Thèses sur le sujet « Social science literature – publishing »

This PhD thesis takes a ’micro’ perspective on the production of higher education and research. More precisely, I use tools of industrial organization to study two individual institutions involved in their production process. The second chapter studies universities, the main producers of higher education and research, and the third and fourth chapters analyze scientific journals, which are central in the production and the dissemination of science. Besides being crucial nodes in the production and transmission of

knowledge, these institutions, interestingly, share other common characteristics: they both emerged before the Industrial Revolution, their importance increased over the centuries and they seem unavoidable today, and many actors are private not-for-profit.
Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Thesis (Ed. D)--College of Saint Mary -- Omaha, 2009.
A dissertation submitted by Daniel D. Moos in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor in Education with an emphasis on Health Professions Education. This dissertation has been accepted for the faculty of College of Saint Mary by: Peggy Hawkins, RN, PhD, chair ; Patricia J. Morin, RN, PhD, committee member ; Sharon Hadenfeldt, CRNA, PhD, committee member. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 7, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-258).

In 2011, over 1.5 million new book titles were published in the United States, a 400% increase in just five years compared to 2006. In the same time period, the market share for eBooks increased dramatically and now comprises 20% or more of sales from many of the biggest publishing companies. This hyper-abundance of titles in an increasingly heterogeneous market place has made it difficult for consumers to connect to books they might want to read. This is the discovery problem. It is compounded by the continuing decline of traditional gatekeepers and sources of discovery such as mass media reviews and advertising, as well as the decline of traditional bookstores where people often find books through browse. Authors and publishers therefore have turned to social media to spread the word about their titles. Social gatekeeping, an extension of traditional gatekeeping theory, is proposed as the framework for understanding how author participation in social networks initiates a flow of the diffusion of information over the web and other computer mediated communication channels, and through individuals and social networks to potential readers. Serendipitous browse and discovery is a key strategy for readers to find titles of interest, and the serendipitous tie is proposed as a social mechanism through which individuals discover new titles and bring it back to their social networks to share. To explore these concepts, a random sample of new eBook titles published during the first week of April, 2012 was generated and analyzed in three phases. The first phase of research classified books and authors according to facets such as traditional or self-published, use of social media and other factors. The second phase used multiple regression to establish an association between the use of social media by authors and a title's sales and presence on the Web. The third phase reviewed selected titles for new approaches to social media use and evidence of the serendipitous tie. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that author web presence predicts discoverability and sales.

The thesis presents a conceptual literature review of the subject of open access as it is reflected in literature relevant to digital library research. An approach to the grounded theory method specifically created for the purpose of performing a literature review is applied to 70 articles and conference proceedings found in the databases LISA and LISTA. Through the coding of the literature five categories that conceptually order the subject of open access emerged; Open Access, Authors, Scholarly Communication, Libraries and Librarians, and Developing and Transitional Countries. The conceptual relations of the categories are discussed in the presentation of the categories. The emerged theory is then validated through a review of earlier literature, which focused on literature reviews on open access. A model of the emerged theory with explanatory narratives are then presented in the concluding chapter.

Many aspects of China's academic publishing system differ from the systems found in liberal market based economies of the United States, Western Europe and Australia. A high level of government intervention in both the publishing industry and academia and the challenges associated with attempting to make a transition from a centrally controlled towards a more market based publishing industry are two notable differences; however, as in other countries, academic communities and publishers are being transformed by digital technologies. This research explores the complex yet dynamic digital transformation of academic publishing in China, with a specific focus of the open and networked initiatives inspired by Web 2.0 and social media. The thesis draws on two case studies: Science Paper Online, a government-operated online preprint platform and open access mandate; and New Science, a social reference management website operated by a group of young PhD students. Its analysis of the innovations, business models, operating strategies, influences, and difficulties faced by these two initiatives highlights important characteristics and trends in digital publishing experiments in China. The central argument of this thesis is that the open and collaborative possibilities of Web 2.0 inspired initiatives are emerging outside the established journal and monograph publishing system in China, introducing innovative and somewhat disruptive approaches to the certification, communication and commercial exploitation of knowledge. Moreover, emerging publishing models are enabling and encouraging a new system of practising and communicating science in China, putting into practice some elements of the Open Science ethos. There is evidence of both disruptive change to old publishing structures and the adaptive modification of emergent replacements in the Chinese practice. As such, the transformation from traditional to digital and interactive modes of publishing, involves both competition and convergence between new and old publishers, as well as dynamics of co-evolution involving new technologies, business models, social norms, and government reform agendas. One key concern driving this work is whether there are new opportunities and new models for academic publishing in the Web 2.0 age and social media environment, which might allow the basic functions of communication and certification to be achieved more effectively. This thesis enriches existing knowledge of open and networked transformations of scholarly publishing by adding a Chinese story. Although the development of open and networked publishing platforms in China remains in its infancy, the lessons provided by this research are relevant to practitioners and stakeholders interested in understanding the transformative dynamics of networked technologies for publishing and advocating open access in practice, not only in China, but also internationally.

Whether in the guise of the novel or non-print media such as film and television, fin-de-millennium science fiction has provided opportunities to envisage a posthuman stage of evolution. The academic response to this has been polarized. Certain elements have embraced the genre as integral to the sociocultural relationship between unfettered biotechnological advance and the limitation of the human flesh. Others have treated the topic as fanciful entertainment, leading them to ignore and sometimes ridicule research on the posthuman. The thesis seeks to utilise the contemporary science fiction allegory as an aid in developing a critique of the emerging posthuman discourse, facilitating the analysis of its socio-political dynamic, and questioning whether discourse advancement necessitates the rejection of the humanist metanarrative. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter differentiates the posthuman from established biotechnological discourses, e mg the discontinuities in global location, temporal engagement, and participant ideology. The second reflects on the contemporary human condition associated with man's technological ingenuity being a credible threat to his own existence. It then outlines the epochal technoscience of the posthuman and introduces the diametrically opposed standpoints of the posthuman as amelioration, or autoextinction. The third chapter draws upon utopian visions of the future to contextualise and assist in the critical analysis of narratives advocating posthuman technoscience. The fourth chapter reverses this, by utilising dystopian imagery as an entree into the rationale of those opposing human alteration, facilitating its critique. The fifth chapter sees the science fiction allegory as a postfoundationalist narrative, offering up a discursive mirror to the influences of providence and progress on the posthuman debate. The final chapter examines whether an a-humanist account of man's relationship with technology might help to advance the posthuman debate.

