Journal articles on the topic 'Greenville Public Library (Ohio)'

Cleveland, like the rest of the state of Ohio, is a land rich with libraries. The greater metropolitan area of Cleveland alone is home to about a dozen academic libraries, two phenomenal public library systems, and numerous special libraries associated with our area’s many professional and cultural heritage institutions. This is in addition to our robust state-wide consortia, SearchOhio and OhioLINK, which respectively serve millions of public and academic patrons throughout the state. If you’ll be attending the ACRL 2019 Conference in Cleveland this spring, or even if you’re just passing through our city, you’ll want to check out what this land of libraries has to offer.

As twenty-first-century libraries create programming, they are finding innovative ways to engage children and families in lifelong learning through hands-on experiences.Outdoor nature spaces and gardens at public libraries are ideal environments for both formal and informal learning. In underserved, urban communities where greenspace is limited, providing a learning garden as a resource is especially valuable.Using Cuyahoga County Public Library’s (CCPL’s) Warrensville Heights (WVH) branch library as a case study, this article explores how a library in a low-income inner-ring suburb installed a children’s garden that led to numerous positive impacts. In October 2015, Sari Feldman, then executive director of Cuyahoga County Public Library in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, approached the staff of the WVH branch with the idea of developing a children’s garden at the branch. In Warrensville Heights, a community with a population of roughly thirteen thousand, many families live in apartments and lack access to green space. The area is aptly described as a “food desert,” where residents have little access to fresh produce.

Trends in Rare Books and Documents Special Collections Management, 2013 edition by James Moses surveys seven special collection institutions on their current efforts to expand, secure, promote, and digitize their holdings. The contents of each profile are generated by transcribed interviews, which are summarized and presented as a case study chapter. Seven special collections are discussed, including the Boston Public Library; AbeBooks; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Washington University of St. Louis; the Archives and Rare Books Library, University of Cincinnati; the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at The Ohio State University; and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare . . .

ABSTRACT From its inception in 1869, Cleveland Public Library (CPL) solidified its mark in library history with the development of resources and practices that have been implemented by other library systems throughout the world. In 1940, when Louise Cornelia Ferguson Bolden made front-page news in the Cleveland Call and Post, the tide shifted for Black librarianship in Cleveland, Ohio. Her historic forty-six-year career in library science includes being the first Black student to graduate from Case Western Reserve University Library Science School and the first Black librarian at CPL. The Cleveland Call and Post, her personnel file, and annual reports provide a treasure trove of information about Bolden’s career as well as the state of the library and the city of Cleveland. Her career as a librarian not only expands the history of the library, but also tells the history and anthropology of the people in the community.

Digital collections serve as one of the many vehicles for cultural heritage institutions to highlight and display digitized material from special and curated collections. Many institutions have long relied on fair use to make digitized content from their collections openly available online. In recent years, after researching collections, some institutions have specifically distinguished public domain content. These institutions took time and resources to enhance their digital collections with rights information. Reassessing and identifying rights status is worth the time and resources because providing this metadata allows visitors to make informed decisions about reuse.

A study of children’s help-seeking behavior in 5 Cleveland, Ohio (USA) neighborhoods revealed the important role played by particular members of neighborhood institutions and establishments not commonly considered in research on children’s social networks: the school crossing guard, the librarian at the local public library branch, and the store owner/clerk at the neighborhood convenience store. These roles—above and beyond their “position descriptions”—ranged from provisioner of winter clothing in the case of crossing guards to mediator of child disputes in the case of public librarians. Moreover, crossing guards, librarians, and store owners/clerks were identi?ed by some children as resources for dealing with bullies. The implications of these unrecognized supportive roles are discussed.

This article focuses on the opening text of a miscellany held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris, BNF, lat. 4686). Upon closer examination the text turns out to be a missing copy of the Oculus pastoralis, untapped by the three editors of the text whose editions are all based upon a single copy (Cleveland (Ohio, USA), Public Library, Wq 789.0921 M-C 37). This article aims to broaden the awareness of the existence of this second copy within the scholarly community. In addition, it intends to demonstrate that this witness profoundly alters our current understanding of the structure, contents and composition of the Oculus pastoralis.

A review of: Todd, Ross J. “Student Learning Through Ohio School Libraries: A Summary of the Ohio Research Study.” Ohio Educational Library Media Association 15 Dec. 2003. Ohio Educational Library Media Association (OELMA), 2004. 15 Nov. 2006 http://www.oelma.org/StudentLearning/documents/OELMAResearchStudy8page.pdf. Objective – This study explored links between school libraries and student learning outcomes that were defined in a multidimensional context, using data provided by the students themselves. The researchers examined learning outcomes that reached beyond the existing correlations of school library services and standardized test scores. Insight was provided into the interactions between students and school libraries that affect student learning. An overarching goal of the study was to establish ongoing dialogue to focus on evidence based practices that may lead to continuous improvement in school library services and to provide the basis for further research. Design – Web based survey. Subjects – Participants were 13,123 students in grades 3-12 and 879 faculty at 39 schools across the state. Setting – Ohio Public school libraries. Methods – Thirty-nine effective school libraries, staffed by credentialed school librarians, were chosen through a judgment sampling process, using criteria based on Ohio Guidelines for Effective School Library Media Programs. The guidelines are aligned to academic content standards, assessments, resources, and professional development. Two web based surveys were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from students and faculty: The Impacts on Learning Survey, composed of Likert scale responses to 48 statements and an open-ended critical incident question for students. The Perceptions of Learning Impacts Survey was a similar survey for faculty. Survey questions were based on Dervin’s theory of information seeking that advances the idea of ‘helps’ as the constructive process of bridging gaps in information use that lead to new knowledge or making sense (sense-making) in relation to a perceived information need (Todd and Kuhlthau). The term ‘helps’ includes both inputs (help that the school library provides in engaging students in learning) and outputs (learning outcomes of academic achievement and active agency in the learning process). The survey statements included a combination of conclusions based on selections from school library research studies, and the Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning from the American Association of School Librarians’ Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning. The two surveys were used to triangulate multiple sources of data to illustrate the “helps” provided by the school library to student learning. Students were also given the opportunity to describe “helps” in their own words in an open-ended critical incident question. Main results – The data showed that the selected effective school libraries were perceived as providing ‘helps’ in dynamic ways that appeared to have a transformative effect on student learning. School libraries and librarians were viewed as having an active role in the learning process. Of the students surveyed, 99.4 % believed that school libraries helped them become better learners. The results were grouped into seven blocks of ‘help’ concepts that frame the contributions of the school library and the school librarian to student learning (Table 1). The study noted that perceptions of the effect of school libraries are strongest for elementary students, and perceptions of the effect decrease as students move through middle and high school. Comments from students indicate that mastery of information skills that lead to independent learning may contribute to the perception that the library is not as strong a ‘help’ in later school years. In ranking the mean scores of the block concepts, the effective school library ranked strongest as a resource agent and technical agent, to support student research and projects with both print and non-print resources. The qualitative data further clarified student perceptions that the library contributed to individualized learning, knowledge construction, and academic achievement. Instructional interventions that benefited from contributions by the librarian included conducting research effectively; identifying key ideas; analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information; and developing personal conclusions. In comparing student and faculty data, there was consistency in the perception of value in the top three conceptual groups of “helps”: libraries as resource agents, as agents for information literacy development, and as agents for knowledge construction. Conclusion – The data analysis illustrated that school libraries were actively involved in student learning and were perceived as important factors in student learning and achievement by both students and faculty. Consistency throughout the sample showed perceptions of multiple effects of school libraries in facilitating student learning for building knowledge. Student comments and survey results showed that students perceived the library as providing strong support for reading for curriculum and informational needs and as less helpful with regard to individual reading for pleasure or personal pursuits. The study speculates that perhaps the emphasis on academics and test-oriented schooling may leave students little time to pursue independent reading interests during school hours. The study identified factors for effective school libraries: informational, transformational, and formational elements. These factors may be used as building blocks for shaping practices that help effective school libraries bring about student achievement. Informational: Resources, technological infrastructure, and reading resources. Transformational: Information literacy, technological literacy, and reading engagement. Formational: Knowledge creation, use, production, dissemination, values, and reading literacy. The visual model of the factors for effective practice and their relationship to student outcomes will be of particular help to practitioners. (Todd and Kuhlthau 23)

A Review of: Oltmann, S. M. (2016). Public Librarians' Views on Collection Development and Censorship. Collection Management, 41(1), 23-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2015.1117998 Objective – To examine public librarians’ perspectives on censorship and intellectual freedom in relation to collection development activities. Design – Survey combining questions from previous studies by Moody (2004) and Harkovitch, Hirst and Loomis (2003) with additional questions regarding intellectual freedom and demographics. Setting – Public libraries in the State of Ohio. Subjects – 251 directors and librarians responsible for collection development. Methods – The researcher created a survey in Qualtrics, a software that supports online data collection and analysis. It contained thirty-two structured and open-ended questions and took approximately 15-25 minutes to complete. To recruit participants, an explanatory letter and survey link were sent to every public library director in the State of Ohio. Directors were also asked to share the survey with librarians under their leadership who were responsible for collection development. To analyze the data set, cross-tabulations were run to identify statistically significant correlations between demographic and community variables. Main Results – The response rate was 43% (108 out of 251). Participants agreed with the American Library Association’s (ALA) definition of intellectual freedom, and to build collections that neither promote nor suppress specific ideas or beliefs. Only 3.7% of respondents reported decisions not to purchase materials due to fear of negative feedback from the community. Nearly 40% of participants reported conflict between personal and professional values at some time. All said that this dilemma had no bearing on professional collection development decisions. Contrary to anecdotal evidence that suggests librarians in rural or conservative communities are less likely to purchase controversial materials, the researcher found that community and political variables were not statistically significant; across the board, participants were most concerned with building balanced, well-developed collections. Gender, however, was statistically significant in terms of pressures felt to restrict access to materials; male librarians reported a higher number of instances where they felt internal or external pressures of this nature. However, as the number of male respondents was relatively low (15 out of 108 participants), the researcher did not draw concrete conclusions as to why this discrepancy exists. Conclusion – Study findings demonstrate a strong professional allegiance to intellectual freedom as defined by the ALA. In a practical sense, the participant group applied the principles of intellectual freedom to collection development activities regardless of demographic, community, or political variables.

