Public Reading Research Articles

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Quality to Impact, Text to Metadata: Publication and Evaluation in the Age of Metrics

The evaluation of scholarly works used to be interpretively complex but technologically simple. One read and evaluated an author’s publication, manuscript, or grant proposal together with the evidence it contained or referred to. Scholars have been doing this for centuries, by themselves, from their desks, best if in the proximity of a good library. Peer review — the epitome of academic judgment and its independence — slowly grew from this model of scholarly evaluation by scholars. Things have dramatically changed in recent years. The assessment of scholars and their work may now start and end with a simple Google Scholar search or other quantitative, auditing-like techniques that make reading publications superfluous. This is a world of evaluation not populated by scholars practicing peer review, but by a variety of methods and actors dispersed across academic institutions, data analytics companies, and media outlets tracking anything from citation counts (of books, journals, and conference abstracts) and journal impact factors, to a variety of indicators like H-index, Eigenfactor, CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank, as well as altmetrics. We have moved from descriptive metrics used by scientists and scholars, to evaluative metrics used by outsiders who typically do not have technical knowledge of the field they seek to evaluate. This is a shift that reflects a fundamental and increasingly naturalized assumption that the number or frequency of citations received by a publication is, somehow, an index of its quality or value.

Decolonizing the reading landscape: A conversation with Kgauhelo Dube

Reading and literacy projects in South Africa have a long and fascinating history. In this conversation, Kgauhelo Dube talks about a contemporary Pretoria-based initiative which seeks to promote reading and literacy through the showcasing of African authors and texts. The discussion explores some of the social and material dynamics which inform the post-apartheid reading project, including the lack of reading and library facilities in township settings and the ongoing alienation experienced by black students and scholars in white-dominated institutions. It points to the importance of the contemporary revival of the discourse of decoloniality as a means of framing the project, and as a route to understanding the broader contexts in which African literature is produced and consumed. The discussion also engages with the importance of the short story form for the public reading event and considers some of the ways in which the written text is subsequently reshaped as a dynamic and mobile digital product.

Tagore’s Gitanjali: A Note on Publics of Performance

Tagore’s Gitanjali has been written seeking inspiration from the bhakti tradition. The nuances of performance and reception of the tradition essentially involve two aspects- public and private. Bhakti as an act of personal devotion of an individual forms its ‘private’ character.The sonic performance of bhakti in forms such as bhajans addressed to Gods, accompanied by musical instruments and joyful cries of ecstasy, encompass the ‘public’ character. Both the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ are the modes of transcendental God realisation. While the ‘private’ is individual-centric, the ‘public’ can be understood in the sense of the integration of the individual with the Universal or the finite with the Infinite. The modes of publics of performance rely on transcendental collective shared experience as a catalyst of self-transformation and as an agent fostering national and universal brotherhood. This paper presents the case for incorporating publics of performance in the pedagogy for the study of Gitanjali, as a text of bhakti tradition. This would involve techniques like theinclusion of a CD demonstrating the rhythmic flow of reading, providing guidance on pronunciation, intonation, emphasis, punctuation and groupings of words and phrases. The trainers, on a more dedicated note can evolve innovative teaching techniques such as a ‘literary jagran’ and perform a collective public reading accompanied by traditional musical instruments of the bhakti tradition such as cymbals and dholaks.

Loans of the revolution: how Mexico borrowed as the state collapsed in 1912–13

AbstractThis article assesses why the French and US banks Paribas and Speyers underwrote a series of loans to revolutionary Mexico in 1912 and 1913, when the state was in the process of collapsing. This is a case of a war debt that failed to prevent the borrowing government from suspending payments and subsequently falling. Based on unpublished primary documents, the article shows that the 1913 loan involved a conflict of interest. The credit delayed a default and sustained the price of Mexican securities while Paribas, its main underwriter, was liquidating its Mexican portfolio. Evidence also suggests the existence of asymmetry of information. Paribas accessed pessimistic but accurate first‐hand information on Mexico, while the public read over‐optimistic press reports. Paribas forced the government to sell the bonds on the primary market at a price that was low, controlling for publicly available data. It subsequently sold the bonds at a margin on the secondary market. An additional reason for the lending is the Nacional railway, a state‐owned company that used a share of the funds to pay its debt. More exposed to Mexico than Paribas, the small and internationalized Speyers held the bad bonds it had underwritten.

