Explicating the relationally attentive approach to conducting engaged communication scholarship

As interest in engaged communication scholarship grows, so does the need for concrete examples of how such research is done. In this essay, we articulate an example of the how by presenting the work of the Purdue Peace Project, a locally led peacebuilding initiative based at Purdue University. We do so by (a) explicating the communicative choices in our approach to engaged scholarship and (b) relating these choices to the impacts that our approach has had on preventing political violence related to a chieftaincy dispute in Keperman (pseudonym), Ghana. Based on qualitative data from multiple time points, we unpack our communicative choices, relate these choices to the realization of engagement goals and setbacks, and reveal multi-level, interdependent, and communicative indicators of impacts. We present what we term the relationally attentive approach to engaged communication scholarship and discuss implications and recommendations for those doing engaged scholarship.     

Best Practices in Crisis Communication: Evolution of Practice through Research

The stories of four practitioners are presented regarding their involvement with the Aspen conference and their reflections on the essays in this forum. Their stories suggest that the ability for academics and practitioners to co-create engaged scholarship depends on articulating common values and interests, creating a shared language that allows them to develop and execute a project and to disseminate their findings in useful ways, and constructing a space for reflection on organizational processes. This suggests that academic and practitioners need to negotiate their differences in values, language, and approach in ways that co-create a mutually satisfying project.     

Becoming More Reflective about the Role of Design in Communication

Robert Craig's constitutive meta-model of communication reminds us that while communication scholarship may feel like discovery of communication's natural properties, it is also often (if not always) on a path to invention of new possibilities and reconstitution. The constitutive meta-model suggests that every theory of communication is also a design language for communication, and that design itself may be a path to theory development. Design inquiry can be conducted in all subdisciplines of communication, incorporating and contributing to widely disparate communication theories. Design work itself takes many forms, producing artifacts as diverse as individual messages, persuasive campaigns, interaction protocols, large-scale participation frameworks for public decision-making, and more. This special issue explores design scholarship in the field of communication, with five original essays representing different subfields and different theoretical approaches. In this introduction, we argue that design work is more than application of theory; design itself is a theory-building enterprise. It is a distinct form of inquiry that builds new knowledge, complementary to, but different in kind from, empirical and critical scholarship.     

Addressing the challenges of critical communication pedagogy scholarship: moving toward an applied agenda

Critical communication pedagogy (CCP) scholarship is a relatively new and important area of research that evaluates how language is used to both empower and marginalize. It faces challenges in terms of recognition and publication outlets. In this essay, I argue that scholars face obstacles when attempting to publish pedagogical work that is critical in nature. I make the case that a major reason that CCP scholarship is not as widely recognized is that it is largely not considered to be applied work. By sharing my experiences, I argue that scholars working in CCP can help to overcome these barriers to recognition and publication by developing an applied language and focus for CCP, demonstrating how CCP can be used to recognize and respond to hegemony in the classroom and in society.     

Philpapers Breaks New Ground for Discipline Based Repositories

This is the first in a series of columns intended to report on the progress of the Open Access (OA) movement in scholarly communication, chart the changes OA brings to the methods libraries and library users employ to acquire information, and estimate the value of OA materials for undergraduate library collections. At this point, it is not clear how long commercially published academic journals will be a sine qua non for college libraries. However, it is already obvious that undergraduate instruction can benefit from the scholarship available through Open Access at the same time that our libraries need the budget relief such resources offer. Librarians who work with undergraduates have very good reasons to stay current with the range and quality of OA content as well as with the best means of providing access to that body of scholarship. In addition, faculty teaching undergraduates depend upon librarians to keep them informed about changes in the information environment. With that in mind, “Out in the Open” is an attempt to introduce readers to the people, resources, and trends identified with the rise of Open Access.     

“Bridging the Gap”: Difference,Dialogue, and Community Organizing

The purpose of this study is to understand a citywide initiative to increase diversity and inclusion in a predominantly white US city with a tragic racial history. This research reveals prevailing struggles with communicating about diversity and race and taking meaningful actions to promote social change. Using theories of difference and dialogue, we analyze in-depth, qualitative fieldwork with three voluntary organizations: The Chamber of Commerce; The Network; and Minorities in Business. Our work answers calls to center race and embodied differences and extends theorizing on dialogic sensibilities. The findings reveal that difference organizes dialogue through: (1) the ongoing construction of context; (2) the mobilizing of social change efforts; and (3) the intermingling of economic and racial justice discourses. Ultimately, we hope this work encourages further conversation about difference, race, and engaged scholarship.     