This article explores how digital humanities (DH) projects, specifically the building of digital archives and digital exhibitions, can be implemented to preserve, reveal, and highlight previously invisibilized histories. This piece examines the construction of the Latino/a/x Issues Conference (LIC) archive at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), a public university in rural Northwest Ohio. This article, from the perspective of the archivist, explores the following research questions: How can DH archival projects reveal and preserve invisibilized histories of Latinx students at public universities against a series of constraints and serve as a means of (re)producing latinidad? This case study explores how to utilize the traditional form of the DH digital archive to document and preserve latinidad in institutional archives and advances the notion of digital archiving as a form of first-aid care to address the historical erasure of Latinx communities in institutional archival contexts. In doing so, this article critically examines the process of archiving the BGSU LIC as a means to consider the possibilities and limits of archival intervention, the production and preservation of memory, and the challenges and affordances of descriptive infrastructures that underlie archival work.

ABSTRACT In spite of increasing public health concerns about the potential risks associated with swimming in waters contaminated with waterfowl feces, little is known about the composition of the gut microbial community of aquatic birds. To address this, a gull 16S rRNA gene clone library was developed and analyzed to determine the identities of fecal bacteria. Analysis of 282 16S rRNA gene clones demonstrated that the gull gut bacterial community is mostly composed of populations closely related to Bacilli (37%), Clostridia (17%), Gammaproteobacteria (11%), and Bacteriodetes (1%). Interestingly, a considerable number of sequences (i.e., 26%) were closely related to Catellicoccus marimammalium, a gram-positive, catalase-negative bacterium. To determine the occurrence of C. marimammalium in waterfowl, species-specific 16S rRNA gene PCR and real-time assays were developed and used to test fecal DNA extracts from different bird (n = 13) and mammal (n = 26) species. The results showed that both assays were specific to gull fecal DNA and that C. marimammalium was present in gull fecal samples collected from the five locations in North America (California, Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Toronto, Canada) tested. Additionally, 48 DNA extracts from waters collected from six sites in southern California, Great Lakes in Michigan, Lake Erie in Ohio, and Lake Ontario in Canada presumed to be impacted with gull feces were positive by the C. marimammalium assay. Due to the widespread presence of this species in gulls and environmental waters contaminated with gull feces, targeting this bacterial species might be useful for detecting gull fecal contamination in waterfowl-impacted waters.

The annual publication of the Theatre Library Association is designed “to gather and disseminate scholarly articles dealing with the location of resource materials” relating to all media as well as popular entertainments, the evaluation of those resources, and to include as well “monographs of previously unpublished original material.” The volumes are slim ones, so we should not expect coverage of the many theatre collections available to scholars and practitioners, but rather a highly selective series of essays reflecting the priorities of the Association or of the individual volume editors. This certainly appears to be the case here: the 1998 volume concerns itself with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American pleasure gardens, whereas, after a publication hiatus of three years, the 2001 volume is focused around the acquisition, scope, and use of four major archives—those of the Joseph Papp/New York Shakespeare Festival and of Lucille Lortel in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, and the holdings of the Weill—Lenya Research Center in New York. As a consequence, the tones of the two volumes are very different, as is their utility. The first volume appears to be directed toward a disinterested readership; the second addresses those who might actually use the particular collections.

A Review of: Daskalakes, D. T. M., & Cahill, M. (2023). “We’re all pretty welcoming”: Inclusion of children with disabilities in library storytime programs. Journal of Early Intervention. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10538151231176193 Objective – To identify and characterize public librarians’ inclusion of children with disabilities and developmental delays (and their caregivers) in storytime programming, and to characterize how librarians determine if inclusion was successful. Design – Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews. Setting – Public library settings across Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana (United States). Subjects – 34 public librarians offering storytime programming. Methods – The researchers invited all public libraries in the geographic area of interest to complete an internet survey expressing their interest in participating, and from the responses a stratified random sample of libraries was chosen. From each of these libraries, researchers randomly selected one storytime librarian to participate in the study. An experienced research team member conducted interviews using video conferencing software, and the other team member reviewed all transcripts to ensure accuracy. The researchers first analyzed the data using an inductive approach to generate descriptive codes. They then assigned these codes to the data that matched the study’s research questions. Finally, they conducted a third round of coding to describe some topics in greater detail. Main Results – Librarians are making attempts to be inclusive, and their attitudes toward children with disabilities and developmental delays (and their caregivers) are welcoming and flexible. However, they expressed limited experience in offering accommodations, and they perceived their positive attitude as being an accommodation in and of itself. Librarians are largely relying on the child’s experience to gauge how successful they are at being inclusive, and engaging in collaborative conversations with caregivers is also common. Conclusion – Overall, librarians are interested in offering programs that are accessible to children with disabilities and developmental delays but struggle to engage with meaningful accommodations that promote better educational outcomes. The authors emphasize that it is important for libraries to be welcoming of everyone, but more should be done to actually meet the needs of these patrons. This study has implications for public libraries and librarians, who should review their practices to ensure they are addressing the needs of children with disabilities and developmental delays and their caregivers. It also has implications for the profession, as it supports the idea that librarians should be better prepared to support these patrons in storytime programming and that institutions should facilitate librarian efforts through information exchanges. Finally, this study establishes that there is a need for further exploration of inclusivity for children with disabilities and developmental delays in storytime programming.

A Review of: Crosh, C., Hutton, J., Szumlas, G., Xu, Y., Beck, A., & Riley, C. (2022). Inequities in public library branch access and children’s book circulation in a Midwestern American city. The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI), 6(3), 68-81. https://doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v6i4.38127 Objective – To explore the impact of the neighbourhood literacy environment (NLE) by examining associations between public library locations, book circulation rates, and neighbourhood racial composition. Design – An ecological study using aggregated data sources. Setting – Forty selected neighbourhood public libraries in the state of Ohio, United States of America. Subjects – Analysis of (1) existing circulation statistics from January 2014 to December 2018 for the neighbourhoods of Cincinnati and Hamilton Public Libraries; and (2) the American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2018. Methods – Among the key components studied for the population was the NLE, which the authors defined as access to literacy materials in a neighbourhood. The data the authors examined for the targeted populations were race, age, poverty level, and library location. The two groups of variables computed were: (1) the connection between circulation rates of children’s books and child poverty; (2) the connection between circulation statistics and the proportion of people who self-identify as Black in the neighbourhood. Additionally, the researchers used the Spearman’s rank order correlation coefficient (rs) to measure the relationships between the correlating variables within each neighbourhood library branch – number of books circulated per child; the census data of children who self-identified as Black; and the children who were designated as 20% below the federal poverty level (FPL). The Chi-square test was used to calculate associations between access to a library branch and child poverty in each neighborhood. In this study, the researchers only looked at the associations between variables at an aggregate level. The authors defined the terms they used in the study: (1) children were ages 0-18 years; (2) children’s books were literature intended for an audience from 0-18 years old; (3) the definition of poverty was taken from the U.S. Census and classified as neighborhoods with 20% of children below the FPL. Main Results – There were 40 library branches that served 81 neighbourhoods, of which there was only a 38% distribution in the high-poverty areas, compared with 58% for the low. Approximately 24 million books were circulated during the 5-year period of 2014 -2018. The median circulation rate per child at the neighbourhood level was 22 books. The results showed steep variations in circulation rates per child across branch locations; the numbers range from 3 to 98 books per child across neighborhoods. The authors indicated that the increases and decreases in the circulation rates were tied to branch location and the area’s socioeconomic status. The primary finding of the data analyzed was a negative correlation between the population identified as Black/African American and lower circulation rates in poorer neighbourhoods. Limitations identified by the authors were (1) the allocation of literacy resources per branch was unknown; (2) the in-library book user statistics in high-poverty neighbourhoods may not be accurately documented; (3) the precise allocations for literacy funds and the use of in-library resources for developing literacy skills need further study. Conclusion – The authors noted that race, economic status, and proximity to public libraries were pertinent factors in understanding inequitable access to books for children in the neighbourhoods studied. The NLE was an important dynamic beyond the home; the availability of books and engagement with them were contributing factors to the development of literacy skills. The associations observed between the variables indicated that improving the NLE matters and libraries must mindfully work to alleviate the disproportionately lower levels of access to books and their unfavorable outcome for children in low-income areas.