Print, Profit, and Perception: Ideas, Information and Knowledge in Chinese Societies, 1895–1949., edited by Pei-yin Lin and Weipin Tsai

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION Pei-yin Lin & Weipin Tsai Chinese modernities revisited: globalization and localization Fluid modernity and ideas Print, profit and perceptions 1. CULTURAL CONNECTIONS IN A NEW GLOBAL SPACE: LI SHIZENG AND THE CHINESE FRANCOPHILE PROJECT IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY Paul J. Bailey Early years in France Sino-French cultural interaction Li Shizeng's philosophy of work-study Conclusion 2. HEALTH AND HYGIENE IN LATE QING CHINA AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF JAPANESE TRAVELERS Che-chia Chang Networks of travelers Categories of traveler First impressions: Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! Understanding the Japanese viewpoint Conclusion 3. MODERNITY THROUGH EXPERIMENTATION: LU XUN AND THE MODERN CHINESE WOODCUT MOVEMENT Elizabeth Emrich Alternative modernities and Lu Xun's Grabism Lu Xun in Shanghai and his Translations on Art Lu Xun and woodcut publications Humanism and social construction in woodblock prints Lu Xun and Woodcut Print Societies Conclusion 4. TECHNOLOGY, MARKETS, AND SOCIAL CHANGE: PRINT CAPITALISM IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA Tze-ki Hon Local initiatives and domestic factors in technology transfer Markets, circulation and profits National learning as cultural capital Professional geographers and public intellectuals Conclusion 5. MEDICAL ADVERTISING AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION: THE CASE OF SHENBAO IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA Max K. W. Huang Understanding the human body in early republican China Medical Advertising and Cultural Translation Conclusion 6. PLANET IN PRINT: THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGINATION IN ZHENG KUNWU'S FICTION DURING TAIWAN'S COLONIAL PERIOD Mei-e Huang From astronomical reports to fiction writing Scientific fantasy and humanistic reality Between science fiction and detective story Conclusion 7. SHAPING PERCEPTION OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR: A STUDY OF TEXTBOOKS IN TAIWAN IN THE 1940s Shi-chi Mike Lan Presentation of the War in Japanese colonial texts before 1945 The War in Chinese nationalist texts after 1945 Localizing the War in textbooks: Before and after 1945 Conclusion 8. ENVISIONING THE READING PUBLIC - PROFIT MOTIVES OF A CHINESE-LANGUAGE TABLOID IN WARTIME TAIWAN Pei-yin Lin Positioning the Chinese-language tabloids in colonial Taiwan Chinese literati-courtesan connections and Western exotica Appropriating and speculating about love From freedom of love to condemnation of unrestrained free love Alternative modernity and re-appropriation of love Conclusion 9. THE FIRST CASUALTY: TRUTH, LIES AND COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNISM IN CHINESE NEWSPAPERS DURING THE FIRST SINO-JAPANESE WAR Weipin Tsai War reporting in the West and in China in the second half of the nineteenth century Battle-ready and eager for the fight The war for readership In the newspapers' defense Conclusion BIBLIOGRAPHY

Better tracheostomy care through targeted education using social media

The National Tracheostomy Safety Project (NTSP) has published strategies to manage and prevent airway emergencies in patients with tracheostomies and laryngectomies.1,2 However, front-line healthcare professionals most likely to benefit from guidance may not have access to or are unlikely to read publications in traditional medical literature. To improve dissemination of such guidelines, The Health Foundation launched Evidence into Practice in 2017. The NTSP’s aim for this project was to produce assessable, digestible resources, and target and influence relevant front-line staff via social media platforms. The NTSP engaged a social media marketing and production company (FeedFirst Ltd.) to produce short (<2 min) videos around key tracheostomy themes, coupled with a branding exercise. The themes were the following: (i) problems can be prevented by basic care, done well; (ii) emergencies can be managed by following NTSP algorithms; and (iii) vocalisation should be a routine goal of daily care. A marketing campaign was devised to target key staff groups (ICU nurses, ENT nurses, paramedics, physiotherapists, speech therapists, doctors, and hospital managers) identified via social media profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Strategies included themed events, paid advertising, and encouraging peer-to-peer sharing of resources. Engagement metrics were captured using social media listening tools from January 1, 2018 to March 31, 2018. A total of 629 270 social media impressions of new NTSP video and infographic resources were captured, including over 267 000 Twitter impressions, 275 430 Facebook impressions, 82 880 YouTube video views (over 80 000 min watched; Fig. 7), and 3960 LinkedIn impressions. Only 85 000 (31.8%) of the Twitter impressions resulted from paid advertising, demonstrating significant social mobilisation around the content, and peer-to-peer sharing. By developing high-quality, professional content to convey key safety messages and targeting front-line staff via native and promoted social media activity, we have demonstrated an effective reach of our resources to target staff. In comparison, the NTSP paper underpinning this project had been cited only 89 times since publication in 2012. We recommend considering a similar social media marketing strategy to target key staff for similar educational projects in the future. The authors would like to thank Health Foundation, an independent UK charity for better health and health care. 1.McGrath BA, Bates L, Atkinson D, et al. Anaesthesia 2012; 67: 1025–412.McGrath BA, Lynch J, Bonvento B. BMJ Qual Improv Rep 2017; 6 (1). bmjqir.u220636.w7996

