Communication Commons^™

Letter From The Dean, Michael Vayda

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

No abstract provided.

Instructions For Authors, Discovery Editors

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

No abstract provided.

“Choking The Channel Of Public Information”: Re-Examination Of An Eighteenth-Century Warning About Copyright And Free Speech, Edward L. Carter

Faculty Publications

The U.S. Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft gave First Amendment importance to the topic of copyright history. In measuring whether Congress has altered the “traditional contours” of copyright such that First Amendment scrutiny must be applied, federal courts—including the Supreme Court in its 2011 Term case Golan v. Holder—must carefully examine the intertwined history of copyright and freedom of the press. The famous but misunderstood case of Donaldson v. Beckett in the British House of Lords in 1774 is an important piece of this history. In Donaldson, several lawyers, litigants, judges, and lords recognized the danger posed …

Towards Cloud Mobile Hybrid Application Generation Using Semantically Enriched Domain Specific Languages, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Ashwin Manjunatha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. Taking advantage of this computing landscape, however, has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space as well as the Cloud space.

This research attempts to introduce a disciplined methodology to develop Cloud-mobile hybrid applications by using a Domain Specific Language (DSL) centric approach to generate applications. A Cloud-mobile hybrid is an application that is split between a Cloud based back-end and …

Resident Identification Using Kinect Depth Image Data And Fuzzy Clustering Techniques, Tanvi Banerjee, James M. Keller, Marjorie Skubic

Kno.e.sis Publications

As a part of our passive fall risk assessment research in home environments, we present a method to identify older residents using features extracted from their gait information from a single depth camera. Depth images have been collected continuously for about eight months from several apartments at a senior housing facility. Shape descriptors such as bounding box information and image moments were extracted from silhouettes of the depth images. The features were then clustered using Possibilistic C Means for resident identification. This technology will allow researchers and health professionals to gather more information on the individual residents by filtering out …

An Information-Gathering Approach To Copyright Policy, Peter Dicola, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

For over a century and with increasing frequency, major controversies have erupted between large distributors of copyrighted works (song publishers, movie studios, record labels, book publishers, etc.) and makers of new technologies for experiencing those works (player piano manufacturers, VCR manufacturers, the creators of file sharing software, Google Books, etc.). Usually, the copyright owners and the technology firms reach a licensing deal-but not without some form of government intervention. Various institutions within the federal government have become involved in these disputes, using a variety of different mechanisms. This Article is a theoretical investigation of government intervention in these content-technology copyright …

Age, Attention, And Ots In A Constrained Vs Unconstrained Task, Courtney Leann Jensen

Theses and Dissertations--Rehabilitation Sciences

The discourse of older healthy adults is commonly described as lengthy and off-topic and thought to be associated with a general cognitive decline that occurs in healthy aging. This study investigated the overall decline in attention associated with healthy aging and its relationship to instances of off-topic speech (OTS) in a constrained and unconstrained language production task. Ninety cognitively healthy adults participated and comprised three age cohorts (40 – 75+). Participants completed cognitive measures of attention and two discourse tasks that included recounting personal events and describing a procedure. Older adults exhibited poorer scores on measures of selective and shifting …

Reassessing The Cultural Distance Between China And The United States As Perceived By Students From The Sino-American 1+2+1 Dual Degree Program, Cynthia Letts

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"As a result of the exponential growth of international commerce and academic exchange between Mainland China and the United States, this thesis examines the present-day validity of those Chinese and American cultural characteristics, such as practices and values, historically understood as defining cultural differences. Using Babiker's Cultural Distance Index (Babiker, Cox, & Miller, 1980) questionnaire (an institutionally established instrument since 1980), 45 Mainland Chinese student-sojourners conveyed their perceptions of cultural differences found in daily living. Chinese participants identified many cultural attributes that still affect the migrant's perceptions of difference. These attributes are language, food, education costs, and leisure activities. Participants …

Ingenium And The Navigation Metaphor: An Examination Of The Power Of Metaphor As A Manifestation Of Ingenium, Daniel M. Brasher

