Calculating publication impact by citations is deeply flawed, Deen Freelon argues
Pablo J. Boczkowski and Michael X. Delli Carpini have done the field a great service with “On Writing in Communication and Media Studies,” Freelon argues. He predicts the article will soon become a classic of first-year PhD proseminars given its clarity and efficacy in laying out the inner workings of the major genres of writing in which we most often participate. In this response, Freelon offers two brief points, both of which pertain to the general issue of how the impact of various forms of scholarly writing should be assessed. Questions ofimpact are inseparable from discussions of scholarly writing in any discipline, as the incentives in place for various writing genres will, to a substantial extent, determine how much of each genre is produced. First, we should consider impact primarily at the level of the writing product as opposed to the journal or outlet level. Second, and relatedly, optimally assessing impact requires knowing which values of each metric count as outstanding, a that requires distributions of impact metrics for scholars in the same subfield who started publishing around the same time. Working toward such a solution would generate an empirical basis for standards of impact, which our field currently lacks.
The conservative populism of President Trump has created the environment that birthed the #MeToo Movement and Fourth Wave Feminism
Misogyny and Media in the Age of Trump argues that misogyny has increased in the United States under President Trump and that although women’s experiences under misogyny are by no means universal, patriarchal social and institutional systems facilitate gender-based hostility. Systemic misogyny and power inequities are at the root of male-on-female bullying, the bullying and harassment of non-hegemonic males and other minorities as well as sexual harassment, rape, and even murder. Given the prevalence of misogyny, and its deep rootedness in religion, it is argued that the social contract needs to be rewritten in order to have a just, gender- and race-equitable society. Misogyny creates a clash of cultures between men and women, hegemonic and non-hegemonic males, feminists and INCELS, the powerful and the oppressed, natives and marginalized minorities, the conservative and the liberal/progressive.
Arguments on social media bout the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire indicate the injustice of attention
On the evening of April 15, 2019, hoary plumes of smoke erupted from Notre-Dame Cathedral and rolled across the rooftops of the Ile de la Cité in Paris, France. World leaders expressed their condolences over the loss, and many experts publicly warned that, though it can be rebuilt, the 12th-century monument to Catholicism will never “be the same.” By the end of the next day, cathedral bells tolled across the city in honor of the devastating fire and hundreds of millions in euros already had been pledged, with the uber-wealthy leading the way. In the days that followed the fire, the fire and fundraising efforts garnered a veritable tempest of media coverage and ignited a social media fervor. The hashtag #NotreDameFire trended on Twitter, spread virally across Facebook and, to date, has garnered almost 22,000 posts on Instagram. Much of this online popular discourse has not been as kind and can be read as a form of political struggle around the meaning and identity of Notre-Dame waged on the digital archive of Instagram. This article examines the #NotreDameFire hashtag on Instagram, reading the associated visuals through the framework set out by Cara A. Finnegan in Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. It considers Finnegan’s presence, character, appropriation and magnitude in the context of Instagram as an archive of, in this case, both site and sight of one imperial landscape — Notre-Dame Cathedral.