived Covid, and continue to thrive after pandemic lockdowns have lifted. After many consumers shifted to online book buying, what techniques are these book stores using to attract and keep customers?

Music: Modernist Remediation And Technologies Of Listening, Josh Epstein

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Excerpt:
Ludwig van Beethoven, if not exactly a modernist, offers ample fodder for modern artists looking to defend – or expand – their turf. While producing City Lights (1928), Charlie Chaplin responded to the newly popular ‘talkies’ by proclaiming that ‘Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics’ (qtd. in Crafton 1999: 296).

Ebux Of Oers For Ptc: Student And Faculty Ebook User Experiences (Ebux) Of Open Educational Resources (Oers) For Professional And Technical Communication (Ptc), Henry Covey

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This report analyzes the digital/electronic textbook user experience (eBUX) of web-based open educational resources (OERs) for professional and technical communication (PTC). Data and information were gathered from students enrolled in introductory PTC courses (with IRB oversight and input from faculty and writing program directors) via online surveys (Google Forms), collaborative documents (Google Docs), remote interviews (Zoom), learning management system analytics (Desire2Learn), workshop documentation (pre-pandemic), and email correspondence. User research revealed issues of use and usability with web-based open-access PTC textbooks related to functional specifications, content requirements, interface and interaction design, information architecture, navigation, and aesthetics. The conclusion discusses the evolution …

Disaster Documentation Revisited The Evolving Damage Assessments Of Emergency Management In Oregon, Henry Covey

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This report revisits a previous case study focused on the computing machinery and design of communication that are employed at the local, county, regional, state, and federal levels in Oregon to collect, review, and publish damage assessments of disasters and other emergency events. Since the last report, emergency managers throughout Oregon have faced numerous disaster incidents, including the COVID-19 pandemic, ice storms, flooding, and some of the worst heat waves, drought conditions, and megafires on record, with the threat of more to come in the years ahead. After years of research and development, fueled by lessons learned from a catastrophic …

Book Readers Who Are Buccaneers And Buyers, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens, Chris Kenneally

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

These readers buy, subscribe to, and borrow books at higher rates than the general population. They engage at higher rates in fan fiction and discover new authors across multiple media, including streaming movies and television. These readers are also pirates.

Immersive Media and Books 2020 is the first study to capture data expressly about how people engage with books, video games, film, and TV. The final report focuses sharply on reader behavior across a wide range of demographic groups, based on surveys conducted before and during the pandemic.

Co-authors Dr. Rachel Noorda and Dr. Kathi Inman Berens probe especially for …

Ooligan Press: Building And Sustaining A Feminist Digital Humanities Lab At A R-2, Kathi Inman Berens, Abbey Gaterud, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

How can practitioners outside of R-1s afford to build a DH lab? How to connect a lab’s output to the communities it serves? This essay is a case study of Ooligan Press, a student-run trade press housed within a R-2, teaching-intensive university. Two elements make Ooligan Press distinctive as a DH lab. First, Ooligan is a not-for-profit business folded into a Master’s program in Book Publishing. Profits from sale of Ooligan Press books sustain the lab, which would collapse if its books were steadily unprofitable. Second, the essay uses the DH feminism “M.E.A.L.S.” framework to explain how Ooligan's horizontal management …

Book Review: Puritan Spirits In The Abolitionist Imagination, Elisabeth Ceppi

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book review; Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert. Published by the University of Chicago Press, 2020

Is Digital Humanities Adjuncting Infrastructurally Significant?, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay examines the infrastructural causes of digital humanities adjunct invisibility and proposes two remedies: to motivate DH adjunct self-identification by convening DH adjunct-specific prizes and bursaries; and what I call "microbenefactions": small actions by senior faculty that extend opportunities to adjuncts that cost little effort and can give adjuncts access to payment, prize-worthy work opportunities, or other benefits. The unspoken assumption is that DH skills are so much in demand that people with these skills are protected from adjuncting. As I interviewed seven DH adjuncts, their heterogeneous responses to standard questions reminded me that happy families are all alike; …

Women Of Color Faculty Reimagining Institutional Spaces During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Marie Lo, Patti Duncan, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

As women of color faculty who have experienced challenges associated with hostile work environments within predominantly white institutions, we consider the ways that working remotely during COVID-19 offers transformative possibilities for reimagining our relationship to the academy. We discuss our embodied responses to institutional spaces that often marginalize faculty of color; how university leadership may be reimagined through a blurring of gendered, racialized lines of “public” and “private” (or institutional and domestic) spaces; and the possibility of healing from the trauma associated with oppressive workplaces and institutional betrayals.

Cultivating “Indian Country”: Settler Imperialism And Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl, Marie Lo

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines Pioneer Girl as a critical juxtaposition of the contradictions of settler imperialism. Settler imperialism denotes how the logic and operations of settler colonialism rationalize modes of conquest that are not reducible to the acquisition of territory but are central to the consolidation of settler state security and power. The novel’s use of Little House on the Prairie to explore the Lien family’s exile and displacement as a result of US imperial violence in Southeast Asia juxtaposes the histories of settler colonialism with imperialism, illuminating how the narratives that justify western expansion are not strictly territorial imperatives. The …

How To Build A Supercomputer: U.S. Research Infrastructure And The Documents That Mitigate The Uncertainties Of Big Science, Sarah Read

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific research. A central question the study sought to answer was, “How does one build a new supercomputer?” One of the answers that emerged is that supercomputers are built by the genre assemblages of documents that mitigate financial, political, and technological uncertainties, and their attendant risks, that are inherent to technoscientific cutting-edge …