A Review of: Powell, Ronald R. and Susan E. Boling. “Post-Master’s Educational Needs of Information Professionals.” Journal of Access Services 3.4 (2005): 29-43. Objective – To investigate post-master’s educational needs and interests of information professionals. Design – Survey research using print and electronic questionnaires. Setting – The geographic area surrounding Wayne State University in Michigan, United States of America. Subjects – Members of the library associations of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Methods – Systematic random samples were derived from the membership lists of the library associations in Ohio, Indiana, and Southwestern Ontario. Paper questionnaires were mailed to those selected. Michigan Library Association’s official policy barred the release of its membership list to researchers. Consequently, announcements of the survey were placed in three successive issues of the Association’s electronic newsletter. Interested members were directed to a web site to complete an electronic version of the questionnaire. This option was also extended to members of the other three library associations. The overall research question was investigated through specific questions that sought to ascertain the overall level of interest in professional library and information studies (LIS) education, levels of interest in specific types of programs, factors that favoured or deterred enrolment in doctoral programs, as well as the fields of study that were preferred for combination with LIS in doctoral programs. With the exception of demographic type questions (e.g., place of residence and educational qualifications) and two questions that required open ended responses, the questionnaire design encompassed questions with Likert scale type responses. Analysis of the responses included descriptive statistics, the use of Pearson chi-square to determine statistically significant relationships, and, to a lesser extent, content analysis. Main Results – A total of 270 questionnaires (33%) were returned from three populations: Ohio, Indiana, and Ontario. A self-selected sample of 101 members (6%) of the Michigan Library Association responded. In general, almost 80% of the respondents admitted some importance to adding to their LIS qualification. However, only 41% felt that this was important or extremely important. From a choice of six educational offerings, namely, continuing education activities, non-degree master’s coursework, a second master’s degree, post-master’s certification, doctoral programs, and other, continuing education activities was the most valued, by 65.5% of the respondents. Participants were asked about their reasons, and the importance of these, for considering or deciding to enrol in an LIS doctoral program. The yearning to acquire knowledge was reported by 69.7% as the major reason, followed by 45.8% of the respondents who cited the wish to increase their income potential. In terms of major factors, prestige received the lowest rating, 21.1%. The time involved (73.8%), cost (66.3%), and distance from the program (63.2%) were cited as the major deterrents to enrolling in doctoral programs. When asked about the likelihood of pursuing a doctoral LIS program in combination with business administration, computer science, or without any combination, “not likely” was the most popular choice. Those who were very likely or likely to pursue a joint program totalled approximately 30% of the respondents, while 37% indicated an interest in undertaking a doctorate in LIS only. The most frequent reasons proffered by those who selected “not likely” or “definitely not” for any of the three doctoral offerings included lack of interest, mitigating factors (e.g. time, cost, age, and program location), unfavourable cost/benefit analysis, preference for another area of knowledge, and the view that Ph.D.s were only useful for university faculty. Given the option to name subject areas that they desired to see combined with LIS in a doctoral program, 23 of 101 respondents proposed education, while 19 opted for public administration. A question inviting any other comments on the issue of post-master’s education yielded a predominant desire for “non traditional instruction,” particularly online courses as well as classes held in convenient locations. In terms of relationships between geographic location and factors that influenced interest in enrolling in a doctoral program, the desire “to become a more effective manager,” and “other” were statistically significant. The analysis also revealed a strong positive relationship between willingness to pursue an LIS-only doctoral program and the availability of such a program in geographic proximity. Similarly, there was a strong relationship between willingness to pursue an LIS program in close vicinity and the importance that was given to further LIS education. Conclusion – Online instruction and geographic proximity are key determinants of information professionals’ interest in pursuing post-master’s education at the doctoral level. Continuing education activities, non-degree coursework, and certificate programs are preferred over doctoral LIS programs, despite the finding that the major reason for enrolling in doctoral LIS programs is to fulfill the desire for knowledge acquisition. Schools offering Library and Information Science studies need to explore options for providing distance-education doctoral LIS programs as a means of reversing the current shortage of LIS faculty.

A Review of: Sisselman, P. (2009). Exploiting the social style of patrons to improve their satisfaction with the reference interview. Library Review, 58, 123-133. Objective – To determine if a patron’s social style affects how satisfied the patron and the librarian working with him/her are with the reference interview, and if a librarian’s knowledge of social styles leads to greater satisfaction with the reference interview for all involved. Design – Direct observation, two survey instruments, and a checklist used to identify patrons’ social styles. Setting – A public library system in the Northeastern US. Subjects – A total of 24 library patrons who sought assistance at the reference desk of a public library and the five librarians who delivered reference services to them. Methods – The researcher observed 24 reference interviews conducted by five different librarians at a reference desk in a public library system. It is unclear if all 24 interviews took place in the same library. Reference interviews that took place during the times the researcher was on site and did not relate to the use of the public computer terminals were included in the study. During each interaction, the researcher compared the patron’s behaviour to a checklist of traits relating to assertiveness and responsiveness. For example, more assertive behaviours included moving and talking quickly and sustained eye contact. Less assertive behaviours included “waiting to be asked” and soft speech (p. 127). More responsive behaviours usually consist of a greater willingness to engage on an emotional level with the librarian and more open facial expressions and gestures. The balance of behaviours across the two categories was used by the researcher to determine which of the following social style categories a patron belonged to: driver, analytical, amiable, or expressive. Drivers, described in social style theory as “practical and task orientated,” were those who demonstrated “less responsive” and “more assertive” behaviours at the desk (pp. 127-128). Those who were “less responsive” and “less assertive” were labelled analytical (p. 128). According to social style theory, analyticals “collect quite a bit of data before making decisions” and are methodical (p. 127). Patrons who were “more responsive” and “less assertive” were determined to be amiable; and expressives were those who were “more responsive” and “more assertive” (p. 128). Amiables are described as “easy-going” and expressives as “outgoing” and “spontaneous” (p. 127). After the researcher had observed twelve reference interviews, the participating librarians received information on how to recognize and adapt to individual social styles. The information they received took the form of an article, a diagram of the four social style categories, and examples of famous people and their social styles. After the librarians received this information, the researcher then observed twelve additional reference interviews. After each reference interview, the patron and librarian completed separate surveys. The surveys were adapted from the tools used by the Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program. Each survey consisted of ten questions, which gauged the patron’s and the librarian’s level of satisfaction with the reference experience. Librarians responded to questions relating to whether they were able to answer the patron’s question, their perceptions of the patron’s satisfaction, how comfortable and confident they felt during the interaction, and whether they “taught the patron something new” (p. 132). The patron survey asked about the quality of service patrons feel they received from the librarian, whether or not they found what they were looking for, and if they learned something new from the experience. A score was calculated based on the following possible responses: yes (4 points), partly (2 points) and no (0 points). Main Results – Of the 24 patrons observed in the study, the majority (10) were analyticals. The next largest group was expressives (6), followed by amiables (4), and drivers (3). The remaining patron was classified as both a driver and an expressive because he/she held an equal number of characteristics for both categories. The median survey scores indicated that, overall, librarians rated the quality of reference interview lower than their patrons. The median score for the librarian survey after the first twelve interviews was 28, while the median score for their patrons was 36. The correlation between these scores was r=0.27. After the librarians received information on social styles, the median score of the librarian survey rose to 32. However, the patrons’ median score dropped slightly to 35. The correlation of the scores after the intervention was r=0.57. The responses of librarians and patrons most closely corresponded when the patrons were amiables. Amiables and the librarians who worked with them were in all in agreement on whether the patron’s question was answered. Only one of the expressives and one of the drivers disagreed with the librarians’ response to this question. In both cases, the librarians’ responses were “partly” while the patrons answered “yes” (p. 129). Twenty percent of the analyticals were satisfied with the information they received from the librarian. In some cases, they were satisfied even though the information they were provided was not what they were looking for when they first approached the reference desk. The study suggests that there may be a disconnect between librarian and patron responses in regard to whether the librarian taught the patron something new in the exchange. According to Sisselman, all expressives and 75% of amiables responded that they had learned something new, but only 93% of the librarians who worked with the expressives and 50% of those working with amiables felt that they had done so. The scores for drivers for this question were double those of the librarians they worked with – the actual figures were not provided by the author. The results for analyticals on this question were not reported. Conclusion – The findings of the study suggest that a patron’s social style may play a role in how they perceive the reference interview. The author also suggests that “there may be a correlation between librarians’ understanding of the social styles of patrons (analytical, expressive, driver, or amiable) and the outcomes of reference interviews” (p. 130). Possible areas of application for these findings include improved public service and tailoring of communication and marketing strategies to the diverse social styles of current and potential patrons.

Objective – As part of a multi-staged project, this study seeks to identify the unanswered questions about users as found in three fields: library and information science (LIS), human computer interaction, and communication and media studies, as well as the convergences and divergences across these fields. Design – A multi-phased, qualitative study involving individual face-to-face and telephone interviews, as well as self interviewing and focus groups. Setting – The fields of LIS, human computer interaction, and communication and media studies as examined in interview situations. Subjects – 83 international experts across the three fields, as well as 31 local experts from central Ohio, USA. Methods – The majority of the 83 international experts in the fields of LIS, human computer interaction, and communication and media studies were interviewed by telephone (some in person). Thirty-one local experts (7 public and 24 academic library directors) were individually interviewed and also took part in focus groups. The Sense-Making Methodology was used as an interview approach with its emphasis on bridging gaps. Neutral interview questions were used to tease out the gaps in certain situations—in the case of this project, the gaps involve communication and the unanswered questions about users. Brenda Dervin developed this approach, which has been transformed and adapted by Dervin and a host of other LIS researchers over the past 25 years. It is a metatheoretical approach that has “evolved into a generalized communication-based methodology seen as useful for the study of human sense-making (and sense-unmaking) in any context” (Dervin 729). The Sense-Making metatheory is implemented three ways in the method: “in the framing of research questions; in the designing of interviewing; and in the analyzing and concluding processes of research” (Dervin 737). In the research under review for this summary the answers to the gap-identifying questions allow different disciplines to begin to communicate and understand each other. Using Sense-Making in focus groups involves self interviewing (diaries, journals) and group discussions. Interviews were transcribed using the “smooth verbatim approach” in which non fluencies such as repetition, hesitancies, and partial words are eliminated. Care was taken to ensure anonymity, as this is necessary in the first step of the Sense-Making approach. The transcripts were analyzed for themes to capture a broad picture of what the participants struggle with across disciplinary and research-practice divides. Analysis was carried out by using comparative coding developed in early grounded theory combined with the Sense-Making methodology’s emphasis on gaps and bridging gaps. The “quotable quote” was the unit of analysis, and thematically representative quotes were selected from the transcriptions. Main Results – In an attempt to analyze communication across and within disciplines, the researchers did a thematic analysis on the interviews conducted with their international and local experts. The thematic analysis found 12 major themes, which included a total of 75 sub themes. The 12 major themes include the following: Participants wanted to make a difference with their work; participants agreed that current user research is not doing the job; there are fundamental disagreements about users and user studies; there are fundamental disagreements about the purposes of using user studies; there are external forces that make carrying out and applying user studies difficult; there was a lengthy list of differing suggestions for improving user studies; interdisciplinary communication across the three fields that do user studies is not effective; it was agreed that interdisciplinary contact is difficult; communication across the research/practice divide is not going well; some participants saw academic researchers as the problem, while some participants viewed practitioners as the problem; and most participants agreed that contact across fields and the research/practice divide would be beneficial. The researchers contend that this analysis is one of many that could be done on the information retrieved from the interviews. Their goal was not to find the definitive answers, but to describe the difficulties that participants are having across disciplines and across the research/practice divide in terms of communication and relating to user studies. The researchers wanted to tease out implications for communication and to illustrate the multiplicity that they found. Conclusions – It is difficult for this study to draw conclusions except in the most general sense, as it is part of a larger, multi-staged research project. However, this study did find that although participants across fields wanted a synthesis, they also expressed their inability to understand syntheses from fields other than their own. There were some who wanted more theories, while some claimed there were too many theories already. There was much criticism about communication across disciplines, but few solutions offered. The researchers can offer up no “magic wands” as solutions for these results, but they do suggest that the modes of communication traditionally used in user studies research are not working.

Abstract Background Public libraries in the United States have experienced increases in opioid-related substance use in their communities and on their premises. This includes fatal and non-fatal overdose events. Some libraries have adopted response measures in their branches to deter substance use or prevent overdose. A small number of libraries around the nation have decided to stock the opioid antagonist naloxone (Narcan) for staff to administer to patrons who experience overdose. This response measure has generated extensive media attention. Although Ohio ranks fourth in age-adjusted drug mortality rate in the United States, there has been no investigation of whether Ohio libraries are observing opioid-related transactions, consumption, and/or overdose events, or which measures they have adopted in response to these activities. We conducted a multimethod survey with Ohio public library directors to identify the response measures they have adopted. We present descriptive findings from the quantitative and qualitative items in our survey. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional 54-item multimethod survey of public library system directors (one per system) in Ohio. Directors of each of Ohio’s public library systems were invited to participate via email. Results Of 251 library systems, 56 responded (22.3% response rate), with 34 respondents (60.7%) indicating awareness of opioid-related transactions, consumption, and/or overdose on their premises. Most (n = 43, 76.8%) did not stock naloxone in their buildings. Over half (n = 34, 60.7%) reported implementing one or more non-naloxone response measures. These measures focus on improving security for staff and patrons, deterring opioid-related transactions (purchases and exchanges) and consumption, and providing educational events on substance use. Nearly half (n = 25, 47.2%) partner with community organizations to provide opioid response measures. A similar proportion reported adequate funding to respond to opioid-related substance use (n = 23, 45.1%), and most (n = 38, 74.5%) reported adequate support from their boards and communities. Few respondents have implemented evaluations of their response measures. Conclusions Ohio public libraries are responding to evidence of opioid-related transactions, consumption, and/or overdose on their premises with a range of measures that focus on substance use prevention and deterrence. Most Ohio library systems do not stock naloxone. Respondents indicated they prefer to call 911 and let first responders handle overdose events. The majority of respondents indicated their library systems have political capacity to respond to evidence of opioid-related substance use on their premises, but have limited operational and functional capacity. Findings suggest the need to revisit assumptions that public libraries are willing to stock naloxone to respond to overdose events, and that libraries have the resources to respond robustly to opioid-related transactions, consumption, and/or overdose on their premises.

tudent Learning Through Ohio School Libraries: The Ohio Research Study, published in 2004, represents one of the largest studies to date that has sought to identify how school libraries affect student learning. Reflecting on the nature and scale of this study, the reader may wonder why Ohio, a state in the central United States with 3,913 public elementary, middle, and high schools, would consider conducting a statewide survey to establish how school libraries benefit learning. This question has several answers. Until 2000, schools across Ohio were required to have a licensed school librarian. However, in 2000, changes in the operating standards for school libraries introduced by the Ohio Department of Education meant that the requirement to have a licensed school librarian became subject to the interpretation of the local school superintendent, possibly allowing for school librarians to be eliminated. This change placed greater emphasis on the need for school librarians to be able to articulate their role in relation to student learning and to demonstrate more concretely the outcomes of their school library program through the provision of evidence.

All students, including those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ), benefit from quality library books that reflect their experiences. This mixed-method research project examines whether public high school library professionals self-censor their library collections when it comes to materials with LGBTQ themes. Quantitative data were collected from 120 Ohio public high school libraries and 12 school librarians were interviewed. The results suggest that school libraries tended to have significantly fewer LGBTQ-themed books than titles with other kinds of controversial content, and that certain school-based factors such as high enrolment, racial diversity, liberal-leaning community locations; and presence of certified school librarians, were present in schools with more inclusive LGBTQ collections.

Literacy development is a complex process. It is well established that the Home Literacy Environment influences literacy development. To better understand the influence of the Neighborhood Literacy Environment, we examined the distribution of public library branches across neighborhoods in an American midwestern city and associations between book circulation rates and childhood poverty rates. This study used children's book circulation data provided by the Hamilton County Public Library in the state of Ohio (U.S.). The primary outcome variable was the branch-specific, five-year mean circulation rate of books-per-child living within the branch neighborhood. The predictor variable was the childhood poverty rate of the neighborhood. There was a significant, moderate negative correlation between book circulation and childhood poverty rates (Spearman's r= -0.52, p<0.001). Using data from a public library system in a large midwestern American city, this study found significant disparities in branch access and children's book circulation in high-poverty neighborhoods.

This paper's purpose is to bring to light the social issue of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and how public and academic libraries are making strides to better serve this branch of the population. Definitions will be provided to better explain what challenges ASD patrons face. In turn, librarians across America, specifically in Illinois and Ohio in recent years, have come together to discuss in both literature and national forums what they are continually doing to better serve, educate, and support their patrons and train their librarians. ASD is a complex social issue faced by millions; one widely covered and not easily solved alone, but through strategic planning and partnerships, libraries are formulating some creative solutions to meet these challenges. Also touched on will be the perspectives of librarians with ASD; the challenges they face each day, and where they see the future for people with ASD working in a library setting. Let us discover how libraries are rising above these challenges and becoming better informed to equip one another to serve all their patrons

What makes a place haunted is the narrative of its ghosts: the curse of the place is expressed through the hauntings of that place by the ghosts of the people who died there. Ghosts are an expression of negative transgression, that is, a violation of social norms and cultural values that leads to the moral destabilization of the community: haunted places are places of tragedy, of deaths caused by violence and negligence. The basic features of haunted places in the US are liminality, the historical experience of what happened there, and the fact that they represent the boundary between the everyday and the impossible. The crossing of the existential boundaries by ghosts is analogous to negative transgression in social behavior. The liminality of ghosts thus corresponds to the liminality of haunted places in spatial, existential, ontological and moral terms. They appear as a kind of propaedeutic device in cultural communication, for the atrocities of their stories address what is good and bad according to the norms of cultural thought, and what is proper and improper in social behavior. Several different types of places are featured in this discussion: private ones, like dwelling places, as well as numerous public places, including a public library, a quarry, a public park, a village lane, a teahouse, the site of one of the best-known battles in United States history, a former correction facility, a beech etc, across the entire country: Atchison, Kansas; New Orleans, Fort Leavenworth and plantations in Louisiana; Peoria, Illinois; Reelsville, Indiana; Little Bighorn, Montana; Washington DC; New York City; the San Francisco Bay area; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portage County, Wisconsin; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Forester, Michigan; Cape May, New Jersey; Tucson, Arizona; Mason, Ohio.

A neighborhood’s social cohesion, referring to the emotional and social connection of people within it, tends to have an influential impact on its crime level. Traditional approaches to measuring social cohesion and collective efficacy are mostly interviews and surveys, which are usually costly in time, money, and other resources. Big social media data provides us with a new and cost-effective source of such information. We believe the combination of spatial and contextual information of geotagged Twitter posts (tweets) can gauge the residents’ collective emotions in a neighborhood. The positivity and negativity of these collective emotions may be used to approximate the collective efficacy of the community. Inspired by the broken window theory, we propose a broken emotion conjecture to explain the relationship between collective emotion and crime. To test this conjecture, we collected data on four types of crime (assaults, burglaries, robberies, and thefts) and all public geotagged tweets ( N = 778,901) in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA in 2013. We extracted innovative variables from tweets’ spatial and contextual information to explain community crime and enlighten new criminology theory. Results of negative binomial models show: (1) with necessary socio-economic and land-use factors controlled, the more negative the collective emotion of a neighborhood, the more the crime (except for theft); (2) however, the positivity of the collective emotion of a neighborhood does not have any statistically significant influence on crime. These correspond well with signal detection theory in psychology. The proposed broken emotion conjecture is supported with data from Cincinnati and its general applicability should be tested in other regions.

Yaşadığımız çağda meydana gelen teknolojik gelişmeler avantajlarının yanısıra bazı dezavantajları da beraberinde getirmiştir. Otomasyon sistemlerinin yaygınlaşması bu sistemleri kullanan tüm kesimleri etkilemiştir. Bu etkilerden birisi de stresin alt boyutu olarak tanımlanan ve son yıllarda iş yaşamında ciddi problemlere yol açan ‘teknostres’tir. Teknostres, çok sayıda bilgisayar sistemiyle çalışmanın ve bu sistemler ile kişisel yaşamın, kuruluşun ve kullanıcıların taleplerini gerçekleştirirken oluşan kaygı veya zihinsel baskı hissi olarak adlandırılmaktadır. Teknostresin olumsuz etkileri; hem kütüphane personeli hem de kullanıcılar için teknoloji tabanlı eğitim ve öğretim, teknolojiye karşı olumlu bir tutum geliştirmek, yeterli ekipman ve teknik destek sağlamak, daha ergonomik çalışma ortamı sağlamak, teknolojiyi kullanırken düzenli molalar vermek, çoklu görevden kaçınmak, stres yönetimi eğitimi, etkili zaman yönetimi ve düzenli fiziksel egzersiz ve meditasyon yapmak vb. çözüm yolları ile azaltılabilir. Bu çalışmanın amacı teknostres ile verimlilik arasındaki ilişkiyi ele almak, teknostresin nedenlerini ve kütüphaneciler üzerindeki etkilerini örgütsel verimlilik açısından incelemek ve teknostres yönetimine ilişkin önerilerde bulunarak alan yazına kavramsal açıdan katkı sağlamaya çalışmaktır. Betimleme yöntemi kullanılan çalışma kuramsal niteliktedir. Kaynakça Aghwotu, P. T. ve Owajeme, O. J. (2010). Technostress: Causes, symptoms and coping strategies among librarians in university libraries. Educational Research, 1(12), 713-720. doi:http://www.interesjournals.org/ER Ahmad, U. N. ve Amin, S. M. (2012). The dimensions of technostress among academic librarians. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences. 65, 266-271. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.11.121 Akınoğlu, H. F. (1993). Teknostres. Türk Kütüphaneciliği, 7(3), 159-173. Erişim adresi: http://www.tk.org.tr/index.php/tk/article/view/1388 Al-Qallaf, C. L. (2006). Librarians and technology in aca­demic and research libraries in Kuwait: Perceptions and effects. Libri, 56(3), 168-179. Erişim adresi: https://doi.org/10.1515/ libr.2006.168 Arnetz, B. B. ve Wiholm, C. (1997). Technological stress: Psychophysiological symptoms in modern offices. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 43(1), 35-42. Erişim adresi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-3999(97)00083-4. Ayyagari, R. (2007). What and why of technostress: Technology antecedents and implications (Doktora tezi). Amerika Birleşik Devletleri: Clemson Universitesi. Erişim adresi: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1133&context=all_dissert Ayyagari, R., Grover, V. ve Purvis, R . (2011). Technostress: Technological antecedents and implications. MIS Quarterly, 35(4), 831-858. Erişim adresi: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41409963 Bondanini, G., Giorgi, G. , Ariza-Montes, A. ve Vega-Munoz, A. ve Andreucci-Annunziata, P. (2020). Technostress dark side of technology in the workplace: A scientometric analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(21), 1-25. doi:10.3390/ijerph17218013 Brod, C. (1984). Technostress: The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading. Champion, S. (1998, Nov). Technostress: Technology’s Toll. School Library Journal, 44(1), 48-51. Chauhan, K. (2018). The influence of technostress on productivity among OPJGU library professionals. Indian Journal of Library and Information Science, 12(2), 83-88. Erişim adresi: http://dx.doi.org/10.21088/ijlis.0973.9548.12218.2 Clark, K. ve Kalin, S. (1996). Technostressed out? How to cope in the digital age. Library Journal, 30-32. Clute, R. (1998). Technostress: A content analysis [Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi]. Ohio, USA: Kent State University. Erişim adresi: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED423911.pdf Çınar, K. (2017). Potansiyel stres kaynaklarının üniversite kütüphanecilerinin çalışma yaşamı kalitesi üzerindeki etkisi. İstanbul örneği (Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi). İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü. Çoklar, A. N. ve Şahin, Y. L. (2011). Technostress levels of social network users based on ICTs in Turkey. European Journal of Social Sciences,, 23(2), 171-172. Erişim adresi: https://www.tecnostress.it/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Technostress-in-Social-Turkey.pdf Das, S. (2019). The status and impact of technostress on library professionals: essionals: A study among the professionals of the selected Private College Libraries in North Bengal. Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)(3642). Erişim adresi: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/3642 Davis-Millis, N. (1998). Technostress and the Organization: A Manager's Guide to Survival in the Information Age. 67th Annual Meeting of the Music Library Association, 14 February 1998. Boston, Massachusetts. Erişim adresi: https://web.mit.edu/ninadm/www/mla.html

One cannot use the Internet for long without encountering its many dead ends. Despite the adage that everything posted online stays there forever, users quickly discover how fleeting Web content can be. Whether it be the result of missing files, platform moderation, or simply bad code, the Internet constantly displaces its archival contents. Eventual decay is the fate of all digital media, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observed in a 2008 article. “Digital media is not always there”, she writes. “We suffer daily frustrations with digital sources that just disappear” (160). When the media content we seek is something trivial like a digitised vacation photo, our inability to retrieve it may merely disappoint us. But what happens when we lose access to Web content about significant cultural events, like viral misinformation about a school shooting? This question takes on great urgency as conspiracy content spreads online at baffling scale and unprecedented speed. Although conspiracy theories have long been a fixture of American culture, the contemporary Internet enables all manner of “information disorder” (Wardle and Derakhshan) to warp media coverage, sway public opinion, and even disrupt the function of government—as seen in the harrowing “Stop the Steal” attack on the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, when rioters attempted to prevent Congress from verifying the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. Scholars across disciplines have sought to understand how conspiracy theories function within our current information ecosystem (Marwick and Lewis; Muirhead and Rosenblum; Phillips and Milner). Much contemporary research focusses on circulation, tracking how conspiracy theories and other types of misinformation travel from fringe Websites to mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times. While undoubtedly valuable, this emphasis on circulation provides an incomplete picture of online conspiracy theories’ lifecycle. How should scholars account for the afterlife of conspiracy content, such as links to conspiracy videos that get taken down for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines? This and related questions about the dead ends of online conspiracy theorising are underexplored in the existing scholarly literature. This essay contends that the Internet’s tendency to decay ought to factor into our models of digital conspiracy theories. I focus on the phenomenon of malfunctional hyperlinks, one of the most common types of disrepair to which the Internet is prone. The product of so-called “link rot”, broken links would appear to signal an archival failure for online conspiracy theories. Yet recent work from rhetorical theorist Jenny Rice suggests that these broken hyperlinks instead function as a rhetorically potent archive in their own right. To understand this uncanny persuasive work, I draw from rhetorical theory to analyse broken links to conspiracy content on Reddit, the popular social news platform, surrounding the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the worst high school shooting in American history. I show that broken links on the subreddit r/conspiracy, by virtue of their dysfunction, persuade conspiracy theorists that they possess “stigmatized knowledge” (Barkun 26) about the shooting that is being suppressed. Ultimately, I argue that link rot functions as a powerful source of evidence within digital conspiracy theories, imbuing broken links with enduring rhetorical force to validate marginalised belief systems. Link Rot—Archival Failure or Archival Possibility? As is suggested by the prefix ‘inter-’, connectivity has always been one of the Internet’s core functionalities. Indeed, the ability to hyperlink two different texts—and now images, videos, and other media—is so fundamental to navigating the Web that we often take these links for granted until they malfunction. In popular parlance, we then say we have clicked on a “broken” or “dead” link, and without proper care to prevent its occurrence, all URLs are susceptible to dying eventually (much like us mortals). This slow process of decay is known as “link rot”. The precise extent of link rot on the Internet is unknown—and likely unknowable, in practice if not principle—but multiple studies have been conducted to assess the degree of link rot in specific archives. One study from 2015 found that nearly 50% of the URLs cited in 406 library and information science journal articles published between 2008-2012 were no longer accessible (Kumar et al. 59). In the context of governmental Webpages, a 2010 study determined that while only 8% of the URLs sampled in 2008 had link rot, that number more than tripled to 28% of URLs with link rot when sampled only two years later (Rhodes 589-90). More recently, scholars from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society uncovered an alarming amount of link rot in the online archive of the New York Times, perhaps the most prominent newspaper in the United States: “25% of all links were completely inaccessible, with linkrot becoming more common over time – 6% of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43% of links from 2008 and 72% of links from 1998” (Zittrain et al. 4). Taken together, these data indicate that link rot worsens over time, creating a serious obstacle for the study of Web-based phenomena. Link rot is particularly worrisome for researchers who study online misinformation (including digital conspiracy theories), because the associated links are often more vulnerable to removal due to content moderation or threats of legal action. How should scholars understand the function of link rot within digital conspiracy theories? If our academic focus is on how conspiracy theories circulate, these broken links might seem at best a roadblock to scholarly inquiry or at worst as totally insignificant or irrelevant. After all, users cannot access the material in question; they reach a dead end. Yet recent work by rhetoric scholar Jenny Rice suggests these dead ends might have enduring persuasive power. In her book Awful Archives: Conspiracy Rhetoric and Acts of Evidence, Rice argues that evidence is an “act rather than a thing” and that as a result, we ought to recalibrate what we consider an archive (12, original emphasis). For Rice, archives are more than simple aggregates of documents; instead, they are “ordinary and extraordinary experiences in public life that leave lasting, palpable residues, which then become our sources—our resources—for public discourse” (16-17). These “lasting, palpable residues” are deeply embodied, Rice maintains, for the evidence we gather is “always real in its reference, which is to a felt experience of proximities” (118). For conspiracy theorists in particular, an archive might evoke a profound sense of what Rice memorably describes as “Something intense, something real. Something off. Something fucked up. Something anomalous” (12, original emphasis). This is no less true when an archive fails to function as designed. Hence, for the remainder of this essay, I pivot to analysing how link rot functions within digital conspiracy theories about the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. As we will see, the shooting galvanised meaningful gun control activism via the March for Our Lives movement, but the event also quickly became fodder for proliferating conspiracy content. From Crisis to Crisis Actors: The Parkland Shooting and Its Aftermath On the afternoon of 14 February 2018, Nikolas Cruz entered his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and murdered 17 people, including 14 students (Albright). While a horrific event, the Parkland shooting unfortunately marked merely the latest in a long line of similar tragedies in the United States, which has been punctuated by school shootings for decades. But the Parkland shooting stands out among the gruesome lineage of similar tragedies due to the profound resolve of its student-survivors, who agitated for gun policy reform through the March for Our Lives movement. In the weeks following the shooting, a group of Parkland students partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit organisation advocating for gun control, to coordinate a youth-led demonstration against gun violence. Held in the U.S. capitol of Washington, D.C. on 24 March 2018, the March for Our Lives protest was the largest demonstration against gun violence in American history (March for Our Lives). The protest drew around 200,000 participants to Washington; hundreds of thousands of protestors attended an estimated 800 smaller rallies held across the United States (CBS News). Furthermore, likeminded protestors across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia held allied events to show support for these American students’ cause (Russo). The broader March for Our Lives organisation developed out of the political demonstrations on 24 March 2018; four years later, March for Our Lives continues to be a major force in debates about gun violence in the United States. Although the Parkland shooting inspired meaningful gun control activism, it also quickly provoked a deluge of online conspiracy theories about the tragedy and the people involved, including the student-activists who survived the shooting and spearheaded March for Our Lives. This conspiracy content arrived at breakneck pace: according to an analysis by the Washington Post, the first conspiracy posts appeared on the platform 8chan a mere 47 minutes after the first news reports aired about the shooting (Timberg and Harwell). Later that day, Parkland conspiracy theories migrated from fringe haunts like 8chan to InfoWars, a mainstay of the conspiracy media circuit, where host/founder Alex Jones insinuated that the shooting could be a “false flag” event orchestrated by the Democratic Party (Media Matters Staff). Over the ensuing hours, days, weeks, and months, Parkland conspiracies continued to circulate, receiving mainstream news coverage when conversative activists and politicians publicly espoused conspiracy claims about the shooting (Arkin and Popken). Ultimately, the conspiracist backlash was so persistent and virulent throughout 2018 that PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the Poynter Institute, declared the Parkland conspiracy theories their 2018 “Lie of the Year” (Drobnic Holan and Sherman). As with many conspiracy theories, the Parkland conspiracies remixed novel information with longstanding conspiracist tropes. Predominantly, these theories alleged that the Parkland student-activists who founded March for Our Lives were being controlled by outside forces to do their bidding. Although conspiracy theorists diverged in who they named as the shadowy puppet master pulling the strings—was it the Democratic Party? George Soros? Someone else?