COMM610/Class notes

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  • Writing and the scholarly career
  • Prof. Goodnight
  • GFS 207

Contents

First meeting, July 6

  • Collabo project:
    • Identify venues of publication
    • Systematize tracking, reading
    • Create a "tool" to help the dept

Housekeeping

  • M,T 1-4pm
  • Each class will have writing, reporting, lecturing, workshopping
  • Goal: everyone sends an article to a journal on the last day of class

Reports

  • ~1 page
  • Thoughts on writing, publishing
  • Broader questions
    • Thinking about the flow: article, diss, book, tenure
    • Imagining an audience
    • Seeing oneself within a field, discipline, "future [academic] space"

Communication

  • Yes, it's a field.
  • A field in transition
    • Annenberg as fulcrum ;)
  • Many of the pillars of the field were 1950s mass-media products
  • 21st c. is not only a mass media age
  • What is the field of comm becoming?
    • And to whom?
  • Burden: learning the old lit, determining a new lit
  • "Method" unleashed sciences within univ
    • "Communication" as a multi-method inter-discipline

"Voice"

  • Most important thing a scholar can develop
  • "You have something to say and it matters"
  • Engaged with other scholars, others
  • Communicating importance
  • Common problem: myopia, no possibility for conversation

"Craft"

  • Technique
  • "Making things"
    • To "achieve" "goals"
  • Crafting knowledge and knowing
    • From sacred texts to natural world, technology
  • Craft == making arguments
    • "Justify a claim put into contention"
    • What is the claim? Sub-claims?
    • What should readers understand and why in this way?
    • Arguments to introduce, to procede, to conclude
    • Signaling, short-handing args
  • "Efficient in claims, fetching in approach"
  • Formal structure of argument: shapes, enables
  • Working with models: imitation, innovation, repetition, variation

Communication "in practice"

  • Intervention
  • Analysis
  • Like a voltmeter on a circuit

Ambiguity around Comm

  • In some places, Comm is under theater
  • UNC/Chapel Hill is a close ranking Comm program to Annenberg/USC
    • But cinema is within Comm
  • Hybrids, contacts
  • This contributes to the proliferation of journals
  • Universities always have overlap: Poli Sci, Socio, Psych, etc.

The changing library

  • Once research tools focused on physical materials, books, microfiche, etc.
  • USC today, all the books are on the 4th floor
  • Space used differently, requires different relationship

Communities

  • Niches, subgroups, within and across depts
  • Study, research groups to join and track

Core journals

Speech

  • Q J o Speech
  • Comm Monographs
  • 4 regional journals

Today in Comm

  • 149 journals
  • ISI Web of Knowledge
  • ISI Social and Behavioral Sciences

Publication, distribution

  • When is an article published?
  • Conference paper might be circulated (online, cd-rom) but still considered "unpublished"
  • Grad students once discouraged
    • Machinery of publication was more complex
    • Fewer outlets, more difficult preparation, editorial process
    • Grad students "protected", "free to explore"
  • Many more opportunities to publish scholarly books in Comm
    • In university press and in places like Sage, Routledge
  • Blogging is a reasonable activity
  • Increasing complexity, choice makes a difference

Selecting journals

  • Who is on the editorial board?
  • What topics have been big in the last few issues?
  • One weakness of being too ambitious is not actually getting the paper out the door
    • More important is to actually publish, pull the trigger

Query the editor in advance?

  • Better to catch a person face-to-face
  • Need to put context
  • In writing might be awkward

Norms for particular journal

  • Example: flow of footnotes, ration of primary to secondary material
  • Contra: term papers always short on "notes and quotes"
    • Can be up-ended by research strategy, efficiency
    • Assemble, process material
    • Better tools but much more information to confront

TODO

  • Select a paper for Goodnight to review
  • Bring a cluster of journals, publishers related to my interests
  • Acquire books
  • Contact William, Nickm, Whitney, Donovan, Beth, Josh, Wayne, Henry, Dmitri re: journals
  • Gregory Bateson, model of enduring Comm writing

July 12

Survey field of comm

  • Lacking in editor
  • Once a field was clear: journals amplified by books
  • Once a discipline was a container:
    • Experiment within a tower and be safely ignored

Disciplines evolving, changing

  • Because of globalization, shift in population
  • Speed with which we can assemble info has increased
  • Institutions must similarly evolve
    • "Red queen effect", "I have to run faster and faster just to stay in place" (Carroll)
  • Foresight of earlier faculty at USC
    • Globalization, digital, civic engagement

Org challenges at USC/ASC

  • Confusion
  • Hard to find out what's going on
  • Hard to know what, who fits where, when
  • System leads toward "dispersion"

How does this class fit?

  • Meeting for 6 weeks to discuss craft, voice
  • But may also understand the field better

"Great department"

  • Great people
  • Great univ
  • Diverse background, interests
  • All necessary, none guarantee
  • Lifespan is unpredictable

Readings for this week

  • Silverman, Huff
  • Both are normative
  • Can be practical reasoning? "It seems to me ..."
  • Two writers with great experience

Scholarship as a negotiation

  • Navigating between "too far", "not far enough"
  • In relation to the truth of what you've found, what you're exploring
  • Overall task: Make the turn toward communication (media, texts, discourse, etc.) compelling

Writing, re-writing

Work like hell to improve the draft for a targeted journal

"Conversational place"

  • Trying to please a journal editor
  • Need a "conversational place" with the state-of-the-art academic conversation

"Telling a story"

  • Performance
  • Double-voice to take the reader from spot-to-spot
    • Signalling to the reader, where they are, where they're going

"Reconstructing the data"

  • Reconstruction for presentation is an art, micro-art
  • Too much of the text, example - let it speak for itself - people wonder "when do we get to the point?"
  • Alternatively, "why am i reading all this theory? when does it matter?"
  • Success == sense of satisfaction, "there's a there there"

"Validity"

  • Inferences for a larger field of inquiry
  • More important in some areas than others

Define a field?

