bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Rhetoric and Gender
Authors: Foss Karen A. 
Published: September 2017

Rhetoric is the art and study of human symbol use. As a discipline, rhetoric began in ancient Greece as a practical art of persuasion, applied principally to political, legal, and judicial contexts (→ Rhetoric, Greek). Gender refers to the cultural constructs of masculinity and femininity imposed upon biological sex by any particular culture – what it means to be
masculine
or
feminine
. The relationship between rhetoric and gender has played out in four different and progressively complex perspectives in the discipline of rhetorical studies.
Rhetoric and Media Studies
Authors: Childers Jay P. 
Published: September 2017

Few would deny media's increasingly central role in the everyday lives of most individuals, particularly in first and second world countries. And increasingly, few would deny media's rhetorical influence in how people come to understand themselves and those around them. News media shape the way individuals see their communities as well as those on the other side of the planet (→ news). Television sitcoms offer representations of individual characters that frame how one sees others of differing national, ethnic, or economic backgrounds (→ Situation Comedies). Movies offer narratives filled with violence and crime, which often leads people to overestimate the occurrence of such acts in real life (→ Cultivation Effects). Media play a central role in shaping the way many people perceive themselves and the world around them (→ Media Effects; Media and Perceptions of Reality).
Rhetoric, Medieval
Authors: Bennett Beth S. 
Published: September 2017

As an area of investigation, “medieval rhetoric” refers to the discipline taught as rhetoric in the liberal arts curriculum of western Europe, as well as to how that art was adapted to communication practices for secular and ecclesiastical purposes, between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. Study of medieval rhetoric includes examining the continuance of the classical rhetorical tradition, as it was transmitted from the ancient societies of Greece and Rome (→ Rhetoric, Greek; Rhetoric, Roman), along with the development of rhetorical education and pedagogical practices in composition that fostered the emergence of distinctive medieval discursive genres, which persisted even into the Renaissance (→ Rhetoric, European Renaissance). In its scope, medieval rhetoric is necessarily complex and only truly began to be studied on its own terms in the twentieth century, as medieval Latin texts were discovered and made accessible for close examination by scholars investigating the history of rhetoric.
Rhetoric and Poetics
Authors: Walker Jeffrey 
Published: September 2017

Any understanding of the relation between rhetoric and poetics will depend on how each category is conceived. The term “rhetoric” can mean “rhetorical discourse”; or the suasory practices observable in any given piece or kind of → Discourse; or the
art
or
theory
of rhetorical performance. Further, “rhetorical discourse” may be defined narrowly or broadly – for example, as any discourse that intends or causes persuasion. “Persuasion” too may be defined narrowly, as the inducement of belief and the promotion of action; or broadly, as the production of any effect in an audience's psyche (→ Persuasion; Rhetoric, Argument, and Persuasion). Likewise, “poetics” can mean the
art
or
theory
of poetic discourse, while “poetic discourse” may mean anything from poetry to “literature” very generally conceived. Thus, any discussion of rhetoric and poetics is working with labile terms.
Rhetoric, Postmodern
Authors: Aylesworth Gary E. 
Published: September 2017

Postmodern rhetoric is a set of discursive and critical practices that diverge from → Persuasion by means of
ethos
,
pathos
, and
logos
(→ Rhetoric, Greek). Where classical rhetoric addresses a known and identifiable → audience, postmodern rhetoric puts into question the identities of the speaker, the audience, and the messages that pass between them, interrupting and displacing senders, receivers, and messages by realigning the networks through which they pass (→ Postmodernism and Communication).
Rhetoric in Western Europe: Britain
Authors: O'Rourke Sean Patrick 
Published: September 2017

The tradition of rhetorical theory and practice in Britain is longstanding and vibrant. In the Middle Ages, Britain produced important contributions to rhetorical theory. The Venerable Bede (c. 672/73–735), for instance, provided a treatment of the stylistic aspects of discourse in his
De schematibus et tropis
, and Alcuin (c. 735–804), the British‐born tutor of and advisor to Charlemagne, left us his
Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus
, a dialogue in which emperor and teacher explore the theoretical underpinnings of civic discourse in the Ciceronian tradition (→ Rhetoric, Medieval). While the practice of public address was quite limited during the period, British rhetorics explored the persuasive elements of verse, and monastic libraries in the British Isles preserved manuscripts of some of the key rhetorical texts of late antiquity.
Rhetorical Studies
Authors: Gaines Robert N. , Gronbeck Bruce E. 
Published: September 2017

