The Radical Practice of “Hanging Out”: China’s University Student Dissidents

This interdisciplinary paper advances existing empirical research on the longevity of anti-state university student protests in the People’s Republic of China. This paper contributes ethnographic data from Beijing and Fuzhou university students to yield a Marxian critique of Chinese authoritarianism. This paper asserts that empowering identity development and subversive scholarship, or the use of critical scholarship to transmit critical consciousness of political injustice, in Chinese universities creates more durable resistance against Chinese authoritarianism. This paper concludes that methodological and tactical shifts can similarly sustain American student protest

The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey

The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a long-term, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process

A Fin(n)ished Collection? Examining the Finnish literature collection at the UiT libraries

This thesis explores collection development and management and classification by examining the Finnish literature collection at the UiT libraries. The objective of the study is to find out what the background and current state of the collection is and how the collection is represented through classification. The study combines two research methods, a quantitative and a qualitative one. Statistical data was gathered from the library database and analysed, and three expert interviews were conducted. The study shows that the collection has an institutional purpose to support the teaching and research done in the Finnish and Kven study programme and is considered to be crucial for the study programme. However, the size of the collection does not correlate with the use. Over 90% of the books in the collection have not been loaned out during the past four years. Norwegian translations of the Finnish books circulate the best. The classification system used at the library, Dewey Decimal Classification, orders Finnish literature to the “other” category. Because the original language of the book determines the class number, Finnish-Swedish literature is placed under Swedish literature but separated into its own subclass. The findings also reveal that the classification of Kven literature has followed the political evolution of the Kven issue

How School Library Media Specialists Support Reading and Information Literacy Skills Instruction for English Language Learners

HOW SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA SPECIALISTS SUPPORT READING AND INFORMATION LITERACY SKILLS INSTRUCTION FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS by Melinda Morin This study explored the school library media programs in four schools. The percentage of English language learners (ELLs) enrolled in each of these schools was among the highest on their respective levels in their school districts. Moreover, the percentage of ELLs in these schools who met and exceeded the standard for reading and English/language arts on the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) in the spring of 2010 was more than the Annual Measureable Objective (AMO) of 73.3% or slightly less. The participants were the school library media specialists who administered the school library media programs in these schools. This was a qualitative study. During an inductive thematic analysis, the data coalesced into four themes that corresponded with the research questions: instruction, collaboration, media/technology, and interpersonal communication. These findings were derived from the data. 1. The participants used both conventional and technology-based instructional strategies to support reading and information literacy skills instruction for all of their students, including the ELLs. 2. The school library media collections included first language, bilingual, and multicultural literatures, picture books, nonfiction books written on a lower reading level, graphic materials, Hi-Lo reading materials and other digital resources; however, the materials varied in age, suitability, and condition. 3. The school library media specialists collaborated informally with the other members of the instructional team. 4. The school library media specialists undertook other practices that support reading and information literacy skills instruction for ELLs on a discretionary basis

Stanley in Cyberspace: Why the Privacy Protection of the First Amendment Should Be More Like That of the Fourth

The 1969 case Stanley v. Georgia forbade the government from restricting the books that an individual may read or the films he may watch “in the privacy of his own home.” Since that time, the Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that Stanley’s protection applies solely within the physical boundaries of the home: While obscene books or films are protected inside of the home, they are not protected en route to it—whether in a package sent by mail, in a suitcase one is carrying to one’s house, or in a stream of data obtained through the Internet. However adequate this narrow reading of Stanley may have been in the four decades since the case was decided, it is ill-suited to the twenty-first century, where the in-home cultural life protected by the Court in Stanley inevitably spills over into, or connects with, electronic realms beyond it. Individuals increasingly watch films not, as the defendant in Stanley did, by bringing an eight millimeter film or other physical copy of the film into their house, but by streaming it through the Internet. Especially as eReaders, such as the Kindle, and tablets, such as the iPad, proliferate, individuals read books by downloading digital copies of them. They store their own artistic and written work not in a desk drawer or in a safe, but in the “cloud” of data storage offered to them on far-away servers. Thus, I argue that courts should revisit and revise their understanding of Stanley v. Georgia in the same way that Katz v. United States revised Fourth Amendment law in 1967—by holding that the privacy it protected is not limited to the physical boundaries of the home (as United States v. Olmstead had held in 1928) but covers wire-line communications and other electronic environments in which individuals have an expectation of privacy. This is not to say that the Court’s understanding of Stanley v. Georgia should be revised in precisely the same way. However, Stanley v. Georgia should, at a minimum, be extended to protect web-based interactions, where use of an electronic resource outside of the home, such as the Internet, is an integral component of the act of possessing, viewing, or reading cultural material

