bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Symbolic Convergence Theory
Authors: Endres Thomas G. 
Published: October 2016

Abstract

Symbolic convergence theory (SCT), and its attendant rhetorical methodology fantasy theme analysis (FTA), provide an explanatory mechanism for interpreting dramatizing messages that catch on and are disseminated through a collective. Developed by Ernest G. Bormann, SCT assumes that, in order to alleviate tension and chaos, individuals share “us” versus “them” dramatistic narratives called
fantasy themes—
comprised of dramatis personae, scene, plotline, and sanctioning agent—that form composite social realities known as
rhetorical visions
, found in small groups, organizations, mass media, and the public sphere. Viewed through a humanistic or applied communication lens, an examination of the symbolic realities of these rhetorical communities provides insights into the meanings, emotions, and motives for action of the collective.
Peer‐to‐Peer Interaction
Authors: Bruns Axel 
Published: October 2016

AbstractPeer‐to‐peer interaction describes an approach to interaction and collaboration between participants in a shared project or activity that is characterized by network‐based organizational structures, a shared common resource base, and an assumption that all participants have the potential to make constructive contributions. Modern forms of peer‐to‐peer interaction often utilize online peer‐to‐peer communication technologies.
Play
Authors: Law Ying‐Ying , Crawford Garry 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
Play is something that we all do; it is often easy to recognize, but also remarkably difficult to define. The meaning of “play” and its role within society have been a subject of debate since antiquity; and providing an agreed‐upon definition of what constitutes play has remained both elusive and fraught with controversy. But though definitions are difficult, they are necessary to provide a frame of reference to contextualize and focus discussion. This entry sets out some of the key theories and debates relating to the definition of play, focusing most notably on the highly influential work of Johan Huizinga, and those who have drawn, built on, and critiqued his work.
Social Construction of Reality
Authors: Krippendorff Klaus 
Published: October 2016

AbstractSocial construction is a paradigm for inquiries into how realities are created and lived rather than existing outside of human beings. The earliest mention of the idea that realities are human creations is found in Greek philosophy, but contemporary conceptions have originated with Berger and Luckmann'sThe Social Construction of Reality. This entry distinguishes cognitive from social constructions and accounts for the latter as constituted in the interactions among their human participants, developing intersubjective, verifiable realities. Suitable conceptions of language are presented, and the role of discourse in the construction of scientific facts is reviewed, but attention is focused mainly on how social realities come to be, are sustained among participating actors, drift, or are reconstructed deliberately. Social constructivism opposes Enlightenment science by questioning the certainty and determinism of its findings. In the tradition of critical scholarship, social constructivism can provide a methodology for exploring emancipatory paths.
Library and Information Science
Authors: Bawden David , Robinson Lyn 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
Library and information science is the discipline that studies the information communication chain: all aspects of the creation, organization, management, communication, and use of recorded information. It supports the professional activities of the collection disciplines, including information management, librarianship, archiving, and records management. Its core areas include information behavior, information organization and metadata, information seeking, information retrieval, information architecture, information society, information law and ethics, information management and policy, bibliometrics, and library services. Library and information science is regarded as a metadiscipline, with a wide variety of applicable theories, philosophical bases, and research methods. The discipline is undergoing changes as it adapts to new forms of documents and collections, and to new information environments.
Diffusion
Authors: Dearing James W. , Lee Sangwon 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
The diffusion of innovations is a general framework about social change that has seen application in many disciplines, including engineering, marketing, management, natural resources, agriculture, high technology, education, political science, anthropology, sociology, journalism, and communication. Contemporary important issues among diffusion scholars are the implementation of innovations in organizations, the variables that affect sustained use of innovations, and sociometric analysis as a means of accelerating diffusion.
Media Ecology
Authors: Strate Lance 
Published: October 2016

