Introductory Comments

The idea for this issue of the journal, as well as the earlier project Mapping and Boosting Digital Humanities in the Visegrad Region (led by the NGO Centre of the Study of Popular Culture), stemmed from reflections on the growing dependence of the humanities on digital resources and research methods. We aimed to gather the best practices in the use of digital methods in the four Visegrad Group countries and Austria in one place, and present them in a public database, which also serves as a tool for mapping the state of digital humanities in the region. The database is published on a dedicated website together with recordings of talks presenting selected relevant projects: https://digihum.cspk.eu/ . Thus, this issue of Colloquia Humanistica can be called the culmination of both the Mapping and Boosting Digital Humanities in the Visegrad Region project and our experiences in the digital humanities.

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual n

Renewing Cultural Studies

The cultural heritage of a people defines the people. Cultural heritage refers to the physical and intangible artefacts, traditions and values that are passed down from one generation to another within a community or society, nation or race. Over the years, it has been observed that cultural heritage studies have been bogged by optimization challenges in the areas of resource allocation, route planning and site selection. Providing solutions using the African Buffalo Optimization is the focus of this paper. The relationship between the African Buffalo Optimization which is a swarm optimization technique in computer science and cultural heritage is also examined using the qualitative research method. Using the analytical research method, not an experimental one, to track the relationship between humanities, computer science, Artificial Intelligence, cultural studies and the social sciences, this paper highlights the application of the African Buffalo Optimization to confronting the challenges of cultural heritage and concludes that the algorithm can be applied to optimize various processes, such as digital preservation and conservation, collection management and curation, exhibition and display design, community engagement and participation and cultural heritage tourism management. Such application benefits the global cultural heritage organizations and institutions in several ways. It is, therefore, recommended that the global research community in cultural studies, digital humanities and social sciences should explore the use of swarm optimization techniques, in general, and the African Buffalo Optimization, in particular, to cultural heritage research and scholarship.

<i>Alex Goody</i> Technology, Literature and Culture<i>Technology, Literature and Culture</i>. Alex Goody. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Pp. viii+193.

Since the launch of Tourism Geographies in 1999, annual international tourist arrivals have surged from 664 million to 1.4 billion, with greater numbers of domestic tourists traversing within borders. Transportation improvements have made travel more efficient, affordable, and accessible, while the digital revolution has introduced social media, the sharing economy, GPS technology, and artificial intelligence to travelers. This forward-thinking collection offers the latest research in tourism geographies, drawing from a collective body of work developed over the last quarter century. During this period, the subfield has evolved from a convergence of geography and tourism studies into a critically engaged, multidisciplinary branch of the social sciences. With roots in social and cultural geography and cultural studies, tourism geographers offer a critical approach to tourism studies, which foregrounds the role of place, space, people, and the environment. This collection illustrates how contemporary tourism geographies scholarship has built on this critical foundation to transcend the disciplinary walls of geography. Tourism geographies has long existed on the verge of disciplinary borders, accounting for the broad range of scholars and scholarship from social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, history, environmental studies, and planning, among others. This collection provides essential frameworks for foundational and emerging themes in tourism geographies, deepening understandings of tourism discourse and practice and setting the stage for the subfield’s next act.

“Popular culture” is a term that usually refers to those commercially produced items specifically associated with leisure, media, and lifestyle choices. To study religion in popular culture, then, is to explore religion’s appearance in the commercially produced artifacts and texts of a culture. The study of popular culture has been a catalyst of sorts in the context of studying religion. Some have speculated that with the increasing presence of religion in commercially produced products and specifically in the entertainment media, religion may be reduced to entertainment. Others, however, have argued that religion has always been expressed and experienced through contemporary forms of culture, and thus its manifestation in popular culture can be interpreted as a sign of the vitality rather than the demise or superficiality of contemporary religions. Popular culture is worthy of study given its role in cultural reproduction. The study of popular culture and religion encourages scholars to consider the extent to which popular cultural representations limit broader critical considerations of religion by depicting and reinforcing taken-for-granted assumptions of what religion is, who practices it and where, and how it endures as a powerful societal institution. Alternately, popular culture has been explored as a site for public imaginings of how religious practices and identities might be different and more inclusive than they have been in the past, pointing toward the artistic and playful ways in which popular religious expression can comment upon dominant religion, dominant culture, and the power relations between them. With the rise of an ubiquitous media culture in which people are increasingly creators and distributors as well as consumers and modifiers of popular culture, the term has come to encompass a wide variety of products and artifacts, including those both commercially produced and generated outside of traditional commercial and religious contexts. Studies might include explorations of religion in such popular television programs as Orange Is the New Black or in novels such as The Secret Life of Bees, but might also include considerations of how religion and popular culture intersect in practices of Buddhism in the virtual gaming site Second Life, in the critical expressions of Chicana art, in the commercial experiments of Islamic punk rock groups, and in hashtag justice movements. The study of religion and popular culture can be divided into two major strands, both of which are rooted in what is known as the “culture and civilization tradition.” The first strand focuses on popular culture, myth, and cultural cohesion or continuity, while the second explores popular culture in relation to religion, power, and cultural tensions.

Notes on Contributors

Picking through the Trash

Physical activity is very important for early childhood, especially outdoor activities that add a lot of new experiences. This study aims to check the relationship of children's outdoor activities and parenting styles and children's social skills. The participants are 125 parents of early childhood who attend kindergarten. The research method is a descriptive study using the relational screening model. The results showed that there was a relationship between outside play and parenting style on the social skills of children in their childhood. Democratic parenting styles are found to promote children's social skills, while authoritative parenting styles have a negative correlation with interpersonal skills, the ability to express verbally, self-control, listening skills, emotional management and adaptation to change. In the sub-dimensions of anger management and adaptation to changing skills is a significant difference between authoritative parenting styles and not permissive parenting with children's social skills.

It is difficult to keep up with the plethora of published monographs and edited books on Latin American and Latino/a popular culture. American university, as well as independent scholarly and commercial presses, have discovered in the past decade that such books have broad appeal. This was not always the case; twenty years ago it was difficult to find a press that would give a publication proposal on popular culture serious consideration. The unspoken response to such proposals seemed to be that the topic itself did not merit serious scholarly consideration. This trend persisted despite the wide U.S. and Latin American distribution of ground-breaking works published mainly in Latin America and Europe. Happily, this situation no longer exists; one finds entire categories in university and other press catalogues devoted to popular culture and cultural studies. In fact, the arrival of cultural and popular culture studies imported from abroad (e.g., Stuart Hall, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Armand Mattelart, and Ariel Dorfman) has given a strong boost to the acceptability of popular culture studies in the United States.

Historical study of crime, media, and popular culture has been underway since “the cultural turn” in the social sciences and humanities in the 1980s. Since then, a diverse literature has emerged presenting different theories, dealing with various time periods and topics, and challenging contemporary assumptions. Much of this work has focused on the press, because newspaper archives offer a familiar source for researchers accustomed to working with documents in libraries and because “moral panic” has provided a theory that can be easy moved from one time and place to another. However, crime, media, and popular culture presents a vast history and much of this has yet to be examined by criminologists. It includes broadcast radio, television, and feature films, as well as folklore, ballad and song, and theatrical performance, not to mention novels and stories. There has been enough historical research by specialists in literature, journalism history, film history, and other fields to demonstrate the value of historical research for criminology. But making to most of this history will require methodological innovation and theoretical development. To understand the history of crime, media, and popular culture, criminologists will need to move away from document-based historical research and toward digital forms of archived media. They will also need to develop theoretical perspectives beyond 1970s sociology.