Social World Sensing via Social Image Analysis from Social Media

Social imagery, the visuals shared by users via various platforms and applications, may be analyzed to elicit something of massmind (and individual) thinking. This work involves the exploration of seven topics from various subject areas (global public health, environmentalism, human rights, political expression, and human predation) through social imagery and data from social media. The coding techniques involve manual coding, the integration of multiple social data streams, computational text analysis, data visualizations, and other combinations of approaches.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1037/thumbnail.jp

Navigating Copyright for Libraries

Much of the information that libraries make available is protected by copyright or subject to the terms of license agreements. This reader presents an overview of current issues in copyright law reform. The chapters present salient points, overviews of the law and legal concepts, selected comparisons of approaches around the world, significance of the topic, and opportunities for reform, advocacy, and other related resources

Worth Fighting For: Factors Influencing Selection Decisions in School Libraries

Intellectual freedom is one of the basic tenets of the library profession. However, most librarians will face attempts to censor or control access to information at some point in their careers. School librarians might choose to self-censor because they fear facing a challenge that calls into question not only their professionalism but also their personal values and ethics. While there have been numerous studies on censorship in other types of libraries, there is little research in the area of censorship and intellectual freedom as it pertains to the school library field. The purpose of this study is to understand the decisions being made by school librarians when choosing or not choosing materials for addition to the collection. To that end, the following research questions were the focus of this study: How do school librarians describe their own selection process? To what extent do school librarians engage in self-censorship as part of the collection development process? When school librarians engage in self-censorship, what are the ways they do it and the factors that influence their decision making? This study used a mixed methods design composed of two phases: an initial survey distributed to school librarians in North and South Carolina and follow-up interviews with school librarians who volunteered to be interviewed. Four hundred seventy-one responses were collected as part of the initial survey. Out of this sample, one hundred thirty of the responders volunteered to participate in the interview portion of the research. Using purposeful sampling in order to obtain representation from both states and the different types of school settings, forty-nine school librarians were interviewed. The survey instrument was designed to collect demographic data, as well as to test the usefulness of a scale to measure the likelihood of self-censorship. The interview questions included nine questions designed to elicit descriptions of the selection process and censorship experiences of school librarians. The following themes emerged through analysis of the survey and interview responses: 1) Communication with those who presented concerns to materials in collections was key in allaying concerns and avoiding a full, written challenge; 2) Support of administration for school libraries and during the challenge process varied widely and influenced the decisions school librarians made when choosing materials and when choosing whether or not to defend them; 3) The grade levels of a school greatly impacted the decision making of school librarians when choosing to add materials, with middle school librarians finding the issue of age appropriateness especially difficult; 4) The awareness of and implementation of both materials selection policies and reconsideration policies influenced both the selection of materials and the successful defense of challenged materials; 5) School librarians sometimes chose to voluntarily remove or restrict access to materials when they thought they might face a full, formal challenge; 6) The funding of school libraries varies widely both within districts and across states; 7) LGBTQ content was particularly troubling for school librarians when undergoing the selection process; 8) Librarians at combination schools (elementary/middle, middle/high) faced unique challenges when making selections and providing access to materials; 9) School librarians’ perceptions of the community environment, particularly those located in rural communities, impacted their decision-making process. The findings of this research suggest that school librarians are influenced by multiple factors when making selection decision and better preparation on dealing with controversial materials may assist them in avoiding self-censoring or censoring behaviors

Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics:’ Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital art works cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital art works are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis, and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists, but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression