Early History of the Information Systems Discipline in the UK: An account based on living through the period

In 2012, the Association for Information Systems (AIS) decided to establish the history of IS as a major study domain and, in 2013, appointed Professor Ping Zhang from Syracuse University as AIS Historian. One of her first acts was to set up a panel at each of the major AIS-sponsored conferences to examine aspects of IS history. The first conference with a history panel was the June 2013 ECIS in Utrecht. The panelists chosen by Professor Zhang had all contributed to the early developments of IS as practitioners and academics. They included Professor Carol Saunders from the USA, Professor Phillip Ein-Dor from Israel, Professor Niels Bjorn-Andersen from Denmark, and Professor Frank Land from the UK. The panel was chaired by Professor Ping Zhang, who also acted as mediator. This paper is based on my contribution to the panel

Virtual worlds: A new paradigm for advertising?

This thesis explores the new paradigms that are emerging as advertising encounters the Internet. The area that I explore is the convergence of corporate advertising and the online game, Second Life. The thesis takes as its starting point the economic and social/cultural history of advertising. I examine both Marxist and cultural theories of advertising, in order to properly understand the paradigm shifts of the past. I also investigate the effect that technological change has had on the practice of advertising. Having established an historical framework I· then turn to the current state of the advertising market, as it is defined by modern technology. The second and third parts of the thesis concentrate on the emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) on the Internet and the effects that these virtual worlds are having on advertising. I focus on the paradigms that the industry employs in entering these worlds. I argue that Second Life has a number of distinct and distinguishing features that render it unique among MMORPGs and that these features have also attracted significant interest from major corporations and advertisers. Finally the thesis investigates the practice of advertising in Second Life, through a comparative analysis of advertising originating in world and a case study of a successful corporate campaign that embodies the new paradigm that has emerged to facilitate engaging with Second Life and its users

Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism

The eighteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion of social, political, religious and literary networks in Great Britain. Increased availability of and access to print combined with the ease with which individuals could correspond across distance ensured that it was easier than ever before for writers to enter into the marketplace of ideas. However, we still lack a complex understanding of how literary networks functioned, what the term ‘network’ means in context, and how women writers in particular adopted and adapted to the creative possibilities of networks. This collection of essays address these issues from a variety of perspectives, arguing that networks not only provided women with access to the literary marketplace, but fundamentally altered how they related to each other, to their literary production, and to the broader social sphere. By examining the texts and networks of authors as diverse as Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Hamilton, Susanna Watts, Elizabeth Heyrick, Joanna Baillie, Mary Berry, Mary Russell Mitford, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, this volume demonstrates that attention to the scope and influence of women’s literary networks upends long standing assumptions about gender, literary influence and authorial formation during the Romantic period. Furthermore, it suggests that we must rethink what counts as literature in the Romantic period, how we read it, and how we draw the boundaries of Romanticism

The Mountains at the End of the World: Subcultural Appropriations of Appalachia and the Hillbilly Image, 1990-2010

There is an aversion within the field of Appalachian Studies to addressing the cultural formulations of the Appalachian/hillbilly/mountaineer as an icon of aggressive resistance. The aversion is understandable, as for far too long images of the irrationally and savagely violent mountaineer were integral to the most gross popular culture stereotypes of Appalachia. Media consumers often take pleasure or comfort in these images, which usually occur in a reactionary context with the hillbilly as either a type of nationally necessary savage OR as an unregenerate barbarian against whom a national civilization will triumph and benefit by the struggle. I bookend my study with two artifacts of Appalachian representation, linked in specific subject matter, but separated by twenty years. The 1991 West Virginia Public Television-produced documentary film The Dancing Outlaw quickly became an underground cult classic—an object of both absurdist delight and cultural identification within the punk subculture, particularly among those with both a punk sensibility and personal connections to the Appalachian region (birth, upbringing, residency, ancestry). In 2009, MTV and the resources of its wildly popular Jackass franchise revisited the locale and family featured in this earlier documentary and produced the sophisticated and polished film The Wild, Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. The core purpose of this project, however, is to examine why Appalachia and/or the hillbilly, as constructed within and across these subcultures, possessed such appeal during this historical moment. My hypothesis is that such appeal lies primarily (but not exclusively) in the negative characteristics of the region and its inhabitants that are represented throughout a variety of subcultural texts: documentary film, art house cinema, niche regional literature, and independent zine publishing and early blogging. For both those identifying themselves as Appalachians/hillbillies (or some related variation thereof) and those “playing” as Appalachians/hillbillies, these images become statements of resistance and survival to challenge the national mass culture and the political ideologies supporting it

