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Interactions in the text: becoming a woman in 1970s teen magazines

This paper uses a case study from 1970s girls’ magazine Honey to demonstrate how paying attention to reader contributions published in magazines can give a richer, more nuanced view of the relationship between magazine and reader. The case study, a debate on why women assume they will have children, offers a new understanding of the way that these interactions in the text contributed to the development of young women’s understanding of the increasing freedoms available to them in the 1970s

Very Low Energy Supernovae: Light Curves and Spectra of Shock Breakout

The brief transient emitted as a shock wave erupts through the surface of a presupernova star carries information about the stellar radius and explosion energy. Here the CASTRO code, which treats radiation transport using multigroup flux-limited diffusion, is used to simulate the light curves and spectra of shock breakout in very low-energy supernovae (VLE SNe), explosions in giant stars with final kinetic energy much less than 10$^{51}$ erg. VLE SNe light curves, computed here with the KEPLER code, are distinctively faint, red, and long-lived, making them challenging to find with transient surveys. The accompanying shock breakouts are brighter, though briefer, and potentially easier to detect. Previous analytic work provides general guidance, but numerical simulations are challenging due to the range of conditions and lack of equilibration between color and effective temperatures. We consider previous analytic work and extend discussions of color temperature and opacity to the lower energy range explored by these events. Since this is the first application of the CASTRO code to shock breakout, test simulations of normal energy shock breakout of SN1987A are carried out and compared with the literature. A set of breakout light curves and spectra are then calculated for VLE SNe with final kinetic energies in the range $10^{47} - 10^{50}$ ergs for red supergiants with main sequence masses 15 Msun and 25 Msun. The importance of uncertainties in stellar atmosphere model, opacity, and ambient medium is discussed, as are observational prospects with current and forthcoming missions.Comment: 19 pages; submitted to Astrophysical Journa

Creating HTML pages in RADAR to use in Moodle

Materials from a webinar on using RADAR's built-in HTML editor to create HTML templates for use in Moodle

Creating your Moodle profile

Guided tour to filling in your Moodle profile setting

OCSLD guide to blogging

A quick guide to some of the uses of blogs in HE, and how to get started with your own blog

Interactions in the text: Girls’ magazines and their readers 1955–2000

In this thesis, I explore textual interactions between teenage girls and their magazines to ask how did this textually-mediated conversation between readers and producers of the magazines contribute to the developing narrative about the nature of girlhood on display in those magazines. This use of readers’ interventions in the text is a new approach to the study of girls’ magazines, as well as a contribution to the tension in feminist magazine scholarship between magazines as an insidious tool of patriarchy, and readers as critically aware. I use a combination of theoretical approaches from book history, feminist theory, and critical discourse analysis, and draw primary data both from magazine texts and from survey responses from adults sharing their recollections of reading teen magazines. I use case studies covering romance, sex, relationships with parents, sexism, and becoming a woman, to examine how changes in the historical context were reflected in teen magazines and especially in the letters girls wrote to the magazines. On each theme, I explore the way the topic developed in the magazines in general, and then focus on a particular magazine in more depth. Exploration of these case studies, and my survey responses, allows me to argue that, contrary to the usual depiction of girls as passive recipients of information aimed at them, some of them do challenge some of this information, but that the patriarchal influence of magazines nevertheless remains with them into adulthood. Paying close attention to the commercial aims of the magazines, I also argue that the textual interaction between readers and magazines, perhaps especially when readers are expressing disagreement with the magazine, serves an important function for magazines in keeping their readers engaged, but also in mitigating possible threats from advertisers, parent companies, and readers’ parents, that might ensue from the publication of contentious material