The subject of this dissertation is the introduction and reception of science fiction literature in Sweden 1950–1968. Apart from considerations on science fiction as a genre and market category, and a brief survey of science fiction published in Sweden before the year 1950, the dissertation scrutinizes the Swedish publishers’ attempts at introducing both domestic and translated science fiction, the reception of the genre in Swedish literary criticism, the magazines Häpna! (1954–1966) and Galaxy (1958–1960), and the foundation of a Swedish science fiction fan culture. Science fiction was established as a category on the Swedish book market in the early 1950s, with several attempts to launch single works or whole series of mainly translated fiction. Between 1952 and 1968, roughly 30 publishing firms published over 160 books marketed as science fiction, with an apex in the late 1950s. Few publishers were successful, however, and most of the series were discontinued within just a few years of their inception. Meanwhile, in Swedish literary criticism, science fiction was increasingly perceived as a deficient form of commercial entertainment. A few of the exceptions were Harry Martinson (1904–1978), with his space epic Aniara (1956), and the translated author Ray Bradbury (b. 1920), who came to be considered as surpassing the boundaries of the genre. With the magazine Häpna!, a Swedish science fiction fan culture was contrived, with fans forming clubs, arranging conventions, disseminating fanzines, and, eventually, starting their own publishing firms and magazines. In the Swedish literary system, science fiction became a semi-separate literary circuit of production, distribution and consumption, and, concurrently, a growing autonomous subfield of cultural production, with its own forms of specific symbolic capital, doxa, and instances of consecration.

In response to the federal legislation No Child Left Behind, schools across the country implemented required reading programs for classroom instruction. Open Court's Reading program meets this criterion for many schools. The text in Open Court Reading for grades two and three was evaluated for science and social science content standards that would be supportive of environmental education. Supplemental lessons from Project Learning Tree, Project WILD, and Project WET were identified.

In my Degree Project I developed a case study of two independent publishers that promote children’s literature with a special focus on diversity and challenging gender stereotypes, situating them within the bigger framework of activism for gender equality and against homophobia in Italy. I looked at the potential of children’s literature as a significant instrument of communication for social change and analysed the publishers’ activities as a form of activism, specifically connected with the sphere of education. I narrow my analysis to two publishers: Lo Stampatello, specialising in children’s literature against gender stereotypes and homophobia, and Settenove, specialising in the theme of gender equality. I analysed first a selection of texts from these publishers and then some of their diffusion practices, through which they engage with other entities dealing with gender equality and LGBT rights. I see these publishers as self-aware agents of change, that produce messages about equality, deliberately diffused into the public and specifically targeting an audience of children, parents, teachers and educators, and that play an active role in the scenario of contentious politics [Tilly and Tarrow, 2007].

Feminists have argued that the association made between teenage childbearing and long-term lower socioeconomic status hides a multitude of socially constructed inequalities. I extend this position by analysing how the association is linked in the South African literature on teenage pregnancy to economic security. I utilise Foucault’s conceptualization of the method of security. Security refers to institutions and practices that defend and maintain a national population as well as secure the economic, demographic, and social processes of that population. I analyse how the traits of the method of security are deployed with regard to teenage pregnancy; how reproductive adolescents are viewed as disrupting the production of the economic self and fracturing population control, thereby threatening economic security; and how the invocation of economic security allows for the legitimation of various regulatory practices.
Rhodes University

This thesis explores new forms of scholarly communication and the practice of open science among UK based academics. Open science broadly refers to practices that allow cost-free open access to academic research. Three aspects of open science are examined in this study: open access to research articles; open access to research data; and publishing ongoing research updates using social media. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining a series of scoping studies using qualitative methods followed up by an Internet survey of 1,829 UK academics. Overall this thesis has shown that whilst there is support for open science, the use of open science by academics was limited. Many academics were not aware of RCUK's open access policy and had limited experience of making their research articles freely accessible online. Most academics did not share their primary research data online. Although some academics had used a range of social media tools to communicate their research, the majority had not used social media in their research work. Overall, male, older and senior academics were more likely to use open access publishing and share primary research data, but were less likely to use social media for research. Academics based in Medical and Natural Sciences were more likely to use open access publishing and share research data, but less likely to use social media for their research compared to academics from Humanities and Social Sciences. Academics who were aware of RCUK's open access policy and who recognised the citation advantages of open access were more likely to publish in open access journals. Academics that were aware of RCUK's open access policy and had used social media for research were more likely to self-archive research articles. Academics that had used secondary data collected by others and self-archived research papers were more likely to share their own primary research data. Academics seemed to be strongly influenced by their colleagues' recommendation for the adoption of social media in research. Those who considered that the general public should know about their research findings were more likely to share their research on social media. A group of academics were identified and described as super users who frequently communicated ongoing research on social media. These super users were more likely to use tablet computers and have received social media training organised by their institutions. It is clear that open science is going to be a major factor in future academic work and in relation to building an academic career. Many academics have recognised the importance of open science. However to date the use of the tools for open science has been limited. With the right guidance and reinforcement of relevant policies, the new forms of scholarly communication can provide a pathway to open science which would serve to benefit individual academics, research communities and the public good.

Mediation is a problem-solving approach to conflict management that is used more and more in virtually every context in which conflicts arise. This paper explores the wide range of meaning for the term 'mediation' as found in the social science literature and examines the question of what processes can properly be called mediation. It surveys the literature related to numerous theories of mediation and examines the meaning of the term as established in its various contexts. The mediation literature can be divided into the following contexts: public sector or court connected mediation, divorce mediation, international mediation, environmental mediation, community mediation, small claims, and judicial mediation. This study delineates these contexts and differentiates them for the purpose of conducting an explication of the various meanings of the term mediation. The term mediation is found to be used throughout the literature without operational definition and only broad generic definitions can adequately describe the processes which are called mediation. The boundaries between mediation and other processes are blurred as a result of this expansive use of the term. This study describes mediation as differentiated from other processes such as litigation, arbitration, conciliation, and process consultation. Numerous concepts and issues are found in the literature related to mediation--caucus, goals, strategies and tactics, success, empowerment, ethics, mandatory mediation, neutrality, power and standards of practice. Many of these concepts are informed through contradictory debate within the literature. This paper describes these concepts and issues of mediation for the purpose of developing a further understand of the theory and practice of mediation. This study also reflects on the critical issues, debates and contradictory expectations of mediation that have been raised within the literature and finishes by drawing some conclusions about mediation. Mediation is described as both art and science. No one process is appropriate for handling all or even most mediation situations.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2008.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 20, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-10, Section: A, page: 3962. Adviser: Patrick Brantlinger.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 15, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-223).

