The rhetorical structure of science? A multidisciplinary analysis of article headings

An effective structure helps an article to convey its core message. The optimal structure depends on the information to be conveyed and the expectations of the audience. In the current increasingly interdisciplinary era, structural norms can be confusing to the authors, reviewers and audiences of scientific articles. Despite this, no prior study has attempted to assess variations in the structure of academic papers across all disciplines. This article reports on the headings commonly used by over 1 million research articles from the PubMed Central Open Access collection, spanning 22 broad categories covering all academia and 172 out of 176 narrow categories. The results suggest that no headings are close to ubiquitous in any broad field and that there are substantial differences in the extent to which most headings are used. In the humanities, headings may be avoided altogether. Researchers should therefore be aware of unfamiliar structures that are nevertheless legitimate when reading, writing and reviewing articles.     

The People Have Spoken (The Bastards?)

Bourdieu’s field theory presents a distinction between the autonomy of a field and the heteronomity of the fields that surround and potentially encroach on it. Journalism is one such field which attempts to maintain its autonomy in the face of change imposed from beyond its boundaries. This paper looks at how the field of journalism responds to two incursions in the form of feedback: quantitative Web analytics and qualitative reader comments. Each offers an opportunity for the field to adapt to incorporate it—that is, turn heteronomous input into autonomous doxa—or to resist it. Based on an ethnography of eight digital newsrooms, it looks at when the voice of the people is accepted as legitimate input and internalised, and when it is resisted as illegitimate and kept external. The implications for further theorising on the relationship between adjacent fields, as well as autonomous and heteronomous aspects of field theory, are discussed.     

The Invisible Woman?

While the coverage of women's sport in UK media rises to comparable levels to men's sports during large sporting events like the Olympics, academics agree that “routine” women's sports coverage is under-represented. According to the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation, “81% of people think that the female athletes at London 2012 make better role models for young girls than other celebrities.” This article examines the representation of women in sport and compares routine coverage of women's sports in the UK national press across a week in February 2012, six months before the London Olympics, with coverage in a week in February 2013, six months after the Olympics, to see if there has been an Olympic “legacy” that increased coverage. It also examines coverage at the same time of year a decade earlier, to see how far, if at all, women's sports coverage in newspapers has progressed. The results suggest that there has been minimal change in everyday coverage of women's sports after the Olympics, and that female athletes continue to be hugely under-represented in the UK press.     

The LibQUAL+(™) Challenge

Abstract

In March 2002, the Duke University Medical Center Library administered the LibQUAL+(?) survey instrument, which measures library users' perceptions of service quality and identifies gaps between desired, perceived, and minimum expectations of service. This case study represents the Library's decisions regarding participants, approaches used to reach them, problems encountered with the survey, and the results of the data for the health care community. We will also explore how including hospital staff in the survey impacted our results.     

《The Daily》

2011年2月2日上午11点,新闻集团首席执行长鲁珀特·默多克(Rupe rtMurdoch)和苹果公司互联网服务副总裁艾迪·库(Eddy Cue)在纽约古根汉美术馆共同宣布了《The Daily》问世的消息,中文名定为《日报》。传媒巨鳄新闻集团与科技龙头苹果公司强强联合,诞生了全球第一份收费的iPad数字报纸,标志着报业与高科技的正式接轨,这将在全世界的报业发展中掀起多少风浪和变革,我们拭目以待。     

“The total woman:”; The rhetoric of completion

The success of Marabel Morgan's Total Woman indicate its rhetorical effectiveness despite its substantive flaws. This article argues that the book's strong appeal to readers stems from: (1) its promise of fulfillment if woman expiate the guilt they bear for marital discord by self sacrifice; (2) its reinforcement of readers perceptions of themselves and their husbands; and (3) its emphasis on the power of “Total Women”; and its encouragement of sexual fantasy and play. These strategies produce a persuasive message which plays on readers’ concerns for their marriages, offers an alternative to the self consciousness urged by feminists and permits women to fulfill comfortable stereotypes yet experience the power and sexual freedom promised by liberationists. For readers with troubled marriages Morgan provides an alluringly simple, emotionally attractive answer to complex questions. Her message is rhetorically effective even if intellectually weak and psychologically misleading.     

What is next for information world mapping? International and multidisciplinary approaches to understanding information behaviors/practices in context

As the use of arts-involved and data visualization methods increases in information science, it is essential to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of various methods. An international lineup of information researchers shares their experiences using the participatory, visual elicitation technique Information World Mapping (IWM) in their work. The authors begin with an overview of IWM, detailing its origins and emerging directions. They summarize their application of IWM to describe information behaviors/practices across various locations, cultures, disciplines, and technology access environments. The authors conclude by discussing key questions and areas of exploration for IWM in information research, including cultural influences, changes in media and methods for data collection, power dynamics, and researcher positionality and reflexivity. Insights offer new possibilities for the next phase of IWM in information research, including challenges and areas for innovation.     