  • By journals
  • By publishers
  • By digital resources (from blogs to multimedia archives)

Professional opportunities in Comm

  • Job listings in Chron of Higher Ed
  • ASCJ grads do unusually well
    • In part because of the field
    • In part because of ASCJ

Silverman

Publishing for tenure and beyond

  • Goodnight's Deleuze-ian philosophy: repetition and difference
  • Categorizing publishing
  • In the past, primary problem was insufficient resources for publication
    • Production, storage, catalog
  • Today, primary problem is not producing but sorting
    • Sorting their destination
    • Organizing responses
    • Tracking the "multiple lives" of a piece of writing
    • Working with data

Book publishers

Univ Presses with good standing

  • "Holy grail"
  • Princeton, U of Chicago, UC
  • Target for a dissertation
  • Assume that the dissertation will be a book

Univ with series

  • "Gold"
  • Michigan State, UPenn, NYU
  • Specialized presses
  • Editors are members of the field
  • More particular peer review

Pro book publishers

  • Focus on academic series
  • Peer reviewed by people with academic credentials

Textbooks

  • Income supplement for young faculty
  • Good ones can make a good amount of money
  • Don't count nearly as much for tenure
  • Do you want to spend time doing it or not?
  • GTG: expects textbooks to make way for downloadable "suites"

General publishers

  • Popularize an idea
  • e.g. Psychology section in Borders, Self-help books
  • Don't count for tenure
  • Univ wants "impact", which this can do
    • But doesn't count for tenure review

Subsidy publishing

  • "Pay to play"
  • Think tanks, grant-based

Self publishing

  • For a company
  • Recently become more popular
  • Rapid release of small reports
    • From institutes
  • Low standing in tenure review

Notes on non-books

  • Books+
    • Digital archive
    • Discussion site

Variation within the fields

Some fields are "book fields", others "article fields"

  • Comm is hybrid, both books and articles

Scholarly articles + monographs

Monograph

  • 19th c term for free-standing essay
  • Typically longer but not necessarily
  • More or less interchangable with articles

ISI journals

  • Thought to be the core in Comm
  • See also: rankings
    • Based on citations

GTG's classic advice

  • Finish dissertation
  • 1 A, 2 B ranked publications before finishing

Core journals

  • Quarterly Journal of Speech
  • Communication Monographs
  • Communication Theory
  • Journal of Communicatoin

Regional journals

  • Communication Studies
    • Central states
  • Communication Quarterly
    • Eastern
  • Western Journal of Communication
    • Western states speech association
  • Southern Journal of Communication

Considerations

  • Journal editors like to publish readers
  • Check that you subscribe to the journal
  • Do you like it well enough to subscribe to it?
  • Regional journals have a style, locality

Journals by publishers that cater to the field

  • Routledge, Sage
    • Explosion of new journals
    • Enabled by digital publishing

Edited volumes

  • With a good press, will count positively to tenure
  • But not as much as a journal article (because of blind peer review)

Blind peer review, edited volumes, conference proceedings

  • Articles are anonymized by editor
  • Edited volumes are peer reviewed but not blind
  • Conference proceedings may be published and findable online
  • Some journals will not accept papers that have been published in proceedings
  • Benefits outweight the problems

If a conference publishes a proceedings

  • Find out your options
  • Who retains the copyright?
  • Not as highly valued as publications in tenure review

Don't be stingy with your ideas

  • Don't be afraid of sharing your thoughts at conferences
  • Give it away, talk about your work
  • Don't worry about people stealing your ideas
  • Doesn't work for everyone at every time

Other kinds of publishing

Book reviews

  • Good thing to do
  • Especially collected book review
    • 2 or 3 books on an emerging specialty
  • IJOC

Forum pieces

  • Announce a particular area
  • Anticipating new movements within a field

Columns in academic newsletters

Blogs

  • May be an informal space to work out new ideas
  • For others, it is a more formal, final space
  • Academic tenure value of blog is not known

Making plans

  • How much time do you have?
  • What are you working on?
  • What shape are they?
  • Developing material from one place
    • e.g. blog post becomes paper
  • What opportunities exist?
  • Be strategic

2, 2, 2

  • 2 new pieces being researched, written up
  • 2 being reviewed by a journal
  • 2 coming out

Selecting a journal

  • Which journals are most likely to be receptive?
  • Is the journal online-only? Or is there a paper edition?
  • Look at the "About us" page, notes from the editor
    • Review recent publications BY the editor
  • Google everyone on the editorial board
  • Review recent articles they've published
  • Look at word length, citation system
    • Screw-ups here can derail the project
    • One benefit of electronic publishing == less restrictions on length

First round of review

  • Reviewers prepare two letters
    • One to the author that is encouraging, constructive
    • One to the editor that doesn't mince words
  • Editor makes the final decision
    • Based on 3 reviews, 1 author
  • Editor reads more or less closely depending on response from reviewers
    • All negative, less
    • All positive, more closely for polish
    • Split, more critical to make a decision

Types of reviews

"Accept"

  • Article is appropriate to publication
  • Ed's assistant will check all of the citations
    • Worth checking, rechecking before sending
    • Easy to mix up sources, quotations, dead links
    • If assistant has a question, you can provide backup
  • Receive galleys
    • Page proof layout, read carefully
    • Grammar, punctuation, facts
    • With co-author, read from original to galleys
    • Cost penalties associated with changes

"Reject"

  • May be cruel, thoughtless
  • All kinds of reasons
    • Lacking significance
    • Quibbling with method
    • Need more data, different kinds of data
  • May also be a reject based on time, resources
    • This could be developed further but too much to do right now
  • Don't take rejection personally
    • Don't start email chain with the editor
    • Distance the value of the article from your own self-worth

"Revise and resubmit"

  • Majority of responses
    • Even when they want the article, they will ask for revisions
    • To see how much it can be improved
  • Neither accept nor reject
    • 1 love, 1 hate, 1 mas o menos
  • Don't feel down
  • Most important thing to read is the editor's letter
    • This will identify most crucial changes
  • Fix essay and respond to the reviewers
    • Praise the positive response
    • Respond specifically to the concerns of mas o menos
    • "Take on" the negative person, explain why they are wrong
  • Participating in an argument
    • Read across the reviews
    • Make corrections
    • Don't make unreasonable corrections
    • Make case for your decisions
    • Arguing within the piece, and within the process
    • New draft is an outcome of this process
  • Errors
    • Too terse, "we fixed abc"
    • Too extreme, personal, "how could you... ?"

Two kinds of R&R:

  • In another, editor will make decision alone upon revision
    • Good sign
    • "Here's your timeline"
  • In one, editor requests revision and commits to send out for further review
    • Less good sign
    • Have to judge the value of your time

How long to wait for a response?

  • Don't be shy
  • If you haven't heard anything in 6 weeks, OK to write
  • Editorial boards may be overworked

Stopping the process

  • Can't send an article to two journals
  • You can present material at a conference while it is in review
  • Courtesy is to respond to the negative feedback
    • Explain why
    • Indicate that you are moving on to a different journal
  • Try to find a journal with non-overlapping editorial board
  • Revise according to criticism from first journal

Writing is a way of concretizing thinking

  • Learn what you don't know as you try to say something
  • Writing is hermeneutic
  • Keep building
  • Writing is reflective

Writing is a habit of focus

  • Bringing thinking into focus through writing
Scope
  • Identifies the worth of your argument in terms of broad relevance
  • To gain scope, you give up precision
Precision
  • Grounded in specificity, control, granularity
  • Looking at specific materials, data
Trade off in articles
  • Want article to contribute to general discuss
  • Want to also have control as to how you will select, read, draw conclusions across particulars that you have

Particulars

  • What or who is it you want to speak to?
  • Temporal, timely-ness
  • Is this still relevant to readers?
Helpers
  • Generally you agree
  • Will be useful to support
Rivals
  • Generally you disagree
  • They disregard material you find relevant
  • They consider the same material but miss import aspects

Co-authorship

  • Fun
  • Productive
  • But important to have a personal, individual trajectory
  • Relationships can last a long time
  • Whoever has the manuscript: change it to make it better
    • Don't do minute status updates
  • Depth, breadth
    • Sometimes helpful to have one person with depth, another with breadth
    • Good ways to make links among areas
  • Valuable to observe different habits, habits of mind

Journals

Francesca found...