Ten Ways to Increase Your Publication's Readership

Ten Ways to Increase Your Publication's Readership

OC-2-KB: integrating crowdsourcing into an obesity and cancer knowledge base curation system

BackgroundThere is strong scientific evidence linking obesity and overweight to the risk of various cancers and to cancer survivorship. Nevertheless, the existing online information about the relationship between obesity and cancer is poorly organized, not evidenced-based, of poor quality, and confusing to health information consumers. A formal knowledge representation such as a Semantic Web knowledge base (KB) can help better organize and deliver quality health information. We previously presented the OC-2-KB (Obesity and Cancer to Knowledge Base), a software pipeline that can automatically build an obesity and cancer KB from scientific literature. In this work, we investigated crowdsourcing strategies to increase the number of ground truth annotations and improve the quality of the KB.MethodsWe developed a new release of the OC-2-KB system addressing key challenges in automatic KB construction. OC-2-KB automatically extracts semantic triples in the form of subject-predicate-object expressions from PubMed abstracts related to the obesity and cancer literature. The accuracy of the facts extracted from scientific literature heavily relies on both the quantity and quality of the available ground truth triples. Thus, we incorporated a crowdsourcing process to improve the quality of the KB.ResultsWe conducted two rounds of crowdsourcing experiments using a new corpus with 82 obesity and cancer-related PubMed abstracts. We demonstrated that crowdsourcing is indeed a low-cost mechanism to collect labeled data from non-expert laypeople. Even though individual layperson might not offer reliable answers, the collective wisdom of the crowd is comparable to expert opinions. We also retrained the relation detection machine learning models in OC-2-KB using the crowd annotated data and evaluated the content of the curated KB with a set of competency questions. Our evaluation showed improved performance of the underlying relation detection model in comparison to the baseline OC-2-KB.ConclusionsWe presented a new version of OC-2-KB, a system that automatically builds an evidence-based obesity and cancer KB from scientific literature. Our KB construction framework integrated automatic information extraction with crowdsourcing techniques to verify the extracted knowledge. Our ultimate goal is a paradigm shift in how the general public access, read, digest, and use online health information.

FamPlex: a resource for entity recognition and relationship resolution of human protein families and complexes in biomedical text mining

BackgroundFor automated reading of scientific publications to extract useful information about molecular mechanisms it is critical that genes, proteins and other entities be correctly associated with uniform identifiers, a process known as named entity linking or “grounding.” Correct grounding is essential for resolving relationships among mined information, curated interaction databases, and biological datasets. The accuracy of this process is largely dependent on the availability of machine-readable resources associating synonyms and abbreviations commonly found in biomedical literature with uniform identifiers.ResultsIn a task involving automated reading of ∼215,000 articles using the REACH event extraction software we found that grounding was disproportionately inaccurate for multi-protein families (e.g., “AKT”) and complexes with multiple subunits (e.g.“NF- κB”). To address this problem we constructed FamPlex, a manually curated resource defining protein families and complexes as they are commonly encountered in biomedical text. In FamPlex the gene-level constituents of families and complexes are defined in a flexible format allowing for multi-level, hierarchical membership. To create FamPlex, text strings corresponding to entities were identified empirically from literature and linked manually to uniform identifiers; these identifiers were also mapped to equivalent entries in multiple related databases. FamPlex also includes curated prefix and suffix patterns that improve named entity recognition and event extraction. Evaluation of REACH extractions on a test corpus of ∼54,000 articles showed that FamPlex significantly increased grounding accuracy for families and complexes (from 15 to 71%). The hierarchical organization of entities in FamPlex also made it possible to integrate otherwise unconnected mechanistic information across families, subfamilies, and individual proteins. Applications of FamPlex to the TRIPS/DRUM reading system and the Biocreative VI Bioentity Normalization Task dataset demonstrated the utility of FamPlex in other settings.ConclusionFamPlex is an effective resource for improving named entity recognition, grounding, and relationship resolution in automated reading of biomedical text. The content in FamPlex is available in both tabular and Open Biomedical Ontology formats at https://github.com/sorgerlab/famplexunder the Creative Commons CC0 license and has been integrated into the TRIPS/DRUM and REACH reading systems.