AbstractMedia ecology is an interdisciplinary field of study defined as the study of media as environments. Media ecology scholars utilize broader definitions of the key term “media” than scholars in other fields, encompassing any type of technology, and any language, code or mode of communication, information, perception, or expression, and are interested in the different biases of different media, their effects on individuals, society, and culture, and how they function as human environments. Media ecology scholars view media as playing a leading role in human history, and stress the need to understand media in a historical context.
Dissemination
Authors: Shifman Limor 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
The word “dissemination” is used in two distinct ways in communication scholarship: as a theoretical model and as a mundane term. According to John Durham Peters's conceptual classification, dissemination is the loose “seeding” of ideas that may (or may not) be harvested by audiences. When used as a mundane term, dissemination depicts the directed spread of information, ideas, or (most often) scientific knowledge from a central source to divergent audiences. While both uses refer to an intentional spread of messages from one entity to many, the theoretical construct is “thinner” as the sender does not aim to control the conditions (or outcomes) of resection. In contemporary digital culture, the two meanings of dissemination collide in the concept of “sharing.” Used as an overarching term for depicting a wide array of online activities, “sharing” incorporates a new incarnation of dissemination, tailored to fit the phatic, self‐oriented, and algorithmic Web 2.0 culture.
Empiricism
Authors: Bergman Mats 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
“Empiricism” refers to a view that seeks to base human knowledge and inquiry firmly in experience as opposed to nonempirical (a priori) insight or intuition. As an epistemological position, empiricism can be said to embrace (1) the belief that external experience is our only source of substantial knowledge and (2) the contention that legitimate terms, propositions, and hypotheses must be ultimately definable, confirmable, or justifiable in terms of observable experience. The empiricists' emphasis on the primacy of experience is characteristically accompanied by a sceptical stance toward abstract objects that are purportedly not referable to concrete experience. In the history of philosophy, the label has often been applied more narrowly to movements in Enlightenment and 20th‐century thought, while communication scholars have tended to use it to denote a broad research orientation or a metaperspective on communication theory.
Evolution
Authors: Lessl Thomas M. 
Published: October 2016

AbstractEvolution may denote the scientific field concerned with the natural history of life and the mechanisms that account for its development, but it can also mean evolutionism, a broader alignment between evolutionary ideas and the idea of progress. Evolutionism has been an important communication resource in modernity, especially within various scientistic movements that have helped to forge science's public identity. Its supposition that progress arises through natural development descends from an earlier association between science and providence that 17th‐century science appropriated from Francis Bacon. Bacon's millenarian belief that science had arrived at the end of history, as God's ordained means to restore the fallen creation, underwent a process of naturalization in the Enlightenment that gave way to evolutionism. With the rise of evolutionary science after Darwin, evolutionism became a vital symbolic resource for scientists like Thomas Huxley, who were trying to enlarge the scope of scientific patronage.
Relevance Theory
Authors: Maillat Didier 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
Relevance theory is a theoretical model of human communication that focuses specifically on aspects of meaning construction and interpretation. It belongs in the field of linguistic pragmatics and brings the insight of language studies together with those of cognitive sciences. Relevance theory provides an empirically testable model of the inferential processes that determine meaning in context. Its explanatory power has been used to cover numerous aspects of human communication. The main theoretical tenets are first put into perspective and defined. Some key insights of particular interest for communication science are then explored in connection with multimodal communication, media studies, and argumentation theory.
H
all,
E
dward
T
.
Authors: Hart William 
Published: October 2016

Abstract

This entry identifies the contributions of the anthropologist Edward T. Hall to the study of intercultural communication. It covers the early development of intercultural communication training and other concepts like the cultural unconscious, nonverbal cultural behavior, and cultural contrasts (high‐context versus low‐context communication, polychronic versus monochronic time orientations). In particular, it covers the founding text of intercultural communication study: Hall's
The Silent Language
.
Poststructuralism
Authors: Vermeulen Timotheus 
Published: October 2016