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Teaching Strategies To Improve Student Perceptions Of Academic Success: An Approach Toward Immediacy, Andra L. Ely

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"Teachers are integral portions of a student's ability to succeed in life. However, too often, many teachers do not take the time to develop the necessary skills to become great teachers in order to truly help their students to succeed in life after college. Therefore, I designed an instrument to measure the correlation between instructor immediacy values and students' perceptions of their success in communication classrooms in hopes to demonstrate that teaching behaviors and student success do in fact influence one another. The research question of this thesis was: Is there a relationship between instructor immediacy and student success as …

Indigenous Voice Closing The Gap And Putting Communication For Social Change Into Practice, Trevor Cullen, Michael Williams, Heather Stewart, Michelle Johnston, Gail Phillips, Pauline Mulligan, Leo Bowman, Michael Meadows

Research outputs 2012

Australian journalism schools are full of students who have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and who do not know their history. Journalism educators are illequipped to redress this imbalance as the large majority are themselves non-Indigenous and many have had little or no experience with the coverage of Indigenous issues. Such a situation calls for educational approaches that can overcome these disadvantages and empower journalism graduates to move beyond the stereotypes that characterise the representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media. This paper will explore three different courses in three Australian Tertiary Journalism Education Institutions who …

Safety Vs Credibility: West Papua Media And The Challenge Of Protecting Sources In Dangerous Places, Kayt Davies

Research outputs 2012

West Papua Media (WPM) is an innovative media outlet established in 2007 in response to the ongoing human rights crisis in the Indonesian provinces that self-identify as West Papua. The context of its establishment included rising hope about the potential of citizen media to empower repressed publics, complaints from mainstream media about the difficulty of establishing the credibility of reports emerging from the provinces, a ban on foreign media, and political moves by Australia to prioritise its relationship with the Indonesian government over demanding an end to oppressive military behaviour in West Papua. This article documents the strategies WPM has …

Digital Games In Journalism Education, Evaluating A Police And Journalism Joint Training Initiative, Kayt Davies

Research outputs 2012

In early 2010, the Edith Cowan University (ECU) journalism programme and the Western Australia Police Academy Detective Training School launched a novel collaboration that involved running joint training days, in which a ‘media pack’ of journalism students interview trainee detectives about mock crimes they have been tasked with investigating. The training improved the trainee journalists’ and detectives’ understanding about the constraints the other parties face. It also made them more confident about their ability to elicit and convey accurate information, and more willing to attempt to do so than before the training.  This article presents a description of the training …

Nature Is Ordinary Too: Raymond Williams As The Founder Of Ecocultural Studies, Rodney Giblett

Research outputs 2012

In a recent article in Cultural Studies, Jennifer Daryl Slack called for the jettisoning of ecocultural studies as an add-on to Cultural Studies and the revitalizing of Cultural Studies with the eco as integral to it. One way I propose of doing so in this article is to revalue and re-establish the beginnings of Cultural Studies, and of ecocultural studies, in the work of Raymond Williams in which both were integral to the other. I call Williams both a founder of Cultural Studies and the founder of ecocriticism and ecocultural studies, though of course he did not use these terms, …

Communication Effectiveness And The Emerald Ash Borer Mitigation Campaign, Jonathon Heide

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Environmental risk communication is scrutinized by several research fields including, as Herndl and Brown (1996) show, technical communications. This technical communications thesis rhetorically analyses how large and small government agencies in the State of Minnesota communicate a specific environmental risk: emerald ash borer (EAB). EAB is an insect native to Asia and arrived in Detroit on a cargo ship sometime in the 1990s (Cappaert 2005, 153; Poland 2011, 46). By 2012, it spread to the 15 states and two Canadian provinces (USDA--APHIS 2012). EAB's life cycle will causes tree decline in Minnesota, the state with the most ash (MNDNR 2012). …

Internal Communication In Ireland Before And During The Economic Recession From The Perspective Of Communication Practice, Technology, And Ethics, Laoise O'Murchú

