Digital Commons Network^™

Ua19/16/1 Volleyball Media Information Guide, Wku Athletic Media Relations

WKU Administration Documents

Athletic media guide for volleyball team.

Ua42/1 Wku Winter Term, Wku Summer Sessions & Winter Term

WKU Administration Documents

Annual report of the WKU Winter Term giving a summery of course enrollments, college data, course section information and marketing efforts.

Ua42/3/2 Wku Glasgow Factbook, Wku Glasgow

WKU Administration Documents

WKU Glasgow factbook.

An Analysis Of The Structure And Evolution Of Networks, Guangying Hua

2011

As network research receives more and more attention from both academic researchers and practitioners, network analysis has become a fast growing field attracting many researchers from diverse fields such as physics, computer science, and sociology. This dissertation provides a review of theory and research on different real data sets from the network perspective. The focus is primarily on the structure and dynamics of social networks.

This dissertation is divided into three essays. The first essay examines a professional online community, and to the best of our knowledge, it is the first paper to address the social network of physicians. The …

Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill And The Racialization Of American Indian Identity, Casey R. Kelly

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

After publishing a controversial essay on 9/11, Professor Ward Churchill's scholarship and personal identity were subjected to a hostile public investigation. Evidence that Churchill had invented his American Indian identity created vehemence among many professors and tribal leaders who dismissed Churchill because he was not a “real Indian.” This essay examines the discourses of racial authenticity employed to distance Churchill from tribal communities and American Indian scholarship. Responses to Churchill's academic and ethnic self-identification have retrenched a racialized definition of tribal identity defined by a narrow concept of blood. Employing what I term blood-speak, Churchill's opponents harness a biological concept …

This Is Not A Love Story: A Semiotic Discourse Analysis Of Romantic Comedies, Stephanie Lynn Gomez

Theses Digitization Project

This study is an examination of the ideologies present in the highest-grossing romantic comedy from each year in the past decade. Because romantic comedies feature prominent romantic relationships, repeated exposure to romantic comedies may influence audiences' perceptions of what romantic relationships should be like. People who are exposed to media content depicting romantic relationships may rely on those portrayals when they are either considering beginning a new romantic relationship, or evaluating a current romantic relationship.

Taking A Deep Breadth: The Rhetorical Construction Of Solidarity In The American Labor Movement, William O'Shannon Murphy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the rhetorical fragments in three case studies of the American Labor Movement constituting movement members in solidarity. Using Kenneth Burke's discussion of rhetorical substance, this project explores the possibilities for developing deep and broad forms of solidarity within the American Labor Movement. Rhetorical fragments of the Industrial Workers of the World, the United Farm Workers, and contingent faculty unionization efforts are explored.

I argue Burke's ideas of substance and identification provide a powerful lens through which we can examine the solidary practices of social movements. Through the examination of the case studies mentioned, I demonstrate that solidarity …

Measuring Scholarly Metrics, Gordon R. Mitchell, Scott Church, Travis Bartosh, Getachew Dinku Godana, Rachel Stohr, Sarah Jones, Adam Knowlton

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The following chapters explore six contemporary metrics of scholarly authority (Journal Impact Factor, Web of Science citations, h-index, SCImago, article download usage data, university press book publication), considering each metric’s strengths and weaknesses as measurement tools, and speculating on the consequences their widespread utilization of each might mean for the field of Communication, the academy, and society. Leaving the task of a systematic meta-analysis of scholarly metrics for another day, this report instead is designed to work as an entry point for readers interested in how the advent of new digital measurement tools carry potential to compete with traditional gold …

Affective Labor And Governmental Policy: George W. Bush's New Freedom Commission On Mental Health, Kristin A. Swenson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

As affective labor is becoming more dominant in contemporary capitalism, the affect of the body politic is increasingly important. This article argues for a theory of the affective state apparatus to account for the state‟s role in governing the affect of the population. An analysis of George W. Bush‟s Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America reveals that an affective state apparatus functions to capture, constitute, and circulate the affects of the population. This article contends that an affective state apparatus operates through the very intimacies of our bodies in order to produce ever more efficient and productive …

Zaftig: A Magazine Prototype And Accompanying Business Plan, Alexandra Wagner Pence

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Currently, there is no voice or home for plus-sized women within the mainstream media. The media industry reflects and promotes an increasingly thin ideal, one that multiple studies have concluded is causing negatiVe self-perception and low self-esteem among young women nationwide. This is especially true for the full-figured woman, whom society tells that she is not skinny enough, and therefore not good enough. This thesis project sets out to prove the host of social benefits that could and would be offered as a result of the instatement of a mainstream women's interest magazine geared specifically towards young plus-sized women. To …

Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the field that investigates infectious brain diseases such as mad cow disease, the verbal and visual packaging of scientific visuals associated with identifying the agent, prion, its processes, and structure served the community ritual of establishing belief in a highly unorthodox phenomenon. Visual promotion fed into cultural expectations of single agents and simple processes, even though the actual agency and disease process have proven highly complex and perhaps unknowable.