—all agreed that a secretive agenda was afoot. The most extreme version of this theory held that David Hogg, X González, and other prominent March for Our Lives activists were “crisis actors”. This account envisions Hogg et al. as paid performers playing the part of angry and traumatised students for media coverage about a school shooting that either did not occur as reported or did not occur at all (Yglesias). While unnerving and callous, these crisis actor allegations are not new ideas; rather, they draw from a long history of loosely antisemitic “New World Order” conspiracy theories that see an ulterior motive behind significant historical events (Barkun 39-65). Parkland conspiracy theorists circulated a wide variety of media artifacts—anti-March for Our Lives memes, obscure blog posts, and manipulated video footage of the Parkland students, among other content—to propagate their crisis actor claims. But whether due to platform moderation, threat of legal action, or simply public pressure, much of this conspiracy material is now inaccessible, leaving behind only broken links to conspiracy content that once was. By closely examining these broken links through a rhetorical lens, we can trace the “lasting, palpable residues” (Rice 16) link rot leaves in its wake. “All part of the purge”: Parkland Link Rot on r/conspiracy In this final section, I use the tools of rhetorical analysis to demonstrate how link rot can function as a form of evidence for conspiracy theorists. Rhetorical analysis, when applied to digital infrastructure, requires that we expand our notion of rhetoric beyond intentional human persuasion. As James J. Brown, Jr. argues, digital infrastructure is rhetorical because it determines “what’s possible in a given space”, which may or may not involve human beings (99). Human intentionality still matters in many contexts, of course, but seeing digital infrastructure as a “possibility space” opens up productive new avenues for rhetorical inquiry (Brown, Jr. 72-99). This rhetorical perspective aligns with the method of “affordance analysis” derived from Science and Technology Studies and related fields, which investigates how technologies facilitate certain outcomes for users (Curinga). Much like an affordance analysis, my goal is to illustrate how broken links produce certain rhetorical effects, not to make broader empirical claims about the extent of link rot within Parkland conspiracy theories. The r/conspiracy page on Reddit, the popular social news platform, serves as an ideal site for conducting a rhetorical analysis of broken links. The r/conspiracy subreddit is a preeminent hub for digital conspiracy content, with nearly 1.7 million members as of March 2022 and thousands of active users viewing the site at any given time (r/conspiracy). Beyond its popularity, Reddit’s platform design makes link rot a common feature on r/conspiracy. As a forum-based social media platform, Reddit consists entirely of subreddits dedicated to various topics. In each subreddit, users generate and contribute to threads with relevant content, which often entails posting links to materials hosted elsewhere on the Internet. Importantly, Reddit allows each subreddit to set its own specific community rules for content moderation (so long as these rules themselves abide by Reddit’s general Content Policy), and unlike other profile-based social media platforms, Reddit allows anonymity through the use of pseudonyms. For all of these reasons, one finds a high frequency of link rot on r/conspiracy, as posts linking to external conspiracy media stay up even when the linked content itself disappears from the Web. Consider the following screenshot of an r/conspiracy Parkland post from 23 February 2018, a mere nine days after the Parkland shooting, which demonstrates what conspiracist link rot looks like on Reddit (fig. 1). Titling their thread “A compilation of anomalies from the Parkland shooting that the media won't address. The media wants to control the narrative. Feel free to use this if you find it helpful”, this unknown Redditor frames their post as an intervention against media suppression of suspicious details (“A compilation of anomalies”). Yet the archive this poster hoped to share with likeminded users has all but disintegrated—the poster’s account has been deleted (whether by will or force), and the promised “compilation of anomalies” no longer exists. Instead, the link under the headline sends users to a blank screen with the generic message “If you are looking for an image, it was probably deleted” (fig. 2). Fittingly, the links that the sole commenter assembled to support the original poster are also rife with link rot. Of the five links in the comment, only the first one works as intended; the other four videos have been removed from Google and YouTube, with corresponding error messages informing users that the linked content is inaccessible. Fig. 1: Parkland Link Rot on r/conspiracy. (As a precaution, I have blacked out the commenter’s username.) Fig. 2: Error message received when clicking on the primary link in Figure 1. Returning to Jenny Rice’s theory of “evidentiary acts” (173), how might the broken links in Figure 1 be persuasive despite their inability to transport users to the archive in question? For conspiracy theorists who believe they possess “stigmatized knowledge” (Barkun 26) about the Parkland shooting, link rot paradoxically serves as powerful validation of their beliefs. The unknown user who posted this thread alleges a media blackout of sorts, one in which “the media wants to control the narrative”. This claim, if true, would be difficult to verify. Interested users would have to scour media coverage of Parkland to assess whether the media have ignored the “compilation of anomalies” the poster insists they have uncovered and then evaluate the significance of those oddities. But link rot here produces a powerful evidentiary shortcut: the alleged “compilation of anomalies” cannot be accessed, seemingly confirming the poster’s claims to have secretive information about the Parkland shooting that the media wish to suppress. Indeed, what better proof of media censorship than seeing links to professed evidence deteriorate before your very eyes? In a strange way, then, it is through objective archival failure that broken links function as potent subjective evidence for Parkland conspiracy theories. Comments about Parkland link rot elsewhere on r/conspiracy further showcase how broken links can validate conspiracy theorists’ marginalised belief systems. For example, in a thread titled “Searching for video of Parkland shooting on bitchute”, a Redditor observes, “Once someone gives the link watch it go poof”, implying that links to conspiracy content disappear due to censorship by an unnamed force (“Searching for video”). That nearly everything else on this particular thread suffers from link rot—the original poster, the content of their post, and most of the other comments have since been deleted—seems only to confirm the commentor’s ominous prediction. In another thread about a since-deleted YouTube video supposedly “exposing” Parkland students as crisis actors, a user notes, “You can tell there’s an agenda with how quickly this video was removed by YouTube” (“Video Exposing”). Finally, in a thread dedicated to an alleged “Social Media Purge”, Redditors share strategies for combating link rot, such as downloading conspiracy materials and backing them up on external hard drives. The original poster warns their fellow users that even r/conspiracy is not safe from censorship, for removal of content about Parkland and other conspiracies is “all part of the purge” (“the coming Social Media Purge”). In sum, these comments suggest that link rot on r/conspiracy persuades users that their ideas and their communities are under threat, further entrenching their conspiratorial worldviews. I have argued in this article that link rot has a counterintuitive rhetorical effect: in generating untold numbers of broken links, link rot supplies conspiracy theorists with persuasive evidence for the validity of their beliefs. These and other dead ends on the Internet are significant yet understudied components of digital conspiracy theories that merit greater scholarly attention. Needless to say, I can only gesture here to the sheer scale of dead ends within online conspiracy communities on Reddit and elsewhere. Future research ought to trace other permutations of these dead ends, unearthing how they persuade users from beyond the Internet’s grave. References “A compilation of anomalies from the Parkland shooting that the media won't address. The media wants to control the narrative. Feel free to use this if you find it helpful.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7ztc9l/a_compilation_of_anomalies_from_the_parkland/>. Albright, Aaron. “The 17 Lives Lost at Douglas High.” Miami Herald 21 Feb. 2018.<https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article201139254.html>. Arkin, Daniel, and Ben Popken. “How the Internet’s Conspiracy Theorists Turned Parkland Students into ‘Crisis Actors’.” NBC News 21 Feb. 2018. <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/how-internet-s-conspiracy-theorists-turned-parkland-students-crisis-actors-n849921>. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Brown, Jr., James J. Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. CBS News. “How Many People Attended March for Our Lives? Crowd in D.C. Estimated at 200,000.” CBS News 25 Mar. 2018. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/march-for-our-lives-crowd-size-estimated-200000-people-attended-d-c-march/>. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.” Critical Inquiry 35.1 (2008): 148-71. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595632>. Curinga, Matthew X. “Critical Analysis of Interactive Media with Software Affordances.” First Monday 19.9 (2014). <https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4757/4116>. Drobnic Holan, Angie, and Amy Sherman. “PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: Online Smear Machine Tries to Take Down Parkland Students.” PolitiFact 11 Dec. 2018. <http://www.politifact.com/article/2018/dec/11/politifacts-lie-year-parkland-student-conspiracies/>. Kumar, D. Vinay, et al. “URLs Link Rot: Implications for Electronic Publishing.” World Digital Libraries 8.1 (2015): 59-66. March for Our Lives. “Mission and Story.” <https://marchforourlives.com/mission-story/>. Marwick, Alice, and Becca Lewis. Media Manipulation and Misinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. <https://datasociety.net/library/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online/>. Media Matters Staff. “Alex Jones on Florida High School Shooting: It May Be a False Flag, and Democrats Are Suspects.” Media Matters for America 14 Feb. 2018. <https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-florida-high-school-shooting-it-may-be-false-flag-and-democrats-are-suspects>. Muirhead, Russell, and Nancy L. Rosenblum. A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. “I Posted A 4Chan Link a few days ago, that got deleted here, that mentions the coming Social Media Purge by a YouTube insider. Now we are seeing it happen.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7zqria/i_posted_a_4chan_link_a_few_days_ago_that_got/>. Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. r/conspiracy. Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/>. Rhodes, Sarah. “Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive's Examination of URL Stability.” Law Library Journal 102. 4 (2010): 581-97. Rice, Jenny. Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2020. Russo, Carla Herreria. “The Rest of the World Showed Up to March for Our Lives.” Huffington Post 25 Mar. 2018. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-protests-march-for-our-lives_n_5ab717f2e4b008c9e5f7eeca>. “Searching for video of Parkland shooting on bitchute.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ddl1s8/searching_for_video_of_parkland_shooting_on/>. Timberg, Craig, and Drew Harwell. “We Studied Thousands of Anonymous Posts about the Parkland Attack – and Found a Conspiracy in the Making.” Washington Post 27 Feb. 2018. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/we-studied-thousands-of-anonymous-posts-about-the-parkland-attack---and-found-a-conspiracy-in-the-making/2018/02/27/04a856be-1b20-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html>. “Video exposing David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez as crisis actors and other strange anomalies involving the parkland shooting.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ae3xxp/video_exposing_david_hogg_and_emma_gonzalez_as/>. Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. Information Disorder: Toward and Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking. Council of Europe, 2017. <https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-researc/168076277c>. Yglesias, Matthew. “The Parkland Conspiracy Theories, Explained.” Vox 22 Feb. 2018. <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/22/17036018/parkland-conspiracy-theories>. Zittrain, Jonathan, et al. “The Paper of Record Meets an Ephemeral Web: An Examination of Linkrot and Content Drift within The New York Times.” Social Science Research Network 27 Apr. 2021. <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3833133>.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