  • Some journals were very clear for subfields
    • e.g. Argumentation, Visual Communication
  • Talk and Text, interdisciplinary
    • If you're looking at publishing something interdisciplinary, helps to look at one from area A, B, and in between

Shoko found...

  • Liminalities, electronic performance studies journal
  • Including video, audio with comment, criticism
  • Finding limits, possibilities

Language-based journals

Semiotics

  • Good place for popular culture, discursive and visual codes, multi-modal communication
  • Semiotics of Internet is journal waiting to happen
  • "Critical discourse studies"
    • Language space for British cultural studies

Symbolic interaction

  • Closer to rhetoric
  • Burke
  • Chicago School sociology

Speech act theory

  • How we mean what we say
  • British sociology

Policy, law journals

  • Editors expect that you are submitting articles to multiple articles
  • You can leverage the offer from a lower journal and ask for expedited review to higher ranking journals
    • Some journals won't even look at the article until they've heard a request for expedited

Health communication journal

Cases in health comm in marketing

  • Very precise
  • Primarily single-company case studies
  • Practice-oriented

Journal of Health Communication

  • Focus on generalizability
  • External validity
  • Theory construct

New Media & Society

Intersection of methods

  • Cultural studies as well as social science

High quality work

  • Much of it published by grad students, junior faculty
  • "Emerging" scholars

Public Culture

  • Tended to publish more senior faculty
  • Status has moved from "cutting edge" to "standard"


TODO

  • Assignment #2: University Film and Video Association
  • Select target journal
  • Rework Routing for that journal
  • Contact advisors regarding list of publications, publishers
  • Carol Blair, et al. revised an article that included inappropriate comments from an unidentified reviewer
  • Acquire Deleuze on protocol
  • Acquire actor-network theory primer
  • The IEEE Annals of the History of Computing?
  • http://www.bogost.com/downloads/bogost_montfort_dac_2009.pdf

Jump offs

  • Possible future task: Locate blogs, sites of academic interest
  • HASTAC

July 19

Form of writing

Imminent form

  • Form adheres in the act, in the material doing
  • Structure that needs to be unfolded in order for a thing to complete itself
  • Form of a journal essay: Aristotle sez: beginning, middle, end.
  • Stick to it and be recognized as "scholarship"

Transcendent form

  • Locating an ideal, best, model piece of writing
  • Open form, models will never be the ideal but will suggest a way
  • What they say, how they say it is memorable
  • Something to aspire to
  • Always leads us on, asks us to think about the perfect, setting goals
  • May also be the product of intuition

Forms in flux

  • Ideal is in conflict with the norm
  • Need to shift, transform

Basic requirements

Must-haves

  • Grammar, spelling
  • Pristine notes, triple-check these
  • Make notes in context of each quote
    • GTG even suggests PDFing the notes in sequence

Title

  • Catchy
  • Keyterms
  • Colon
  • Hot and cool components

Abstract

  • Describe what you're going to do
  • Start: 1.5 pages
  • Finish: 4-5 sentences
  • Strike "I will...", "Generally speaking..."
  • Short, direct statement

Keywords

  • List of keywords
  • Test in advance on google scholar

Notes

  • Thanks
  • History of the essay
    • Previous versions published
    • Short
  • If co-authored, ID contact info

Outline

Introduction

  • Should be shorter than 3 pages
  • Will be re-written after the rest of the paper is done

Method

  • What you have, data
    • Carefully gathered
    • Within the field
    • Strong amount, representative
  • Treatment is true to the info and somewhat generalizable

Thesis, pivot

  • State the thesis
  • Pivot == signpost to establish expectations for the reader
    • "The essay proceeds to..."

Writing the content

  • Test your legibility: if you can follow the argument with subheads + 1st sentences, you're probably on good track
  • Developing resonance:

Breadcrumb trail

  • Signposting, repetition

Conclusion

  • Stands on its own
  • Don't over/understate the impact

Presentation

  • Fewer citations, 20-30
    • journal 50-60 citations
  • More experimental
    • Try new things out
  • Emphasis on what you say
    • Rather than how it is said
  • Oral presentation is pleasurable
    • Passion, curiosity
  • Don't have a "conference meatball"
    • Present different papers to each conference
  • "Settling a quarrel"
    • Reading a paper v. speaking off hand
    • Try to balance between the two
    • Some reading (precision)
    • Some speaking spontaneously (adaptation)
  • Purpose-directed communication
    • 10 minutes to get your point across

Stuckey's recommendations

  1. Why should I care? First paragraph
  2. State the "point" right up front
  3. Maintain authorial voice. Write "through" a quotation.
  4. Assume audience read the original text, no lengthy description
    1. Interpret literature according to your argument
  5. No weasel words ("thus", "however", "therefore"), no distance ("maybe"), no waffling
  6. Substantial, re-usable conclusion
  7. Make clear connections between sub-sections, keep people situated
  8. Get used to rejection. Remove defensive reactions. Reviewers' goal is to make you smarter.

Gunn's position

  • Multiple different scholarly social norms
  • Review process reveals the conflict of these various habitas

Livingstone's article

  • 17 young people
  • Interviews
  • Analysis of their online output, SNS profiles
  • Who does she cite?
    • Top people in social theory
  • Rather than setting up a methodology section

Haskins' article

  • Last / first
  • Finish up a thought in the last sentence of a para, pick it up in the first sentence of the next
  • Not necessarily heavyweight thesis statements
  • But carrying forward the flow

Finding a model article

  • Look at the target journal
  • Find an essay "in the ballpark"
  • Won't be a perfect model nor an ideal
  • Process of long-term accumulation of models

Research protocol

Write some notes for GTG

  • Where you go
  • Why
  • In what sequence
  • Primary, secondary sources
  • How to refine
  • Should be a useful exercise, not homework
  • Something shareable to other students

Jump offs

  • Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses

July 20

Agenda:

  • Research, labs, libraries, laptops
  • Journals, identify, target
  • Protocols of research, model, assembling, ID primary/secondary resources
  • Discussion of publishing houses delayed

Research amid change

  • What matters?
  • What to study?
  • What will matter to journal editors?
  • How to do research in unstable times?
  • "Bets" on topics, time, risk
  • Annenberg was a "mass comm" department
    • Now we're working in "niche comm" areas
    • How can theories be adapted, tested?