Using Science Fiction To Teach Science Facts, Stephanie N. Putt

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Hugo Gernsback, the publisher of one of the first science fiction magazines and the man whom some people label as the godfather of modern science fiction, defined science fiction as "a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision" (cited in Westfahl, 1998, pp. 38-39). If science fiction truly includes scientific facts, it can have serious implications for the teaching of science to students, as well as implications for the general reader. Studies by Negrete and Lartigue, as well as by Stanhope, Cohen, and Conway, have provided evidence that information learned through narratives can be retained for a longer …

Communication Apprehension Vs. Social Phobia And Related Conditions A Correlational Study, Christine M. Donaldson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Of all social situations, public speaking is the most prevalent fear in both the general population and among social phobic individuals (Mannuzza, Schneier, Chapman, & Liebowitz, 1995; Stein, Walker, & Forde, 1996). The fear of public speaking is referred to as communication apprehension (CA) by members of the communication field; in other programs of study, this condition has been categorized and conceptualized in a wide variety of ways ranging from stage fright to reticence. Several scholarly fields including communication, social psychology, the health sciences and the social sciences, seek to find an explanation and effective intervention for this prevalent condition. …

Smart Health For Autism In Northwest Ohio Survey Summary [Slides], Louisa Ha, Lynne Elizabeth Hewitt, Linell Weinberg

School of Media and Communication Faculty Publications

Slides from a presentation given by Louisa Ha, Lynne Hewitt and Linell Weinberg in 2011.

Examining The Relationship Among Physical And Psychological Health, Parent And Peer Attachment, And Cyberbullying In Adolescents In Urban And Suburban Environments, Jemica Monique Carter

Wayne State University Dissertations

Cyberbullying is a new phenomenon that has received substantial attention via media. An extensive review of the literature revealed limited nursing research on this topic. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of cyberbullying on adolescents' physical (e.g., headache, stomachache, etc.) and psychosocial (e.g., self-esteem, depression, post traumatic stress syndrome, etc.) outcomes. Individuals who experience repeated traditional bullying are at increased risk for experiencing repeated incidents of cyberbullying. Research has shown that effects of cyberbullying may be more traumatic than traditional bullying because victims can be bullied 24 hours and 7 days a week, on and off …

Rhetorical Analysis Of Public Policy Rhetoric: Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act Of 2004 And 2010, Julie Ann Stella

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In this research, I employed content analysis using the constant comparative method to examine and comment on the rhetoric of public policy and its audiences of specialists and generalists in the context of participative government. I examined the specific case of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act (CNR) by comparing technical report texts from 2004 and 2010 to reveal and contrast their specialist and generalist features. Unique attributes of the rhetoric of public policy are discussed, particularly authorship and recursion. I organized the research findings into physical features, affective features, and cognitive features according to Carliner's framework of information design (2000). …

Considering The Perspective Of Emergency Management Professionals Regarding Radiological Response And School Resiliency, Ronald G. Edmond

Ed.D. Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to consider the perspective of emergency management professionals regarding need for a radiological response plan and its implications to school resiliency. This study utilizes a three-round, Modified Delphi Method to provide structure for the group process, elicit experts’ opinions, and build consensus regarding radiological response and school resiliency. The experts’ opinions are analyzed at the conclusion of each round and synthesized to create considerations for school systems for a school-system-based radiological-specific response plan. The recommendations align existing school system’s capabilities, roles and responsibilities with required emergency response actions necessary to protect the health and …

A Unified Framework Fro Managing Provenance Information In Translational Research, Satya S. Sahoo, Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, Priti Parikh, Todd Minning, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background

A critical aspect of the NIH Translational Research roadmap, which seeks to accelerate the delivery of "bench-side" discoveries to patient's "bedside," is the management of the provenance metadata that keeps track of the origin and history of data resources as they traverse the path from the bench to the bedside and back. A comprehensive provenance framework is essential for researchers to verify the quality of data, reproduce scientific results published in peer-reviewed literature, validate scientific process, and associate trust value with data and results. Traditional approaches to provenance management have focused on only partial sections of the translational research …

A Decade Of Research Exploring Biology And Communication, Justin P. Boren, Alice E. Veksler

Communication

The study of communication has come a long way since Aristotle's conceptualization of persuasion in Rhetoric from the 4th century B.C. Today, scholars conceptualize communication in much more comprehensive ways than did those Greek Aristotelian philosophers. Still, much of the discipline of communication focuses on the way that messages have an impact on individuals or societies. Since the late 1970s a small group of communication scholars, greatly influenced by their peers in other social-science disciplines (i.e., psychology) began to direct their attention to the way that communication influences and is influenced by processes in the human body. During the early …

Social Media At Academia's Periphery: Studying Multilingual Developmental Writers' Facebook Composing Strategies, Kevin Eric Depew

English Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the writing strategies second-language students use to compose on social media sites. These alternative and unconventional sites for learning provide language learners opportunities to acquire language by using multiple modalities to respond to various rhetorical situations. In comparison to these sites, academic writing contexts, particularly the developmental-writing course, impose monolingual norms and deficient identities on students. Where these courses articulate these language learners as possessing inadequate skills to perform well in mainstream writing courses, the students' social-media compositions demonstrate that these students have the potential to respond to communicative situations in rhetorically complex ways. This study …

Written In Black And White: A Content Analysis Of Newspaper Coverage Of The Desegregation Of Three Flagship Public Southern Universities, Michael Alexander Patronik

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to correlate agenda-setting effects of the press to newspaper coverage of public university desegregations in the southern United States in the early 1960s. Front-page news and editorial page content from the Atlanta Constitution, the Athens Banner-Herald and the Red & Black newspapers were analyzed for the 1961 desegregation of the University of Georgia. The Clarion-Ledger , the Oxford Eagle and The Mississippian newspapers were analyzed for the 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi. The Birmingham News, the Tuscaloosa News and the Crimson White newspapers were analyzed for the 1963 desegregation of the University …

Media Effects In Context, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

The media effects tradition occupies a hugely influential and dominant role within mainstream communications research. It is unquestionably the longest running tradition within the field of audience studies, spanning nearly its entire history, yet it continues to divide opinion, both methodologically and with regard to its fundamental approach towards the study of media audiences.  Its influence extends well beyond the academy, and the powerful influence exerted by its research agenda on public and political understanding of the impact of media is perhaps one of its most significant achievements.

The Obvious Invisibility Of The Relationship Between Technology And Social Values, Jamie P. Ross

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

We all too often assume that technology is the product of objective scientific research and that technology’s moral value lies in only the moral character of its user. To remove technology from a moral realm, we assume value and context neutrality. Yet the power of technology is a reflection of the values that exist in its developmental context. Technology’s moral realm is visible in the reciprocal relationship between culture and technology in the epidemiology of AIDS, clinical research and practice regarding heart disease, and DNA research. Cultural values decide what counts as a scientific question. When we look at the …

Instructions For Authors, Discovery Editors

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

No abstract provided.

Journal Impact Factor, Scott H. Church

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In a recent issue of Human Communication Research, Thomas Hugh Feeley notes, “journal impact rankings provide objective data for tenure, promotion, and, possibly, grant review committees on the quality of scholars’ work.” Though the metric is widely regarded as the conventional measure to assess the influence of a journal in both the social and physical sciences, many doubts regarding its effectiveness have been raised. This essay assesses the effectiveness of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as a scholarly metric. After first considering the metric's history and developing a working definition of JIF (part one), next I delineate its strengths and …

The Tyler Perry Effect Examining The Influence Of Black Media Images On The Black Identity, Nicole E. Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the influence of Tyler Perry‟s House of Payne and Meet the Browns on black viewers‟ racial identity, based on a survey of 145 members of four predominantly African American churches in the Central Florida area. Mirroring Allen, Dawson, and Brown‟s (1989) model of an African American racial belief system, this study proposed that both shows would positively influence three dimensions of the black identity including closeness to blacks, black separatism, and the belief in positive stereotypes about blacks, while negatively influencing the dimension that emphasizes negative stereotypes about blacks. Socioeconomic status and religiosity were also hypothesized to …

Mobile Application Adoption By Young Adults: A Social Network Perspective, David G. Taylor, Troy A. Voelker, Iryna Pentina

WCBT Faculty Publications

The use of mobile applications, defined as small programs that run on a mobile device and perform tasks ranging from banking to gaming and web browsing, is exploding. Within the past two years, the industry has grown from essentially nothing to a $2 billion marketplace, but adoption rates are still on the rise. Using network theory, this study examines how the adoption of mobile apps among young consumers is influenced by others in their social network. The results suggest that the likelihood of adoption and usage of mobile apps increases with their use by the consumer's strongest relationship partner. In …

Bereaved Parents' Experiences Of Supportive And Unsupportive Communication, Paige W. Toller

Communication Faculty Publications

This study examines bereaved parents' experiences of supportive and unsupportive communication using the optimal matching model of stress and social support (Cutrona & Russell, 1990). Analysis of the interviews revealed that parents described action-facilitating support as supportive, although information-giving was experienced as unsupportive. Regarding nurturant support, bereaved parents felt emotionally supported when family and friends were willing to talk about their deceased child. Parents also described network support as helping them cope with their grief. The results of this study indicate that listening, being present, and honoring the ongoing connection parents have with their deceased child are key ways …

Index Of Titles And Authors, Volumes 1-22

Basic Communication Course Annual

No abstract provided.

The Bison: 2011: Part 1, Howard University

Howard University Yearbooks

This digital object was funded in part through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The digitalization of this object was part of a collaborative effort with the Washington Research Library Consortium and George Washington University.