bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What Is to Be Done?
Authors: McGann Jerome J
Published: January 2007

The paper addresses the so-called "Crisis in the Humanities" in the context of two of its most apparent symptoms: the digital transformation of our museums and archives, and the explicitly parallel "Crisis in Tenure and Publishing" that has more recently come to attention. It introduces and frames a practical proposal, now underway, for dealing with both. This is the NINES initiative: Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship. The rationale of NINES is described, including the initial set of digital tools now in active development. The general aim of NINES is to move the rethinking of literary and cultural studies, method as well as theory, by establishing an institutionalized mechanism (peer-reviewed) for new kinds of digital-based analytic and interpretive practices.
The Flying Manuscript
Authors: Cixous HÃ©lÃ¨ne , Kamuf Peggy
Published: January 2007

Hélène Cixous's "The Flying Manuscript" turns around the chance rediscovery of a handwritten draft of the text by Jacques Derrida that would eventually become "A Silkworm of One's Own" and be published with Cixous's own "Savoir" in the volume titled Veils in 1997. Written after the disappearance of Derrida in 2004, the text is a moving tribute to the friend whom the author continues to address in the ongoing present of their long and rich dialogue.
Where Thinking Is Not What We Think
Authors: Hanrahan MairÃ©ad
Published: January 2007

This article offers a reading of Hélène Cixous's Jours de l'an (First Days of the Year), the first of many texts by Cixous to feature the problematic of an unwritten book which would be at the origin of all her other books. In particular, it examines the relationship between the text as a whole and its final chapter, "An Ideal Story," in the light of Heidegger's notion of thinking as digression, arguing that for Cixous the search for truth takes a necessarily oblique, indirect form. After consideration of the detours the text takes via Clarice Lispector and Marina Tsvetaeva, it contends that the story Cixous ends up telling runs counter to the one it set out to tell, simultaneously taking its place and reaffirming the need to tell it yet again.
"The Self is a People": Autoethnographic Poetics in Helene Cixous's Fictions?
Authors: Hilfrich Carola
Published: January 2007

This article argues that Hélène Cixous's fictions develop a poetics of autoethnography. It argues further that this poetics explores undersides of the modern discourse of the sublime as well as limits of the authorial "I" that has been engendered by this discourse. Through a metafiction of "ghostwriting," on the one hand, and a fiction of the peopled "I," on the other, Cixous rearticulates justice and authority in ways that can reinform our understanding of these frames of reality.
Portmanteau
Authors: Royle Nicholas
Published: January 2007

Noting that the reception of Cixous's work in an Anglophone context has, to date, been principally and in some respects misleadingly filtered through issues of feminist theory, this essay proposes the notion of the uncanny as an alternative way of exploring the significance and effects of her writings. Royle focuses on the relatively early "Fiction and Its Phantoms" (on Freud's "The Uncanny") and her essay on Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in order to elucidate their crucial relationship with the writings of Jacques Derrida. Royle expounds a detailed reading of the figure of the portmanteau as a way of apprehending the remarkable complexity and strangeness, as well as the beauty and humor of Cixous's work.
The Feminization of Democracy Under Siege: The Media, "the Lady" of Burma, and U.S. Foreign Policy
Authors: Brooten Lisa
Published: January 2007

This study explores representations of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in three major U.S. newsmagazines—Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report—analyzing her symbolic role as arguably the most powerful feminine personification of besieged democracy alive today. The coverage examined here employs an Orientalist framework that underpins media representations of both a threat to democracy worldwide and a set of differing national competencies available to deal with this threat. Media representations of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma invoke a "protection scenario," which positions the United States as a comparatively mature, masculine form of democracy run by highly competent yet compassionate leaders working to promote freedom and democracy worldwide. This case study demonstrates that within a larger, Orientalist framework, enacting a protection scenario provides a great degree of flexibility for symbolically coding the complex geopolitical environment that has emerged in the aftermath of the cold war.
In Whose Name? Crime Victim Policy and the Punishing Power of Protection
Authors: Wood Jennifer Kay
Published: January 2007

This essay analyzes crime policies enacted on behalf of, and often named for, particular victims of crime. This article argues that this naming reinforces a persistent and troubling image of the crime victim as young, white, female, and middle class. This image of victimization has so dominated and distorted discourse about crime in the United States that it is almost impossible to recognize and even harder to discuss how punishing these policies are not only for those accused and convicted of crime, but for most crime victims as well. As this essay argues, these crime victim policies often harm the very people they are supposed to protect.
Special Section: "The Visible Skeleton Series": The Art of Laura Ferguson
Authors: Dreger Alice Domurat
Published: January 2007