Surviving to Thriving: Advancing the Institutional Mission

ABSTRACT

Academic research libraries can employ several approaches to advance the institutional mission. First, libraries can shift from goals focused on collections and traditional library services and instead align with their campus academic plan and an emphasis on supporting the institution's strategic initiatives. A second approach is for libraries to modify their organizational structures from being function-based on the tasks that traditional libraries performed (e.g., public services, technical services, collection development) and move instead toward organizational units that directly support their university's missions (e.g., undergraduate education; graduate and professional education; research, scholarship, and creative activity; and public engagement). The key is to have library staff engaged in work that contributes to vital institutional outcomes such as student success and faculty research productivity. Academic research libraries should also continue to work towards an assessment program that demonstrates the value of the academic research library in providing quality services that advance the institutional mission.     

The Influence of James C. McCroskey’s Research in South Korea

In honor and remembrance of Dr. James C. McCroskey, this article looks at McCroskey’s influence in Korean academic fields. We find that McCroskey’s scholarly articles and books were increasingly cited from 2001 to 2016 and that his work has been cited in Korean journals across diverse fields. In addition to the communication and education fields, McCroskey was cited also in the fields of science and medicine in South Korea. The findings document the international and interdisciplinary impact of McCroskey’s scholarship.     

Reviewing Digital Scholarship: The Need for Discipline-Based Peer Review

ABSTRACT

Digital scholarship connects scholarly research to students and the public in nontraditional ways. Authors present research in a digital form, which may include links to primary source material and teaching guides. In this format, design and accessibility are important, and, unfortunately, those quick to dismiss all digital work as teaching or outreach can overlook the research element. The confusion over what digital scholarship is and how to evaluate it can affect promotion and tenure decisions in academic institutions. This article will examine issues surrounding the availability of peer review for digital scholarship, especially in the field of American history. Mechanisms for peer review must be created by scholarly associations and applied to digital scholarship to ensure this form of scholarship is acknowledged and rewarded.     

Collaboration for Compliance: Identity Tensions in the Interorganizational and Interdisciplinary Regulation of a Toxic Waste Storage Facility

Safely securing toxic waste necessitates collaboration across organizational and disciplinary boundaries. This study focused on the Waste Compliance Team (WCT), an interorganizational and interdisciplinary collaboration of a team of experts responsible for the regulatory documentation of a toxic waste storage facility. The results distill four coherent premises for self-definition evident in their collaboration: knowledge creating/scientist, knowledge checking/regulator, knowledge applying/engineer, and knowledge scheduling/project manager. Our analysis emphasized the implications of identity tensions among these competing premises for how the WCT made sense of their documentation work, safety concerns, and conflict and decision-making. Integrating multiple data sources, including interviews, observations, and a workshop with participants, we employed mosaic portraiture, a methodology developed through the study, to understand and convey the polyphony of the site. We conclude by discussing implications of the findings for theory and practice and the utility of mosaic portraiture for engaged scholarship.     

Promoting Faculty Scholarship Through The University Author Recognition Bibliography at Boise State University

One of the most important contributions by any university is its faculty members’ scholarship. Providing an interface to view the full scope of an institution's academic accomplishments is vital for promoting both the scholarship and the university at large. Because of their unique information skills and services, librarians can facilitate the discovery of this scholarship on behalf of their institutions. This article explores how Albertsons Library at Boise State University utilizes an institutional repository to produce a faculty publication bibliography. Processes for collecting academic scholarship and organizing the citations within a repository structure are also discussed. Library staff found that this approach not only reduced redundancy and increased the usability of researcher publication data, it also increased the profile and value of the institutional repository.     

No scholar is an island: The impact of sharing in the work life of scholars

The sharing of scholarly articles is an intrinsic and often ignored facet of the value and mission of scholarship. It is so entwined in the daily work life of scholars that it has almost become second nature, an integral part of the research process itself. This article addresses this often overlooked area of research in usage studies. In an international survey of 1,000 published scholars, the Beyond Downloads project examined their sharing behaviours in order to gain a more contextualized and accurate picture of their usage beyond download patterns and citation counts. Scholars share published articles with others as a mode of content discovery and dissemination, particularly if they work in groups, and most expect to increase their sharing in the future. While their methods of sharing articles may change, and their reasons for sharing may vary from self‐promotion to the more altruistic motives of scientific progress, they desire to share the final published versions of articles with their colleagues.     