The first issue of IJURR was published more than 30 years ago, in 1977. It opened with a brief editorial statement in which the journal’s founders defined their project. IJURR would be interdisciplinary. It would be open to diverse theoretical approaches and methodologies, whilst seeking to understand urban and regional development in terms of the ‘fundamental economic, social and political processes which operate at local, national and international levels’. Such an understanding should inform ‘social action’ and not be confined to intellectual debate. The tone for the new journal was set by the inaugural issue, which opened with four articles (by Ray Pahl, Jean Lojkine, Enzo Mingione and Richard Child Hill) on ‘urbanism and the state’. Other contributors to the first volume of IJURR included Manuel Castells, Edmond Preteceille, Chris Pickvance, Patrick Dunleavy, Doreen Massey, Martin Ravallion, Roger Friedland, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Alford, Josef Gugler and William Flanagan. Pahl, Mingione, Preteceille, Pickvance, Piven and Castells were all founding members of IJURR’s editorial board, together with Michael Harloe (the editor) and S.M. Miller. The founders of and initial contributors to IJURR comprised a remarkable generation of scholars concerned with the development of a radical or critical approach to urban and regional issues that would be relevant to political and social change. Indeed, IJURR included a section on ‘Praxis’. In the first issue, this section comprised articles on social or popular movements in the USA, Mexico and Spain, and on the civil war in Beirut. The impetus behind IJURR came mostly from sociologists, and there was a considerable overlap between IJURR and Research Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association, but IJURR also drew on the efforts of political scientists, planners and geographers. Change was central to IJURR’s identity. Drawing on egalitarian conceptions of social justice, IJURR’s founders sought to show that cities and regions could change in a variety of directions. Marxist theory was especially appealing to scholars who combined activist and scholarly missions, although Marxist theory certainly did not go unchallenged (not least by Ray Pahl and Patrick Dunleavy) and was never a precondition for publication. The scholarly practice of the journal was unambiguously embedded in an overall surge of radical and even revolutionary politics across the world. The 1970s were the morning after the 1960s explosion of critical theory and revolutionary practice. Student rebellion and scholarly debate fed and radicalized each other. IJURR was both a product of and protagonist in this important shift, and was seen by its editors, authors, reviewers and readers as such.

Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open

THIS READER'S FORUM GOT ITS START because of an article written by Robert Fulford for the National Post on 13 October 2007 about SSHRC (The Social Science and Humanities Research Council) and the work of Dr Jes Battis. The article, Lex Luthor Hearts Superman: Your Tax Dollars at Work, takes SSHRC to task for not revealing much about its research proposals, then moves on to mock Dr Battis for doing research on popular culture and queer issues, and ends by criticizing Dr Battis's success at earning grants. Fulford even supplies the fact that Dr Battis wrote about soy milk and corn muffins on his blog as some kind of evidence that he is not a good scholar. It is easy to be annoyed by Fulford's predictable attack on SSHRC (what a waste of tax dollars!) and to be disturbed by his extended attack on Jes Battis as a person and as a scholar (cornbread! muffins! piercings! queer stuff!). It's more puzzling to see him get upset about research on popular culture--and in its parent discipline, cultural studies--if only because one of his recent books, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (1999) discusses popular culture at length, including the films of D. W. Griffiths, the culture of gossip, and Jack Nicholson, among other topics. Clearly, it's not the objects of popular culture which have attracted Fulford's ire since he writes about these himself, but popular culture research influenced by the politics of cultural studies, which aims to critique the conservative values Fulford holds dear. Fulford chooses to cloak that discussion of politics in contempt for the subject matter, and that's where things get really interesting. Fulford's strategy of expressing contempt for studies of popular culture on the one hand while writing about popular culture seriously on the other isn't so different from the position of popular culture in the humanities and social sciences today. Doing research and teaching on popular culture is seen in some academic quarters as a guilty pleasure, but it is not a pleasure which creates real research or substantial teaching, or which--until the recent creation of the cultural studies category for SSHRC Standard Research Grants--deserves funding. Fulford's hiding of ideology behind a contempt for everyday objects that he finds banal when he's not talking about them finds an uneasy parallel in the world of research and teaching, where emergence of popular culture as a field within cultural studies is accompanied by worries about its possible banality, its threat to serious fields, even the fact that popular culture is, well, popular with students and the general public too. And anything popular cant be all that educational, can it? It isn't only Fulford who gets exercised at the thought of articles about Buff, the Vampire Slayer: The general response to the Oprah Winfrey Show and Oprah's Book Club in the popular press is equally dismissive and hostile about Oprah Winfrey's choice of books (even when they are classically literary) and about the way readers in Oprah's Book Club choose to read and interpret. Recent scholarship on Oprah's Book Club is creating a more complex idea of what it is to be a participant on the show and what the selections themselves can mean. …