Laura Ferguson's The Visible Skeleton Series constitutes an artistic self-representation of scoliosis. Ferguson employs high-tech medical imaging and innovative graphical techniques to suggest a novel view of her skeletal "deformity." This section presents introductions to the series by a historian of medicine and by the artist herself, and offers personal and professional reflections on the work from an orthopedic surgeon, a social worker with lived experience of cleft lip, and a retired pediatric forensic pathologist.
Establishing the Mental Health Baseline
Authors: Frankel Sherman
Published: January 2007

This paper introduces a new organization, cognitive-web.org, whose goal is to make cognitive tests available on the internet, and thereby to provide users with a "mental health baseline" against which to assess their cognitive function over time. These tests will provide information about changes in cognitive function during normal aging and in dementia.
Skepticism, Statistical Methods, and the Cigarette: A Historical Analysis of a Methodological Debate
Authors: Parascandola Mark
Published: January 2007

The discipline of modern "risk factor" epidemiology was in its formative stages in the early 1950s, when epidemiologic studies revealed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer mortality. Many medical scientists and physicians were reluctant to accept these studies as a demonstration of causation because the methods were "statistical" and involved data collected in uncontrolled conditions outside the laboratory. But a substantial number of senior biostatisticians and epidemiologists also voiced concerns, albeit more methodologically sophisticated, about the quality of the evidence at the time. Statistical methods were just beginning to work their way into medicine and public health, and many epidemiologists and statisticians were concerned about the potential misuse of these methods by untrained investigators. When studies of smoking and lung cancer gained increasing publicity and were being used to recommend public health policies, some prominent epidemiologists and statisticians highlighted this debate in their efforts to pursue methodological reform. Participants in the debate over smoking and lung cancer saw the need for explicit and rigorous standards for evaluating etiologic hypotheses, but they held conflicting views about what those standards should be. These diverging views reflect an underlying tension within the discipline of epidemiology between the search for "objective" methods of scientific inference and the practical needs of public health research that persists today.
Does Biomedicine Entail the Successful Reduction of Pathology to Biology?
Authors: Keating Peter , Cambrosio Alberto
Published: January 2007

The idea of reducing pathology to biology has an extensive history, and the initial forms of the enterprise were unsuccessful. This article discusses the philosophical literature surrounding the notion of reduction in the sciences in general and of biology in particular; reviews several 19th-century programs that promoted the reduction of medicine to other biological disciplines; and examines the post-war origins of the notion of biomedicine. It shows how biology and medicine tend to interact in the constitution of new biomedical knowledge and how the notion of a pathological process resulting in a lesion remains central to the understanding of disease. The article proposes that while strict reduction has yet to be realized, one can speak of a continuing and successful realignment of biology and pathology since the Second World War.
Moving Beyond Bioethics: History and the Search for Medical Humanism
Authors: Belkin Gary S. (Gary Stuart)
Published: January 2007

From both within and without bioethics, growing criticism of the predominant methods and practices of the field can be heard. These critiques tend to lament an emphasis on logically derived rules and philosophical theories that inadequately capture how and why people have the moral attitudes they do, and they urge the use of more empirically grounded social sciences—history, sociology, and anthropology—to draw attention to the complex factors behind such attitudes. However, these critiques do not go far enough, as they do not question why debate over ethical categories should have such a central role in voicing concerns about medicine.The importance of using other forms of inquiry, especially that of history, to examine aspects of medical practice and the emergence of bioethics itself is not simply to refine bioethical moral analysis. Instead, history can be employed to counter the preoccupation with translating concerns about medicine into moral terms and to move towards what is more sorely needed: a true medical humanism.
The Placebo Response: Its Putative Role as a Functional Salutogenic Mechanism of the Central Nervous System
Authors: Kradin Richard L
Published: January 2007

The concept of placebo has evolved over time. Generally believed to be the basis of the premodern pharmacopoeia, the placebo has been adopted in practice as a harmless but unscientific approach towards alleviating symptoms. Currently, many medical scientists view placebos pejoratively as confounding elements in the analysis of randomized control trials.This article examines the changing attitudes towards placebos and the persistent controversies that surround their administration. The possible role of the placebo response as a functional salutogenic brain mechanism is considered, and elements of Edelman's neurobiological model of self and attractor theory are combined to explain how a unitary response by the central nervous system might yield diverse placebo effects. It is concluded that placebo responses are rooted in the complexity of mind/body interactions and that their underlying physiological mechanisms may be elucidated via methods that directly examine brain activity as the basis of subjective experience.
The Role of Anemia in Congestive Heart Failure and Chronic Kidney Insufficiency: the cardio renal anemia syndrome
Authors: Silverberg Donald S. , Wexler Dov , Iaina Adrian
Published: January 2007

