I went looking just now for references to two highly influential books about the media - Thompson, J. B. (1995) The Media and Modernity : A Social Theory of the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

For the former, Google Scholar found 442 references. For the latter it found 486 references.

I also tried looking up references to those books in four leading academic reference databases – the Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s normally-excellent Scopus, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and Communication Abstracts (all four require academic subscriptions to access).

Whether searching for author name or title, the first two found very few records, almost all of them to do with academic papers these authors had written rather than the books in question. The IBSS at least found some reviews of the books in academic journals which was some help and Communication Abstracts contained a short summary of the Meyrowitz book but neither was much help in finding books referenced by other books either.

Admittedly, these databases are primarily aimed at indexing and cross-referencing papers, but for better or worse much of the scholarship in media studies is published in books (or book chapters).

It could be that I failed to use the right syntax to bring up the references I needed – Web of Knowledge’s can be a little tricky in places - and the Google Scholar citations don’t give you as much information (eg abstracts) once you have found them - doubtless many of them are of little utility - but considering the short length of time Google Scholar has been working I am impressed at the speed with which it is closing the distance to its competition.

Is there a trick I have missed?

David Brake

The British Academy has produced a report on Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences which concludes inter alia while the law itself gives academics sufficient ability to use copyright work, “risk averse publishers, who are often themselves rights holders, demand that unnecessary permissions be obtained, and such permissions are often refused or granted on unreasonable terms” and “there are well-founded concerns that new database rights and the development of digital rights management systems (DRMs) may enable rights holders to circumvent the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate research and scholarship”.

David Brake

A fellow blog researcher has provided a handy list of her own favourite Internet and software productivity tools and has invited me (and some colleagues) to respond (one has already given her own list).To be honest though I think of myself as a near-compulsive collector of this kind of stuff, almost everything I use is already on one or the other of the two lists already. To their collection I would add:

• Netvouz, a more feature-packed way to share and store bookmarks than any of the others I have looked at including del.icio.us - my collection now numbers 6540 - the public version is here and my collection of bookmarks tagged “academic” may be worth browsing.
• Scopus from Elsevier is a better journal searching tool than Web of Knowledge with a much easier to use interface (though you need a subscription to be able to use either)
• A9 from Amazon is a handy way to access the ‘read inside the book’ features offered by Amazon with fewer clicks.
• I find Bloglines’ search seems to find links to blogs on a given subject area that other blog search engines miss but in truth I haven’t experimented extensively with the wide range of blog search tools available.
• I did the survey that formed part of my thesis work using QuestionPro which has lots of handy features and offers academics one free unlimited use survey (though eventually your access to the results will expire so don’t forget to download them to SPSS!).
• Go Digital and other “techtalk” podcasts (see the podcast section of the extensive resources along the right side of my personal blog). Primarily because they enable me to keep up with the tech news including blog-related stuff while I am doing the dishes or cycling around town rather than reading until my eyeballs bleed (though actually I do both!).
• On that resources list you will also find a number of free PC software tools like anti-virus software and a link to a blog posting I made, gathering all the useful cheap and free Mac software I use (academic and otherwise).
• Update: If you want to manage your thesis like you would a business project, you could use a web based project management tool like Basecamp or open source software like GanttProject 2
• Not strictly a research tool but something absolutely necessary to the future of my research nonetheless - Synk - a piece of Mac software which helps me back my entire hard drive to a separate drive which I keep at the LSE so if our flat burns to the ground with my laptop in it I will still have a thesis to complete!

I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…

Variation in English Words and Phrases (VIEW) is a search engine for the British National Corpus of words. Among its many functions it lets you find out the kinds of words that are frequently associated with other words. The adjective most commonly found with "nerd" is "computer", for example. Unfortunately, it is a corpus of late 20th century words and does not contain the words that would be most interesting to me - "blog" or "blogger". It also turns out if you go to Google.com and type "define:yourword" it will offer you "related phrases" (the related phrase for "blogger" was "Baghdad Blogger".

Here are some thoughts/queries I had while I was writing my first (not entirely satisfactory) bit of analysis of the interviews I did for my thesis.
• I didn’t realise until I really got into it that the analysis is a bit like fractal geometry - each individual section could grow to any size as the closer you look at an issue in detail the more you can find to say.
• It is hard to draw boundaries around an individual topic when other related topics keep intruding that would be dealt with in a separate chapter. When it comes to writing up I worry I might end up repeating key points several times in different ways (though perhaps this is not a bad thing?)
• I realise that it is harder than I thought it would be to use the interview text. I can easily characterise an interviewee as having a given attitude based on my familiarity with a whole interview but when it comes to substantiating it with excerpts often I find either the particular sentences are banal and/or they are embedded in a conversational context irrelevant to my theme but without which the sentence is meaningless. To what extent will the reader be willing to take my characterisation of the overall attitudes of interviewees on trust?

I don’t know if anyone out there has thoughts on these points - I imagine these are just concerns that will fade with practice, practice practice!

A big “thank you” is due to Hanna (who are you? Why not add yourself to our little map and tell us about your research?) who brought Transcriva to my attention - a lovely little Mac application for transcription. It costs $19.99 but you can try it out with few limitations and it works better in some ways than the software I had been using - Transana - in a number of respects (though Transana does much more than transcription alone). She also reminded me of the existence of Express Scribe which was a commercial product and is now free. It is available in both Windows and Mac versions and claims that it, “works with speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically convert speech to text” which is, of course, the holy grail for transcribers. I wouldn’t expect an interview to work though since you would have two different speakers and background noise to contend with. Windows users may also want to check out Dictation Buddy but it costs $33 and as far as I can tell doesn’t offer any important advantages over Express Scribe.

Or of course if you have the money you can always farm your transcription out to Katwa or another commercial transcribing company (for $50 per hour of transcribed audio). Since it takes around 4 hours (for me at least) to transcribe an hour of audio it may well be worth considering!

Update: I spoke too soon - you should still keep an eye on Transcriva (and Transana is still in Alpha for the Mac so if you are a Mac user you have to ask the programmers for a copy) but I am going back to Transana for the moment as Transcriva has some niggling irritations (eg it doesn’t handle recordings longer than 1hr well for example and doesn’t let you do any text formatting as you type to indicate emphasis).

The Boston Review published a fascinating article recently, Do the Right Thing about how scientists and scholars are attempting to determine whether there is a universal moral sense. Rebecca Saxe’s roundup includes contributions from social science and anthropology on one side and from cognitive science and biology on the other.

Mentioned in the article is the Moral Sense Test - an Internet-based survey using sample moral dilemmas to see who answers in what way and find patterns across different cultures. If you think their work is worthwhile, take the test yourself…

First some things you shouldn’t do:

• Use Audacity for this - it seems to crash when asked to save long files as MP3s - at least on my machine.
• Rely on just one device to record anything important. Fortunately, I was also recording my interview on a minidisc which worked so I didn’t lose my data when Audacity crashed.
• Pay for shareware software - it just seems wrong to me that I should have to pay for an application just in order to save audio from my built-in microphone to my hard disk!

Luckily I found advice on Transom - a handy website designed to help would-be amateur and semi-pro radio programme producers to get started. The somewhat convoluted answer to my problem appeared to be to use Apple’s "Garageband" which comes with new Macs - as recommended by MacWorld. Even this stopped recording for some reason after an hour and 11 minutes of my latest interview but at least let me save the results.

Any idea why that might have happened or what I should use instead?