The digital public humanities: giving new arguments and new ways to argue

ABSTRACT

In response to the latest “crisis” in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and—especially—argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing “case for the humanities” by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud's theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud's theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources for meaning-making. Through the methods of DPH, we offer a response to the humanities “crisis” that activates the humanities’ already broad constituencies by giving resources for humanistic inquiry rather than seeking to capture adversaries. Our case study is Photogrammar, a DPH project for organizing, searching, and visualizing the New Deal and World War II era photographs funded by the U.S. federal government. The project forefronts visual, nonlinear, and interactive argumentation in order to engage publics in generative humanistic inquiry. By enlisting participants and sharing expertise, Photogrammar shows how humanities advocates can deepen attachments to the humanities and build broad constituencies of collaborators and allies.     

The crisis of higher education and the rhetorical vicissitudes of the common good

ABSTRACT

Over the course of this essay, I advance four interrelated claims. One, today's crisis in the humanities is real. Two, today's crisis in the humanities is also manufactured. Three, a jettisoned archaeogenealogy of civil society and its associated political principle of the common good will show that the crisis in the humanities that is both real and manufactured is indicative of a dramatic transformation of the common good. Four, turning the crisis around therefore will require humanists to rigorously interrogate their own investment in the common good as a single substantive idea or transcendental ideal and, on that radically unsettled ground, begin to articulate alternatives to the late neoliberal common sense, using the classroom as a training ground for others to do the same.     

To the humanities: what does communication studies give?

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as (1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; (2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, performative, and ethical implications of our communicative being, our being constituted by symbolic action and mediated exchange in ever-present yet always variant material and affective environments, spaces, and places; (3) a discipline emerging from rhetoric, one of the original liberal arts, yet developing in transdisciplinary ways, transforming the binary of humanities and sciences; (4) a tool for decolonizing knowledge(s); (5) a tool for exploring, critiquing, engaging, and creating with the new media of our digital lives together; (6) a long-standing yet ever inventive method and mode for public humanities; and (7) a praxis of resistance. These essays bring to light what studying communication offers the humanities: a plural, public, reflexive, and ever inventive enterprise for examining being human together on this planet.     

The humanities and their effect on engineering education

The author seeks to shed light on the current debate on what constitutes an appropriate education in the humanities and social sciences, to give some of its history and rationale, and to explain why there will and always should be such a debate. He then describes the humanities and social sciences and shows how they evolved fairly recently from philosophy. He discusses the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the education of engineers, to the engineering profession, and to the quality of life of individuals and society. Finally, he describes how the humanities and social science requirements are structured in most engineering curricula and makes recommendations for improvement     

Invectives against ignoramuses: Petrarch and the defense of humanist eloquence

ABSTRACT

Francesco Petrarch was a pioneering figure not only in the study of the humanities, but also in the defense of the humanities. A prolific writer and avid reader of the classics, particularly of the historians, rhetoricians, and poets, Petrarch cleared the way for humanistic studies in an age dominated by rigid scholasticism. Not surprisingly, then, Petrarch also had to defend himself against attacks from establishment elites who condemned the new studies as useless distractions from the pursuit of knowledge, by which they meant the study of syllogisms. I argue in this essay that Petrarch's invectives against his detractors offer a unique and communicative defense of the humanities that does not rely on the traditional recourse to civic humanism, a tradition that arose only subsequent to Petrarch. In his understanding of humanism, the value of humanistic studies is found in their capacity to produce a combination of humility and love—humility by expanding the circumference of our experience and exposing the limitations of our knowledge, and love by the capacity to create unity out of division. Furthermore, Petrarch defines the enduring opponent of the humanities as the scholastic ignoramus, a character that endures today.     

Some Dared Call It Torture: Cultural Resonance,Abu Ghraib,and a Selectively Echoing Press

This study draws upon research on “indexing” and “cascading activation” to explore U.S. political and news discourse surrounding the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Specifically, we systematically analyze White House, military, congressional, and news messages. In so doing, we incorporate scholarship on social identity theory to suggest why news media challenge certain White House frames but uncritically echo others. Our data demonstrate that White House frames were consistently challenged by Democrats in the opposing party, but that these competing congressional messages were largely absent in news coverage. These results challenge previous research on news coverage of Abu Ghraib. We discuss how these patterns align with and expand Entman's cascading activation model of press‐state relations, and consider the implications for future scholarship.     