Anemia is a major problem in patients with chronic kidney insufficiency. The development of recombinant human erythropoietin has enabled physicians to correct this anemia. Although anemia has not been considered to be a common or important contributor to congestive heart failure, anemia of any cause can lead to cardiac damage and eventually congestive heart failure. Our joint renal-cardiac heart failure team found that anemia was indeed very common in congestive heart failure and was associated with severe, medication-resistant cardiac failure. Correction of the anemia with erythropoietin and intravenous iron led to a marked improvement in patients' functional status and their cardiac function, and to a marked fall in the need for hospitalization and for high-dose diuretics; renal function usually improved or at least stabilized. Subsequent investigations by others have confirmed many of our observations. We call this interrelationship between congestive heart failure, chronic kidney insufficiency, and anemia the Cardio-Renal Anemia syndrome. Treatment of the anemia in congestive heart failure may prove vital in preventing progression of both the heart failure and the associated renal disease.
Remembering the "Golden Years" of Patient-Oriented Clinical Research: a collective conversation
Authors: Swazey Judith P , Fox Renee C. (Renee Claire)
Published: January 2007

The period from the end of World War II to the early 1960s has been characterized as the "golden years" of patient-oriented clinical research in the United States, a period catalyzed and fostered by advances in biology and medicine, changes in the organization and financing of research units, and strong moral and political convictions growing out of the war about the importance and possibilities of the scientific enterprise. This account of some of the salient themes, phenomena, and issues in clinical research during that era draws primarily on the proceedings of an oral history conference whose core participants were a number of emeritus physician-investigators who had played major roles in shaping patient-oriented research. The topics that they and the other conferees discussed included the factors that had led the emeritus physician-investigators into clinical research; the organizational attributes of the units where they had trained and worked, focusing particularly on Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital; the vital role played by private and federal funding for research and training; and some of the changes in the nature of clinical research, research training, and their relationships to the care of the sick in the decades since the golden years.
Denny-Brown, Boston City Hospital, and the History of American Neurology
Authors: Vilensky Joel A , Gilman Sid , Sinish Pandy R
Published: January 2007

Harvard University's Neurological Unit at Boston City Hospital (BCH) became the premier center for neurological training in the United States during the middle part of the 20th century. During part of this period (1939-1967), it was directed by Derek Denny-Brown, who had been recruited from England by Harvard president James Conant. The training program that Denny-Brown initiated at BCH emphasized neurology as a medical specialty, independent of psychiatry and neurosurgery. This program, which reflected Denny-Brown's British training, was remarkably effective and served as a model for rest of the country.
Pathways of Innovation: a history of the first effective treatment for sickle cell anemia
Authors: Williams Valerie L
Published: January 2007

The promise of molecular medicine is the prevention and treatment of illness. Understanding the mechanism of the disease should allow one to "fix" it. For sickle cell anemia, however, knowledge of the biochemical basis of the disease was only partly responsible for finding a means of treating the disease—of equal value were hypotheses and conclusions generated from clinical observations. This article describes the research path that led to the first effective treatment for sickle cell anemia, hydroxy-urea. Rather than exemplifying the "bench-to-bedside" model commonly used to describe the process of therapeutic innovation, this history of this research reveals that the critical advances for the development of treatment came not from basic research, but instead from clinical and patient-oriented research. Given that the linear approach is the prevailing paradigm of therapeutic innovation, this history is important because it indicates the inadequacy of this approach for a relatively straightforward single-gene mutation disease such as sickle cell anemia and suggests the need for multiple models of innovation for more complex diseases. Thus, this article questions the expectations of molecular medicine and the dominance of a linear model of therapeutic innovation, which often excludes or subordinates other models of developing treatments.
Gonorrhea and the Beginnings of Clinical Research Ethics
Authors: Benedek Thomas G
Published: January 2007

Research on ocular inflammation associated with gonorrhea began in conjunction with the entry of trachoma into Europe during the Napoleonic wars. The initial questions involved the cause of the contagiousness of gonorrhea and how the contagion spreads from the genitalia to other sites. Because efforts to infect animals with gonorrheal matter were unsuccessful, all experiments were conducted on human subjects. Once these two causes of blindness were tentatively differentiated, attempts to restore vision in an eye that had been blinded by a trachomatous membrane over the cornea by instilling gonorrheal pus began to be practiced. In 1841, Joseph Piringer described his use of this method to determine infectiousness decades before the discovery of pathogenic bacteria, as well as ethical concerns about the associated endangerment of patients. Beginning in the 1880s, research focused on the identification of the gonococcus and assessment of its pathogenicity.The ethical dilemma of inducing a disease with an unpredictable outcome persisted until the 1940s, when gonorrhea could be reliably cured by penicillin.
Ambiguous Bodies and Deviant Sexualities: hermaphrodites, homosexuality, and surgery in the United States, 1850-1904
Authors: Matta Christina
Published: January 2007