Popular Music in Canterbury Between 1965 and 1971 and Theories of Scene

This thesis examines the phenomenon and lasting influence of what has come to be known as the Canterbury Scene. It argues that the Canterbury music scene is best understood through an investigation of the scale and diversity of live music in the city in the 1960s, the nostalgia and interest it still evokes and the sense of popular music heritage which it contains. It adds to the relatively small body of literature about the Scene by examining academic and theoretical writing on the subject and using this and other paradigm examples to cast further light on the relationship between the music and its perceived location. My original contribution to knowledge is a detailed account of the state of musical performance and the performative features in Canterbury between 1965 and 1971, in particular. Through this, an assessment of the importance of the music to the canon of progressive rock may be made and new insight gained into the extent to which the Canterbury of fifty years ago might be said to have been the locus of a scene or, at least, have given some support to a network of musicians - albeit musicians in bands with little economic co-dependency. The work draws on first hand accounts of the music making of the time as well as local media accounts, fan magazines and online materials and attention is paid both to the translocal nature of the scene and musicians for whom Canterbury and East Kent remained the geographical focus of the musical practices

Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism

The eighteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion of social, political, religious and literary networks in Great Britain. Increased availability of and access to print combined with the ease with which individuals could correspond across distance ensured that it was easier than ever before for writers to enter into the marketplace of ideas. However, we still lack a complex understanding of how literary networks functioned, what the term ‘network’ means in context, and how women writers in particular adopted and adapted to the creative possibilities of networks. This collection of essays address these issues from a variety of perspectives, arguing that networks not only provided women with access to the literary marketplace, but fundamentally altered how they related to each other, to their literary production, and to the broader social sphere. By examining the texts and networks of authors as diverse as Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Hamilton, Susanna Watts, Elizabeth Heyrick, Joanna Baillie, Mary Berry, Mary Russell Mitford, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, this volume demonstrates that attention to the scope and influence of women’s literary networks upends long standing assumptions about gender, literary influence and authorial formation during the Romantic period. Furthermore, it suggests that we must rethink what counts as literature in the Romantic period, how we read it, and how we draw the boundaries of Romanticism

Seven decades of sports writing at the West Australian (1901-1971)

For a country whose identity is much bound up with sport, little research has been done so far into Sports journalism in Australia. This study traces the changes that have occurred in the reporting of sport in the West Alustralian between 1901 and 1971. This time span has been chosen to cover the period from Federation to the point when sport acquired its own section at the back of the newspaper and sports editor Ted CoIlingwood retired after 32 years in the job. In this seventy year period, January and July of every seventh year are taken as a sample to map out the developments in sports journalism. The months January and July have been chosen so as to capture both summer and winter sports. The newspaper\u27s editions of these two months in the eleveo periods were assessed both quantitalively and qualitatively. The quantitative study shows the amount of sport reporting, all the column space devoted to the various sports. It confirms that the amount of sports reporting has been on a steady increase ever since 1901, except for tbe war year 1943

Folk song in Cumbria:a distinctive regional repertoire

One of the lacunae of traditional music scholarship in England has been the lack of systematic study of folk song and its performance in discrete geographical areas. This thesis endeavours to address this gap in knowledge in a small way, through a study of Cumbrian folk song and its performance over the past two hundred years. Although primarily a social history of popular culture, with some elements of ethnography and a little musicology, it is also a participant-observer study from the personal perspective of one who has performed and collected Cumbrian folk songs for some forty years. The principal task has been to research and present the folk songs known to have been published or performed in Cumbria since circa 1900, designated as the Cumbrian Folk Song Corpus: a body of 515 songs from 1010 different sources, including manuscripts, print, recordings and broadcasts. The thesis begins with the history of the best-known Cumbrian folk song, ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’ from its date of composition around 1830 through to the late twentieth century. From this narrative the main themes of the thesis are drawn out: the problem of defining ‘folk song’, given its eclectic nature; the role of the various collectors, mediators and performers of folk songs over the years, including myself; the range of different contexts in which the songs have been performed, and by whom; the vexed questions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘invented tradition’, and the extent to which this repertoire is a distinctive regional one. Analysis of the corpus reveals a heterogeneous collection of songs on a wide range of themes, but with certain genres predominating, notably hunting songs and songs in dialect - songs which, like ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’, have been mobilised to reinforce ideas of regional identity and pride over many years