Abstract: In September 1980 the inaugural issue of the Apple II enthusiast magazine Softalk opened with a curious declaration from its thirty-nine-year-old female editor, Margot Comstock Tommervik: "Softalk is not a programming magazine."1 It is the sort of statement we might easily overlook if we were flipping through the magazine today, admiring Softalk's hopelessly homebrewed advertisements, fervent game reviews, breathless Apple enthusiasm, and other forms of nostalgia-inducing archival content. But for many microcomputer owners in 1980, Tommervik's pitch for a computer magazine that was not a programming magazine likely felt refreshing and expansive—if only because such a thing had never existed.Since 1975, when the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: To be a socialist was to be a reader. "Who of us," asked a writer in 1898 for the American socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, "does not trace their own conversion to printed words that have all at once roused him from apathy and heartlessness and have given us new, soul-stirring hopes'"1 Indeed, when the newspaper published a 1914 pamphlet of its readership titled Who's Who in Socialist America, a full 74 percent of respondents attributed their own socialist conversion to the extensive reading of books, newspapers, and pamphlets.2 Though describing America's socialist reading public, the above remarks could just as easily have been written for a German, Russian, or Mexican audience, for in the minds of many ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Notions of governmental information should not be taken for granted. Such ideas should rather be characterized by conflicts and negotiations. What was once perceived as a plausible argument might be an impossible stance today. In 1972, for instance, the Swedish economic psychology scholar Kjell Nowak, along with some colleagues, argued that information provided by governmental agencies for citizens should be "controversial and conflict enhancing."1 This type of information, according to them, would stir up emotions and encourage citizens to engage in societal issues. Governmental information should hence not be neutral; such information would almost be equal to bad propaganda. This might seem an odd statement ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This article reports on the first part of a two-part study tracing the evolution of the ethnographic catalog of the Canadian Museum of History and its predecessors between 1879 and 2018. The study's overall objective is to analyze the social actions performed by the catalog and its historical precursors; the sociocultural needs, values, and forces that have shaped its development; and the particular understanding of Indigenous material culture as embodied knowledge the genre has communicated and perpetuated over time.1 In both parts of the study, we draw on insights from the field of rhetorical genre studies.For rhetorical genre theorists, genres are best understood as tools for carrying out various kinds of ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In October 2019 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the House Financial Services Committee for a hearing on the company's plan to launch a new digital currency called Libra. The hearing occasioned some of the most direct critiques of Facebook's position as a global technological hegemon, its data-collection and targeted ads–based business model, and its aspirations to replace or disrupt the fundamental mechanisms of governments. That a hearing over the plans to launch a digital currency not yet designed quickly became a much broader debate over the role of digital technology in economic and political life was best summed up by Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina, who told Zuckerberg ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This is not a book of facts, scientific knowledge, or scientific methods. Neither is it a set of instructions or principles dictating how to conduct web searches. Instead, The Joy of Search is a lively collection of snapshots from Dan Russell's daily search practice and observations. Holding the title of Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google for about thirteen years, Russell tells his search anecdotes from a user's perspective in the real-life setting just like everyone else's. Seventeen of the twenty chapters in the book are individual search stories in response to some clearly stated research questions. What Russell has done is document the path of each search he completed. By ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jacqueline Wernimont's Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media serves two main purposes. First, it analyzes the use of mathematics to mediate human behavior, and second, it examines how quantum media are not universal but rather take men (in particular, white Christian men) as their baseline. Literary or historical scholars interested in the history of quantum media will be interested in the book based purely on its subject matter, but the book is also particularly strong as an introduction to the problems inherent in data collection and as such is an essential book for students and scholars making their first forays into digital humanities.Wernimont succinctly defines quantum media as "media that count ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The most recently released volume of the nine-volume series The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture will likely serve as an excellent resource for scholars of print culture for years to come. The forty essays in the present volume, which is focused on print culture in the United States from that nation's colonial beginnings through its antebellum period, aim to provide "a people's history of popular print culture" (4). As such, the focus is on "imprints" in their many varied forms, that is, essentially anything a press might produce (5). The volume's authors contextualize reading cultures within their broader interaction with the written word, including, for example, oral performances and larger social ... Read More PubDate: 2020-06-19T00:00:00-05:00
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