This doctoral thesis focuses on active Spanish scholarly journals which follow internationally‐recognized quality standards, in order to analyze their main features, study the adoption of Open Access, observe the relationship between their price and bibliometric impact, and examine its internationality characteristics. Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus have been selected as the sources for identifying the journals. After depurating mistakes, a final list of 445 journals has resulted. A set of indicators has been defined and all data has been collected from the journals’ primary source (website or hard copy). Correlations and association tests have been carried out to explore relationships among variables. The population of Spanish journals indexed in WoS and Scopus grew steadily over the last years: there were 300 titles by 2012, 406 by 2013 and 445 by 2015. A 69.7% of these were launched after 1980 and their average age is 30 years. This selection of This selection of 445 journals stands for a 25% of journals published in Spain, but the subject areas are not equally distributed - Science, Technology and Medicine fields (STM) are overrepresented, while Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) appear less frequently. Indeed, 84% of all journals concentrate in only three of the seven subject areas considered for this study – 35% on Social S., 32% on Health S. and 18% on Arts & Humanities. Universities and research centers (mostly the Spanish National Research Council, CSIC) publish 43% of the journals. To run their publishing services, most of them use OJS platforms (34% of the total population). They publish mostly on Arts & Humanities (in Spanish language) and Social Sciences. Online‐only format and free access are their favorite output. Commercial publishers are the second in importance, accounting for the 32% of the journals. They focus on Health Sciences and run most of the few free‐access journals with APCs. They also account for most of the few hybrid journals, which are usually published in English. Elsevier is the largest commercial publisher, publishing about 17% of all the journals in this study. Scientific societies, professional associations and other not‐for‐profit private institutions publish 21% of the journals. They own or participate in another 24% of the journals, which are published by companies like Elsevier. Indeed, their scientific participation is crucial, reaching almost half of the population studied (45%). Government agencies publish only a 4% of all the journals. As to languages, almost half of the journals (47%) are published only in Spanish. Nonetheless, 26% are published both in Spanish and English, and 18% only in English. Remaining languages are residual. Free access is the most common type of publication (64.5%), followed by restricted (16.6%), embargo (14.4%) and hybrid (4.5%). Free‐access is associated with academic publishers and Social Sciences, while restricted‐access and hybrid journals are more common among companies and usually refer to STM fields. Open Access, as measured by free access with self‐archiving permissions, results in 56.9% of the total of journals. This indicates a sustained increase according to previous studies. Article Processing Charges (APCs) are beginning to be introduced in Spain, but only in 7% of these journals. Both free‐access and hybrid journals charging APCs are associated with commercial publishers, English language and high bibliometric impact rates. Annual subscription prices are much higher for STM, commercial companies and English language content, but the difference is lower when using price per article, because expensive journals usually provide more scientific content. APC prices are on average ten times higher in hybrid titles than in free‐access ones. Impact Factor (IF, which is only available for 27% of the studied journals), Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) and Source‐Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) have in general higher impact values for STM fields, journals with APCs and journals published in English. While the highest IFs usually appear in journals issued by commercial publishers, highest SNIPs are related to journals published by associations and societies. Subscription prices, both at volume and article level, have no relationship with any impact indicator. On the contrary, APC prices correlate moderately with impact indicators, but only with SJR and SNIP, not with IF. English language, foreign‐authored articles, international collaborations and foreign members at scientific teams have been identified and measured as elements that indicate internationality. Except for international collaborations, with very few appearances (especially in Arts & Humanities), all elements have global averages of around 33%, although they vary depending on subject areas and access types. The English language is most common in STM fields, journals published by companies and journals charging APCs. Foreign authors are more present in Health Sciences and Mathematics & Physics, and journals with APCs. The proportion of foreign experts is similar to that of foreign authors’, but with smoother differences among categories – also, they are lower in Health Sciences and higher in Engineering. Academic publishers usually include more members from foreign institutions than the rest. Internationality elements present a similar pattern, especially as far as the participation of foreign authors and foreign experts is concerned. Limitations of the study, future research lines and final considerations are provided.
Aquesta tesi doctoral estudia les revistes científiques espanyoles actives i amb un nivell de qualitat reconegut internacionalment, per tal d’analitzar les seves característiques principals, el grau d’adopció d’Accés Obert, la relació entre el preu i l’impacte bibliomètric, i els seus elements d’internacionalitat. Web of Science (WoS) y Scopus van ser seleccionades com a les fonts adequades per identificar la població objecte d’estudi. Després de depurar els errors detectats a les llistes de revistes extretes, es va obtenir una llista definitiva de 445 revistes. Es va definir un conjunt d’indicadors i es van recollir totes les dades de la font d’informació principal (el lloc web o la versió impresa de cada revista). Finalment, es van realitzar proves de correlació i associació per explorar relacions entre variables. S’ha posat de manifest que la població de revistes espanyoles indexades a WoS y Scopus ha crescut de manera sostinguda durant els darrers anys: hi havia 300 títols al 2012, 406 al 2013, i 445 al 2015. El 69,7% dels darrers van ser creats després de 1980 i la seva edat mitjana és de 30 anys. Aquesta selecció de 445 revistes suposa el 25% dels títols publicats a Espanya, tot i que les àrees temàtiques no hi estan reflectides de manera proporcional: la ciència, tecnologia i medicina i estan sobre-representades, mentre es recull un baix percentatge sobre ciències socials i humanes. Tot i així, el 84% de les revistes es concentren en només tres dels set camps considerats en aquest estudi: 35% en ciències socials, 32% en ciències de la salut, i 18% en arts i humanitats. Les universitats i els centres d’investigació publiquen el 43% de les revistes estudiades, amb especial menció del CSIC (Centre Superior d’Investigacions Científiques). La majoria d’aquestes revistes usen Open Journal Systems (OJS), plataforma on es recolza el 34% del total. Les institucions acadèmiques també publiquen principalment revistes sobre arts i humanitats (en castellà) i sobre ciències socials. Aquests títols solen estar disponibles en línia, sense versió impresa, i en Accés Obert. Les editorials comercials són les segones en importància, ocupant-se del 32% de les revistes, la majoria de les quals tracten sobre ciències de la salut. Aquestes entitats són responsables de moltes de les escasses revistes que inclouen càrrecs per publicació (“Article Processing Charges”, APC), tant en Accés Obert com híbrides (aquestes últimes, principalment en anglès). Elsevier és l’editorial amb més títols, publicant el 17% de les revistes d’aquest estudi. Les societats científiques, associacions professionals i altres institucions privades sense ànim de lucre publiquen el 21% de les revistes, i a més a més col·laboren en un altre 24%, del qual s’ocupa principalment Elsevier. La participació d’aquest tipus d’institucions és crucial, ja que en total arriba al 45% de totes les revistes de la població analitzada. Finalment, els ens governamentals responen només del 4% dels títols Quant als idiomes, quasi la meitat de les revistes (47%) estan publicades només en castellà. No obstant, el 26% està publicat en castellà i anglès, i el 18% exclusivament en anglès. La presència de la resta d’idiomes és residual. L’accés lliure és el tipus d’accés més comú (64,5%), seguit pel restringit (16,6%), embargat (14,4%) i híbrid (4,5%). És freqüent a les editorials acadèmiques i a les ciències socials, mentre que l’accés restringit i híbrid és més comú entre les comercials i normalment es troba als àmbits de la ciència, tecnologia i medicina. Les revistes en Accés Obert, considerades com aquelles disponibles en accés lliure i amb permisos d’auto-arxiu, suposen el 56,9% d’aquesta població. Segons estudis anteriors, aquesta dada indica un augment sostenible del grau d’adopció de l’Accés Obert. Els càrrecs per publicació s’estan començant a introduir a Espanya, però de moment només estan presents al 7% d’aquests títols. Tant les revistes en accés lliure amb APC com les híbrides es publiquen per editorials comercials, en anglès i amb alts indicadors d’impacte bibliomètric. Els preus de subscripció anual són molt més alts a revistes sobre ciència, tecnologia i medicina. També ho són als títols publicats per editorials comercials i a revistes en anglès. No obstant, la diferència de preu disminueix si es considera el preu per article, perquè les revistes més cares solen aportar més contingut científic. Els preus dels APC són, de mitjana, deu vegades més cars a les revistes híbrides que a les d’accés lliure. El Factor d’Impacte (IF, que només està disponible per al 27% de les revistes estudiades), el Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) i el Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), tenen en general valors més alts per a les revistes sobre ciència, tecnologia i medicina, amb APC i en anglès. Mentre que els valors més elevats d’IF apareixen a les revistes publicades per editorials comercials, els SNIP més alts estan relacionats amb associacions i societats. Els preus de subscripció no guarden relació amb cap indicador d’impacte, ni a nivell de volum anual ni a nivell d’article. Pel contrari, els preus dels APC correlacionen moderadament amb indicadors d’impacte, però només amb SJR i SNIP, no pas amb IF. L’anglès, els articles escrits per autors estrangers, les col·laboracions internacionals i els experts estrangers dels equips editorials han estat considerats com a elements d’internacionalitat mesurables. Excepte les col·laboracions internacionals, amb molt poca incidència (especialment baixa en arts i humanitats), tots els elements tenen una mitjana general aproximada del 33%, tot i que depenen molt de l’àrea temàtica i del tipus d’accés. La llengua anglesa és la més comú en ciència, tecnologia i medicina, així com a les revistes publicades per editorials comercials i també en publicacions amb APC. Els autors d’altres països tenen major presència a ciències de la salut, matemàtiques i física, i també a revistes amb APC. La proporció d’estrangeria és similar entre autors i equip editorial, però amb diferències menys notables entre categories. La proporció d’experts forans és també inferior a ciències de la salut, i superior a enginyeries. Les revistes publicades per institucions acadèmiques solen incloure més investigadors amb filiació estrangera als seus equips editorials que la resta de revistes. En general, els elements d’internacionalitat presenten patrons de distribució similars, especialment quant a autors i experts estrangers. Finalment, es descriuen les limitacions d’aquest estudi, possibles línies futures d’investigació, i conclusions globals.

Purpose This thesis analyses what are the current information security risks and opportunities of social media in a business context based on publications from 2015 to 2020. Design/methodology/approach This papers follows a qualitative method, particularly a Systematic Literature Review guided by Okoli and and Schabram (2010), the concept-centric approach described by Webster and Watson (2002) and thematic analysis described by Braun and Clarke (2006). Findings Data leaks, non-compliance and reputational risks seem to be the most significant corporate social media risks. Adopting social media policies and providing employees social media security education, training and awareness are the most mentioned controls by the reviewed literature. Social media are more and more used as a threat intelligence source and for cyber security prediction and detection. Furthermore, social media may be used for InfoSec discussion, as a tool for Information Security Training and Awareness, for internal cyber threat sharing and for incident response handling. Originality/value This thesis provides an overall view of the risks, controls and opportunities that social media use implies for private organizations. Further research is needed that focuses primarily on the opportunities that social media offer to strengthen business Information Security.

DNA is an intrinsic part of the working system of the body. These basic units of creation adhere to rules of operation, replication, organization, and are implicated in the maintenance of a delicate system. When cells mutate, when foreign agents such as viruses infiltrate or are introduced into the body, the assault is on the cellular level. It is from this point that we can trace the escalation of symptoms and effects.This project examined how the scientific language of genetics and epidemiology can be used to read a literary narrative as a body. Narrative is a system that replicates, moves and maintains itself much as cells and bodies do. Assaults upon and interventions into teleology, subjectivity and conventions of realism by the postmodern are seen in terms of mutations and viral invasions. Literature as a product of late twentieth century culture represents a physical emission of the reading subject's fear of infection, invasion, and the instability of the body. The project involved reading the inner narrative structure of a text as DNA and examining the exterior consumption of a cultural text in terms of its similarities to the transmission of a virus. This project enunciated a theoretical paradigm that used scientific language to examine the matrix of interaction between text, reader, and culture as it exists in a climate of threat, as bodies under siege.
Department of English

This thesis examines the strange career of Sterling Brown, a poet, literary critic and civil rights activist who was highly acclaimed between 1930 and 1945. In this period, he chose to sideline his creative writing and involved himself instead in social research. He turned to folklore, the Federal Writers’ Project, the Carnegie Myrdal Study of the Negro in America, and to reportage of the wartime South. This thesis is distinctive in examining these endeavours and provides new perspectives on Brown’s efforts to transform the national discourse about black Americans. Increased migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I led to a dialogue about race relations, black identity, and the future of the South that intensified during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Brown was central to debates during the New Negro Renaissance, within the Popular Front, and in investigations of black life sponsored by the New Deal government and philanthropic foundations. This thesis argues that the projects in which Brown involved himself in these years expose a tangled interracial debate on whose opinion would dominate in the representation of black character, identity, and culture. Brown and his black contemporaries in the social sciences influenced the building and dissemination of knowledge about African Americans within a challenging context. Their shared efforts to change the national dialogue about the ‘race problem’ have been under examined. Prevented by segregation and discrimination from gaining access to a wide audience, their desire to surmount these barriers helps to explain why Brown made this strange career choice. This thesis demonstrates that where he differed from his intellectual allies was in his conviction that black culture was a dynamic force that was as important as the ‘harder’ components of politics, class or economics. Brown’s prescient insights made him a founding figure in the fields of American cultural history and black studies.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010.
Committee Chair: Bruckman, Amy; Committee Member: Grinter, Rebecca; Committee Member: Grudin, Jonathan; Committee Member: Guzdial, Mark; Committee Member: Kolodner, Janet. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

This thesis addresses, from a comparative perspective, an important lacuna in the research devoted to German and English revolutionary literature in the period from 1819 up to the European revolutions of 1848/49. It illustrates that a major shift from a concept of political revolution to one of social revolution took place within these years which is reflected in radical literature between the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ (1819) and the failure of the bourgeois political revolution of 1848/49. Theoretically based on selected writings of the early Marx and Engels on ideology, consciousness and political and social revolution as well as on more recent Marxist theories of cultural studies, this study shows how the contemporary philosophical, socio-political, socio-economic and literary discourse on revolution must be regarded as closely interlinked. This interconnection is not limited to an ideological, but also extends to a rhetorical and even metaphorical level. However, although it foregrounds these shared textual elements, the purpose of this thesis is not to add yet another philological analysis of literary works, but rather to flesh out the shared ideological involvement of the fictional and non-fictional revolutionary discourse. Texts and authors include in the British context of 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley and British radical journalists such as Richard Carlile. In order to analyse the shift in revolutionary discourse in the years between the French bourgeois July Revolution of 1830 and the early 1840s, texts by the literary revolutionary writers Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Georg Büchner are contextualised with the pamphlets and writings by the most radically socio-revolutionary among the French early socialists, Louis Auguste Blanqui, by rebellious weavers, by the Parisian German early proletarian movement as well as Marx’s earliest socio-philosophical justification of a proletarian social revolution, the “Einleitung Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechts-Philosophie” (1844).

We are living within the age of information. The ever increasing flow of data and publications poses a monumental bottleneck to scientific progress as despite the amazing abilities of the human mind, it is woefully inadequate in processing such a vast quantity of multidimensional information. The small bits of flotsam and jetsam that we leverage belies the amount of useful information beneath the surface. It is imperative that automated tools exist to better search, retrieve, and summarize this content. Combinations of document indexing and search engines can quickly find you a document whose content best matches your query - if the information is all contained within a single document. But it doesn’t draw connections, make hypotheses, or find knowledge hidden across multiple documents. Literature-based discovery is an approach that can uncover hidden interrelationships between topics by extracting information from existing published scientific literature. The proposed study utilizes a semantic-based approach that builds a graph of related concepts between two user specified sets of topics using semantic predications. In addition, the study includes properties of bibliographically related documents and statistical properties of concepts to further enhance the quality of the proposed intermediate terms. Our results show an improvement in precision-recall when incorporating citations.

This dissertation reports the results of a qualitative research project investigating an approach to composition instruction in a high school social studies course that is based on the Upanishadic concept of tat tvam asi (you are that). Research for this study was conducted while I taught a section of Non-West History to high school juniors and seniors. This dissertation addresses the issues involved in the teaching of writing in a high school social science course. Specifically it focuses on the issues involved when a teacher attempts to construct a class that engages students to read and write in ways that promote empathic understanding of the other. To make this argument, I collected data in the Non-West History courses that I taught in 2012. The data consists largely of writing prompts I gave students dealing with literature we read and films we watched as well as their written responses. This dissertation argues that writing in a social science class should not be limited to research papers and essay tests. Further, this dissertation argues (citing the work of Jeremy Rifkin, J. Krishnamurti, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Thomas Merton, and S. Radhakrishnan) that writing assignments should also be given that promote the empathic awareness that the self is the other. Further, I will offer a counter notion that writing in Social Studies classes should not be just about "conveying information" or "demonstrating knowledge" (cf. Kiuhara et al. 150). Instead, writing should be used to give students the opportunities to creatively develop new insights about their place in the world. Thus, this dissertation concludes by proposing a new model for the teaching of writing in a high school social science course.

A bridge connecting student's new multi-modal abilities and schooling can be built. Students choose between school and other activities outside of the classroom walls (and sometimes even inside the classroom) and schoolwork seems to be losing ground in the battle of spare time more and more. Students could benefit from an electronic space that incorporates their media know-how, their studies, and others in the classroom. Blogs, or weblogs, provide just that type of space by relying on the user's insightful writing and creativity to retain a dynamic position in the Internet blogging community. Blogs have the ability to better the writing classroom by providing an educational forum for dialogue, spatial creativity, and social awareness.

In my thesis, I explore how advanced robotic technologies affect human society and my particular concern centers on investigating the boundaries between actual humans and artificial beings. Taking Steven Spielberg’s film Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) as my primary sources, I illustrate how humans are experiencing dehumanization whereas artificial beings are acting much more like humans by analyzing the main characters and events that depicted in both sources. Further on, based on Nick Haslam’s theory of two main forms of dehumanization (animalistic dehumanization and mechanistic dehumanization), I discuss the interrelationships between social categorization, empathy, alienation and dehumanization by comparing actual humans and artificial beings as counter-parts. According to the descriptions of the strained relationship between these two parties, I argue that the rigid social hierarchies set foundation for dehumanization and the characteristics that define a human being, such as humanity is not a trait that only exits in humans. It can be both gained and lost.

Social engineering as a method of attack is increasingly becoming a problem for both corporations and individuals. From identity theft to enormous financial losses, this form of attack is notorious for affecting complex structures, yet often being very simple in its form. Whereas for other forms of cyber- attack, tools like antivirus and antimalware are now industry standard, have proven to be reliable ways to keep safe private and confidential data, there is no such equivalent for social engineering attacks. There is not, as of this day, a trustworthy and precise way of estimating resilience to these attacks, while still keeping the private data private. The purpose of this report is to compile the different aspects of a users computer data that have been proven to significantly indicative of their susceptibility to these kinds of attacks, and with them, devise a system that can, with some degree of precision, estimate the resilience to social engineering of the user. This report is a literature study on the topic of social engineering and how it relates to computer program data, configuration and personality. The different phases of research each led to a more comprehensive way of linking the different pieces of data together and devising a rudimentary way of estimating human resilience to social engineering through the observation of a few configuration aspects. For the purposes of this report, the data had to be reasonably accessible, respecting privacy, and being something that can be easily extrapolated from one user to another. Based on findings, ranging from psychological data and behavioral patterns, to network configurations, we conclude that, even though there is data that supports the possibility of estimating resilience, there is, as of this day, no empirically proven way of doing so in a precise manner. An estimation model is provided by the end of the report, but the limitations of this project did not allow for an experiment to prove its validity beyond the theories it is based upon.
Social Manipulering som attackmetod har blivit ett ökande problem både för företag och individer. Från identitetsstöld till enorma ekonomiska förluster, är denna form av attack känd för att kunna påverka komplexa system, men är ofta i sig mycket enkel i sin form. Medans andra typer av cyberattacker kan skyddas med verktyg som antivirus och antimalware och tillförlitligt hålla privat och konfidentiell information säker så finns det inga motsvarande verktyg för att skydda sig mot Social Manipulering attacker. Det finns alltså inte idag ett pålitligt och säkert sätt att motstå Social Manipulering attacker och skydda personliga uppgifter och privat data. Syftet med denna rapport är att visa olika aspekterna hur datoranvändares data är sårbarhet för dessa typer av attacker, och med dessa utforma ett system som med viss mån av precision kan mäta resiliens mot Social Manipulering. Rapporten är ett resultat av studier av litteratur inom ämnet Social Manipulering och hur den relaterar sig till datorns data, konfiguration och personuppgifter. De olika delarna av utredningen leder var och en till ett mer omfattande sätt att koppla samman de olika uppgifterna och utforma ett rudimentärt sätt att uppskatta en persons resiliens mot Social Manipulering, detta genom att observera olika aspekter av datorns konfiguration. För syftet av rapporten så har uppgifterna varit rimligt tillgängliga, har respekterat integriteten och varit något som lätt kan anpassas från en användare till en annan. Baserat på observationerna av psykologiska data, beteendemönster och nätverkskonfigurationer, så kan vi dra slutsatsen att även om det finns data som stöder möjligheten att uppskatta resiliens, finns det idag inget empiriskt bevisat sätt att göra det på ett exakt sätt. En exempel av modell för att uppskatta resiliens finns i slutet av rapporten. Ramen för detta projekt gjorde det inte möjligt att göra ett praktiskt experiment för att validera teorierna.