While the necessity of normalizing surgery on intersexed individuals is a topic of ongoing debate in the 21st century, the origins of surgery as a therapeutic practice for ambiguous or unusual genitalia lie in the 19th century.The first report of corrective surgery published in the United States appeared in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1852, but surgery did not immediately replace more traditional social prescriptions designed to fit hermaphrodites into a dimorphic model of human sex. Only after homosexuality became a matter of discussion in American medical journals did the frequency of normalizing surgeries increase. This paper explores the connection between physicians' increased interest in preventing "abnormal" sexual behavior and their insistence that interventionist surgeries were the most appropriate means of treating cases of hermaphroditism.
The Eye Does Not See What the Mind Does Not Know: the bacterium in the worm
Authors: Rajan Thiruchandurai V
Published: January 2007

Symbiotic relationships underlie the evolutionary success of many different life forms. The filarial worms are long, slender nematode parasites that cause considerable pathology in large segments of the world's population. About 25 years ago, investigators first reported the presence of bacterial organisms living inside these parasitic worms. Recent molecular biological studies have indicated that these bacteria belong to the genus Wolbachia, members of which have been known to be associated with numerous species of insects. Elimination of the Wolbachia from the nematodes (by, for instance, treatment with broad spectrum antibiotics) results in profound disturbances in the physiology of the latter, including a complete block in reproduction. This observation, taken together with the fact that every individual worm examined to date contains Wolbachia, validates the classification of the latter as "endosymbionts." Many studies indicate that the Wolbachia may also play an important role in the pathology caused by the nematode worms, and that it might be possible to target therapy against the Wolbachia to treat the filarial disease. Intriguingly, the intense recent interest in Wolbachia is in complete contrast with the virtually complete indifference evoked by the original discovery of these organisms.
Disparities and Discrimination in Health Care Coverage: A Critique of The Institute of Medicine Study
Authors: Epstein Richard Allen
Published: January 2007

The 2003 Institute of Medicine (IOM) study on Unequal Treatment takes the strong position that many of the current disparities in health care by race are attributable to forms of conscious and unconscious discrimination by health care providers. The study, however, is flawed by imprecise definitions of discrimination that fail to distinguish between differences in treatment due to breakdown in communications and differences in the treated population that are prompted by invidious motives of health care providers. It is doubtful that hidden forms of discrimination are prevalent in a profession whose professional norms are set so strongly against it. In addition, the IOM relies too uncritically on similar studies in unrelated fields to show the ostensible forms of discrimination. These errors have adverse social consequences. A false diagnosis of discrimination where none exists will send a false signal to members of racial minorities that may induce them to avoid receiving needed medical care and instead pursue costly and ineffective remedial devices that will take away funds better spent on providing direct health care.
Black-White Differences in the Economic Value of Improving Health
Authors: Murphy Kevin M , Topel Robert H
Published: January 2007

This article examines how differences in longevity over time and across groups add to the typical measures of economic progress and intergroup differentials. We focus on gains for and differences between groups defined both by race (black and white) and by gender, relying on willingness to pay as our measure of the economic value of gains in longevity. Measured at birth, the gains for white males between 1968 and 1998 were about $245,000 per person, while the gains for black males were far larger, about $390,000 per person. The gains for women were somewhat smaller, with white females gaining about $150,000 per person and black females gaining about $305,000 per person. Our estimates suggest that differences in income explain about 1/3 to 1/2 of the current black-white gap in longevity.
Breast Cancer and Race: A Rising Tide Does Not Lift All Boats Equally
Authors: Polite Blase N , Olopade Olufunmilayo I
Published: January 2007

African American women have a lower overall incidence of breast cancer but a higher overall mortality than do white women. African American women with breast cancer present for medical care at an earlier age, with more advanced stage disease, and with higher-risk tumor biology. While the advanced stage at presentation and higher-risk tumor biology appear to account for much of the excess mortality in African American women, differences persist even after controlling for these factors. This paper discusses the factors that may contribute to differences in survival and differences in stage at diagnosis between African American and white women.
"Step into My Zapatos, Doc": Understanding and Reducing Communication Disparities in the Multicultural Informed Consent Setting
Authors: Simon Christian M , Kodish Eric
Published: January 2007