Rennaissance in public speaking

  • Once thought through pamphleteering, public speech, pres speech
  • Internet comm returns us to the area of public speaking
  • Moving from framed product of mass media to sites of public speaking
    • Preserved, duplicated, appropriated, manipulated

Visual comm

  • Iconic photography, representing the real
  • Studying a photo that stands for a whole class of photos
  • Related to mass comm, newspaper, 1 image abov the fold
  • Now galleries of images on news sites, interactive
    • Photoshop

Bounded study

  • Tending to universalize our theories
  • Enabled by air travel, international comm
    • Diplomacy, business
  • Carrying spaces, world-fragments from place to place
    • Diasporic life
    • No longer the sole province of people forced to move
  • Meaning of "extended" family

Writing habits

  • Same time, space each day
  • Plan what to do the night before
  • Spend a little time each day instead of big chunks
  • Use checklist in the Huff book, p156-7
  • Revise backwards, ensure that the paragraphs "perform independently"

Facing the blank page

  • Free writing
  • Dumping quotes from secondary sources
  • Build bank of quotations, citations
    • Tag them with keyterms (location), subterms (particular area of arg)
  • Printing, cutting, pasting, mapping w markers, stickies
  • Building a situation in which you are prep to write

Time constraints, efficiency

  • Comm is a vast field
  • Interests are time-driven, legacy
  • Moving from one thing to a collateral area
  • New manifestations of comm concerns in new spaces, different ways
    • Not the ivory tower, now popular practices drive acad research
  • Theory, legacy over momentary pop interests
    • E.g. an article about Ally McBeal may be hard to read
  • Stewardship, preservation, building archives
    • Ethical, moral commitment, responsibility to steward?

Reference materials

Encyclopedic reference materials

  • International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences
    • Strong, definitive reference for social science concepts
    • 3 editions (30s, 60s, 90s)
      • 1930s ed is a "classic", 13 volumes
  • Fellowships at the Huntington (post-quals)
  • Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
  • Wikipedia as a search tool

Keyword searches

  • Questia databank
  • Multiply research power across different sources
    • Creating codex of keywords
  • Limited context in keyword searching

Electronic journals

  • Using USC libraries gateway
  • Jstar
    • Draws together journals from specifc fields
  • Google Scholar Search
    • Tricky to control the search, a "sifting matter"
    • Using "related items" to feel your way through a field
    • Paying attention to number of citations
  • Citation Indeces
    • Social Science Citation Index
    • Arts and Humanities Citation Index
    • Located in the Medical School search engine (open to all stds)

Primary literature

  • Case by case
  • Work with texts, institutions, controversies, debates
  • Problems:
    • Volume
    • Assessing quality
    • Retrieving, storing, archiving material
  • New methods for working through digital materials
    • Semi-autonomous software assistants
    • Building new research tools

PAIS

  • Gov't hearings, policy studies
  • Emerging issues controversies
  • Narrow, efficient index

Congressional Quarterly (CQ Library)

National journal

  • Week-by-week

Google Trends

  • Timelines, dates
  • Skew toward info available on the web at that moment

Governemtn materials

  • Lexis Nexis

Interaction history

  • Archiving online discussion
    • Expressive discourses
  • Needed tool: archving reflexive speech

Jump offs

Todo

  • Research strategy, protocol
  • Tools

July 26

  • New mentorship program?
    • Someone more senior than a 2nd year buddy?
    • 3rd yr student?
  • Conferences, round 2

Master calendar?

  • URLs to capture the various calendars, events
  • Is there a master calendar? Who owns it?
  • Planning to expand the graduate student website
  • Appoint a "lurker"?
  • Fwding address that goes online?
  • Can we get an ASCJ server?
    • Even if it is not publicly accessible?
  • Research team meetings?

Review

  • Thorough
  • Helpful
  • Honest

Making an argument in Communication

  • What kinds of arguments appear when we're making statements about communication
  • To whom is your arg addressed?
    • Primary audience: yourself + your friends
    • Secondary audience: your field, discipline
    • Wider audience: Through the university, out to the world

Teaching argument

  • How do you introduce methods in ways that facilitate dialog with undergrads rather than create a division between under+grad stds?
  • Modeling

What does it mean to be an academic, scholar?

  • In this time, place
  • These topics
  • Why should I spend my time doing it?
  • Why should ppl invest in getting the work done?
  • What does it mean to be a university citizen?
    • Being a grad student
    • Earning a degree
    • Becoming faculty
  • What should you think about that's not happening in classes?

Gaff, The Disconnect between Graduate Education and the Realities of Faculty Work: A Review of Recent Research

  • http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-su02/le-su02feature.cfm
  • GTG says that they try to make the information available on the website
    • Mututal interest in making this info knwon
  • Some institutions try to provide this info (e.g. ASCJ)
    • Creating alumni networks, transparency?
  • Grad stds wnat to know what an Asst Fac is...
    • But it's a bit mysterious
  • Identify yr intellectual community
    • They will be all over the world
    • Not necessarily in yr department
  • "Departments are like small towns"
    • Words become loaded
  • Tenure
    • Uncertainty
    • Falling number of tenured people
    • Different for different disciplines
  • Profs are overworked, competing responsibilities
    • Much of this is written during Clinton boom times
    • Economic survivability may have replaced this as a more fundamental concern
    • Lifestyle for representing the various spaces in your life
  • Don't get caught up in "double-binds":
    • Evaluative situations in which criteria of one area trades on another, a no-win
  • Teaching, advising
    • New PhDs were unprepared for teaching, advising grads/undergrads
    • Not TAing is "deprivation", you "need to learn to teach"

Austin reading (?)

Model universities

  • Princeton, English
  • Johns Hopkins, German

Goals: training people to be competent

  • In business, govt administration

Civil service arrived in the US in the 1870s

  • Came to Japan in the late 19th
  • In China, struggle over Western modernisation

Univ not only a site for elites to do administration

  • But for engineering, medicine, law, non-elites
  • Key component to modernism, "myth of progress"
  • But also a center for colonialism
    • Good intentions for colonialism: create institutions of justice, peace, end of warfare
    • But was actually human exploitation on a grand scale
  • Univ was also believed to be a site of "foppishness"
    • Not the school of hard knocks
    • Kids reciting poetry, wasting time, not reducible

Civilizing institution

  • Leading toward civil resolution of problems, rather than violence
  • Engineering leads to "progress of science"
    • But not just agricultural tools -- also weaponry, atom bomb

Suspicion of the university

  • Economic drain
  • Skepticism needs to be answered generally but discipline-by-discipline
  • Humanities in a particular "vice", people flee from humanities
    • Toward business schools

ROI, fiscal responsibility

  • How much do we spend educating an English major?
  • Investment in time
  • How long does it take to get undergrads through college? 4? 6?