AbstractThough poststructuralism is often associated with a strain of continental, mostly Francophone philosophy from the 1960s and 1970s, the label was proposed byUSliterary critics at the onset of the 1980s. Indeed, even today, poststructuralism is a characterization that resonates less in philosophy than in the literary and cultural studies and, to a lesser extent, in discourses about media and communication. As the name suggests, poststructuralism is perceived as a response to structuralism—the theoretical premise that cultures can be read as semioticstructures, as sign systems, indeed as languages. By and large, poststructuralism's reaction to its predecessor is fivefold. Two of its parts—the understanding of culture as text and the treatment of texts as structural rather than as individual—extend structuralist debates. The other three—which emphasize the extent to which structures are discursive, intertextual, and deferential, that is, open for interpretation—challenge these debates.
I
nnis,
H
arold
A
.
Authors: Blondheim Menahem 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
Harold Adam Innis (1894–1952) was a prominent Canadian economic historian and academic leader, who shifted his interest, late in his career, to the history and theory of communications. He is recognized as the central figure in what became known as the Toronto School of communication theory, a communication‐technology‐oriented and historical‐research‐based approach to understanding communications.
Jakobson,Roman
Authors: Coghill Mary 
Published: October 2016

AbstractRoman Jakobson's (1896–1982) contribution to communication theory resides in a combination of his interest in mathematical models, including Markov chains, and formalist semiotic analysis. The result is a structural analysis of language use that is based on scientific methods. He proposes, through the use of formalist processes, to interpret the text, in itself, as the full message. His analysis is both linguistic and semiotic: a unique combination of Russian Formalism and Saussurean linguistics. His theory of poetics, which included analysis of parallels in poetry, was, as Jakobson acknowledged later in life, significantly influenced by the nineteenth‐century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Identity
Authors: Banet‐Weiser Sarah , Chatman Dayna 
Published: October 2016

AbstractThis entry overviews key theories of “identity” and associated concepts that are employed within the discipline of communication. The overview highlights two main oppositional strands in philosophical thinking about identity—essentialism and social construction—and identifies several prominent figures engaged in theorizing identity in terms of performativity, politics, intersectionality, media representation, and digital media environments.
Text
Authors: Larsen Peter 
Published: October 2016

AbstractThe entry traces the term “text” from its origins in classical rhetoric through 19th‐century textual scholarship and 20th‐century literary studies to its expansion during the “semiotic turn” of the 1960s. In contemporary communication studies, “text” is used as a general concept covering a wide variety of cultural objects. To characterize movies, television programs, comic strips, and so on as “texts” implies that they are signifying objects that can be described and analyzed like written texts, by means of concepts and procedures developed in linguistics and semiotics. The entry presents these implications as well as a series of objections to the expanded use of the term.
S
apir,
E
dward
Authors: Hart William 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
This entry identifies the contributions of anthropologist Edward Sapir to the study of intercultural communication theory. It covers Sapir's work on two key intercultural communication concepts: (1) the unconscious nature of culture; and (2) linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. It traces the path of these concepts from Franz Boas, one of Sapir's professors at Columbia University, to Sapir and then to Sapir's students Benjamin Whorf, Harry Hoijer, and George Trager. Later on Trager collaborated with Edward T. Hall, when they were both at the Foreign Service Institute in the 1950s.
Encryption and Cryptography
Authors: Berry David M. 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
Cryptography is a very old science of studying and using means of encryption or encoding to hide or obscure the meaning of a message that is being communicated, so as to prevent its reading by an unintended recipient. Until the 1970s, encryption was only employed in specific circumstances, usually for military or diplomatic messages. Today, cryptography has moved out of this limited sphere, and is now widely taught and practiced, both by corporations and individuals. As part of a digital economy, encryption makes possible the transmission and reception of information through a secure channel.
Ritual
Authors: Cui Xi , Rothenbuhler Eric W. 
Published: October 2016

Abstract
This entry reviews the origin, development, and various forms of the idea of ritual in communication theory. It traces the academic genealogy of ritual communication to Durkheim's sociology of religion. Recognizing the essential role of rituals in communicating shared meanings to social members, it reviews theorizations of ceremonial media events, the ritualistic nature of routine interactions, both face‐to‐face and mediated, as well as the concentration of symbolic power in the institution of the media. Over the years, the scope of communicative rituals and the contexts of ritual communication have varied and undergone academic debates. However, it is argued that ritual communication studies are premised on the common understanding that the periodically performed patterned behaviors bear symbolic meanings for the participants and bind them to their groups and social orders.
Psychology, Social
Authors: Franks Bradley , Green Helen A. , Bauer Martin W. 
Published: October 2016

AbstractCommunication involves intrinsically social and psychological processes, hence theories of communication should interface with theories and findings from social psychology. Social psychology studies the interdependence of mind and social settings at three levels (which are themselves interdependent), relating the mind to social settings of increasing complexity—themicrolevel of interpersonal interaction, themesolevel of relations between individuals and groups, and themacrolevel of relations between individuals and groups and large‐scale cultural patterns. Current theories of communication typically address only part of this multilevel complexity, and thus have limited social psychological explanatory force. We suggest that future approaches should be pluralistic in integrating insights from different communication theories, constrained by insights from the social psychology of the interdependence of mind and social settings.
Repair of Bone Erosion in Rheumatoid Arthritis by Denosumab: A High‐Resolution Peripheral Quantitative Computed Tomography Study
Authors: Yue Jiang , Griffith James F. , Xiao Fan , Shi Lin , Wang Defeng , Shen Jiayun , Wong Priscilla , Li Edmund K. , Li Martin , Li Tena K. , Zhu Tracy Y. , Hung Vivian W. , Qin Ling , Tam Lai‐Shan 
Published: October 2016

ObjectiveTo compare the bone healing effects of denosumab and alendronate in female rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients by high‐resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography.MethodsThis is a post hoc analysis of a randomized controlled trial. Forty patients were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to receive either subcutaneous denosumab (60 mg) once or oral alendronate (70 mg) weekly for 6 months. The size of individual bone erosions and the presence and extent of erosion‐associated sclerosis (marginal osteosclerosis) were measured in the second metacarpal head of the nondominant hand at baseline, 3 months, and 6 months.ResultsForty‐two erosions were identified at baseline. After 6 months, the width, depth, and volume of erosion significantly decreased in the denosumab group (−0.23 mm, −0.16 mm, −0.91 mm3, respectively; all P < 0.01), whereas these parameters significantly increased in the alendronate group (0.19 mm, 0.32 mm, and 1.38 mm3, respectively; all P < 0.01; between‐group differences, P < 0.01 for all). Quantitative analysis showed that the bone mineral density of the erosion margin significantly increased only after treatment by denosumab (19.75 mg/cm3; P < 0.05 for denosumab, and −5.44 mg/cm3; P = 0.51 for alendronate; P < 0.05 for between‐group differences).ConclusionInhibition of receptor activator of NF‐κB ligand by denosumab can induce partial repair of erosions in patients with RA, while erosions continued to progress in patients treated with alendronate. Combining denosumab with disease‐modifying antirheumatic drugs may be considered for RA patients with progressive bone erosions.
Preparation and Characterization of Chitosan‐Based Nanoparticles as Protein Delivery System
Authors: Han Yunfei , Duan Qian , Li Yanwei , Li Yanhui , Tian Jian 
Published: October 2016