The BBC,Group Listening,and ‘The Changing World’

This article examines the content and impact of a series of BBC lecture courses broadcast in the early 1930s. The Group Listening Scheme was established in 1928: experts working in a variety of fields were invited to broadcasts a series of evening lectures. Adults across the country were encouraged to gather for the lectures and stay on afterwards to discuss them. ‘The Changing World’ consisted of half-hour talks over six evenings a week during a six-month period. The broadcasts amounted to a two-term syllabus, with 24 talks devoted to each of the six themes (the modern dilemma, industry and trade, literature and art, science, the modern state, and education and leisure). This article will sample some of these broadcasts and explore the listener response to the series in order to reach an understanding of the BBC’s achievements in adult education during the interwar period.     

The development of discourse presentation in The Times, 1833–1988

Newspaper preferences for particular formats of speech presentation differ and they change in the course of time. In this contribution we focus on The Times and trace such developments in the formative years of the modern Anglo-American newspapers, from 1833 to 1988. We extracted data from The Times Digital Archive in six samples of roughly 5000 words at intervals of 31 years and analysed the texts manually for instances of reported speech. Our analysis shows that the focus has shifted from the presentation of speech events as coherent wholes in earlier newspapers towards a more selective use of individual statements that summarise an event or characterise it from different angles. And it also shows that the frequency of indirect forms of discourse presentation decreases over the years in favour of direct forms. This gives further support to the claim that in terms of discourse presentation broadsheets slowly develop into the direction spearheaded by tabloids.     

The “Unplugged” Project

Courses: This assignment, with modifications, can be used in most Communication Studies courses along with other courses across disciplines

Goals/Objectivies: Students will (1) demonstrate an awareness of their digital media use, (2) identify how their digital media use affects their communication behaviors, and (3) identify how their digital media use affects other aspects of their lives     

《The Daily》裁员

科技网站All Things D7月31日报道,新闻集团推出的首份iPad电子报《The Daily》打算裁员50人,占员工总数近1/3。报道推出不久,《The Daily》主编杰塞·安格洛在《The Daily》官方网站发表《致读者和朋友的一封信》,证实了这一消息。     

The Froude‐Burke controversy

This study investigated the impact of age, task complexity, and practice on adult message‐production‐skill acquisition and performance. Participants (30 older adults and 30 college students) learned a sequence for describing geometric arrays and then employed this organizing sequence in a series of 90 performance trials. Half of the participants learned a six‐step (high task‐complexity) sequence, while the remaining participants learned a three‐step (low task‐complexity) sequence for describing the arrays. The results suggest that overall message‐production speed is characterized by a “complexity effect” (i.e., an interaction between age and task complexity such that younger adults exhibited superior performance relative to their older counterparts, and this difference was more pronounced under complex‐task conditions). Complexity effects were also found for initial message‐production‐skill performance and rate of skill acquisition: older adults exhibited slower initial performance and slower rates of skill acquisition than younger adults, and this difference was even more pronounced when learning a complex skill. Finally, the results indicate a significant main effect for age on variation in overall task performance in that older adults’ learning curves, regardless of task complexity, were characterized by greater variability in performance quality from trial to trial. These effects are consistent with changes in processing speed and working‐memory capacity that have been suggested to accompany advancing age. The current findings may be seen to have direct implications for older‐adult‐skills training.     

The Academic Libraries in China

Academic libraries in China have gone through enormous changes since 1980's. This artical summarizes their administrative system, information services, user education, library automation and networks.     

The Development in Germany of Archival Processing – The Vertical and Horizontal Appraisal

Based on a discussion about appraisal which has been going on for over a 100 years, the so-called vertical and horizontal appraisal have been developed and tested since the middle of the 1990s. During this process the tasks, functions and competences of the agencies, which are to be appraised were analysed. The appraisal of the content itself is undertaken only when multiple archival processing has been eliminated by this method and the most significant records identified. Actual tasks and functions of single administrative branches of different institutions (federal government, states, counties, and municipalities) are appraised, apart from already closed records. In this way, agencies creating archives and records today receive written decisions on the appraisal of records, which will be offered to the archives in future. Archivists of different institutions are involved in this appraisal procedure. The experience gained here has continually developed the techniques of vertical and horizontal appraisal. This appraisal procedure is being further developed in a constant balance between theory and practice.     

The Daily为何竟遭夭折

被誉为"未来的发展潮流"、"iPad上最令人期待的新闻阅读产品",但上线仅22个月——2011年2月,新闻集团与苹果公司合作开发的iPad付费新闻阅读产品The daily诞生。2012年7月,经营18个月的The Daily为了维持生存,宣布从原有170名员工中裁员50人。随后其设计和生产部门也都接二连三地裁员。     

美国The Verge网站的启示

The Verge,脱胎于Engadget,是美国的一个科技新闻及媒体网站,发布新闻、长篇专题报道、产品评价、博客以及娱乐节目,由Engadget前主编Joshua Topolsky以及Nilay Patel在2011年11月创办。这家网站抱负不小,“The Verge”的意思是总在最前沿,在成立不到2年后就拿到了5项威比奖,包括最佳写作（编辑）奖、最佳播客奖、最佳视觉设计奖、最佳消费电子产品网站及最佳移动新闻应用,该奖项被誉为“互联网的奥斯卡”。