The rhetorical impulse may be conceived as the desire to express one's thoughts in a way that affects the thoughts of others. Such an impulse is universal among humans, and historical evidence exists for its cultivation in ancient civilizations of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (Lipson & Binkley 2004). Early instances of theoretical inquiry concerning rhetorical communication have been documented in China (c. eighth centurybce), Egypt (c. eleventh centurybce), India (c. fourth centurybce), and Greece (including Magna Graecia, c. fifth centurybce; → Rhetoric in East Asia: China and Japan; Rhetoric, Pre‐Socratic; Rhetoric in South Asia). Arguably, each of these regional developments gave rise to a different tradition and trajectory of indigenous rhetorical studies. However, as a historical matter, the European tradition was most closely related to the emergent discipline of communication; accordingly, it receives emphasis here.
Rumor
Authors: Froissart Pascal 
Published: September 2017

The concept of rumor covers a wide range of realities: false or unverified → news, of course, but also any journalistic errors or disinformation maneuvers when publicly revealed, any prejudices and stereotypes made into narratives, some → propaganda pieces if ambiguous enough, some hoaxes their authors do not kill, some realistic contemporary legends, and even some examples of viral marketing. The reason for this conceptual maelstrom is that, although the reality of rumor is old and well documented, new and problematical conceptualizations of rumor have emerged.
Rural Development
Authors: McAnany Emile G. 
Published: September 2017

Rural development was the almost exclusive focus of the early development of communication endeavors in the 1950s. The focus was on economic outcomes and, to a great extent, the emphasis was placed on agriculture, with some attention to how the mass media (radio and print at first, then television from the 1960s) could improve the lives of rural populations in literacy, education, health, and community development. The early projects of communication for rural development, sponsored by such multilateral aid agencies as → UNESCO and bilateral programs like Point Four in the US, were influenced by academic writings on development like → Daniel Lerner's → modernization theory, → Wilbur Schramm's policy strategy, and → Everett Rogers's diffusion paradigm (→ Diffusion of Information and Innovation). The focus on rural development, however, began to shift in the 1970s when specific areas like education, telecommunications, agriculture, health, and nutrition took attention away from rural development more broadly (→ Health Communication; Health Campaigns, Communication in). In recent years, less project attention has been devoted to agriculture and education and more has gone to health and telecommunications as issues in rural development. In the early years of the new century, rural development has re‐emerged in the form of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, centered on the reduction of global poverty, which is often more concentrated in rural areas. Development communication has again been identified as a potential factor in the accomplishment of these goals.
Satellite Communication, Regulation of
Authors: Shin Dong Hee 
Published: September 2017

In recent years, satellite communication has been drastically changed by regulatory reform and technological advancement. The regulatory environment and technological advances have influenced satellite communications both structurally and content‐wise. Competition in network and services development has led to advances in satellite technologies. Technological improvements in telecommunication systems have brought about lower cost digital services. Meanwhile, satellite communications facilitate the → free flow of information while creating a national sovereignty conflict over global communication (→ Satellite Television).
Schemas and Media Effects
Authors: Matthes Jörg 
Published: September 2017

According to schema theory, the encoding and processing of information depends on learned, relatively stable cognitive structures in long‐term memory, so called → schemas (Information Processing). These cognitive structures include knowledge about concepts, persons, events, and the self. When individuals encounter a stimulus, they search their minds for the appropriate schema to match the stimulus. The selected schema then structures the way the stimulus is interpreted. Because individuals use their prior knowledge to process and to understand the stimuli, schema theory is an example of top‐down or concept‐driven processing.
Scopic Regime
Authors: Jay Martin 
Published: September 2017

The French film theorist Christian Metz coined the term “scopic regime” in
The imaginary signifier
(1982, 1st pub.1975) to distinguish the cinema from the theatre: “what defines the specifically cinematic
scopic regime
is not so much the distance kept … as the absence of the object seen” (1982, 61). Because of the cinematic apparatus's construction of an imaginary object, its scopic regime is unhinged from its “real” referent (→ Cinema). Representation is independent of what is represented, at least as a present stimulus, both spatially and temporally (→ Visual Representation).
Semiotics
Authors: Bruhn Jensen Klaus 
Published: September 2017

Semiotics is an interdisciplinary field that studies “the life of signs within society” (Saussure 1959, 16). While “signs” most commonly refer to the elements of language and other symbolic communication, it also may denote any means of knowing about or representing an aspect of reality (→ Sign; Sign Systems). Accordingly, semiotics has developed as an affiliate of such traditional disciplines as philosophy and psychology. In the social sciences and humanities, including communication research, semiotics became an influential approach particularly from the 1960s.
Sexual Violence in the Media
Authors: Kitzinger Jenny 
Published: September 2017

The representation of sexual violence has been subject to critical inquiry in two main ways. One strand of research explores whether scenes of sexual violence (in films, computer games, and pornography magazines) might trigger sexual aggression. This sort of research is often pursued under the umbrella of psychology and criminology (→ Violence as Media Content, Effects of). A second strand, more often pursued by communication scholars, focuses more on how the media frame sexual violence as an issue. The aim of this body of work is to explore how the media present the causes of, and solutions to, sexual violence, and examine how this might help to shape public and policy responses. This approach also includes an interest in the everyday representations of sexuality that infuse popular culture and how these might reinforce gender inequalities or romanticize sexual aggression (Ramasubramanian & Oliver 2006).
Situation Comedies
Authors: Taflinger Richard F. 
Published: September 2017

The situation comedy, or sitcom, has been a staple of entertainment media for decades. More than 900 have been on the air since 1947. Starting on → Radio, it quickly became popular with audiences. With the advent of → Television in the late 1940s, sitcoms migrated to the small screen, and it is these sitcoms with which most people today around the world are familiar. Content and neo‐Aristotelian analyses of from 1 to 100 episodes each of approximately 800 situation comedies has led to the following understanding of situation comedies and how they work (Taflinger 1996).
Social Comparison Theory
Authors: Mares Marie‐Louise 
Published: September 2017

The central idea of social comparison theory is that individuals often assess how well they are doing by comparing themselves with others around them. When → Festinger (1954) originally developed the theory, he argued that individuals want an accurate assessment of their opinions and performance, and that in the absence of objective standards, they look to others (preferably those who are similar in a relevant dimension) for → Information about their relative standing. Individuals, he argued, seek to be right in their opinions, and have a unidirectional drive upward for their abilities.
Social Desirability
Authors: Mangold Roland 
Published: September 2017

The social desirability bias is a major → response set that is possibly active when data are collected in empirical social studies with → interviews, psychometric tests, or questionnaires in particular. This tendency interferes with the “true values” of the subjects' traits or states that are to be assessed and puts a systematic bias onto the measured values (→ Scales; Measurement Theory; Validity). People react in a socially desirable way if they do not answer in a way or choose the alternative that best reflects the intensity or strength of the state or trait that is to be measured. Instead, subjects answer in a way that they assume to be expected by their peer group or the interviewer/experimenter or approved by the general public (→ Climate of Opinion; Public Opinion). For example, a person who sympathizes with a radical (right‐wing) political party and is asked in a questionnaire to state his or her beliefs concerning migration or foreign persons will probably give moderate answers despite holding a more radical view. By that, the person intends not to stand out from other subjects or to the experimenter as being deviant or radical.
Social Mobilization
Authors: Calabrese Andrew 
Published: September 2017

Social mobilizations are concrete evidence of commitment and activism aimed at some form of social transformation, whether in the formal sense of changing laws or by influencing informal social norms. Mobilizations are episodic and shorter‐lived than movements, and are often key milestones in the history of movements, providing observable evidence of solidarity, progress, and public awareness built around a particular cause or set of related causes (→ Social Movements and Communication). Mobilizations may receive the conferral of legitimacy through the support of political institutions such as local and national governments, or intergovernmental organizations such as UN agencies. But mobilizations also may challenge and serve to undermine the moral authority and/or political legitimacy of such institutions. They can be understood as means to the ends sought by social movements, and although no single mobilization is sufficient evidence of the existence and scope of a social movement, no movement can be said to exist without one or more forms of observable mobilization.
Special Effects
Authors: Cubitt Sean 
Published: September 2017

Special effects are those techniques employed in moving image technologies to provide images other than those recorded by simply opening the camera's shutter and recording. In some cases the entire image may be produced using non‐camera techniques. Alternatively, events may be staged or images altered to produce special effects. Special effects (hereafter “effects”) may usefully be divided between (1) physical effects produced in front of the camera; (2) effects produced in the camera; (3) effects produced during printing; and (4) effects produced during editing. A fifth, relatively rare category of effects is produced at the point of reception (→ Film Production).
Speech Fluency and Speech Errors
Authors: Tusing Kyle James 
Published: September 2017

Speech fluency refers to clear oral communication devoid of speech errors. A speaker who is able to deliver a message that features a continuous flow of information at an appropriate rate, unmarred by any of the multiple speech errors, is said to possess speech fluency, an area of communication mastery. Speech fluency is the product of mental skills, such as recall of procedural and declarative knowledge, and physical motor skills involving correct functioning and use of the vocal cords, tongue, mouth, and lips to produce speech (→ Message Production).
Spiral of Silence
Authors: Petersen Thomas 
Published: September 2017

Developed by German survey and communication researcher → Elisabeth Noelle‐Neumann in the 1960s and 1970s, the spiral of silence theory describes collective opinion formation and societal decision‐making in situations where the issue being debated or decided upon is controversial and morally loaded (→ Public Opinion; Conflict as Media Content; Social Conflict and Communication). The theory is one of the most frequently cited and debated to emerge from the field of communication studies during the latter half of the twentieth century.
Stereotyping and the Media
Authors: Appiah Osei 
Published: September 2017

Stereotypes are positive or negative generalizations indiscriminately attributed to members of a group (Tamborini et al.