Toward an Interaction-Centered Approach to Media Events: Mediated Public Intimacy on the Reality TV Show Big Brother

Scholarship on media events has rarely considered how interpersonal interactions between participants mobilize collective feelings of solidarity. Drawing on a study of Big Brother Israel, we demonstrate how several structural-interactional features of the show encourage viewers to shift from a position of bystanders to one of confidants and companions of the contestants. We analyze this shift through the lens of mediated “public intimacy”—the staging of exclusive interactions in front of a third party. The emergent sense of collective complicity affects everyday interactions between viewers and public discourse on social media. We conclude that beyond the public staging of self, it is the staging and concretization of social relations in media events that serves to reaffirm the collective's solidarity.     

Journalism in the Service of Communication

This article discusses the role of journalism in the disciplinary growth of the study of communication. It traces the initial role that journalism played in communication studies' development, considers how it has taken shape differently in some of the discipline's sub‐fields of inquiry, and charts how it has developed in different geographic regions. Addressing journalism's contemporary positioning around the world, the article argues that the study of communication could profit by acknowledging more fully journalism's centrality in helping keep communication studies a singular and vibrant field of academic inquiry.     

The Relation Between Television Exposure and Theory of Mind Among Preschoolers

This study explored the relation between preschoolers' television exposure and one important indicator of cognitive processing called theory of mind (ToM). A total of 107 preschoolers and their parents provided data on the preschoolers' television exposure (including both intentional viewing and exposure via background television), parent–child discussion of television, and preschoolers' ToM. The results indicated that preschoolers who were exposed to more background television and who had a television in their bedroom performed more poorly on ToM assessments compared with other children. Parent–child discussion of television was positively related to ToM performance, however. These results have implications for how we understand the effects of television on preschoolers.     

Integrating guanxi into technology acceptance: An empirical investigation of WeChat

Social influence is an important research topic in the technology acceptance literature, in particular for social media. Prior empirical studies have for the most part employed social influence theory to investigate user intentions to continue with social media, while culture driven theories have been neglected. Rather than using social influence theory, we introduced guanxi theory to explore how guanxi social mechanisms (or processes) influence Chinese users’ continuance intentions in WeChat. Specifically, we developed a model that examines the role of guanxi as manifested by renqing, mianzi and ganqing in perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment and continuance intention in WeChat. A survey research method was adopted to test the proposed hypotheses. This study found that ganqing has a positive impact on perceived usefulness and continuance intention. Mianzi exerts a negative effect on continuance intention but exhibits a positive effect on perceived usefulness. Renqing was found to have no significant impact on perceived usefulness and continuance intention. Our study advances the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by introducing guanxi-based constructs in a Chinese mobile social-messaging application context. Our study also offers alternative insights on guanxi-based social influence processes in the Chinese technology acceptance literature.     

Between campus and planet: toward a posthumanist paideia

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, humanities advocates have called for public support of liberal arts education, noting the vital contributions of the humanities to local, national, and global conversations. At the same time, systemic public problems have energized serial community discussions on campuses across and beyond the U.S.A. In the contexts of corporatized higher education and posthumanism, this essay suggests specific contributions rhetorical education can make in the service of human welfare and democratic life. We contribute a defense of rhetorical education by tracing its humanist foundations to revivify its promises for the global multiversity poised between campus and planet. We advance a posthumanist paideia, a rhetorical education that builds on the best of the humanist rhetorical tradition while including a plurality of historically distant and contemporary theories of rhetoric oriented toward feminist, antiracist, and posthumanist perspectives on citizenship, civic engagement, and “the public.” We advance a posthumanist paideia that takes campus public problems seriously and equips students with the collaborative habits and ethical communication practices necessary to respond to the calls of posthumanist democratic life. Our posthumanist paideia fosters the collaborative habits and practices of posthumanist public scholarship.     

Influence of Social Media Use on Discussion Network Heterogeneity and Civic Engagement: The Moderating Role of Personality Traits

Using original national survey data, we examine how social media use affects individuals' discussion network heterogeneity and their level of civic engagement. We also investigate the moderating role of personality traits (i.e., extraversion and openness to experiences) in this association. Results support the notion that use of social media contributes to heterogeneity of discussion networks and activities in civic life. More importantly, personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experiences were found to moderate the influence of social media on discussion network heterogeneity and civic participation, indicating that the contributing role of social media in increasing network heterogeneity and civic engagement is greater for introverted and less open individuals.     

Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square

Based on a survey of participants in Egypt's Tahrir Square protests, we demonstrate that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success. We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face‐to‐face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook.     