Current informed consent standards are aimed at promoting an equitable and ethical environment for conducting research across diverse patient populations. This paper explores the possible effects of ethnicity and culture on the consent process for pediatric cancer clinical trials. Informed consent discussions were observed, recorded, transcribed, and coded. Question asking by parents and clinician/ parent word ratios were used to create an interactivity measure, or "I-score."Visual analog scales were used to rate the clarity of specific explanations. Cases were sorted into two groups on the basis of parents' self-reported ethnicity: Caucasian (n=79, 56%) and minority (predominantly Latino) parents (n=61, 44%). Chi-square and t-tests were used to compare the groups. A series of logistic regression analyses (controlling for ethnicity and SES) were run for variables that showed statistically significant differences (p ≤ 0.05). Our findings suggest that the content and quality of the informed consent process is linked to parental ethnicity, or clinician attitudes toward parental ethnicity.These findings are discussed in terms of current perspectives on culture and "cultural competence" in health care. Further research is needed to understand how cultural factors affect outcomes such as parental understanding, decision making, mutual trust, and satisfaction within the informed consent process.
Geographic Variation in Health Care and the Problem of Measuring Racial Disparities
Authors: Baicker Katherine , Chandra Amitabh , Skinner Jonathan
Published: January 2007

In its study of racial and ethnic disparities in health care, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that there were large and significant disparities in the quality and quantity of health care received by minority groups in the United States. This article shows that where a patient lives can itself have a large impact on the level and quality of health care the patient receives. Since black or Hispanic populations tend to live in different areas from non-Hispanic white populations, location matters in the measurement and interpretation of health (and health care) disparities. There is wide variation in racial disparities across geographic lines: some areas have substantial disparities, while others have equal treatment. Furthermore, there is no consistent pattern of disparities: some areas may have a wide disparity in one treatment but no disparity in another. The problem of differences in quality of care across regions, as opposed to racial disparities in care, should remain the target of policy makers, as reducing quality disparities would play a major role in improving the health care received by all Americans and by minority Americans in particular.
Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish : Mourning as a "Delirium of Study"
Authors: Diamond James Arthur
Published: January 2007

What does one do when the death of a parent demands reentry into an abandoned religious formalism? Raised in an orthodox Jewish home, schooled in the intricate discourse of rabbinic texts and yet long estranged from the ritualism of Jewish law, the prospect is maddening. Filial love compels a yearlong daily synagogue attendance where one recites a mourning prayer laden with myth and superstition. Kaddish is an exquisitely maneuvered headlong plunge into Judaism's expansive intellectual tradition. Thereby the current literary editor of the New Republic fulfils his duty both as a Jew and a son, while never turning his back on another imperative he so cherishes "the moral obligation to be intelligent."
Kierkegaard's Aesthete and Unamuno's Niebla
Authors: Evans Jan E , Evans C. Stephen
Published: January 2007

What is truly beautiful? For Søren Kierkegaard the beautiful is to be found in an integrated self, one that is freely chosen. This article explores Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" stage of existence through the character of Augusto Pérez, the protagonist of Miguel de Unamuno's novel, Niebla. After establishing a solid link between Unamuno and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's "ethical" stage is used to critique the "aesthetic" stage on aesthetic grounds, on the basis of the beauty found in life's work, a calling. The conclusion is that the sphere of the "aesthetic" does not achieve Kierkegaard's "aesthetics" of an integrated, fully existing self.
Mourning and Melancholia: Reading the Symposium
Authors: Rosenstock Bruce (Bruce Benjamin)
Published: January 2007

The characters Apollodorus and Alcibiades represent the melancholic and manic poles of what Freud calls the "cyclic disease" in "Mourning and Melancholia." Plato conceives of erôs as entrapped within cycles of pleasure and pain, filling and emptying, until the self recognizes its overfullness — that is, its pregnancy. Socrates embodies the "out-of-placeness" (atopia) that overfullness signifies in a world characterized by emptying and filling, the "whole tragedy and comedy of life" as the Philebus puts it. As a lure for erôs, Socrates points beyond himself; for Apollodorus and Alicibiades, however, he catalyzes their melancholic and manic positions. The reader of the dialogue is thereby cautioned not to relate to the text as containing the fullness of Socratic speech, but to see it as the occasion for the recognition of his or her own out-of-placeness in the "tragedy and comedy of life."
Tolstoy and the Moral Instructions of Death
Authors: Sansom Dennis
Published: January 2007

Tolstoy critiques the assumption one can live a meaningful life merely by following social conventions. Though they may give a semblance of control, they do not prepare one to face mortality. Compassion for others enables one to transmute a preoccupation with filling one's preferences and desires to an appreciation of others and one's individuality. In telling of Ivan's death, Tolstoy shows the ineffectiveness of the practice of medicine and marriage when they are treated only as conventions.
The New Literacy Thesis: Implications for Librarianship
Authors: Weissinger Thomas
Published: January 2007

The old adage that literate cultures have an intellectual advantage over
oral cultures finds its latest expression in predictions that digital
technologies are causing a knowledge revolution. The new literacy thesis
is that digitally literate cultures have intellectual advantage. Implicit
in such forecasts is a theory of human progress that jeopardizes the
future of librarianship. It assumes that knowledge and human culture
must be expressed in terms of the new literacy. This article undertakes
to show that librarianship cannot always be understood in terms of its
association with the social practices and institutions founded upon
literate expression.
For Electronic Journals, Total Downloads Can Predict Number of Users
Authors: Davis Philip M
Published: January 2007