Doctoral

Internal communication in Ireland from the ‘celtic tiger’ era through to the economic
recession from the perspective of: communication practice, technology and ethics.
This thesis examines the practice of internal communication in Irish public and
private sector organisations during 2007/8 and 2010. This period spans the end of
Ireland’s ‘celtic tiger’ economy and the development of a major recession. All the
case study organisations have been affected by the credit crunch and are experiencing
economic, financial and ethical challenges.
The practices of internal communication in Ireland has evaded in depth academic
examination in communications literature. Therefore, the contribution to knowledge …

Thin Is In: A Content Analysis Of Images In Women's Magazines From 2009-2011, Jennifer Kate Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many research studies have shown that women constantly compare themselves to the models they see featured in women's magazines, and in turn, develop body image issues, negative mood changes and even eating disorders. The majority of findings show that women often develop these serious side-effects because they are bombarded with images of mostly thin models. Yet editors of women's magazines continue to choose women much smaller, in most cases at least six times smaller, than the average sized American women to feature. It is very unusual to see fashion spread in a women's magazine featuring a model close to the …

Overcoming Cognitive And Motivational Barriers To Media Literacy: A Dual-Process Approach, Erica Lynn Rosenthal

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In today's fast-paced, hyper-mediated society, the ability to balance accuracy and efficiency is essential. Media literacy educational programs have arisen to meet this need and proliferated in recent years. Although the practice of media literacy is thriving, its underlying mechanisms are poorly understood and evidence of effectiveness is mixed (e.g., Bergsma & Carney, 2008). A social psychological perspective has the potential to illuminate previously overlooked variables and inform research and practice in this growing field. In particular, whereas media literacy efforts typically emphasize thorough processing of media messages, dual-process theories of persuasion (e.g., Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Petty & Cacioppo, …

Editor's Introduction: Playing For Keeps: Games And Cultural Resistance [Special Issue], Marc A. Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

This edition is as much about Game Studies as it about the games being studied. At its heart there are really two impulses behind the collection of critical thought we have been fortunate enough to gather for this issue of Reconstruction. First, there is the sense that games can’t do anything. Second, there is the sense that games don’t do anything. Their origin (and the underlying biases) makes these sentiments particularly intriguing. In the simplest terms, these premises delineate competing camps, as well. Roger Ebert notoriously asserts that video games will never be art (Ebert). Similarly, and yet quite differently, …

An Interview With Francisco Ortega, Creator Of Crossing The Bridge, Observance: The Board Game, And H1-B: The Board Game, Marc Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Facebooking In Distance Education: Constructing Virtual Communities Of Practice, Virginia M. Tucker

English Faculty Publications

The growth of distance education warrants a closer look at how virtual communities of practice form in asynchronous online classrooms. Prior studies have sought to identify a process to virtual community formation, which may vary depending upon the media used for collaboration. This microstudy examines how one student group in a distance writing course used the popular social media site Facebook to construct community and whether the stages of virtual community development were observed in this setting. Findings suggest that revisions might be made to our current understanding of the process of building virtual community within small groups. “Othering” and …

Negotiating Forgiveness In Nonvoluntary Family Relationships, Kristen Carr, Tiffany R. Wang

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

This study examined the ways in which individuals communicatively negotiate the process of forgiveness in nonvoluntary (family) relationships. Drawing from relational dialectics theory (RDT) as well as other dialogic perspectives on forgiveness (e.g., Waldron & Kelley, 2008), we examined the complexity of communicating forgiveness in nonvoluntary relationships. Participants’ experiences supported the idea that forgiveness is an ongoing process of communicative negotiations between and among family members. Consistent with previous research, participants also noted that they generally did not explicitly verbalize forgiveness of a family member. Ultimately, the degree to which participants judged their forgiveness as successful often depended on whether …

Jour 4120/6120: Advanced Reporting (Syllabus), Thomas J. Hrach

Journalism and Strategic Media Syllabi Archive

Course Description: Analyzing and writing news reports about government, courts, energy, economy, taxes, education, environment, medicine and science; emphasis on relationship between current issues and public’s need to be informed; topics vital to large urban society.