The vast majority of William Cobbett’s personal letters have never been published. This thesis examines these manuscripts alongside the ‘open letter’ form that dominated his published writings, using correspondence to illuminate the hybrid and highly idiosyncratic form of Cobbett’s radicalism. It shows how he responded to continued persecution from the government through a series of innovative epistolary strategies, creating a popular journalism that incorporated many of the tropes usually associated with letter writing, including familiarity, authenticity, the spontaneity of speech and the domestic scene of reception. These became inseparable from the idealized presentation of Cobbett’s own radical and agrarian domestic life, and this thesis represents the first critical study to address the significance of Cobbett’s family in the physical production and imaginative world of his writings, drawing on many of the letters written by his seven children. Individual chapters concentrate on a series of episodes in Cobbett’s post-1800 career, including his friendship with William Windham, imprisonment in Newgate, exile in America, support for Queen Caroline and writings on the Captain Swing uprising. During these years, Cobbett’s correspondence helped to establish the modern newspaper leading article as an open letter to readers, although Cobbett’s are stamped with his own personal authority. However, while correspondence invested Cobbett’s journalism with a sense of situatedness unmatched in radical writing of the period, it also highlights some of the tensions within his political and pedagogical practice. By the 1820s, Cobbett’s correspondence bristles with the contradictions of wanting to recognize the individuality and difference of his readers’ lives, and at the same time pull them within the orbit of a very paternal political vision.

This study provides a precise definition of the term 'Kafkaesque' by enriching literary criticism with scientific theory and practice, including an experiment on readers' responses to Kafka. Dictionary definitions justify taking the term back to its textual origins in Kafka's works, and the works can fruitfully be analysed by investigating how readers engage with them through cognitive processes of imagination. Modern scientific developments posit that vision, imagination, and consciousness should be conceived of not in terms of static pictorialism – reducible to the notion of 'pictures in the head' – but in terms of enaction, i.e. as an ongoing interaction with the external world around us. Most traditional nineteenth-century Realist texts are based on pictorialist assumptions, while Kafka's texts evoke perception non-pictorially and are therefore more cognitively realistic. In his personal writings, Kafka wrestles with problems entailed by pictorialist conceptions of vision, imagination, and the function of language, and comes to enactivist solutions: evocation of perception that does not result in painting static tableaux with words. In his fictional works, Kafka correspondingly evolves a cognitively realistic way of writing to evoke fictional worlds that directly engage the cognitive processes of their readers; Der Proceß is a prime example of the 'Kafkaesque' text and reading experience, defined by being compelling yet simultaneously unsettling. Modulations in narrative perspective and evocation of emotion as enactive also contribute to the experience of the 'Kafkaesque' as compelling; yet Kafka's texts simultaneously unsettle by preventing straightforward emotional identification with the protagonists, and destabilising deep-rooted concepts of selfhood as singular and unified. The theoretical discussion of the 'Kafkaesque' experience as compelling yet unsettling is complemented and refined by an experiment testing readers' responses to a short story by Kafka. The term 'Kafkaesque realism' denotes Kafka's compelling yet unsettling non-pictorial evocation of perception of the fictional world. Kafkaesque realism falls into the broader category of 'cognitive realism', which provides a framework for analysing fictional texts more generally.

This thesis provides the first rigorous history of the concept of midlife crisis. It highlights the close connections between understandings of the life course and social change. It reverses accounts of popularization by showing how an idea moved from the public sphere into academia. Above all, it uncovers the feminist origins of the concept and places this in a historically little-studied tradition of writing about middle age that rejected the gendered "double standard of aging." Constructions of middle age and life-planning were not always oppressive, but often used for feminist purposes. The idea of midlife crisis became popular in the United States with journalist Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976), a critique of Erik Erikson's male-centered model of ego development and psychoanalytic constructions of gender and identity more generally. Drawing on mid-century notions of middle life as the time of a woman's entry into the public sphere, Sheehy's midlife crisis defined the onset of middle age, for men and women, as the end of traditional gender roles. As dual-earner families replaced the male breadwinner model, Passages circulated widely, read by women and men of different generations, including social scientists. Three psychoanalytic experts-Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Roger Gould-rebutted Sheehy by putting forward a male-only concept of midlife as the end of a man's family obligations; they banned women from reimagining their lives. Though this became the dominant meaning of midlife crisis, it was not universally accepted. Feminist scholars, most famously the psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, drew on women's experiences to challenge the midlife crisis, turning it into a sign of emotional instability, immaturity, and egotism. Resonating with widespread understandings of mental health and social responsibility, and confirmed by large-scale surveys in the late 1990s, this relegated the midlife crisis to a chauvinist cliché. It has remained a contested concept for negotiating the balances between work and life, production and reproduction into the present day.

This thesis traces the inter-relation between human/machine hybrid figures, imagination and “human” subjectivity through the early science fiction of H. G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, E. M. Forster's “The Machine Stops” and Karel Čapek's R.U.R.. It demonstrates how the “human” operates in a state of flux, in parallel with its environment which both defines and is defined by the “human.” I argue that all four writers use social satire and machine tropes to explore and critique the effects of industrialization upon, and the tension between, society as a whole and the individual in society. I argue that in The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Wakes, The First Men in the Moon, We, and “The Machine Stops,” Wells, Zamyatin and Forster create worlds where technocratic authorities apply science to create closed-system, totalitarian states. The thesis explores how these authors privilege creativity as crucial to “human” existence and use fantasy to create future societies critical of industrialization’s dehumanization of the individual. In these early twentieth century texts, network models are interrupting the clockwork. If one applies N. Katherine Hayles’ pattern/randomness dialectic, emergent human behaviours are noise disrupting the rigid pattern of the closed-system state, causing it to assume a higher complexity. In the late twentieth century, Donna Haraway, and others, wrote against technocratic authority’s employment of network models, focusing upon cybernetics. Yet prior to World War Two, Wells, Zamyatin, Forster and Čapek also wrote against technocratic totalitarianism, centring their fiction upon mechanical engineering and the machine (rather than information theory) to create versions of industrial/mechanical man. Thus, this thesis demonstrates that Haraway’s ‘cyborg’ is an echo of these earlier industrial anti-authoritarian figures—robots. The driving force in these narratives is the realization of technocracy’s application of science to completely control the individual, eliminate diversity and facilitate totalitarianism.

Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) are considered a suitable strategy to combine nature conservation and poverty alleviation in southern Africa, usually through ecotourism. There have, however, been critical voices questioning whether this is actually succeeding. Many researchers claim that the conservation and tourism efforts are leaving the local communities at greater risks of impoverishment rather than helping them. This study consults previous research to examine this issue through the examples of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA), and the communities living close to its National Parks in Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The methodology used is a systematic literature study of 26 secondary sources. The study finds that the previous research reveals that the experiences of the communities vary between different areas in the TFCA. The general feeling is that of displacement in different ways, except in those communities that have found ways of empowering and developing themselves; through tourism schemes. Otherwise, the attitude from the authorities in the national parks of the TFCA seems to be that the conservation and tourism efforts in the area are given priority over the local residents’ needs. Theories such as systems ecology, sustainable development and deep ecology may have answers to this issue on paper, however judging from the reality presented in the literature used in this study they are not realistic in practice. What is obvious is that economic interests are prioritized in the GLTFCA just as in the rest of the world.

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This research dialogues with the line "Literature, Identity and Memory" aiming at presenting a study that shows Literature as a means of cultural and social marginalization in service to some sectors of English society at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, this research had as it´s objective to unroll that the novels Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker, and The War of the Worlds (1898), by Herbert George Wells, reflects the fear of English elite in relation to the masses, as such, they are seen as an unwanted side of the British Empire, in the same way that the native populations from the colonies under British control. So, both novels may be read as a variation of the perspective of Colonial Gothic. In order to do so, this study will use the theoretical works by, among other ones, Fred Botting (1996), Roberto de Sousa Causo (2003), H. L. Malchow (1996), Alison Milbank (1998), Mary Ellen Snodgrass (2005), Alexandra Warwick (1998), Adam Roberts (2006), Kelly Hurley (2002), Patricia Kerslake (2007). Initially, we present the historical contextualization of Victorian age when it comes to the role of the masses in society. In the sequence, we analyze how gothic literature and science fiction approach social debates in end of the century English Literature. Finally, in the main chapter, we demonstrate that, beyond being works that criticize English imperialist ideology, Bram Stoker and H. G. Wells’ works present a subtext based on scientific discourse of eugenic thought and criminal Anthropology, in which, the masses are equated to the populations of English colonies and, as such, considered an obstacle to the full development of the country and a threat to Victorian England status quo.
Este trabalho dialoga com a linha de pesquisa “Literatura, Memória e Identidade” no intuito de apresentar um estudo que mostra a Literatura como meio de marginalização cultural e social a serviço de alguns setores da sociedade inglesa em fins do século dezenove. Especificamente, a pesquisa teve como objetivo demostrar que os romances Drácula (1897), de Bram Stoker, e A Guerra dos mundos (1898), de Herbert George Wells, refletem o medo da elite inglesa em relação às massas, sendo estas enxergadas como um lado indesejado do Império Britânico, da mesma forma que as populações nativas das colônias sob o controle da Inglaterra. Assim, ambos os romances podem ser lidos dentro de uma variação da perspectiva do Gótico Colonial. Para tal proposta, este estudo fez uso dos trabalhos teóricos de, dentre outros, Fred Botting (1996), Roberto de Sousa Causo (2003), H. L. Malchow (1996), Alison Milbank (1998), Mary Ellen Snodgrass (2005), Alexandra Warwick (1998), Adam Roberts (2006), Kelly Hurley (2002), Patricia Kerslake (2007). Inicialmente, apresentamos a contextualização histórica da época vitoriana no que se refere ao papel do povo na sociedade. Na sequência, analisamos como a literatura gótica e a ficção científica abordaram a questão social da literatura inglesa de fim de século. Finalmente, no capítulo principal, demonstramos que, além de serem obras que criticam a ideologia imperialista inglesa, os romances de Bram Stoker e H. G. Wells também apresentam um subtexto pautado pelo discurso científico do pensamento eugênico e da Antropologia criminal, no qual as massas também são equiparadas às populações das colônias inglesas e, como tais, consideradas um obstáculo ao pleno desenvolvimento do país e uma ameaça ao status quo da Inglaterra vitoriana.

Arguably, the impact of Darwinism on the novel is an indispensable part of the study of English literature. However, with regard to such literary study there is an ongoing aversion towards approaching Darwin outside the confines of his contemporaneous Victorian setting. This thesis explores what remains an extremely under-represented area of current scholarship; namely, the active status of Darwinism as an influence upon contemporary novelists. To address this gap, this study starts by conducting textual and comparative analyses of a representative selection of contemporary British novels, a literary field that, since 1990, has featured significant authors who have found in Darwin a source of intellectual and literary inspiration. The aim is to argue that Darwin's classic texts, and more recent incarnations of his theory such as Sociobiology, are deployed as a materialist discourse, used to subvert various problematic assumptions in the declining Postmodernist philosophy, the previously dominant theoretical paradigm. For novelists including Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt and Jenny Diski, Darwinism provides the tools to define human nature in an oppositional manner to the Social Constructivism which reduces the human to a blank slate ready for society's dictation. A universal human nature can be seen manifested in biological phenomena including competition, altruism, reproduction and aggression. The treacherous territory of biological determinism is still present, yet the desire to experiment is carried forward by McEwan in Enduring Love and Saturday into the realm of challenging traditional religion. In a more nuanced manner, Jim Crace's Being Dead manages to create a wholly naturalistic narrative of death. Finally, reinstating alterative meta-narratives is a practice that comes fully into its own in contemporary renditions of history. Byatt's Neo-Victorian novels, Possession and Morpho Eugenia, exhibit faith in knowing the past as if it were an evolutionary process of accumulated changes. Moreover, Diski's serio-ironic Monkey's Uncle is focused on how the present is haunted by the past in the form of immortal DNA coils. This study analyses the texts in a manner suggesting a paradigm shift in literary scholarship, where Darwin is no longer seen as simply an ideological threat. As the sciences continue to become more hermeneutically enigmatic, and as literature seems embedded in an elitist Postmodernist trajectory, there is now huge democratic potential in the New Darwinian Novel which invites the everyman of today to participate in the controversies of both disciplines.

Culturally responsive education has been an actual topic in teacher education for decades, but most teachers still finish their education without appropriate knowledge and skills for teaching in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Providing quality education to diverse learners remains a challenge, particularly in the fields of mathematics and sciences. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to describe intervention programs preparing in-service and pre-service math and science teachers for teaching in culturally diverse classrooms, and the outcomes of such programs. A search for scholarly journals evaluating such intervention programs has been carried out in several databases, resulting in nine articles included in the analysis. Intervention programs described in these articles covered several important aspects of culturally relevant education and had a limited success in developing cultural responsiveness of teachers. The construct of culturally relevant education is complex and multi-layered, and thus hard to measure without simplifying it to measurable constructs. Limitations of the study and implications for the future research and practice are discussed.