Una inscripción de Senaquerib en la Real Academia de la Historia

La Real Academia de la Historia conserva en los fondos de su Gabinete de Antigüedades una inscripción del rey asirio Senaquerib (704-681 a.C.) procedente de su palacio de Nínive. Algunas inexactitudes en las ediciones del texto de J. F. Riaño (1895) y de J. M. Peñuela (1966), nuevas informaciones derivadas de los trabajos de catalogación del mencionado Gabinete de Antigüedades, así como la publicación de recientes e importantes obras acerca de la epigrafía y las esculturas del palacio de Senaquerib, aconsejaban revisar algunos aspectos de la inscripción. Esta fue probablemente extraída en torno a 1850 de la Sala IX del palacio, en concreto del reverso de alguno de los bajorrelieves o esculturas que adornaban dicha sala. Su texto no estaba destinado, por tanto, a la lectura pública: alude únicamente al palacio y a la titulatura de Senaquerib, y habría servido para asociar el nombre del rey a su monumental obra. Una pequeña parte de ella -dos hermosos bajorrelieves- se encuentran también depositados en la RAH y procedían quizá de la misma sala del palacio.

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion

The Virgin and the Spy: Authority, Legacy, and the Reading Public in Eliza Haywood’s The Invisible Spy

This essay addresses the self-referential tendencies of Eliza Haywood’s The Invisible Spy (1754), as well as its reflections on authorship and print culture and its relationship to Haywood’s legacy. The Invisible Spy, like other works in Haywood’s oeuvre, simultaneously deploys and interrogates literary techniques commonly associated with low culture, including amatory fiction. In the figure of Explorabilis, the Invisible Spy, Haywood creates a proxy that allows her to comment on the insincerity and cynicism of the eighteenth-century print marketplace. Explorabilis imitates features of the periodical eidolon who expresses concern for contemporary culture, as he claims to provide readers with a text whose edifying qualities justify its exploitative content. The Invisible Spy represents both a commentary on mid-eighteenth-century literary culture and an assessment of Haywood’s career: it not only emphasizes her prowess in diverse genres but also suggests a sense of cynicism about texts’ manipulation of their readers. In self-consciously enacting the project of reforming imaginary readers, The Invisible Spy demonstrates that such contemporary efforts exploit the same material as the texts they criticize. This essay argues that The Invisible Spy serves as Haywood’s definitive statement about the literary marketplace and her mastery of it.

THE PHENOMENON OF HELPLESS BEHAVIOR IN JUNIOR SCHOOL AGE: THE ESSENCE, CONTENT, CONDITIONS FOR OVERCOMING HELPLESSNESS

The article deals with the problem of helpless behavior of a child of junior school age – the structure, peculiarities of the manifestation of helplessness, the consequences of fixing helpless behavior for the next stages of the student's development.The article analyzes the psychological and pedagogical conditions for overcoming the helpless behavior of schoolchildren in the conditions of an elementary school. The article contains the results of the diagnosis of helpless behavior, recommendations for teachers on the use of various forms and methods of preventing and overcoming the trained helplessness among elementary school students.The article intended for public reading, as well as for those who are interested in pedagogical research.

The Individual and the Collective: Sociological Influences on Lacan's Concept of the Relation Subject-Other.