An On-Demand and Cloud-Based Digital Scholarship Applications Dashboard

Building on the findings of a 2013 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up funded project, in early 2016 we began working on an IMLS Sparks! funded project: Digital Scholarship Applications Dashboard. The project is a collaborative initiative between University IT and the Library's Center for Digital Scholarship. We are currently evaluating an efficient and user-friendly dashboard solution that will allow faculty and student to easily choose, configure, deploy, and evaluate any of a set of common web applications in a shared and virtual hosting environment. The service is similar to those offered by commercial hosting providers for deployment of popular web applications, but our Scholars Dashboard service will focus on tools more relevant to digital scholarship and digital humanities. The prototype leverages OpenNebula, an open source cloud-computing platform for managing distributed data center environments, and Amazon Web Services for deploying virtual machines. In this article, we will describe the work we have done in the last year and further discuss the role of digital scholarship teams within academic libraries in providing cloud-based infrastructure for digital scholarship and research.     

Placing Facebook

Facebook is challenging professional journalism. These challenges were evident in three incidents from 2016: the allegation that Facebook privileged progressive-leaning news on its trending feature; Facebook’s removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm Girl” photo from the pages of prominent users; and the proliferation of “fake news” during the US presidential election. Using theoretical concepts from the field of boundary work, this paper examines how The Guardian, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter editorialized Facebook’s role in these three incidents to discursively construct the boundary between the value of professional journalism to democracy and Facebook’s ascendant role in facilitating essential democratic functions. Findings reveal that these publications attempted to define Facebook as a news organization (i.e., include it within the boundaries of journalism) so that they could then criticize the company for not following duties traditionally incumbent upon news organizations (i.e., place it outside the boundaries of journalism). This paper advances scholarship that focuses on both inward and outward conceptions of boundary work, further explores the complex challenge of defining who a journalist is in the face of rapidly changing technological norms, and advances scholarship in the field of media ethics that positions ethical analysis at the institutional level.     

On the Shapley value and its application to the Italian VQR research assessment exercise

Research assessment exercises have now become common evaluation tools in a number of countries. These exercises have the goal of guiding merit-based public funds allocation, stimulating improvement of research productivity through competition and assessing the impact of adopted research support policies. One case in point is Italy's most recent research assessment effort, VQR 2011–2014 (Research Quality Evaluation), which, in addition to research institutions, also evaluated university departments, and individuals in some cases (i.e., recently hired research staff and members of PhD committees). However, the way an institution's score was divided, according to VQR rules, between its constituent departments or its staff members does not enjoy many desirable properties well known from coalitional game theory (e.g., budget balance, fairness, marginality). We propose, instead, an alternative score division rule that is based on the notion of Shapley value, a well known solution concept in coalitional game theory, which enjoys the desirable properties mentioned above. For a significant test case (namely, Sapienza University of Rome, the largest university in Italy), we present a detailed comparison of the scores obtained, for substructures and individuals, by applying the official VQR rules, with those resulting from Shapley value computations. We show that there are significant differences in the resulting scores, making room for improvements in the allocation rules used in research assessment exercises.     

An analysis of human factors and label accuracy in crowdsourcing relevance judgments

Crowdsourcing relevance judgments for the evaluation of search engines is used increasingly to overcome the issue of scalability that hinders traditional approaches relying on a fixed group of trusted expert judges. However, the benefits of crowdsourcing come with risks due to the engagement of a self-forming group of individuals—the crowd, motivated by different incentives, who complete the tasks with varying levels of attention and success. This increases the need for a careful design of crowdsourcing tasks that attracts the right crowd for the given task and promotes quality work. In this paper, we describe a series of experiments using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, conducted to explore the ‘human’ characteristics of the crowds involved in a relevance assessment task. In the experiments, we vary the level of pay offered, the effort required to complete a task and the qualifications required of the workers. We observe the effects of these variables on the quality of the resulting relevance labels, measured based on agreement with a gold set, and correlate them with self-reported measures of various human factors. We elicit information from the workers about their motivations, interest and familiarity with the topic, perceived task difficulty, and satisfaction with the offered pay. We investigate how these factors combine with aspects of the task design and how they affect the accuracy of the resulting relevance labels. Based on the analysis of 960 HITs and 2,880 HIT assignments resulting in 19,200 relevance labels, we arrive at insights into the complex interaction of the observed factors and provide practical guidelines to crowdsourcing practitioners. In addition, we highlight challenges in the data analysis that stem from the peculiarity of the crowdsourcing environment where the sample of individuals engaged in specific work conditions are inherently influenced by the conditions themselves.     