Myths proliferate

  • Public/ private university divide

How does univ function in an information society?

  • How does knowledge, ed continue after graduation?

Types of diversity

  • Many many int'l students
  • But non-representative of our local community, LA
  • Perhaps not so diverse socio-economically
  • Complex question, not easily measured

New institutions in competition with the university

  • Privatised universities like the U of Phoenix
  • 2nd largest univ in the state of Iowa is a "digital" univ
  • Some models involve selling chunks
    • Others involve "giving it away" (MIT OCW)

Learning outcomes

  • "Measurable outcomes"
  • What do they KNOW? What can they DO?
  • Influence of NCLB on undegrad/grad education

Part-time, full-time faculty

  • Different duties
  • Are part-time faculty spoken about in demeaning ways?
    • "Freeway fliers" teaching at multiple institutions

Independence of mine

  • Emerson, The american scholar, summary: an independence of mind with the hope to learn and to spend time in difficult pursuits
  • Standing up and speaking for the value of one's work
  • Recovering material that has disappeared
  • Thinking of academic work outside of the present moment
  • Creating enduring work
  • In what ways is it limited?
    • What might the "Asian Scholar" or the "Euro scholar" be like?
  • Must also come to the defense of others' work

Univ and neoliberalism

Lynch

  • "Commercial interest trumps public interest"
  • Control, surveillance
  • Promote anxiety

Rutherford

  • Shield of achilles, nation-state/ market-state

What about Annenberg?

  • How does the mkt overlap with comm and new tech?
  • Making "communication interventions"
  • Working with and in developing nations
  • Working in fragments

Are we preparing a class that keeps SoCal profitable?

  • Students develop strong social networks
  • Economic / financial literacies?

Communicative competence:

  • Research, data
  • Mean what you say, say what you mean
  • Confident with your information, argument
  • Habermas: communicative action
  • Being responsible to relationship between evidence and claim

Rigor:

  • Reject something true because you're not ready to reject something false
  • Insufficient evidence
  • Requires a judgement of risk
    • Based on your standards for research
    • Maybe conventional (to the field)
    • Others are based on the nature of the research
  • High standards when the cost of a mistake is high
  • Evidence is proportional to claim

Aim of critique

  • Goal is to awaken, to shock, to traumatize
  • Hold feet to the fire
  • That which is calibrated, predicted, contained
    • Can't be dismissed
  • Lacking transparency
    • Person writing it isn't sure that real evidence is available?
  • Sometimes works through selective evidence:
    • Choosing only the worst things, suggesting that they are typical
  • Totalizing critiques
    • Everything is colored the same because of some fundamental power relat

Legitimation crisis

  • Occurs when a system of communication breaks down
    • Once thought natural, rational
  • When the cost/benefits can no longer be satisfactorily reproduced
  • Becomes evidence who gets all the benefits
    • And who bears all the costs
  • When the words used to correct a system, multiply its problems
  • When a response to skepticism produces more skepticism

How do you do a study and make an argument out of it?

Hypothetical topic: what is the Tea Party?

Brainstorming

  • Unusual 'collection' appearing on the media all the time
  • People talk about the TP as though it is an "it"
  • "Lots of suspicions, pocket full of evidence"
  • Unanswered questions linger behind MSM coverage
  • Trash talk: popular but unpredictable

Thematiziation

Thematic approach

  • Need to find a thematic question
  • One that will be key to understanding multiple parts
  • e.g., "Is the Tea Party a racist movement?"
    • Not trivial
    • Not without consequence
    • If you can answer it, you attend to racism in the US as it occupies certain political spaces

Gathering artifacts

  • Gathering, organizing, collecting
  • Crucial to structuring what you can do
  • Figuring out how much time you have,
    • What kinds of things you can gather to help give insight to your question
  • Grouping, categorizing

For our TP hypothetical?

Interpretation

  • Research question can change!
    • If the TP is racism, how is that translated through the MSM?
  • Building an argument == continual conversation w your research question
    • Question gets sharper, more precise as the research evolves

Differentiating scholarship from journalism

  • Looking at the range of reception
  • Working across time / spaces
  • Comparison, seeking similarities, differences
  • Placing events, artifacts in one or more contexts

Fill a hole in the literature

  • No one has done x
  • e.g. No one has analyzed the racist component of TP posters
  • More holes than space in journals,
    • Must fill it with greater certainty than in the past

More than hole-filling, contributing to broader understanding of communication

Affective argumentation

  • "Reason heheheheh TINKERTOYS"
  • Emotion gets people heated, excited
  • If you're indifferent, you should be making widgets + a pile of money

Is Anger is different across media?

  • How does TP illuminate this topic?
  • Which methods are best for this inquiry?

The empirical turn

  • Must struggle to stay true to what you see
  • True to what you find
  • But also engaged in an on-going conversation
    • Larger claims
    • Larger questions
  • Connecting to a problem, question of human communication
    • Anger, spectacle, populism

For tomorrow

Make the case

  • Why should it interest other people in the room?
  • What have you done to talk about it?
  • How has it been thematized?
  • How do the artifacts gathered, arranged speak to this theme?
    • This-that, before-during-after, for+against
  • How are these artifacts interpreted?
    • Exemplary sets
    • Complete sets
    • Useful samples
  • How have these artifacts been generally received?
  • How does that perception give us a starting point?
  • How does this contribute to the discussion of communication in a problem area?
    • In our hypothetical: Hate speech, racism, populism

Conclusion

  • Also an argument
  • A bad conclusion repeats and nothing more
  • Don't conclude by groving about how bad the study went
  • Independent
  • Must renew excitement about the topic
  • Figure out the broader predicaments of communication

Criticism, critique

  • Not opposing things
  • But complementary
  • Allow you to make moves
  • Walking a path

Tomorrow

  • Argumentation and scholarship
  • Bring publisher material
    • Talking about book publishing
  • Bring in the arg
  • Ready to crit args that are made

Jump offs

July 27

  • Disciplines, fields achieve equilibrium
  • Sometimes a shock will destabilize but open up new avenues of funding, research
    • DNA, nuclear physics, cultural studies
  • Notes on the book about book publishing

Eva Von D'Asson

Speech to Open Regents Forum at U of Minn

More on neoliberal univ

Biopolitics

Biopolitics shapes the university

  • There are good aspects
  • And aspects that you need to wrangle with
  • One of the productive trajectories

Creating a historical dimension

  • Taking a text
  • Giving it a context
  • Find historical development and a contemporary set of questions

Value of Communication today

  • What is critical thinking in the digital age?
    • Not sitting back but participating, contributing
    • Fan cultures, politics
  • Figuring out how we produce knowledge

Research tools

  • In the old days, you developed habits by yourself
    • Figure out what your professor does
    • Some amount of mystery, proprietary knowledge
  • In the ideal new situation, the digital age changes scholarly life
    • Make and share tools
    • Deal with the larger scope of materials

Resource recommendations

Writing a criticism

  • Relevance: sometimes there is little time spent on justification
    • Importance of the questions may be known to the filed
  • Part of the work of writing about communication is making it present
  • Categories of data: is it coherent?
  • What is the story?