Social Media and the Activist Toolkit: User Agreements,Corporate Interests,and the Information Infrastructure of Modern Social Movements

The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere have been credited in part to the creative use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet the information policies of the firms behind social media can inhibit activists and empower authoritarian regimes. Analysis of Facebook's response to Egypt's “We Are All Khaled Said” group, YouTube's policy exemption for videos coming from Syria, Moroccan loyalist response to the online presence of atheists, and the activities of the Syrian Electronic Army illustrate how prohibitions on anonymity, community policing practices, campaigns from regime loyalists, and counterinsurgency tactics work against democracy advocates. These problems arise from the design and governance challenges facing large‐scale, revenue‐seeking social media enterprises.     

What is happening in the city? A case study for user-centred geovisualisation design

ABSTRACT

For citizens, being aware of what is happening in their urban surroundings becomes challenging as more information from diverse sources becomes available. In this paper, we describe our user-centered approach of designing an interactive tool making use of urban data visualisations to facilitate people’s decisions about social and cultural events. After gathering the needs of urban actors through formative user studies, we identified beneficial data types and collected a variety of data sets from publicly accessible online sources. For the aim of enabling casual exploration of events in the city, we designed a set of geovisualisation prototypes and designed a variety of evaluative user studies based on established geovisualisation techniques. The main aim here is to enable casual exploration of events in the city more than the intended search for specific events. We developed two prototypes that make use of two different geovisualisations to represent events: Prototype A uses common location markers, and prototype B uses a novel glyph design to visualize more types of data at a glance. We share the lessons learned from the results of our study, which will inform the design of geographical data visualisations for citizens.     

社区大学的科学课程———以文山社区大学为例

社区大学是台湾特有的一种成人教育设施。1997年由台大数学系教授、社会运动家黄武雄倡议,翌年获台北市政府支持,于文山区设立全台第一所社区大学——文山社区大学。其后台北市其他区及各县市相继成立,现全台共有83所。社区大学的课程分为学术、生活与艺能及社团等三大类,其中学术课程大多分为人文、社会、自然科学等三类。社区大学的自然科学课程,可视为科普的一环。本文以文山社区大学的自然科学课程为例,简介其课程、师资及学员,异日或许可供大陆成人教育界及科普界参考。     

ICANN's new ombudsman has a ‘community’ service mission

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has a new ombudsman's office. M. Scott Donahey, of Palo Alto, Calif., describes how the troubleshooter's office came about and how it will work.     

The Role of Identification and Perception of Just Outcome in Evoking Emotions in Narrative Persuasion

The question is addressed whether identification with a story character can evoke emotions that subsequently influence the audience's attitude. Study 1 (N = 145) manipulated identification and found it to influence the evoking of emotions as well as the audience's attitude. Study 2 (N = 115) examined whether emotions are evoked by the extent to which the story's outcome is perceived as just. The main character's culpability was manipulated thereby influencing the extent to which a bad ending was considered just. Mediation analyses attested to the greater importance of identification for evoking emotions compared to the perception of justice. The studies reveal the mediating role of emotions in narrative persuasion as well as how identification can evoke these emotions.     

The Dynamics of Audience Fragmentation: Public Attention in an Age of Digital Media

Audience fragmentation is often taken as evidence of social polarization. Yet the tools we use to study fragmentation provide limited information about how people allocate their attention across digital media. We offer a theoretical framework for understanding fragmentation and advocate for more audience‐centric studies. This approach is operationalized by applying network analysis metrics to Nielsen data on television and Internet use. We find extremely high levels of audience duplication across 236 media outlets, suggesting overlapping patterns of public attention rather than isolated groups of audience loyalists.     

Terminological (di) Similarities between Information Management and Knowledge Management: a Term Co-Occurrence Analysis

The terminological composition of information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM) is described in order to evidence how much do these areas overlap within the library and information sciences (LIS) space. A term co-occurrence analysis is conducted as from documents extracted from Web of Science, covering the period 1980–2015. To examine the terminological (di) similarity two approaches are applied: ‘overlay visualization? and ‘topic detection?. The percentage of terminological similarity oscillates between 24% and 38% according to the ‘overlay visualization? and ‘topic detection? techniques. At the core of the terminological intersection between IM and KM lies the study around processes, technologies and information systems. However, they are semantically two separate areas that tend to address similar dimensions -such as the managerial, educational and medical, but emphasizing different approach. Moreover, IM refers to the library and information organizations, highlighting the focus on personal information management, human information behavior, health information management, and information resource management. Oppositely, KM highlights the business, management and accounting realms in which topics like knowledge sharing and social networks, knowledge management strategies, and knowledge management projects are prevailing. These results would help to (re) define curricular contents of LIS programs as well as research and practical activities conducted by academicians and managers. This is the most comprehensive quantitative study in examining the epistemic borders between IM and KM in the LIS research. The authors consider that the methodological procedures here employed might be suitable to understand the boundaries between similar fields.