Results from two multiple regression models involving HighWire journal subscriptions in 2003 for 16 participating universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden indicate a highly predictive relationship between the number of article downloads and the number of users—meaning that the size of a user population can be estimated by just knowing the total use of a journal. The relationship is consistent over time and across institutions and appears to be unrelated to the subject, size, or popularity of a journal. It is not consistent across publishers, however, suggesting that an "interface effect" may exist. The development of a Project COUNTER standard to deal with extreme or abnormal journal usage is necessary if we wish to compare the performance of journals across publishers.
The Campus Racial Climate and Undergraduates' Perceptions of the Academic Library
Authors: Whitmire Ethelene
Published: January 2007

Using secondary data analyses, this study investigated the relationship between the campus racial climate and how 851 White and 252 students of color attending a midwestern Research I predominantly White institution perceived the academic libraries on campus. Results indicated that race-related aspects of the campus environment were correlated to the perception of the academic libraries for White undergraduates. This was not the case for the students of color. Future research on this topic is suggested in the conclusion.
Evaluating the Quality of a Chat Service
Authors: Arnold Julie , Kaske Neal K
Published: January 2007

A quantitative study of a university chat reference service (online synchronous) addresses the following research questions: (1) What types of questions are being asked? (2) Who is asking the questions of the service? and (3) Did the customers get correct answers to their questions? All the transcripts (351) from January through August 2002 were examined, yielding 419 questions that were analyzed. The relationships among accuracy of answers, types of questions, and customer groupings were analyzed. Correct answers occurred 91.72 percent overall, with a wide range between question types. Analysis by types of questions posed from different customer groupings is provided, along with changes made and planned for the chat service.
The Preservation of Digital Content
Authors: Cloonan MichÃ¨le Valerie , Sanett Shelby
Published: January 2007

The authors are conducting a three-part study to evaluate current trends in the preservation of digital content, with an emphasis on electronic records. The study emanated from the authors' work on the Preservation Task Force of the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) project. This article incorporates the findings of both the survey and individual key-informant interviews that we conducted from August 2001 through February 2003, as round 2 of the study. Round 2 builds on the 2000-2001 round 1 survey that sought to identify and describe strategies for preserving electronic records. In this second round the authors found that progress has been made in some areas while it is still lags in others.1 The full study consists of three phases: round 1 identified and surveyed 13 institutions, projects, and programs in North America, Australia, and Europe. Round 2 surveyed eight of the 13 institutions again to follow up on their progress. Additionally, we interviewed 18 key informants, including archivists and librarians. In round 3 the authors will each conduct one case study drawn from the survey participants in rounds 1 and 2. By the end of the three rounds, the authors will have studied a continuum of activities (over a six-year period) that constitutes a range of digital preservation strategies. The study will have charted the change in technological developments over this period—developments that have occurred in our survey institutions to meet the requirements of their mandates to preserve digital content for as long as needed.
Model for Presenting Resources in Scholar's Portal
Authors: Feeney M. (Mary) , Newby Jill
Published: January 2007

Presenting electronic resources to users through a federated search engine introduces unique opportunities and challenges to libraries. This article reports on the decision-making tools and processes used for selecting collections of electronic resources by a project team at the University of Arizona (UA) Libraries for the Association of Research Libraries' Scholar's Portal Project. A brief overview of the Scholar's Portal Project is provided, and the approach used at the UA Libraries to implement the federated search engine is detailed. This article also reports on the results of usability testing, interviews, and a user satisfaction survey used to determine the functionality of Scholar's Portal and the search results.
The Viability of Live Online Reference: An Assessment
Authors: Horowitz Lisa R , Flanagan Patricia A , Helman Deborah L
Published: January 2007

The MIT Libraries enthusiastically implemented real-time online reference service in September 2001. After 15 months, Ask Us!—Live was suspended due to ongoing software problems. This article describes the four-part assessment of the service with recommendations for the future.
A Library Communication Audit for the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Chalmers Mardi , Liedtka Theresa , Bednar Carol
Published: January 2007

This article describes a case study relating to an internal communication audit conducted in a large academic library that assessed existing information channels during a period of organizational change in order to recommend improvements. A communications task force developed and administered a survey instrument and then analyzed data and reported results and recommendations. The task force also suggested methods for implementation and continuing assessment. A questionnaire collected quantitative communication procedural and behavioral data, as well as qualitative commentary on satisfaction with existing information and decision-making structures. Focus groups identified recommendations and strategies to enrich and clarify organizational communication and monitor progress toward implementation of recommendations.
Factualization and Plausibility in Delusional Discourse
Authors: Georgaca Eugenie
Published: January 2007