AbstractIn this study, methoxy poly(ethylene glycol)‐chitosan‐poly (l‐lysine) (mPEG‐CS‐PLL) was synthesized and characterized by 1H NMR, X‐ray diffraction spectrometry (XRD), and differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). mPEG‐CS‐PLL nanoparticles were prepared by ionic cross‐linking with tripolyphosphate (TPP) under mild conditions and used as a carrier for protein. To demonstrate the feasibility of mPEG‐CS‐PLL as a protein carrier, bovine serum albumin (BSA) was used as a model protein and encapsulated in the mPEG‐CS‐PLL nanoparticles by electrostatic binding. The system showed very high encapsulation efficiency and loading capacity for BSA which was up to 78% and 42%, respectively. Dynamic light scattering (DLS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and zeta potential study were further used to measure the size, morphology, and Zeta potential of the nanoparticles. The results indicated that the nanoparticles were spherical with a homogeneous size below 300 nm, and the system was positively charged about +21.78 mV. Moreover, the protein cumulative release from the protein delivery system could reach to 82.5% after 54‐h incubation in PBS (pH 7.2) at 37°C. Cell viability tests against L929 cells showed that the cytotoxicity of mPEG‐CS‐PLL polymers was very low, which was favorable to practical applications. It can be suggested from the above results that the mPEG‐CS‐PLL can be used as a safe and effective carrier for protein delivery.
Synthesis and characterization of silver nanoparticle incorporated gelatin‐hydroxypropyl methacrylate hydrogels for wound dressing applications
Authors: Resmi Rajalekshmi , Unnikrishnan Sivan , Krishnan Lissy K. , Kalliyana Krishnan V. 
Published: October 2016

ABSTRACTA replaceable wound cover which absorbs moisture and resist infection can be used to prevent development of chronic wounds. A major criterion for a replaceable wound dressing is nonadherence to cells to prevent pain upon removal. A major limitation of water absorbing hydrogels used in wound dressing applications is their poor mechanical strength. In this study, gelatin methacrylate (GelMA) was synthesized by reacting Type A porcine skin gelatin with methacrylic anhydride at 50  °C. Resultant GelMA monomer containing polyethylene glycol (PEG) protected silver nanoparticles were subsequently copolymerized with 2‐hydroxypropyl methacrylate (HPMA) at room temperature by redox mechanism. This resulted in a hydrogel copolymer with optimum mechanical stability and moisture retention while inhibiting microbial contamination and FT‐IR spectroscopy was used to confirm copolymer formation. Antimicrobial properties of the hydrogel using agar diffusion showed zone of inhibition against Staphylococcus aureus. Surface morphology was observed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and elemental analysis was carried out using energy‐dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). Micro‐computed tomography (micro‐CT) analysis of the hydrogel showed enhancement in the pore size from around 32 µ to 48–64 µ after incorporation of silver nanoparticles. Degradation of the hydrogel was observed after 48 h when stored in PBS containing collagenase enzyme. In vitro cell culture experiments established absence of cytotoxicity in the hydrogel and nonadherence character to dermal fibroblasts. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2017, 134, 44529.
A Selective Near‐Infrared Fluorescent Probe for In Vivo Imaging of Thiophenols from a Focused Library
Authors: Pan Yue , Ren Tian‐Bing , Cheng Dan , Zeng Ze‐Bing , Yuan Lin , Zhang Xiao‐Bing 
Published: October 2016

AbstractThiophenols are highly toxic industrial materials that, once released, will accumulate in the environment, and ultimately in human bodies, thereby causing serious health problems. To achieve their selective and sensitive detection, a novel near‐infrared (NIR) fluorescent probe (CCP‐1) from a focused library was developed for thiophenol species. Our studies show that CCP‐1 displays a thiophenol‐triggered 28‐fold fluorescence intensity enhancement at 706 nm, with a detection limit of 34 nm observed. It is also able to differentiate thiophenols from various other thiol‐containing analytes including hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen persulfide, and aliphatic thiols. In total, the desirable properties (e.g., excitation/emission in the NIR region, good cell‐membrane permeability, intracellular stability, and low cytotoxicity) make CCP‐1 a potential candidate for thiophenol detection both in vitro and in vivo. In addition, CCP‐1, for the first time, successfully visualized thiophenols in mice models of thiophenol inhalation.