“Decolonize” E-Literature? On Weeding The E-Lit Garden, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Berens asks: Should the e-literature community include third-generation works in collections, syllabi, databases, prizes? A related question: do third-gen makers have a role in “decolonizing” e-literature? Who or what “colonizes” e-lit? E-literature, like earlier avant gardes, began as a coterie and has become a scholarly field. Using the comparison of a field versus a walled garden, the essay examines critiques of e-literature and variations on field definitions. It ends with two ideas about how to "decolonize" e-literature; about how equity and inclusion work in tandem with decolonization, but are not the same thing; and why decolonization efforts are urgent in …

“Keep Portland Weird”? Carnivalesque Elements In The Rebranding Of The Portland Book Festival, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Portland Book Festival, originally known as “Wordstock,” is the main annual literary event in Portland, Oregon. It is also an increasingly prominent literary festival in the United States. The branding shift from “Wordstock” to “Portland Book Festival” in 2018 unearths key tensions, hierarchies, subversions, and cultural changes in the communicative and social functions of the Festival. The essay identifies transactional and transformative aspects of the Festival. Bank of America’s festival-naming “title” sponsorship, the partnership of cultural heritage organizations, and Portland place branding offer transactional stability for the Festival, where parties give and get in kind. The Festival’s temporary affective …

Disaster Documentation: The Impact Of Oregon’S Evolving Damage Assessment Methodology For Emergency Declarations, Henry Covey

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This experience report focuses on the impact of Oregon’s evolving methodology for documenting and publishing data and information about damage from natural disasters and other emergencies. In tracing public damage assessment genre sets through organizational levels and user groups, the report (a) outlines the current processes by which data and information are generated and transferred and (b) connects the potential future damage assessment methodology to a larger paradigm shift in the state’s broader data-sharing approach.

Twenty-First Century Book Studies: The State Of The Discipline, Rachel Noorda, Stevie Marsden

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

During the 25th annual Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) conference in 2017, held at the University of Victoria, Canada, Stevie Marsden and Rachel Noorda moderated a workshop on the topic of “The Twenty-First Century Book.” Six scholars (Beth Driscoll, Per Henningsgaard, Simone Murray, DeNel Rehberg-Sedo, Simon Rowberry and Claire Squires), whose research is predominantly positioned within the twenty-first century, were invited to discuss the challenges and opportunities for studying the twenty-first century book. The 2017 SHARP conference, “Technologies of the Book”, seemed the perfect setting to hold this workshop. Not only did the conference theme …

Open City'S Abschied: Teju Cole, Gustav Mahler, And Elliptical Cosmopolitanism, Josh Epstein

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay addresses Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), a deconstructed bildungsroman preoccupied with Gustav Mahler’s late compositions. Building on Theodor Adorno’s account of Mahler, the essay argues that Cole positions Julius’s violent subjectivity in dialectical tension with the patterns of consumption that inform both his and Mahler’s intellectual landscapes. Previous scholarship, though attentive to Cole’s cosmopolitanism, has ignored the novel’s fixation on Mahler: a Jewish Bohemian-Austrian composer whose cosmopolitan sensibilities led him to appropriate a range of literary and musical sources, Western and Eastern. These sources, Adorno argued, are mediated in Mahler’s music as “pseudomorphs” that unravel their own pretenses …

Third Generation Electronic Literature And Artisanal Interfaces: Resistance In The Materials, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

What is the role of hand-crafted literary interfaces in a world of memes and bots? Kathi Inman Berens examines five recent books that address literary interfaces and applies pressure to the definition of "third generation electronic literature," exploring the role of code and intention in e-lit authorship.

The Discourse And Value Of Being An Independent Publisher, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Publishing did not have independents enter self-discourse until the 1960s when media conglomeration created a need to distinguish other publishers from this network of corporate giants. But rather than decimating the independent publishing landscape, the corporate conglomeration of book publishing has opened a space for independent publishers to thrive (Simon and McCarthy, 2009; Schiffrin, 2001; Hawthorne, 2014, 2016; Kogan 2007, 2010), in part because of the social currency that positioning themselves as independent in discourse affords. In order to analyze the use, purpose, and meaning of independent in publisher discourse, this article conducts a content analysis on mission statements of …

Dh Adjuncts: Social Justice And Care, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

It is not a question of whether or not adjuncts teach DH, but whether adjuncts’ DH pedagogy is infrastructurally visible. As digital humanities migrates from R-1s to small liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensive universities, community colleges, and precariously-funded local private institutions, DH is apt to be taught by adjunct faculty. Adjuncts comprise the majority of the non-tenure track humanities professoriate in the United States; 75.5% of humanities faculty are tenure-ineligible. DH is taught and learned by the most vulnerable people in higher education. A DH ethic of care should explicitly facilitate access and equity for them.

This essay examines strategies …

The Infrastructural Function: A Relational Theory Of Infrastructure For Writing Studies, Sarah Read

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article theorizes the term infrastructure as a framework for articulating how writing products, activities, and processes underwrite organizational life in technical organizations. While this term has appeared broadly in writing studies scholarship, it has not been systematically theorized there as it has been in other fields such as economics, computing, and information science. This article argues for a four-part framework that incorporates and builds on Star and Ruhleder’s relational theory of infrastructure. Fieldwork from a federally funded supercomputing center for scientific research operationalizes the theory for its contributions to writing studies scholarship and its applications for industry and writing …