According to social constructionism factuality, the establishment
of accounts as corresponding to an objective external reality,
is an interactional accomplishment ordinarily achieved in everyday
conversations. In cases of disagreement regarding the interpretation
and nature of events, however, not only the plausibility of the
account, but also the rationality, integrity, and accountability of
the participants is at stake. Delusions present extreme cases of
such disagreement. This paper analyzes extracts from an interview with
an individual diagnosed as delusional focusing on the factualization
devices used in the negotiation of accounts. The question of whether
the observation of conversational rules documented in the interview
is sufficient to establish the plausibility of an account and the
rationality of its teller leads to arguments around the necessity of
shifting the focus from the grounded micro-analysis of talk to wider
social and institutional processes.
Why Some Delusions Are Necessarily Inexplicable Beliefs
Authors: Klee Robert
Published: January 2007

After presenting and criticizing recent theoretical work on the
nature of delusional belief, I argue that the works of the later
Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson offer heretofore underappreciated
insights into delusional belief. I distinguish two general kinds of
delusion: pedestrian and stark. The former can be explained as cognitive
mistakes of various kinds, whereas the latter I argue are necessarily
inexplicable. This thesis requires the denial of the Davidsonian dogma
that rationality is constitutive of mental content. I claim that the
dogma holds only for normal cognition and is violated precisely in the
case of stark delusion.
Autistic Self-Awareness
Authors: McGeer Victoria
Published: January 2007

A currently popular view traces autistic cognitive abnormalities to a defective capacity for theorizing about other minds. Two prominent researchers, Uta Frith and Francesca Happ�, extend this account by tracing further autistic abnormalities to impaired self-consciousness. This paper argues that Frith and Happ�'s account requires a treatment of autistic self-report that is problematic on both methodological and philosophical grounds. However, the philosophical problems point to an alternative account of self-awareness and self-report in normal individuals; and this account gives us a methodologically more attractive approach to explaining autistic abnormalities.
Knowing Your Own Strength: Accurate Self-Assessment as a Requirement for Personal Autonomy
Authors: Anderson Joel , Lux Warren
Published: January 2007

Autonomy is one of the most contested concepts in philosophy and psychology. Much of the disagreement centers on the form of reflexivity that one must have to count as genuinely self-governing. In this essay, we argue that an adequate account of autonomy must include a distinct requirement of accurate self-assessment, which has been largely ignored in the philosophical focus on agents' ability to evaluate the desirability of acting on certain impulses or values. In our view, being autonomous (i.e., self-guiding) involves understanding the extent to which one has the capacities required for one's intended actions. On both clinical grounds (drawn from cases of frontal brain injury) and conceptual grounds, we argue that one's autonomy is diminished to the extent to which one's ability to assess one's capacities is impaired.
Reasons of Which Reason Knows Not
Authors: Church Jennifer
Published: January 2007

How is it possible for unconscious states to function as reasons? Two challenges are considered—one concerning the apparent dependence of normativity on self-knowledge, the other concerning the apparent irrationality of the unconscious. Both challenges are addressed through a discussion of 'spatial reasoning', which helps to make sense of 'emotional reasoning' as well.
Personal Identity and the Past
Authors: Schechtman Marya
Published: January 2007

In the second edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke argues that personal identity over time consists in sameness of consciousness rather than the persistence of any substance, material or immaterial. Something about this view is very compelling, but as it stands it is too vague and problematic to provide a viable account of personal identity. Contemporary "psychological continuity theorists" have tried to amend Locke's view to capture his insights and avoid his difficulties. This paper argues that the standard approach fails because it takes Locke to be a memory theorist, and does not focus enough on his claim that we need continuity of consciousness for personal persistence. An alternative reading of Locke is offered, emphasizing the role of self-understanding in producing continuity of consciousness. This alternative overcomes the difficulties with the standard approach, and shows how it is possible to attribute unconscious psychological elements to a person, even when personal persistence is defined in terms of consciousness.
Strategies of Illumination: U.S. Network News, Watergate, and the Clinton Affair
Authors: Baym Geoffrey
Published: January 2007

This study examines the metaphors of publicity that structured
U.S. network television news coverage of Watergate in 1973-74 and the
Clinton affair of 1998. During both Watergate and the Clinton affair,
the networks understood publicity to be the light of public inquiry. The
two sets of coverage, however, differ substantially in the nature of
that light. The Watergate coverage gives explicit voice to the metaphor
of publicity as a searchlight, an apersonal and disembodied agent of
surveillance that illuminates the political in a rational-institutional
light. By contrast, the Clinton coverage implicitly rests upon a
metaphor of publicity as a floodlight, a dramaturgical exposure of
the political process that celebrates instead an emotional, personal,
and narrativistic frame for the political and a subjective, embodied
approach to journalism. While the floodlight model is often maligned, this
analysis concludes that it is expanding the assumptions and boundaries
of public discourse.
Privacy, Publicity, and Propriety in Congressional Eulogies for Representative Stewart B. McKinney (R-Conn.)
Authors: Brouwer Daniel C.
Published: January 2007