In this conceptual analysis we discuss the sociological influences on Lacan's conceptualization of the relation between the subject and the other. In his writings predating World War II Lacan defines this relation in terms of identification. However, from 1953 onward he defines it in terms of the subject of speech and the Symbolic Other. It is a popular notion to characterize this change in terms of a radical breach, influenced by the reading of Lévi-Strauss. However, through a close reading of both Lacan's early writings and their Durkheimian influences we will demonstrate that what has changed, is Lacan's conceptualization of the relation between the individual and the collective. This change was gradual rather than sudden. Moreover, it can be situated within the theoretical evolution of the contiguous fields of sociology, anthropology and psychoanalysis. Thus we reject the idea of a breach within his own thought and with what came before him. We will establish our point through a summary of how the relation between the individual and the collective was theorized before Lacan. Durkheim conceptualized this relation as dual: the individual and the collective are radically separated. Mauss attempted to unify the field of anthropology through the holistic concept of the total man. In Lévi-Straus's formalization the individual becomes a function within a structured, Symbolic system. Finally, a reading of Lacan's publications concerning the notion of the logic of the collective will testify to his attempts at formulating a notion of the subject that asserts itself against this collective while at the same time retaining its nature of a logical function. This is the conundrum that Lacan will confront time and again throughout his teachings. Lévi-Strauss merely provided him with the methodological tools of structural anthropology that helped him refine the interrogations that he had already begun.

‘The Black House’, or How the Zulus Became Jews

In the now standardised collection of the James Stuart Archive (JSA), there is an odd mention by Zulu informants of the speculation that the Zulus were descendants of the Jews, or that they are one of the lost ten tribes of Israel. Historians who have sourced the JSA have largely ignored this discourse, preferring to read the archive as a repository of Zulu history and cultural knowledge. This article is an exploration of the notion of a ‘diaspora’ and of how literate Zulus of the 19th century read the Bible as implying an affinity between the cultural identities of Zulus and Jews. These literates constituted themselves into reading publics, and the biblical narrative of the dispersal of the Jews became one of the most popular and hotly debated topics. Literate Zulus were actively involved in biblical exegeses, not only allowing them to read biblical passages together on the pages of the newspapers but also opening up the Bible to novel interpretations and ‘refashioned’ prophetic traditions. The ‘Israelite’ or ‘diaspora’ narrative was appealing, since they used it to write about their own origins. These accounts are related in truncated ways to James Stuart by his literate informants, but their appeal – maybe even enigma – is that they are explicitly speculative, religious, fantastical, magical and ultimately destabilising, suggesting that ‘religiosity’ and ‘reading’ were synonymous (at least in the minds of Zulu or African literates). This article will demonstrate how the Judaic diaspora functioned as a template by which Zulu literates of the 19th and early 20th centuries reconstructed stories of migration, origins and history in the service of a re-imagined Zulu diaspora; what they called indlu emnyama (‘the black house’).

Remembering a Friend and a Teacher: Reflections on Stephen Mitchell’s Can Love Last?: Introduction to Papers by Merav Roth and Dana Amir

Stephen Mitchell was at the apex of his creativity as a clinical psychoanalyst and analytic theoretician, and was at the cusp of courting a lay, public readership, when he died, tragically and abruptly, in 2000. At that moment, the scholarly work he was in the midst of refining was Can Love Last?, his excavation of love and the land mines that accompany it. In this introduction, Lewis Aron remembers his friend and collaborator in personal terms and discusses how Mitchell’s theoretical thinking on love continues to extend through the academic elaboration in papers by Merav Roth and Dana Amir. Aron emphasizes Margaret Black’s foreword as a text unto itself that both anticipated the inevitability of Mitchell’s sustained influence and secures his continued place in the evolution of relational psychoanalytic thinking.

The power of the personal: situating Aboriginal memoir in the Indigenous public sphere and as a mode of public intellectual intervention

Memoir is not routinely considered a part of media practice. However, as a literary form produced for reading publics that express cultural identities, it can be considered a part of the Indigenous public sphere, which has been theorised as a counter-public of resistance and a site of cultural renegotiation of ideas about Indigeneity. Through an analysis of a selection of Indigenous memoir published during the 1980s, it is argued that these texts operated as a version of Edward Said’s public intellectualism by exposing the oppression of the inherited and unexamined binaries and regimes of truth that produce and perpetuate the conditions of inequality and injustice. As the authors recalled lives of suffering, their memories provided alternative narratives that challenged the silences of Australia’s official history, which sustained racist attitudes and identities and cast the Indigenous Public Sphere as a site of contested historiography.

Secaba-Rank, herramienta online para analizar y evaluar bibliotecas

Secaba-Rank is an online tool that includes Secaba-Rank Universitarias and Secaba-Rank Publicas, which can be used to evaluate both Spanish university libraries and public reading networks. Using a systemic approach, the methodology makes use of second level indicators focused on efficiency. This methodology facilitates the benchmarking of libraries to find models of good practice in order to improve. Secaba-Rank is an essential tool for decision making by researchers and managers in libraries.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.