3 components to credibility:

  • Good sense
  • Good faith
  • Good will

How to deal with a bigger controversy:

  • There's a large controversy, make a footnote, state your position
  • Or you can walk through each position in a controversy
  • Assume your readers/critics know the arguments too
  • Never give the opposition unlimited space

Anonymity

  • Younger scholars won't be dismissed
  • Older scholars won't get a pass

Length:

  • Article: 1, 1.25
  • Book review: 2-5 pages
  • Focus on the judgement and choose the reasons for making the judgement
    • If you are "for", pick out the positives, impact, contribution, creatively thematized
      • You are trying to get the editor to accept it
    • If you are "against", begin with the positives (tend to be formal), but layout the reasons for the negative reasons for the judgement in neutral terms
      • There is a private space for editor-review communication where you can be more blunt but this doesn't mean to be unconsctructive, unprofessional

Key terms:

  • Define a set of key terms
  • Use them consistently throughout the essay

Reviewing arguments

Francesca

Pillow Angel, Ashley X

  • Responding to a specific article by Jordan in QJoS
  • Jordan: "Pillow angel" redefines her as a "permanent infant"
  • F arg 1: trying to make her "more than human ... angelic, divine"
    • Referring to Burke on justification, guilt
    • Also Foucault on biopower
  • F arg 2: is "superhuman rhetoric" a better way than infantilizing?
    • Could it be handled transcendentally? Or "post-human"?
    • Show how disabilities are celebrated: soldiers returning from war

Adam, Bush/Engelbart

Returning to

  • "As we may think", V. Bush, on the memex
  • Doug Engelbart, mother of all demos, on-line system
    • NLS as a realization of Bush's thoughts

Historical question of influence

  • Engelbart has gone on record saying that Bush was an influence
  • There is another article that offers counter-narrative
  • Referring to augmentation

Julien, Minitel

  • Responding to criticism of Minitel
    • "Path dependence", was determined not because of efficiency but because of history
    • Barriers to internet penetration
  • J arg: No path dependence
  • J arg: In fact, internet penetration faster than other countries
  • J arg: Minitel was internet catalyst
    • Using penetration data

Is this the same data?

  • J: none of the path dependence writing uses data
  • J's data is published by the ITU, widely accepted

Is there a particular theory in play?

Why did people buy the other guys' argument work?

Andrew, Knowledge gap in rural situations

Transactive memory systems

  • Mid-stage project
  • Collected data through interviews
  • Group cognition, sharing among different members of a family
  • Different group environment than he thought it would be

Unit of analysis argument

  • Looking at first-generation Latino immigrant families
  • Gaziano and gaziano piece

Specialization occurs within a family

  • Unusual breakdown among generations
  • Communities have knowledge

Ref literature on knowledge gap

  • Pull out just the distinct part about immigrant, family

Neta, collective memory

  • Assumption that msm has impact on collective memory
  • Untested
  • Risks: scholars see media representations as a proxy to what is actually remembered
  • That may grant the media more power than it actually has

Theory:

  • Media effects, agenda setting

Method:

  • Content analysis of msm
  • Survey of people
  • Two time points

"Media memory agenda", "public memory agenda"

  • Not a complete experimental design but
  • Trying to go further toward causality

Contribution:

  • Filling gap: untested assumption
  • Enriches relationship between media studies / memory studies

Strength/weakness from the point of view of an editor?

  • Clear contribution
  • How could it be even better?
    • If, what the public remembered was different because it countered the assumption

Shoko, Learning from diffs betw Western + JP comm

Defining the Japanese enthymeme

  • Bitzer, syllogism w the major premise assumed
  • Jackson, conversational argument - asking questions fills in major premise

e.g. Questions to clarify logic of an argument

  • A. (Claim) Food prices will be going down soon
  • B: What makes you say that?
  • A: We had a bump in crop production this year.
  • B: How do you know ... ?

Shoko hypothesis

  • Japanese conversation style follows different general outline
  • B might say, "Oh, really?" Not push much.
  • Using paper from JP mentor
    • Args that JP ppl must learn Western logic

Artifacts:

  • Pop cultural examples
  • "KY" means: "you can't read atmosphere" / "you can't read between the lines"
    • If you start asking questions, ppl will say, "oh, you're KY"
    • Shutting down argumentation
  • KY was "most popular word of 2007"

Who is the audience?

  • Is KY data or a provocation?

Narrowing the claim of the essay

  • Looking at cultural differences is a large project
  • Requires thematization

Allie, Open / transparent governance

Open / transparent governance is something fundamentally defined-enabled by digital media

Artifacts:

  • Reviewing govt documents about transparency
  • Recovery.gov website required by recovery act legislation
  • Analysis of recovery.gov site itself

Important:

  • Talk about how e-govt fundamentally changes the process of govt
  • Not just making the traditional way easier

Not an arg about where it is going

  • But a "picture of how the future might be"

Paper ends with audience:

  • Who is actually going to the site
  • How they are interpreting the available information

Comparative work?

  • This paper is scoped to the US, not comparing to the EU
  • How to make claims that aren't too broad?
  • Maybe argument focuses on Recovery Act as complementary to e-gov but not wholly within

Agency?

  • Conneting to Pierre Levy, collective intel?
    • Different collective intelligence (see: Conv Cult, Jenkins)
  • Disconnecting agency + actions?

Neolib critiq?

  • Is there backdoor control?

Collaboration

  • Looking at how collab is talked about in org comm
  • How might it compare to collab in digital media (cass sunstein shout out?)

More to transparency to meets the eye

  • Frame the contribution of the piece

Next week

  • Going at the argument in a constructive way
  • Review assignment

Jump offs

  • Speeches to the UC regents in the 1960s

Aug 3

Co-authoring tips

  • Sort out primary/secondary author status first
  • "Co-authoring lasts a long time"
  • Extra special care for citations, etc.
  • For jobs: one piece single-authored
  • For tenure: half of yr work single-authored
    • Co-authoring can get complicated in tenure review
  • Value is high for interdisciplinary work
  • Collaborating w senior folks has extra complications
    • Senior person has more reputation capital on the line
    • Might take first author even if they didn't write as much
  • Select one person to be point person to editors
  • In grant-funded situations, PI will likely be the 1st author
  • Tie-breaker might be the person who benefits most career-wise
  • GTG rule of thumb: wait til quals
    • You'll know yr own trajectory better
  • Publishing w other professors?
    • Talk to other students who've worked w

Today

  • Quals
  • Publishing
  • Prospectus

Quals

"Competencies"

  • Knowing key authors, books, concepts, controversies
  • Not about future, not about new developments

Quals ==

  • Figuring out the assumptions of professors, future peers
  • Not laid out explicitly in any coursework
  • Need to think strategically: "how do i build my area?"
  • And then need to test if this sub-specialty makes sense
    • Is the same as yr committee, advisor

Grouping people, ideas

  • Sharing methods
  • Sharing publication targets
  • What do they have in common?
    • Key terms, etc.