Jour 1700: Survey Of Mass Communication (Syllabus), Candy Justice

Journalism and Strategic Media Syllabi Archive

Course Description: Social background, scope, functions and organization of modern communication media, attention to all major mass communication media; philosophy and goals of modern journalism; impact on governmental, social and economic systems.

Three Interdisciplinary Studies On It Outsourcing, Sonia Gantman Vilvovsky

2012

This dissertation provides interdisciplinary insights into the role of client's internal collaborative experience in managing communication during a complex outsourced project, building a quality client-vendor relationship and ultimately achieving success in the project. Each of the three studies in this dissertation identifies a gap in existing scholarship and proposes an interdisciplinary research agenda.

The first essay advances the development of the public sector IT outsourcing (ITO) inquiry by consolidating the existing research into an analytical framework and validating a part of the framework with rich qualitative data collected from collaborative initiatives of public safety agencies ("Public Safety Networks", or PSN). …

Ironic Advertising: Theory, Evidence And Practice, Ekin Pehlivan Yalcin

2012

Irony is one mechanism that advertisers use to attract consumer attention. Although ironic advertising (IA) is utilized in the mass media, it has received surprisingly little conceptual or empirical attention from marketing scholars. Perhaps one reason for this is that in marketing irony has been viewed primarily from a postmodern perspective. This is in marked contrast to psycholinguists where the phenomenon is approached from a more ecumenical, realist point of view. This dissertation is based on the premise that a realist approach to ironic advertising would produce insights for both marketing theory and practice.

This dissertation comprises of three papers …

Speaking Ill Of The Dead: Anonymity And Communication About Suicide On Mydeathspace.Com, Lynette G. Leonard, Paige W. Toller

Communication Faculty Publications

From birth to death, many individuals chronicle their lives online through blogs, pictures, games, Web sites, and social networks. Online spaces, created by the living about the dead, provide a glimpse into often invisible or silent grieving practices. To investigate the role computer-mediated communication (CMC) plays in influencing communication surrounding the often private and taboo topic of suicide, we analyzed the comments sections of MyDeathSpace.com. Our results suggest both a breaking down of social taboos (speaking ill of the dead) and a reaffirming of strict social norms (enforcing a narrow range of acceptable presentation of identity and purpose in life), …

Intellectual Property Rights (Ipr) Disputes In Cyberspace: U.S. Hegemony And Chinese Resistance, Dexin Tian, Chin-Chung Chao

Communication Faculty Publications

This paper aims at explicating the hegemonic pressure from the U.S. side and the constant resistance from the Chinese side during the U.S.-China IPR disputes in the cyberspace. The theory of hegemony and extended literature review reveal that during the U.S.-China IPR disputes in cyberspace, the dominant U.S. power has shaped the IPR world order so effectively for its own interests that China as a disadvantaged country has been included, albeit with reservations, in the broad consent of the U.S. hegemonic sphere of influence. This study has also demonstrated significant theoretical and practical implications.

An Analysis Of The Importance Of Evaluation In Campaigns, And The Use Of Social Media And Public Relations For Non-Profit Organisations, David Crowley

Theses

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgements are wrong. Only racists make them ”.

Elie Wiesel (a writer, professor, and political activist) (Wiesel).

In recent months, events occurring in sport involving Luis Suarez, John Terry and Michel Morganella (Swiss athlete sent home from Swiss Olympic team after a racist tweet) have drawn attention to the continual issue of racism in sport and its stubborn refusal to listen to the calls of countless progressive campaigns. Irish sport seems to not be exempt from racist behaviours, such as Eamon Zayed, Lee Chin both suffered abuse on …

Competing Discourses Surrounding Primary Caregivers Of Hospice Patients, Paul Kozar

Communication Theses - Archive

The aging of the baby boomer generation has resulted in dynamic growth in end-of-life care. In the year 2030, 22% of Americans will be over the age of 65. Given this projection and the lack of communication research based practices for end-of life care, this study is a contribution that helps facilitate the layperson and health care professional's awareness of end-of-life communication. The researcher adopted relational dialectical theory to examine the discourse of twenty primary caregivers of hospice patients. The research questions guiding the study were what competing discourses do primary caregivers experience during end-of-life care and how do caregivers …