This essay reads Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853) as an example of Victorian imitative art by reading it through the lens of Victorian domestic handicraft. It does so in order to resituate Atkins's work within the history of scientific visualization and to contribute to the increasing complexity scholars of visual culture and of the scientific image have added to prevailing accounts of the rise of the “objective” scientific image in the nineteenth-century. Building on the work of historians of photography, art, science, and literature, it argues that her cyanotypes point toward an alternative history of scientific image as a form of craft and collection that resonates with recent calls in the study of the scientific image and scientific practices to move “beyond representation.”
Journal of Creative Communications, Ahead of Print. This article explores how certain food and the stories linked to the same are capable of evoking feelings of comfort and security. Food binds people together. The rituals and practices surrounding food inspire and sustain the association of various memories, experiences and emotions. The area of food studies is especially interested in how these linkages translate into the practice of nourishment. The narratives surrounding comfort food take on a cross-cultural flavour in the videos from Beryl Shereshewsky’s YouTube channel. This article analyses these narratives through the lens of Symbolic Interactionism to explicate how these food narratives bring people together from across the world by evoking the universal needs of food and comfort. Consequently, it is seen that even though it is true that the experience of consuming comfort food is extremely personal, it is also rendered as a universal phenomenon through the narratives that are created and shared.
The museum is not a neutral container, a passive collection of art and artifacts. Rather the museum is itself a historical argument, using objects and their relations to write our collective stories. This essay shows how the museum, as it developed within nineteenth-century European imperialism, directs meaning both within and beyond literature. The museum integrates readers into its collections and its narratives, directing them figuratively and literally through exhibits. Nineteenth-century literature, I argue, capitalizes on this dynamic interplay among the collection, the viewing subject, and the museum's ideologies. In both poetry and prose the museum appears as a place, a concept, and a form. For example, William Thackeray's “May Day Ode” shows how the Crystal Palace and the 1851 Great Exhibition facilitate an imperialist agenda. The galleries in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, meanwhile, are not just places the characters go; they also exert control over how characters (and readers) experience and evaluate collections. Across these texts, the museum is setting and theme. But, I argue, the museum also works as form, curating the collections, the characters who visit them, and the readers who access the narrative through museum logics. In conjunction with literary examples and an overview of scholarly conversations around nineteenth-century museum studies, I consider how the museum continues to direct bodies, interpretations, and ideas today by drawing on my experiences using museums in the college classroom.
Discourse &Communication, Ahead of Print. The article retrospectively looks at Russia’s strategic communication during the Ukraine crisis (2013–2014) in light of the ongoing Russian-Ukraine conflicts. Russia’s strategic communication campaign, especially the sophisticated use of state-sponsored international broadcaster-Russia Today (RT)-has been proven to raise sympathy, distract attention and delay effective reactions from the Ukranian government and NATO. RT’s strategic mediatisation of the Ukraine crisis not only fermented a favourable environment for Russia’s annexation of Crimea but set up the meta-narratives and operational framework for the subsequent influence operation practiced by the Russian government during the current Russo-Ukraine war. The article adopts a multimodal discourse analysis to elicit RT’s identity narratives about three main actors during the Ukraine crisis: Russia, the West, and Ukraine. By analysing RT’s YouTube audio-visual representation of the Ukraine crisis, the research finds that RT has applied a victimisation strategy to legitimise Russia’s military intervention in the Annexation of Crimea as a defencive counterattack. The West is accused of provoking a divide between Russia and Ukraine and being an unreliable partner and hypocritical norm-upholder. The Ukrainian components are dichotomously represented. While the pro-Eu protestors and the interim government are framed in line with violence, disorder, and neo-Nazism, the ejected pro-Russian Yanukovych government is legitimised as a democratically elected government, and its policy is aggressively crushed by the pro-Eu protestors. The empirical research suggests that RT’s discursive construction of the Ukraine crisis is built on a divisive script between a victimised pro-Russia club and an aggressive pro-EU camp. By reflecting upon RT’s strategic mediatisation of the Ukraine crisis, the paper seeks to illuminate the historical continuance and variation of Russia’s strategic communication in the post-cold war era. It thus aims to make a meaningful addition to the study of Russian propaganda and shed historical insights to make sense of Russia’s ever-intensifying information campaign during the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War.