When U.S. House Representative Stewart B. McKinney (R-Conn.) died of AIDS-related causes on May 7, 1987, while still in office, House representatives and senators eulogized the departed from their respective chamber floors. An examination of these eulogies reveals Congress members' extraordinary concern about propriety within their forums, particularly with regard to the proper boundaries between the public and the private.
The Illusion of Reform: Corporate Discourse and Agenda Denial in the 2002 "Corporate Meltdown"
Authors: Conrad Charles
Published: January 2007

Political scientists long have argued that public policymaking is a complex and boundedly rational process, one that can aptly be described as a system of punctuated equilibrium. Recently, much of that work has focused on the ways in which various interest groups frustrate public policy reform, by keeping topics off of the public policy agenda and/or seeing that so-called reformist measures do not lead to fundamental social or political change. In this essay I examine the rhetorical processes through which organizational rhetors and pro-corporatist public policymakers successfully undercut pressures for meaningful reform in the wake of the Enron-initiated "meltdown."
When Patriots Protest: The Anti-Suffrage Discursive Transformation of 1917
Authors: Maddux Kristy
Published: January 2007

Historians have tried to use social movement, organizational, and leadership markers to define the anti-suffrage movement and to explain the radical change that occurred in that movement in 1917, and they have largely failed in doing so. As an alternative, this essay explains the anti-suffrage movement through that change, and specifically through its discursive transformation. To illuminate this transformation, the essay focuses on the case of the antis' treatment of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible. Before 1917, antis opposed woman suffrage on narrowly pragmatic grounds: that it would be bad for the family, for women, for progressive organizing. After 1917, the anti-suffrage movement evolved into a larger anti-radicalism movement, using the Woman's Bible to link together suffrage, feminism, socialism, and Bolshevism, and decrying them all as evil. This discursive transformation signals a shift from social movement to counterpublic.
Justice and Argument in Judaism: A D'var Torah on Shofetim
Authors: Aune James Arnt
Published: January 2007

In the form of a commentary on passages from the Torah and the Talmud about the death penalty, this essay identifies unique characteristics of the Jewish concepts of justice and of argumentative dialogue. The Jewish concepts of justice and argument potentially serve as a useful corrective to some current efforts by conservative Protestants to bring religion into the public sphere.
Rhetoric and the Catholic Imagination
Authors: Farrell James M
Published: January 2007

The Catholic imagination encourages a sacramental appreciation of a world that is full of grace. Catholics understand that each baptized person has a unique vocation to fulfill, a particular way in which he or she is invited to cooperate with God in bringing about His Kingdom. That is no less true for Catholic rhetoricians, who see in history and public controversy glimpses of God's plan for salvation, and who are called to respond to God's invitation by joyfully entering civic life sustained by church teaching drawn from the truth of scripture and tradition.
Filled with the Spirit: Rhetorical Invention and the Pentecostal Tradition
Authors: Medhurst Martin J
Published: January 2007

This essay proceeds in three movements: a history of modern Pentecostalism, a personal narrative of my own experiences in a Pentecostal church, and an examination of five enthymemes, drawn from my Pentecostal experience, that continue to structure the way I think and write. These enthymemes are found to be guides to topic selection, critical practice, and intended audience response in my professional life as a rhetorical critic.
Rhetorical Invention and Lutheran Doctrine?
Authors: Sullivan Dale L
Published: January 2007

From a Lutheran perspective, rhetorical invention is the process by which a person determines how to take responsible action, understanding identity in terms of one's habitation in two kingdoms and in terms of one's role as an agent of grace and of law; grounding arguments in Scripture and subordinating reason to the Word; and responding sensitively in service to others.
Patriots and Pacifists: The Rhetorical Debate about Peace, Patriotism, and Internationalism, 1914-1930
Authors: Snider Christy Jo
Published: January 2007

Between 1914 and the late 1920s, peace organizations and their critics engaged in a debate over the meaning, importance, and value of certain ideological terms. While those critical of peace workers tried to link words like internationalism and pacifism to "un-American" ideas, peace groups responded by explaining that concern for international issues did not lead to disloyalty, that patriotic citizens wanted to protect their countries from wartime violence, and that verbal attacks against peace advocates violated American values such as free speech. The reciprocal nature of this discourse eventually helped the peace movement increase its influence in governmental affairs.