Communication Abstracts Update

The June update of the Communication Abstracts database is now complete, with 639 new journal articles, book chapters, and books. Use the links below to view all of the new entries or to browse them by major topic area:

All New Abstracts

New Abstracts by Topic Area

1. Communication Processes
2. Interpersonal Communication and Relations
3. Economics and Communication
4. Communication, Culture, and Society
5. Education and Communication
6. Health Communication
7. Political Communication
8. Communication, Regulation, and the Law
9. Organizational Communication
10. Public Relations
11. Advertising, Marketing, and Consumer Behavior
12. Mass Media
13. Journalism and News Media
14. Communication and Information Technology
15. Telecommunications
16. Communication Theory and Research

New Journal: Electronic News

The first issue of Electronic News, a new journal from the publisher Erlbaum, is now available electronically via the BC Libraries.

Here's the publisher's description of the journal:

Electronic News is a quarterly journal devoted to advancing knowledge and understanding of news as disseminated through electronic media platforms. This journal will promote and publish readily accessible research and ideas that have clear relevance to the content, practice, and administration of electronic news, especially radio, television, and the Internet, and related areas, such as station Web sites. The journal will also provide articles for those who practice and/or teach broadcast/electronic journalism and related topics. The journal will provide both scholars and industry practitioners the opportunity to publish and read applied research, and will include research articles, invited essays, and reviews of books relevant to electronic news as an evolving and dynamic practice.

A Note of Thanks

As the academic year comes to an end, I want to offer thanks to all of the students I've had an opportunity to work with on research questions, big and small, throughout the year. The topics you've come up with and the ways in which you've approached them have kept me on my toes and reinforced my sense of how interesting and diverse a discipline this is. I hope you've learned some tools and techniques for communication research -- and information gathering in general -- that you'll carry with you whether you're moving on or coming back for more. Congratulations to all of the graduates, and I'll see the rest of you in the fall.

Awards & Rewards

Each of the three academic years I've been at BC, I've attended the annual Communication Department Honors Dinner. It's a great opportunity to see students I've worked with -- and others -- be recognized for their accomplishments. This year it seemed a particularly high number of award winners were students I had worked with individually at some point in their time here, so I decided to do a quick count.

I offer the results below, partly as self-congratulation (I'm not above that), and partly to reinforce the idea that getting help from the librarian can be part of your success as a comm major. No, I'm not guaranteeing that if you come see me your GPA will go up, but don't be one of those students afraid or embarrassed to ask for help. That's what I'm here for; let me know what I can do for you.


Percentage of Communication Award Winners Who Contacted the Communication Librarian for Individual Help
Dorman Picklesimer Jr. Outstanding Major Awards (Top 25 GPAs)
60% (15/25)

Majors Registered for Honors Classes
63% (26/41)

Communication Department Academic Excellence Awards (recognizing excellence in writing and creative work)
67% (4/6)

Junior Scholar Awards (Students presenting original research at a Communication conference)
73% (8/11)

Majors Graduating with Communication Honors
75% (21/28)

Phi Beta Kappa Communication Majors
86% (12/14)

24-Hour Study

Both the O’Neill Library Reserve Reading Room and Gargan Hall in the Bapst Library will be open for 24-hour study through the evening of Monday, May 14. See Library hours for more on which libraries are open when.

Blackwell Reference Online

Several new electronic reference books of value in Communication Studies are now available via Blackwell Reference Online. These include: A Companion to Media Studies; A Companion to Television; A Companion to Cultural Studies; The Handbook of Discourse Analysis; and many others in psychology, sociology, race and ethnicity studies, and other disciplines.

In Media Res

In Media Res is an experiment from the Institute for the Future of the Book's Media Commons project that uses short video clips and comments about them to "promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media scholarship."

A fuller description of the experiment is quoted below. You can view the posted videos and commentary on them on the In Media Res site.

Each day, a different media scholar will present a 30-second to 3-minute clip accompanied by a 100-150-word impressionistic response. The goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media scholarship through clips chosen for either their typicality or atypicality in demonstrating narrative strategies, genre formulations, aesthetic choices, representational practices, institutional approaches, fan engagements, etc.

In Media Res is envisioned as an experiment in just one sort of collaborative, multi-modal scholarship that MediaCommons will aim to foster. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for more immediate critical engagement with media at a pace closer to how we typically experience mediated texts. In Media Res hopefully will:

• Give scholars the opportunity to critically engage with the media in a more immediate and timely way.

• Promote discussion within the media studies community through virtual interactions around contemporary media artifacts.

• Enable a lively debate in which the sum total of the conversation will be more valuable than any one particular voice.

• Bridge the divide between academic and non-academic communities, inviting a critically-engaged and/or curious public to join in.

• Lead to the emergence of new scholarly and pedagogical ideas about studying and teaching media.

• Work toward reinvigorating the academic’s role as public intellectual by presenting media scholars no just as informed experts with valuable ideas to impart about critical media literacy, but as fellow citizens in a mediated society.