Journal of Creative Communications, Ahead of Print. Polymedia chat applications such as WhatsApp are facilitating ‘mixed-media’ relationships (Parks, 2017, Communication Research, 4, 505) as they have penetrated our everyday mediated interactions. This has led to calls for a deeper probe into the interconnections of the varied modes. After defining its vital term ‘mode’, the current study focuses on two widely used modes—image and text—in everyday mediated interactions via chat applications. In order to study their interconnections, the study adopts Martinec’s (2005) image–text relation systems. The findings indicate two extreme range points of image–text interconnections in mediated chat app-based interactions. At one extreme point, images and texts seem to be repeating each other’s messages, and at another point, they seem to complement one another. The point where images and texts complement one another highlights the role of images, and the point seems to play evocative and facilitative roles.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. As Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), such as the internet and mobile phones, facilitate the spread of knowledge and interactions across borders in previously unimagined ways, questions are being asked about whether the benefits of this digitization process are equally distributed between and within countries. Motivated by the way technology adoption and usage patterns may differ in the Arab Middle East, this paper examines how the Kuwaiti context shapes people’s understanding of a survey instrument used for evaluating digital inequalities, as they relate to access, skills and engagement, and outcomes of ICT use. Specifically, it discusses the adaptation and validation of the survey measures of socio-digital inequalities through a process of cognitive interviewing and provides insight into the theoretical and empirical linkages between cultural conceptions of digital and traditional inequalities in ways that explore both their universal and contextual aspects, or denotative and connotative meanings. Evidence suggests that important cross-cultural complications relate to language issues, socio-economic conditions, citizenship, and differing perceptions of social desirability. These findings offer important considerations for improving the reliability and validity of future survey-scale adaptations in the broader MENA region, especially in countries containing significant multicultural populations. Simultaneously, they call into question the extent to which global conceptualizations of digital inequalities and their measures reflect complex local realities.
Discourse &Communication, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 630-661, October 2023. Aviation English (AE) is a distinct register of English used by pilots and air traffic controllers. As it is one of the contributing factors to aviation safety, ICAO and its Member States’ aviation authorities require the airspace users to have the proficiency in using AE effectively. In recent years, the training and testing have gained more attention, but little work has been done to describe its linguistic features. The study set out to describe AE from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics with an aim to illustrate its linguistic features as compared to conversational English (CE). To achieve this goal, the corpora of CE and AE communications between native English speakers from the United States were respectively constructed and then scrutinized to demonstrate that AE has a significant difference from CE in functional-semantic aspects. The findings of this study reveal how distinct AE with CE in terms of speech functions. Some pedagogical implications were then proposed for enhancing AE training to cultivate the students’ competence in semantics and interaction.
Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1151-1167, October 2023. This article analyzes ‘Boomer Remover’ the controversial term for COVID-19 popularized on social media in early 2020. It mobilizes digital media theory and discourse analysis to ask what makes Boomer Remover acceptable for its users. It conceptualizes Boomer Remover as an internet meme and argues that memes use intertextuality (the way new texts build upon older texts) as a core mechanism of meaning making. This allows the meme form to communicate a high-level of complexity and depth in an easily consumed format, however, it also bifurcates audiences as a meme is understood differently depending on the audience member’s familiarity with reference points. This article analyzes these divergent understandings through a framework of ‘discourse communities’. It unpacks how for a discourse community familiar with internet memes the term has come to be connected with progressive politics, and contrasts this with readings of Boomer Remover as ageist attack for those unfamiliar with the memetic contexts. Rather than privilege one reading of the Boomer Remover meme as correct, this article shows that in order to understand the social impact of memes, we must recognize their inherent polysemic nature.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. This article argues that the digital sphere has maintained the offline hierarchal forms of political, economic, and cultural powers, taking the Arab journalism sector as a topical case study. The article explores the potential of digital platforms as a new source of revenue for Arab news media and a new site for disseminating informative content that helps push the freedom of speech in the region. It demonstrates the difficulty of achieving either goal partly due to the monopoly of Big Tech over the digital advertising market and partly due to the competition among Arab media outlets to use clickbait content to lure audiences and hence increase superficial metrics such as clicks and shares. The article draws on different forms of evidence, including articles penned by Arab journalists, in which they reflect on their experiences in the digital sphere, papers by Arab scholars, in addition to informal conversations with selected Arab journalists.
Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1389-1408, October 2023. Professional sport has entered the digital economy as organisations adopt data-driven business model innovations. The purpose of this article is to highlight the potential ethical vulnerabilities sport organisations and their leaders face when adopting digital sport business models. Here, we treat data as a species of capital that can be converted into economic capital once it undergoes a computational transformation via a data-driven business model innovation. We argue for two advantages in this approach. First, it helps make transparent the mechanisms through which digital sport business models work. Second, it reveals how the extraction and application of big data exacerbates inequitable power relationships between sport organisations and supporters – the big data divide – that leads to ethical vulnerabilities for sport organisations and their consumers. We suggest that sport consumers might be particularly vulnerable to digital data risk as a consequence of their high levels of brand loyalty and involvement, which tend to encourage trust in the sport properties soliciting, analysing, and monetising their data. Platform broadcasting partnerships, e-ticketing in smart stadiums, and cryptocurrency-based fan tokens are used as examples of data-driven business model innovations based on the conversion of data to capital, demonstrating how sport organisations risk violating the trust of supporters when using digital strategies. The article concludes with directions for future research to deliver an ethically informed data-driven sports industry.