This dissertation examines the process of limited political liberalisation in China by analysing the coexistence between critical journalists and the party-state under the Hu-Wen leadership. In contrast to the scholarship on authoritarianism and Chinese politics, which tends to analyse the perspectives of societal actors and the state separately from one another, this study brings the two together, unveiling the intricacies of their interactions. In the past decade, critical journalists and the party-state maintained a partnership which can be best described by a jazz ensemble metaphor. The players—critical journalists and the party-state—share a common purpose: improving their performance or governance within the existing political system. They overcome the limitations on their collaboration with ad hoc creative adjustments made in response to one another. The party-state acts as a band leader, setting the key by establishing a framework within which creative manoeuvring can take place. The study is based on unique access to politically sensitive material, including 120 in-depth interviews with critical journalists, media and crisis management experts, and government officials. It also includes multilayered textual analysis of the Chinese Communist Party journal, Qiushi, and investigative reports in two outspoken media outlets, Caijing and Nanfang Zhoumo. The data is employed to analyse the boundaries for limited political liberalisation of the media as well as how it manifests itself during major crisis events. More broadly, the dissertation draws the attention of both China and authoritarianism scholars to the significant yet neglected feature of interactive improvisation as a force that can sustain coexistence between critical actors and authoritarian states. It shows that by engaging in actor-driven analysis and illuminating the process of their interactions, we can better grasp the dynamics of authoritarianism in China and beyond. A step is made towards applying the analytical framework distilled in the China case on other authoritarian regimes by including a limited comparison to media–state relations under Gorbachev and under Putin. It shows that the variables of collaboration and improvisation are useful in explaining the different outcomes of political liberalisation reform.

This study describes how information spread on the internet by examining diffusion, framing and source use surrounding coverage of the 2010 best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The book presented a rare opportunity to view how a story about science, discovery and race became a best-seller within weeks after its publication. Through a mixed-methods and case study approach, the author examines patterns of coverage using Google Alerts that traced the book's online coverage in the first six months of its release. The author found that online information clustered around several themes with the most prominent describing aspects of science and scientific discovery, followed by the book's characterization as a "best seller" or "good read." Another recurring theme centered on issues surrounding exploitation in human research. In addition, the study reveals that sources who "set the frame" for coverage were most likely to be media figures, including Oprah Winfrey, Alan Ball and HBO films, in addition to newspapers and individual journalists and science writers. By examining the relationship of online frames with sources, the author found that a diversity of frames is paired with key sources: that is, multiple themes co-occur with source mentions, although the themes may not have been generated by the sources themselves. Rather, sources are linked to narrative frames by others who generate online coverage. The author concludes that, while key sources initially set a message's frame, once diffused, the message may take on other qualities.

Etude d'une catégorie de romans de science-fiction, qu'on appelle le livre-univers. Cinq oeuvres littéraires servent d'exemples à la théorie, avec une prédilection pour Noô (1977) de Stefan Wul.
LA PREMIERE PARTIE s'efforce de localiser le livre-univers dans le territoire de la science-fiction. Le livre-univers s'inscrit dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. Plusieurs indices éditoriaux distinguent un livre-univers d'un space opera classique : par sa taille importante qui le rapproche du "roman-fleuve", par la réception critique qui le célèbre comme un événement littéraire, par son succès auprès du lectorat amateur. Le livre-univers présente un monde structuré, dense et original dans ses composants, dont plusieurs lectures n'épuisent pas l'intérêt. Pour une première définition, on est parti de celle de la romance planétaire (récit dont l'élément de base est une planète, Terre exceptée, et dont l'intrigue tourne autour de la nature de cet élément), en l'élargissant car le livre-univers dispose d'un arrière-plan galactique, souvent de plusieurs planètes. Le livre-univers puise à de nombreuses sources : le space opera et la romance planétaire, les thèmes de l'histoire du futur et de l'empire galactique, la hard science.
LA DEUXIEME PARTIE aborde les structures singulières qui se dessinent sous l'histoire et les thèmes abordés dans le livre-univers. L'approche systémique fournit une analogie entre les caractéristiques d'un système et celles d'un livre-univers. Un système se caractérise par la totalité qu'il forme, la transformation et l'autoréglage. Le livre-univers est un tout autonome, avec des frontières symbolisées par son éloignement dans le temps et dans l'espace du récit, ainsi que son appartenance au merveilleux qui le coupe de la réalité contemporaine. Cette totalité se compose d'éléments signifiants variés, qui interagissent pour former un système-monde. (Des exemples d'interactions sont donnés dans la thèse.) Ainsi, l'analogie systémique définit une véritable écologie du livre-univers. Dans l'optique systémique, le livre-univers en tant que fiction peut sans peine être comparée au jeu, avec lequel il possède beaucoup de points communs : des règles fixées dès le départ, un espace virtuel, un déroulement politique, un goût du grossissement et de la démesure.
LA TROISIEME PARTIE présente à gros traits ses "éléments de construction". En partant des éléments manifestes du récit (les personnages-types, le décor, le bestiaire, l'économie, la politique et la religion), l'on met en évidence un certain nombre d'interactions, tendues vers un effort de cohérence du système-monde, une volonté de "faire monde". Les thèmes classiques de la science-fiction (les machines pensantes, les extraterrestres, la science) servent aussi à nourrir le système-monde, au prix d'une certaine dénaturation, car les thèmes ne sont plus traités pour eux-mêmes.
Dans la QUATRIEME PARTIE, on considère le livre-univers à la fois comme expression artistique du monde et comme interprétation de l'univers. Le livre-univers s'élabore dans le temps. Il résulte d'un long processus de maturation, qui peut passer par un travail préparatoire (notes, cartes...) souvent considérable (Noô). L'étude du style et du langage est éclairante : la dominance de la variété lexicale (registres de langue, néologismes...), le schéma narratologique multilinéaire ou composite, la tendance au baroque concourent à une vision qui privilégie la complexité, en même temps qu'une appréhension multiple de la réalité qui est la marque du roman moderne. Le livre-univers traduit bel et bien une Weltanschauung, même s'il n'a pas la valeur démonstrative du roman total ; celle-ci s'efface derrière le monde fictif qui prétend vivre par lui-même. L'intérêt de la création d'un tel monde, pour le romancier, est esthétique autant (ou même plus dans le cas de Noô ou Hypérion) qu'idéologique. Chaque livre-univers reflète le point de vue sur la réalité de son auteur : Frank Herbert développe une philosophie écologique fondée sur l'adaptation permanente des groupes au milieu extérieur et au milieu intérieur ; Brian Aldiss trahit une tendance au sociobiologisme, également perceptible chez Stefan Wul mais gauchie, chez ce dernier, par une poétisation du monde ; la Terre glaciaire de G.-J. Arnaud résulte d'une perception essentiellement politique.
Le livre-univers n'est ni la représentation exacte d'une réalité, ni un pur symbole, il est un modèle imaginé. Enfin, le livre-univers nourrit et se nourrit de la littérature de science-fiction. Si, comme l'affirme Brian Aldiss, la SF cherche ou propose une définition de l'homme et de son statut dans le cosmos, alors le livre-univers occupe bel et bien une place privilégiée au sein de la science-fiction.