IntroductionSince its launch in 2005, YouTube has fast become one of the most popular video sharing sites, one of the largest sources of user generated content, and one of the most frequently visited sites globally (Burgess and Green). As YouTube’s popularity has increased, more and more people have taken up the site’s invitation to “Broadcast Yourself.” Vlogging (video blogging) on YouTube has increased in popularity, creating new genres and communities. Vlogging not only allows individuals to create their own mediated content for mass consumption—making it a site for participatory culture (Burgess and Green; Jenkins) and resembling contemporary forms of entertainment such as reality television—but it also allows individuals to engage in narrative and identity forming practices. Through filming their everyday lives, and presenting themselves on camera, YouTubers are engaging in a process of constructing and presenting their identity online. They often form communities around these identities and continue the practice in dialogue and collaboration with their communities of viewers on YouTube. Because of YouTube’s mass global reach, the ability to create one’s own mediated content and the ability to publicly play with and project different self representations becomes a powerful tool allowing YouTubers to publicly challenge social norms and encourage others to do the same. This paper will explore these features of YouTube using the recent “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, as an example. Through a virtual ethnography of the movement as developed by Christine Hine—following the people, dialogue, connections, and narratives that emerged from Nikkie’s original video—this paper will demonstrate that YouTube is not only a tool for self transformation, but has wider potential to transform norms in society. This is achieved mainly through mobilising communities that form around transformative practices, such as makeup transformations, on YouTube. Vlogging as an Identity Forming Practice Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, constructing their identity online. Although the aim of beauty vlogs is to teach new makeup techniques, demonstrate and review new products, or circulate beauty-related information, the videos include a large amount of self-disclosure. Beauty vloggers reveal intimate things about themselves and actively engage in the practice of self-representation while filming. Beauty vlogging is unique to other vlogging genres as it almost always involves an immediate transformation of the physical self in each video. The vloggers typically begin with their faces bare and “natural” and throughout the course of the video transform their faces into how they want to be seen, and ultimately, who they want to be that day, using makeup. Thus the process of self-representation is multi-dimensional as not only are they presenting the self, but they are also visually constructing the self on camera. The construction of identity that beauty vloggers engage in on YouTube can be likened to what Robert Ezra Park and later Erving Goffman refer to as the construction and performance of a mask. In his work Race and Culture, Park states that the original meaning of the word person is a mask (249). Goffman responds to this statement in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, saying the mask is “our truer self, the self we would like to be” (30). Beauty vloggers are engaging in the process of constructing their mask—their truer self and the self they would like to be—both through their performance on YouTube, and through the visual transformation that takes place on camera. Their performance on YouTube not only communicates a desired identity, but through their performance they realise this identity. The process of filming and the visual process of constructing or transforming the self on camera through makeup brings the subject into being. Scholarship in the fields of Life Writing and Digital Media including Autobiography, Automedia and Persona Studies has acknowledged and explored the ways narratives and identities—both online and offline—are constructed, created, shaped, chosen, and invented by the individual/author (Garner; Bridger; Eakin; Maguire; Poletti and Rak; Marshall; Smith and Watson). It is widely accepted that all representations of the self are constructed. Crucially, it is the process of documenting or communicating the self that is identity forming (Richardson; Bridger), as the process, including writing, filming, and posting, brings the subject or self into being (Neuman). The individual embodies their performance and realises the self through it. Park and Goffman argue that we all engage in this process of performing and realising the self through the roles we play in society. The significance of the beauty vlogger performance and transformation is the space in which it occurs and the community that it fosters. YouTube as a Transformative Tool and MirrorThe space in which beauty vloggers play with and transform the self on camera is significant as digital technologies such as YouTube invite exploration of the self. Networked digital media (Meikle and Young) invite multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation in/of identity performances (Bolter; Gergen; Turkle, "Parallel Lives"). These technologies create opportunities for defining and re-defining the self (Bolter 130), as they allow people to present a more multi-mediated self, using both audio-visual components and text (Papacharissi 643).YouTube, in particular, allows the individual to experiment with the self, and document an ongoing transformation, through film (Kavoori). Many scholars have described this ongoing process of identity construction online using the metaphor of “the mirror” (see Kavoori; Raun; and Procter as recent examples). In his research on trans gender vlogging on YouTube, Tobias Raun explores the theme of the mirror. He describes vlogging as a “transformative medium for working on, producing and exploring the self” (366). He argues the vlog acts as a mirror allowing the individual to try out and assume various identities (366). He writes, the mirroring function of the vlog “invites the YouTuber to assume the shape of a desired identity/representation, constantly assuming and evaluating oneself as an attractive image, trying out different ‘styles of the flesh’ (Butler 177), poses and appearances” (367). In reference to trans gender vlogging, Raun writes, “The vlog seems to serve an important function in the transitioning process, and is an important part of a process of self-invention, serving as a testing ground for experimentations with, and manifestations of (new) identities” (367). The mirror (vlog) gives the individual a place/space to construct and perform their mask (identity), and an opportunity to see the reflection and adjust the mask (identity) accordingly. An important feature of the vlog as a mirror is the fact that it is less like a conventional mirror and more like a window with a reflective surface. On YouTube the vlog always involves an audience, who not only watch the performance, but also respond to it. This is in keeping with Goffman’s assertion that there is always an audience involved in any performance of the self. On YouTube, Raun argues, “the need to represent oneself goes hand in hand with the need to connect and communicate” (Raun 369). Networked digital media such as YouTube are inherently social. They invite participation (Smith; Sauter)and community through community building functions such as the ability to like, subscribe, and comment. Michael Strangelove refers to YouTube as a social space, “as a domain of self-expression, community and public confession” (4). The audience and community are important in the process of identity construction and representation as they serve a crucial role in providing feedback and encouragement, legitimising the identity being presented. As Raun writes, the vlog is an opportunity “for seeing one’s own experiences and thoughts reflected in others” (366). Raun identifies that for the trans gender vloggers in his study, simply knowing there is an audience watching their vlogs is enough to affirm their identity. He writes the vlog can be both “an individual act of self validation and . . . a social act of recognition and encouragement” (368). However, in the case of beauty vlogging the audience do more than watch, they form communities embodying and projecting the performance in everyday life and thus collectively challenge social norms, as seen in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement. Exploring the “The Power of MAKEUP!” MovementOn 10 May 2015, Nikkie, a well-known beauty vlogger, uploaded a video to her YouTube channel NikkieTutorials titled “The Power of MAKEUP!” Nikkie’s video can be watched here. In her video Nikkie challenges “makeup shaming,” arguing that makeup is not only fun, but can “transform” you into who you want to be. Inspired by an episode of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which the competing drag queens transform half of their face into “glam” (drag), and leave the other half of their face bare (male), Nikkie demonstrates that anyone can use makeup as a transformative tool. In her video Nikkie mirrors the drag queen transformations, transforming half her face into “glam” and leaving the other half of her face bare, as shown in Figure 1. In only transforming half of her face, Nikkie emphasises the scope of the transformation, demonstrating just how much you can change your appearance using only makeup on your face. Nikkie’s video communicates that both a transformed “glam” image and an “unedited” image of the self are perfectly fine, “there are no rules” and neither representations of the self should bring you shame. Figure 1: thumbnail of Nikkie’s videoNikkie’s video started a movement and spread throughout the beauty community on YouTube as a challenge. Other famous beauty vloggers, and everyday makeup lovers, took on the challenge of creating YouTube videos or posting pictures on Instagram of their faces half bare and half transformed using makeup with the tag #thepowerofmakeupchallenge. Since its release in May 2015, Nikkie’s video has been watched over thirty million times, has been liked over five hundred and thirty thousand times, and has received over twenty three thousand comments, many of which echo Nikkie’s experience of “makeup shaming.” “The power of makeup” video went viral and was picked up not only by the online beauty community but also by mainstream media with articles by Huffington Post, Yahoo.com, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, DailyLife, POPSUGAR, Enews, Urbanshowbiz, BoredPanda, and kickvick among others. On Instagram, thousands of everyday makeup lovers have recreated the transformation and uploaded their pictures of the finished result. Various hashtags have been created around this movement and can be searched on Instagram including #thepowerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeup. Nikkie’s Instagram page dedicated to the challenge can be seen here. “The power of makeup” video is a direct reaction against what Nikkie calls “makeup shaming”—the idea that makeup is bad, and the assumption that the leading motivation for using makeup is insecurity. In her video Nikkie also reacts to the idea that the made-up-girl is “not really you,” or worse is “fake.” In the introduction to her video Nikkie says,I’ve been noticing a lot lately that girls have been almost ashamed to say that they love makeup because nowadays when you say you love makeup you either do it because you want to look good for boys, you do it because you’re insecure, or you do it because you don’t love yourself. I feel like in a way lately it’s almost a crime to love doing your makeup. So after last weeks RuPaul’s Drag Race with the half drag half male, I was inspired to show you the power of makeup. I notice a lot that when I don’t wear makeup and I have my hair up in a bun and I meet people and I show them picture of my videos or, or whatever looks I have done, they look at me and straight up tell me “that is not you.” They tell me “that’s funny” because I don’t even look like that girl on the picture. So without any further ado I’m going to do half my face full on glam—I’m truly going to transform one side of my face—and the other side is going to be me, raw, unedited, nothing, me, just me. So let’s do it.In her introduction, Nikkie identifies a social attitude that many of her viewers can relate to, that the made-up face isn’t the “real you.” This idea reveals an interesting contradiction in social attitude. As this issue of Media/Culture highlights, the theme of transformation is increasingly popular in contemporary society. Renovation shows, weight loss shows, and “makeover” shows have increased in number and popularity around the world (Lewis). Tania Lewis attributes this to an international shift towards “the real” on television (447). Accompanying this turn towards “the real,” confession, intimacy, and authenticity are now demanded and consumed as entertainment (Goldthwaite; Dovey; King). Sites such as YouTube are arguably popular because they offer real stories, real lives, and have a core value of authenticity (Strangelove; Wesch; Young; Tolson). The power of makeup transformations are challenging because they juxtapose a transformation against the natural, on the self. By only transforming half their face, the beauty vloggers juxtapose the “makeover” (transformation) with “authenticity” (the natural). The power of makeup movement is therefore caught between two contemporary social values. However, the desire for authenticity, and the lack of acceptance that the transformed image is authentic seems to be the main criticism that the members of this movement receive. Beauty vloggers identify a strong social value that “natural” is “good” and any attempt to alter the natural is taboo. Even in the commercial world “natural beauty” is celebrated and features heavily in the marketing and advertising campaigns of popular beauty, cosmetic, and skincare brands. Consider Maybelline’s emphasis on “natural beauty” in their byline “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” This is not the way the members of “the power of makeup” movement use and celebrate makeup. They use and celebrate makeup as a transformative and identity forming tool, and their use of makeup is most often criticised for not being natural. In her recreation of Nikkie’s video, Evelina Forsell says “people get upset when I’m not natural.” Like Nikkie, Evelina reveals she often receives the criticism that “the person with a full on face with makeup is not you.” Evelina’s video can be watched here.“The power of makeup” movement and its participants challenge this criticism that the made-up self is not the “real” self. Evelina directly responds to this criticism in her video, stating “when I have a full face of makeup . . . that’s still me, but a more . . . creative me, I guess.” The beauty vloggers in this movement use makeup and YouTube as extensions of the self, as tools for self-expression, self-realisation, and ongoing transformation. Beauty vloggers are demonstrating that makeup is a tool and extension of the self that allows them to explore and play with their self-representations. In the same way that technology enables the individual to extend and “reinvent him/herself online” (Papacharissi 645), so does makeup. And in the same way that technology becomes an extension of the self, or even a second self (Turkle, The Second Self; Vaast) so does makeup. Makeup is a tool and technique of the self. Vlogging is about storytelling (Kavoori), but it is also collective—it’s about telling collective stories (Raun 373) which can be seen in various vlogging genres. As Geert Lovink suggests, YouTube is one of the largest databases of global shared experience. YouTube’s global popularity can be attributed to Strangelove’s assertion that “there’s nothing more interesting to real people . . . than authentic stories told about other real people” (65). Individuals are drawn to Nikkie’s experience, seeing themselves reflected in her story. Famous beauty vloggers on YouTube, and everyday beauty lovers, find community in the collective experience of feeling shame for loving makeup and using makeup to transform and communicate their identity. Effectively, the movement forms communities of practice (Wenger) made up of hundreds of people brought together by the shared value and use of makeup as a transformative tool. The online spaces where these activities take place (mainly on YouTube and Instagram) form affinity spaces (Gee) where the community come together, share information, learn and develop their practice. Hundreds of YouTubers from all over the world took up Nikkie’s invitation to demonstrate the power of makeup by transforming themselves on camera. From well-established beauty vloggers with millions of viewers, to amateur beauty lovers with YouTube channels, many people felt moved by Nikkie’s example and embodied the message, adapting the transformation to suit their circumstances. The movement includes both men and women, children and adults. Some transformations are inspirational such as Shalom Blac’s in which she talks about accepting the scars that are all over her face, but also demonstrates how makeup can make them disappear. Shalom has almost five million views on her “POWER OF MAKEUP” video, and has been labelled “inspirational” by the media. Shalom Blac’s video can be watched here and the media article labelling her as “inspirational” can be viewed here. Others, such as PatrickStarrr, send a powerful message that “It’s okay to be yourself.” Unlike a traditional interpretation of that statement, Patrick is communicating that it is okay to be the self that you construct, on any given day. Patrick also has over four million views on his video which can be watched here. During her transformation, Nikkie points out each feature of her face that she does not like and demonstrates how she can change it using makeup. Nikkie’s video is primarily a tutorial, educating viewers on different makeup techniques that can manipulate the appearance of their natural features into how they would like them to appear. These techniques are also reproduced and embodied through the various contributors to the movement. Thus the tutorial is an educational tool enabling others to use makeup for their own self representations (see Paul A. Soukup for an overview of YouTube as an educational tool). A feminist perspective may deconstruct the empowering, educational intentions of Nikkie’s video, insisting that conceptions of beauty are a social construct (Travis, Meginnis, and Bardari) and should not be re-enforced by encouraging women (and men) to use make-up to feel good. However, this sort of discourse does not appear in the movement, and this paper seeks to analyse the movement as its contributors frame and present it. Rather, “the power of makeup” movement falls within a postfeminist framework celebrating choice, femininity, independence, and the individual construction of modern identity (McRobbie; Butler; Beck, Giddens and Lash). Postfeminism embraces postmodern notions of identity in which individuals are “called up to invent their own structures” (McRobbie 260). Through institutions such as education young women have “become more independent and able,” and “‘dis-embedded’ from communities where gender roles were fixed” (McRobbie 260). Angela McRobbie attributes this to the work of scholars such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck and their emphasis on individualisation and reflexive modernisation. These scholars take a Foucauldian approach to identity construction in the modern age, where the individual must choose their own structures “internally and individualistically” (260), engaging in an ongoing process of self-monitoring and self-improvement, and resulting in the current self-help culture (McRobbie). In addition to being an educational and constructive tool, Nikkie’s video is also an exercise in self-branding and self-promotion(see Marwick; Duffy and Hund; and van Nuenen for scholarship on self-branding). Through her ongoing presence on YouTube, presenting this video in conjunction with her other tutorials, Nikkie is establishing herself as a beauty vlogger/guru. Nikkie lists all of the products that she uses in her transformation below her video with links to where people can buy them. She also lists her social media accounts, ways that people can connect with her, and other videos that people might be interested in watching. There are also prompts to subscribe, both during her video and in the description bar below her video. Nikkie’s transformation is both an ongoing endeavour to create her image and public persona as a beauty vlogger, and a physical transformation on camera. There is also a third transformation that takes place because her vlog is in the public sphere and consequently mobilises a movement. The transformation is of the way people talk about and eventually perceive makeup. Nikkie’s video aims to end makeup shaming and promote makeup as an empowering tool. With each recreation of her video, with each Instagram photo featuring the transformation, and with each mainstream media article featuring the movement, #thepowerofmakeup movement community are transforming the image of the made-up girl—transforming the association of makeup with presenting an inauthentic identity—in society. ConclusionThe “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, demonstrates one way in which people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online, using makeup. Through their online transformation the members of the movement not only engage in a process of constructing and presenting their identity, but they form communities who share a love of makeup and its transformative potential. 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