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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Pragmatism And Meaning: Assessing The Message Of Star Trek: The Original Series, Anne Collins Smith, Owen M. Smith Nov 2011

Pragmatism And Meaning: Assessing The Message Of Star Trek: The Original Series, Anne Collins Smith, Owen M. Smith

Faculty Publications

The original Star Trek television series purported to depict a future in which such evils as sexism and racism do not exist, and intelligent beings from numerous planets live in a condition of peace and mutual benefit. As many scholars have observed, from a standpoint of contemporary theoretical analysis, Star Trek: The Original Series contains many elements that are inimical to the utopia it claims to depict and thus undermine its supposed message. A different perspective may be gained by drawing on the American pragmatist movement, in which the value of an idea is judged by its effectiveness, how it …


Visual Framing Of Patriotism And National Identity On The Covers Of Der Spiegel, Andrea Pyka, Scott B. Fosdick, William Tillinghast Oct 2011

Visual Framing Of Patriotism And National Identity On The Covers Of Der Spiegel, Andrea Pyka, Scott B. Fosdick, William Tillinghast

Faculty Publications

Patriotism in Germany has been a controversial issue since the Nazi era. Despite the fear and hesitations surrounding the idea of German pride and national identity, Der Spiegel, one of Germany's major national news magazines, showed an increasing visual presence of national identity symbols on its covers following key historical events: the building of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the adoption of the euro, and the 2006 World Cup.


Book Review Of Inside The Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History Of Star Makers, Fabricators, And Gossip Mongers, Scott B. Fosdick Oct 2011

Book Review Of Inside The Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History Of Star Makers, Fabricators, And Gossip Mongers, Scott B. Fosdick

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Creating A Supportive Culture For Online Teaching: A Case Study Of A Faculty Learning Community, Anne Marie Todd, Mei-Yan Lu Ph.D., Michael T. Miller Jul 2011

Creating A Supportive Culture For Online Teaching: A Case Study Of A Faculty Learning Community, Anne Marie Todd, Mei-Yan Lu Ph.D., Michael T. Miller

Faculty Publications

This case study describes the creation of a supportive culture for online teaching at a western university that was transitioning to a new learning management system. The case study highlighted the creation of a faculty learning community as one strategy to address the challenge of faculty working through a change process. The faculty learning community provided a space for the development of best practices in teaching, drawing from the pedagogical experiences of teachers from diverse disciplines. The learning community also provided a venue for expanding the technical knowledge level of faculty members with a range of comfort levels with varied …


Every Parent’S Worst Nightmare: Myths Of Child Abductions In Us News, Spring-Serenity Duvall, Leigh Moscowitz Apr 2011

Every Parent’S Worst Nightmare: Myths Of Child Abductions In Us News, Spring-Serenity Duvall, Leigh Moscowitz

Faculty Publications

Through a content analysis, this study seeks to uncover the predominant narrative themes centered on gender and class that shaped mainstream U.S. newspaper coverage of child kidnappings from 2000-2003. The abductions that dominated news coverage were neither random nor representative cases; clear patterns emerged in the kidnappings that garnered the most media attention. Though statistically rare, the news media disproportionally covered stories of young Caucasian girls being snatched from their middle-to-upper class homes by male strangers, manufacturing a nationwide epidemic. Our analysis reveals how gender and class were used to construct vulnerable girl victims and predatory male perpetrators. News narratives …


Copyright Ownership Of Online News: Cultivating A Transformation Ethos In America's Emerging Statutory Attribution Right, Edward L. Carter Mar 2011

Copyright Ownership Of Online News: Cultivating A Transformation Ethos In America's Emerging Statutory Attribution Right, Edward L. Carter

Faculty Publications

Several federal district courts in 2009 and 2010 interpreted a relatively obscure provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to grant a potentially broad right of attribution to owners of copyright in creative works. The statutory provision prohibits removal or alteration of copyright management information. The law gives reason for both hope and fear for news organizations. On one hand, an attribution requirement is seen by some in the news industry as relief from negative effects of technology, including online news aggregators. On the other hand, news organizations already have been sued under the copyright management provision for their conduct …


Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering Jan 2011

Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering

Faculty Publications

The notion of timing in humor is often mentioned as a very significant issue, and yet very little has been written about it. The paper reviews the scant literature on the subject and narrows down the definition of timing as comprising pauses and speech rate. The discussions of timing in the literature see it either as a speeding up or slowing down of speech rate. Using data collected from twenty joke performances, we show that speakers do not significantly raise or lower their speech rate at and around the punch line. The other common assumption is that punch lines are …


Resolutions And Their Incongruities: Further Thoughts On Logical Mechanism, Christian F. Hempelmann, Salvatore Attardo Jan 2011

Resolutions And Their Incongruities: Further Thoughts On Logical Mechanism, Christian F. Hempelmann, Salvatore Attardo

Faculty Publications

This paper is a contribution to the study of the resolution of incongruities in humor. We reject some criticisms of logical mechanisms and analyze three different types of incongruities in humorous texts: completely backgrounded, backgrounded, and foregrounded. Only the latter are addressed by logical mechanisms. We identify a mechanism of “incongruity shifting” which may be a candidate for “deep” logical mechanism (along the lines of “parallelism” in Attardo et al. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15: 1–44, 2002). We finally discuss the similarities between Oring's (Engaging humor, University of Illinois Press, 2003) “appropriate incongruity” theory and our approach, which …


“We Need A Showing Of All Hands”: Technological Utopianism In Make Magazine, Susan Currie Sivek Jan 2011

“We Need A Showing Of All Hands”: Technological Utopianism In Make Magazine, Susan Currie Sivek

Faculty Publications

Make magazine is a quarterly publication focused on do-it-yourself projects involving technology and innovation. The magazine also sponsors a biannual event, the Maker Faire, that brings “makers” together to share their knowledge. As a strategy for building audience loyalty and identification with the magazine, the Make products are skillfully crafted. However, they also invoke ideals such as environmentalism and nationalism in a potent mix that not only engages readers, but also represents an additional cultural demonstration of the phenomenon of technological utopianism.


"Fourth World" Values In A Spanish-Language Newspaper Serving An Immigrant Community, Richard J. Peltz-Steele Jan 2011

"Fourth World" Values In A Spanish-Language Newspaper Serving An Immigrant Community, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

This study operationalized the Four Worlds model for mass media values in a new context — that of a foreign-language newspaper serving a recent-immigrant community within a First World society, namely a Hispanic community in central Arkansas, in the United States. The study established baseline representations of previously described “First World” and “Fourth World” values in a mainstream central Arkansas newspaper, and in Cherokee and Koori newspapers. The study speculated that the central Arkansas Hispanic community exists with a measure of physical and cultural separation from mainstream society — arising from informal barriers such as socioecomomic status, residential neighborhoods, language, …


Saying Goodbye To Friends: Situation Comedy As Lived Experience, Anne Marie Todd Jan 2011

Saying Goodbye To Friends: Situation Comedy As Lived Experience, Anne Marie Todd

Faculty Publications

The series finale for NBC’s sitcom Friends was a media event, a two-hour broadcast promoted for months, and immediately followed by cast appearances on late night comedy shows and the next morning’s news shows. The show’s popularity demonstrated by fan response to the last episode positions the online and broadcast media discourse surrounding the finale as a rich cultural text for examining the influence of the modern sitcom on fans’ cultural identities and social communities. The Friends broadcast finale taken together with the online discussion of the show creates a site for the production and consumption of fan culture in …


Of Careers And Curricula Vitae: Losing Track Of Academic Professionalism, Kathleen F. Mcconnell Jan 2011

Of Careers And Curricula Vitae: Losing Track Of Academic Professionalism, Kathleen F. Mcconnell

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Labor Pains In The Academy, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D. Jan 2011

Labor Pains In The Academy, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This piece offers autoethnographic reflections on crossroads to which many academics come: whether to seek (or postpone or avoid) parenthood and when. The author deeply explores the personal (her own trajectories from daughter and sister to potential mother and from graduate student to full professor) in order to reflect on structural constraints associated with graduate education, the academic job market, and institutional policies and politics.


Free E-Books And Print Sales, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley Jan 2011

Free E-Books And Print Sales, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley

Faculty Publications

Digital technologies now enable books and other digital resources to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher that put free digital versions of eight of its print books on the Internet. The cost to put these eight books online was $940. Over a 10-week period, these books were downloaded 102,256 times and sales of these books increased 26%. Online sales increased at a much higher rate. Comparisons with historical book sales and sales of comparable titles indicate that that this increase may have been connected to the …