An empirical and comparative analysis of E-government performance measurement models: Model selection via explanation,prediction, and parsimony

Driven by the growing importance of the digital provision of government services (e-government), recent research has sought to develop and test conceptual models of citizen satisfaction and trust with these services. Yet, there remains little agreement on how to optimally model these relationships with regards to the somewhat divergent goals of explanation and prediction of citizen trust. In this paper, we test two prominent modeling paradigms of the e-government satisfaction-trust relationship: the “service quality” model and the “expectancy-disconfirmation” model. We compare several variations of these models for their in-sample explanatory abilities, out-of-sample predictive abilities, and parsimony. To test the models, we examine a pooled, cross-agency sample of survey data measuring citizens' experiences with and perceptions of three important and widely accessed U.S. federal e-government services—the webpages of the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Our findings suggest that while the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm performs well in explanation, a parsimonious model with an “overall quality-satisfaction-trust” link is best suited for predicting trust. In addition, the service quality paradigm offers the best compromise between predictive accuracy and explanatory power. These findings offer new insights for academic researchers, government agencies, and practitioners, especially those deciding upon an empirical model to adopt to measure e-government satisfaction and its impact upon citizen trust.     

Concept analysis of gender,feminist, and women's studies research in the communication literature

In recent decades a distinctive literature has accumulated discussing the role of gender, feminism, and women's studies‐related research (GFWS) in the communication field; however, questions have persisted about how this research is represented in the field's publications. Contributing to the literature on the sociology of the field's scholarship, the history of the GFWS literature was sketched in a field test of a concept mapping technique that tracks patterns of publication and isolates conceptual associations within the titles of GFWS articles. The data for the study were significant concepts extracted from titles of 31,500 articles appearing in 70 communication journals and annuals within the period 1970 to 1997. The study accomplished several goals. First, it examined the accuracy of historical arguments about GFWS scholarship, arguments that bear on the issue of fair treatment of GFWS scholarship within the field. Second, it examined GFWS articles by publication source to assess patterns of representation by journal. Third, it provided a response to requests by some scholars working in the area for a thorough survey of the dimensions of the GFWS literature. Findings support the idea that GFWS scholarship is represented by a unique constellation of conceptual relationships. Feminist scholarship is found to have a history unto itself separate from that of studies of gender or sex differences, and has entered the literature in two distinctive eras. As well, feminist research was found to have a unique and uneven pattern of representation in the field's literature. By identifying threads of theoretical connection between articles in a widely dispersed literature, the concept mapping methodology is argued to provide one means for offsetting the fragmentation of the discipline's scholarship that has occurred throughout the last three decades as a result of the rapid proliferation of new specialized communication journals.     

Dealing with temporal variation in patent categorization

In this paper, we quantify the existence of concept drift in patent data, and examine its impact on classification accuracy. When developing algorithms for classifying incoming patent applications with respect to their category in the International Patent Classification (IPC) hierarchy, a temporal mismatch between training data and incoming documents may deteriorate classification results. We measure the effect of this temporal mismatch and aim to tackle it by optimal selection of training data. To illustrate the various aspects of concept drift on IPC class level, we first perform quantitative analyses on a subset of English abstracts extracted from patent documents in the CLEF-IP 2011 patent corpus. In a series of classification experiments, we then show the impact of temporal variation on the classification accuracy of incoming applications. We further examine what training data selection method, combined with our classification approach yields the best classifier; and how combining different text representations may improve patent classification. We found that using the most recent data is a better strategy than static sampling but that extending a set of recent training data with older documents does not harm classification performance. In addition, we confirm previous findings that using 2-skip-2-grams on top of the bag of unigrams structurally improves patent classification. Our work is an important contribution to the research into concept drift for text classification, and to the practice of classifying incoming patent applications.