; → stereotypes). They have a significant impact on individuals' perception of and interactions with members of different social groups by conveying information about the social groups' capabilities (e.g., fast learners, good athletes), personalities (e.g., shy, violent) and/or socio‐economic status (e.g., educated, powerful, poor).
Strategic Framing
Authors: Hallahan Kirk 
Published: September 2017

Framing is a rhetorical tool used by communicators to delimit the scope of a situation or argument. Although it is “media framing” that has received extensive attention since the late 1970s (→ Framing Effects; Framing of the News), the framing construct is employed to understand communication in a wide range of disciplines, including speech, organizational behavioral, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. “Strategic framing” involves the purposeful use of this technique by rhetors, social advocates, and communications professionals in fields such as → Public Relations and advertisers (→ Advertising). The goals of strategic framing are to telegraph → meaning and to focus audience attention on particular portions of a message or aspects of a topic in order to gain a favorable response.
Style and Rhetoric
Authors: Fahnestock Jeanne 
Published: September 2017

Under the term
style
in rhetorical studies are grouped all those concerns with effective language that have been part of the rhetorical tradition from its beginnings in ancient Greece (→ Rhetoric, Greek). In rhetorical manuals from antiquity through to the present, language issues are typically discussed at the levels of word choice, sentence structure, and passage arrangement according to certain broad principles guiding selection, such as clarity or vivacity. Rhetorical stylistics also describes linguistic devices that can help construct the interaction between rhetor and audience (e.g.,
apostrophe
or direct address), express states of mind (e.g.,
dubitatio
, the expression of doubt), or even control the flow of discourse (e.g.,
transitio
, marking the movement from one section to another). Many of these rhetorical
figures of speech
survive in the everyday vocabulary of language awareness (e.g.,
rhetorical question
), while others are studied as literary devices achieving aesthetic effects (e.g.,
personification
, extending human attributes like speech to the inanimate and nonhuman).
Subaltern Communities, Communication in
Authors: Escobar Gabriela Martínez 
Published: September 2017

In most of Latin America, subaltern populations are those whose primary origins are indigenous, including lower‐class
mestizo
people (i.e., people of mixed origins – indigenous with European) and the urban poor of predominantly indigenous background. Internal migration, urbanization, and modernization are three elements that have influenced transformations in popular communication. For instance, in Peru, television has changed due to socio‐economic and political factors. Television came about in 1957 with the altruistic ideal of education, as a plan for modernization, and with → UNESCO's financial and technical aid (Perla

). However, within a year of the birth of television in Peru, US → television networks NBC and CBS began lending money and providing content for the recently formed local stations. At that point it was clear that television would be primarily a commercial and entertainment enterprise targeting the middle and upper classes rather than subaltern groups (→ Brazil: Media System; Bolivia: Media System).
Suspense
Authors: Nieding Gerhild 
Published: September 2017

Which elements of films, novels, or plays are able to produce suspense in the viewer or reader? (We will use the term “viewer” in the rest of this entry to cover viewers, readers, and users.) This question immediately indicates that the concept of suspense has to be treated on multiple levels because it is a multilayered phenomenon. First, suspense is a cognitive‐emotional strategy in the dramaturgy of a written, auditive, audiovisual, or performed “text,” which usually possesses a narrative structure. Second, the recipient has to be able to experience the suspense potential of this text. In order to manage this task, her or his cognitive architecture and socio‐emotional as well as motivational makeup have to fulfill specific prerequisites. Finally, if the suspense construction has achieved its effect, the question that follows is which processes take place in the viewer. Usually cognitive analyses of suspense phenomena are carried out by focusing either on the text, as a calculated structural proposal for → information processing by the viewer, or on the viewer's reception process.
Symbolism
Authors: Olson Scott Robert 
Published: September 2017

Symbols are linguistic devices in which complex, culturally specific meanings are communicated simply. Nearly all human utterance is in some ways symbolic, and for many who study communication, symbolizing is the most fundamental attribute of being human (Burke). Peirce defines a symbol as “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object” (1965, 143). In other words, when cultural conventions define how a → Sign is to be associated with an idea or object, then that sign is a symbol. Generally, the connection between signifier and signified in a symbol is arbitrary, necessitating a cultural context for understanding. Because nearly every image has symbolic aspects, symbols are especially important in the visual media (→ Visual Communication).