Networking w other students

  • Post-quals
  • Sharing reading lists

Qual exams

Not the same for everyone

  • Open book/ closed book?
  • Time structure?
    • How many hours / day?
    • Timed at all?
    • Day?
    • Week?
  • How are questions asked?
    • Three given, two answered?
    • No questions, working with synthesizing reading list

Quals advising

  • Advisor should be approachable, available
    • If the relat isn't working out, switch - no hard feelings
  • F2f meetings are crucial
  • Phone and email are inadequate

Prospectus

  • Contract to committee
  • Set of plans, blueprints
  • Will lead to a successful quals

Working paper

  • Must be signed off by the committee before quals
  • Might be a single-authored publication
  • Might be a particularly good term paper
  • Might also be the perspectus

Post-quals

  • Gotta have a gameplan
  • Can have a post-part experience w quals

Selecting committee

Outside members

  • Outside members keep tabs on ASC profs
  • Old school standard, no phd faculty
  • Non-SC outside member is possible
  • Also "affiliated" faculty

Seek document from Anne Marie

  • "Outside member duties"

Scheduling around oral exams

  • Difficult to plan
  • Important to select committee that will be available

For split-appointments

  • Count as "inside" member
  • Might be worth looking further afield

Only need 3 (2 + 1 outside) for diss

  • You can have more

Reading list

  • Cluster of key terms
  • Key authors
  • You are claiming competencies over the fundamentals
  • Reading list STRUCTURE should reveal conceptualization of competence
  • Five (gtg's 'sacred number') themes
    • Overlaps, relationships

Flexibility of interdisciplinary interests

  • Different patterns of inquiry
  • But greater burden of planning/strategy on student

Teaching

Parsing readings in different areas

  • Think about 15 week class
  • Start building skeleton of a course
  • Quals as "double duty" on syllabus creation
  • Look for stand-alone themes, topics that need to be taught

Undergrad courses that need to be taught

  • Non-verbal comm
  • Inter-cultural comm
  • Small group comm

Administrative preparation

Crystal clear memo/contract (attached to reading list)

  • When do exams begin?
  • Where do they happen?
  • When must the questions be written? (Due date)
  • To whom are the questions sent?
  • When will the responses be written?
  • How will they be distributed?
  • When will the oral exam take place?
  • Where will the oral exams take place?
  • Single most important document we prepare since application to program
    • Don't bungle this and let it disrupt the experience

Pass memo to advisor

  • Ask him/her to circulate

Call Anne Marie the week before

  • Ask her to remind the committee, are the questions in?

Make sure everything else in life is chilled out

  • Top health
  • Safe, solid place to work
  • Tech in good shape

Writing discussion

Critique

  • Need not be totalizing

Storytelling

  • Focus on one or more salient stories
  • Offers a way to move into an area without having to speak to everything

Prospectus

  • 25-30 pp long
  • Get committee + student on the same page
  • Setting expectations, game plan
  • "Prospectus defense" follows quals
    • Useful term but inaccurate
    • Not the same kind of "test" as quals

Three outcomes of prospectus

  • Accepted as-is
  • Accepted with modifications (and signatures)
  • Revision and later meeting required

Advisor calls for prospectus when ...

  • Work is ready to be discussed, discussion is additive
  • Candidate is struggling with dissertation goal but doing well with research (literature, data)
  • Committee is helping to shape the project

Model prospectus

  • Find related diss on ProQuest
  • Mine the bibliographies

TODO

  • Print Julien
  • Send comments to j
  • Get new thing up to speed

Jump offs

Aug 9

Quals follow up

  • Writer thinks you know that you don't know
  • Things you think you know that you don't know
  • Process of organizing reading list is key
  • Most important document: MEMO
    • Rooms
    • Dates, times
    • Reading list
    • Who is writing in which areas
    • When and where the questions must be submitted
    • Menu?
    • Timing, location of writing

Comm as a "thematizing" discipline

  • If you want to know about information & society
    • What do you need to know about info theory?
    • Not the "whole armada" but just the slices that are relevant

Things one does while writing ...

"Moves"

  • Turns of phrase
  • "Tricks of the trade"
  • "Terms of endearment for your reader ..."

Aphorism

  • Repeatable
  • Succint, witty

Attribution

  • Citations
  • Present what is known, taken as common attitude

Cliffhanger

  • Building suspense
  • Building a need-to-know
  • In scholarship, when you're coming to the end of a chapter
    • You may have questions lingering
    • Insufficient data to answer
  • Cliffhanger builds expectations
  • Antagonist / protagonist / drama in scholarship
    • Antagonist preventing us from getting the right info

Coinage

  • Inventing terms
  • "Neologism", "jargon"
  • Editors tend not to appreciate this
  • Sometimes you find yourself stuck and need to create a term
    • e.g. "hypercollage" in recent new sites, no wall left to stick anything on
    • e.g. "celebrity advocacy", easier term if you're doing ethnography with hollywood stars because "celebrity politics" leads to zipped lips

Deconstruction

    • e.g. "Groupthink" naturalizes a process and defers responsibility
    • If everyone is responsible, no one is responsible

Dialect

  • Manner of speaking
  • Colloquialism

Dialog(ue)

  • Useful way of writing
  • Creating interactions among writers from different fields, backgrounds, points of view
  • Refer to Platonic dialogs

Editorializing

  • Important but should be brief
  • Intervention to sharply differentiate where credit is due and where your contribution begins
  • Don't give away the whole argument
    • Reads like a conclusion if it comes before the inquiry
    • Then an argument with support sounds like editorializing
  • Abstract is a tautological device
    • Extract 4 "load-bearing" sentences
    • Make them work as a paragraph
    • Abstract "gives it all away" but stays "bracketed" during reading the essay
  • Remember: voice is harmonics
    • Editorial voice is just one of several

Use of non-English terms

  • Classic example flanuer

Hagiography

  • Term drawn from "list of the saints"
  • In journal articles, more of a genealogy
    • Not a history of ideas
    • How ideas run successively through writers
    • How do you arrive at the current state of terms

Humor

  • Can be used, not recommended by GTG
    • Particularly prone to backfire: irony
  • Comic irony used as way to manage "explosive" material
  • Tragic irony identifying conflict such as ppl voting against class interest
  • "Frames of rejection"
    • Parody
    • Burlesque, find devolving conditions, norm but chaotic

Metaphor

  • "Master organizer"
  • "Deep-rooted metaphors form frames"
    • Container for what it is you're talking about
  • Four root metaphors for communication
    • Machine
    • Form, pattern, comm as imminent reality, genre (sports talk)
      • Also looking at transcendent form, suggested by particular performance/genre
      • Looking at a pattern unavailable to makers - there in spite of what can be practically thought of

Rhizome

  • Known artifacts, terms floating to the surface enable discussion of unknown depths
    • e.g. "tar balls" in BP discussion

Narrative

  • "What's the story?"
  • Skill to be learned
  • Setting context about the phenomenon about

Quotation

  • If you're citing authorities, go to the primary source
    • Int'l encyclopedia of social sciences makes the connection
  • "Like jewels in a ring" as opposed to stacks of words
  • Mix quotes
  • Don't end a paragraph with a long quote

Headings, subheadings

  • Refer to publication style guide
  • Do them right from the get-go
  • Resonance between headings, paragraphs

Rhetorical questions

  • These are questions that we expect to be asked
  • Help to focus, sharpen focus

Sarcasm

  • Sometimes useful, depending on the text
  • Feature major contradiction
  • Taking down something claiming respect
  • "If you have an attitude and it fits the work..."
  • Emotional display can be a liability

Syntax

  • Correct word use
  • Look at mix of long and short sentences
  • Long sentences may be elegant but require "tropological features" to make them understandable
    • Repetition, balance, "wordcraft"
  • Easy way to clean up writing is to look for dependent clauses that ramble on
  • Vary sentence length
  • Read aloud and see if it works
    • Do you write how you talk/think?

Co-authoring?

  • Challenge to mix writing styles
  • Identify writers strengths
    • Have diff voices featured in different sections
  • Trust, criticism, directness

Elif Shafak, TED Talk

  • Recurring images, moving a symbol among contexts
    • Cigarette, as a stereotype, shared ceremony among earthquake survivors
    • Circle, boundaries, and holes in boundaries
  • Classic rhetorical trope (Right out of Quintillian)
    • "I don't mean to say that fiction has the power of an earthquake..."
    • Deny the comparison that was just made...

Prospectus design

Research expectations

  • Citation index, web
  • Public Affairs Information Service Index
    • Good to look for hearings on certain topics

5 Chapters

Very rough norm

  • Introduction
  • Methodology
  • A, B, C examples
  • Conclusions

If you're crazy about the topic, you may suggest a 6th chapter

Prospectus must answer:

  • WHY these chapters and not any others?

Returning to primary material

  • You may find that the "theory is driving the research" and not the data
    • e.g. Many secondary sources making the same mistake about some feature of a primary text

Assignments remaining

  • Imagining the diss
  • Diss to book
  • These should imagine why these are important and how they might be accomplished
  • How they speak beyond the academic world
  • To whom it ought to be addressed
  • Due by Friday (email or paper)
  • Assignment about journals should consider more than just the journals we are assigned for class
    • Make list of journals you wish to keep up with

Aug 10

Strategic planning

  • Key to class
  • Key to prep for quals
  • Selecting courses

Being a denizen of the university

  • Networking
  • Balancing private struggle, social work

Life of the mind

  • Some amount of social alienation
  • Not all time is equally productive
  • Staying current, gathering, sorting, reading

"Life happens"

  • Family, health, etc. are important
  • Don't try to be equally productive across all life situations

Timing

  • No need to compare with other students
  • Only thing to stress is a long gap between quals + prospectus

Dissertation

Publication

  • Do you want it right up on ProQuest?
  • Or do you want a delay (up to 2 yrs) for revision or book publication?
  • Or do you not want it published at all?

Tricky

  • Jobs might expect the diss to show up on ProQuest
  • But publishers might want it unpubbed

Don't give away chapters for free!

  • If you have a book-length manuscript, keep working on it
  • Don't give it away piece-by-piece to get a short-term publication

Tenure review

  • Reputation, comparison, citation
    • How does this scholar compare to other scholars in similar positions?
  • Publications
    • Where?
    • How often?
    • How many?
      • Rising because of electronic publishing

Job hunt

  • Gotta have that website
  • Postdocs, grants, etc. gives time to beef up cv for more competitive job hunt

Dissertation fellowship

  • Mellon or other
  • Generate confidence in yr ability to do the work
    • Do this by being about 1/2 way thru diss, want money to complete
    • They need to know it's not going to be a mistake
    • Record of completing the work
    • Extra year == year to position yrself, work on publication
  • Data: more rare, difficult to obtain, juicy, the better
    • Access to great data
    • "Data is important and also a fiction..."
    • Something you plan, build on
    • Data is "heart of a proposal"
  • III. Moving from specialized expertise (to handle the data) to the situation where it becomes important to know
    • Some capacity to resolve or react

Postdoc

  • Signal confidence, completion
    • Like diss fellowship
  • Transition to professional life

Extension

  • Family leave

Tenure track jobs

  • Be sure to have in writing max number of years until tenure review
  • Be sure to have in writing tenure policy
  • It is a contract
    • Need to know what conditions you are working under
  • What will the teaching load be like?

Teaching

  • How do publication expectations match with the teaching load?
  • Typical load: "3-3"
    • Nice to have courses that are prepared and you can teach over and over
  • Teaching can be exhausting (risk)
    • But can also be a site to engage undergrads with research

Research

  • You can't be TERRIBLE at teaching or service
  • But research is the ultimate determinant of tenure

Becoming a dean, administrator

  • "Leadership", some standing as an academic
  • Little formal training for deans
    • "Summer camp" at Harvard

Getting turned down

  • If you don't get tenure,
    • You sepnd a year back on the job market
  • You MAY appeal but it is rare

Future research

  • Where are we going?

Disconnect between undergrad expectations + work in the field

  • Students interested in media industries
  • Faculty, grad students researching in other areas

Model: Journalism re-imagines its curriculum

  • Turning away from a "melting down" print industry
  • To examine new media, niche journos
  • How can Comm learn from this example?

Political economy

  • Taking McChesney's critique seriously

Public opinion research

  • Observing programs requiring change
  • Methodological issues (non-rep landline phone sampling)
  • Crisis in faith, ppl know better how polls are manipulated
  • Developing new methods for assessing, collecting public opinons
    • Dating mining
    • "Big data"
    • In "natural" contexts, SNS, etc

Grant funding

  • How do grad students participate in writing grants?
  • What is ASCJ policy on student grants?
  • Grant-writing workshop, finding info

More topics

  • Biopolitics
  • Space, place, mapping, geography
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