Category Archives: Officers

Oct./Nov., 2020, ‘Clio:’ Check in from the chair

By Will Mari

Hi, everyone,

I hope you’re all hanging in there. I don’t have a full column for this month, just some quick updates.

Cayce has done a great job with our panel process—we hope to announce our selections this month (we are waiting on some programming decisions). There was a great deal of negotiation on his part, and working with our sibling divisions, to make things happen, and it was not easy in a year in which folks are feeling understandably crunched. Thank you to all those who sent the division their panel pitches.

If folks are up for it (and as always I am sensitive to limited bandwidth), I’d like to continue Teri’s tradition of hosting a webinar or two, so that we still see and benefit from a virtual panel or two during the academic year. But more on that soon.

As I told our executive board, and as you saw via email and to social media, we had to cancel this year’s Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference. You can read that announcement separately in this newsletter, but basically, Maddie, Cayce and I, after talking with our colleagues and fellow leaders at AJHA, Donna Lampkin Stephens, Aimee Edmondson, and Mike Conway, all came to the agreement that it will be safer and smarter to wait another year, and until after we have an effective vaccine and other treatments for coronavirus, to meet in person (with the place of New York being such a critical part of that conference). While disappointed, I appreciate the help of Matt Pressman, our AEJMC co-chair for the conference, and Elisabeth Fondren, our departing co-chair, with facilitating that decision from our end. Scholars who deferred last year are being given some options in the meantime.

For an alternative that will be online in March, I would encourage you to look at the SE Colloquium, and for a hybrid conference option in May, don’t forget our friends at the International Communication Association’s Comm History division. You can read their call for papers and abstracts (as they do have that option) on ICA’s page, here. They pushed their deadline back to Nov. 6, but that’s very soon.

Maddie will have more info on our own paper call closer to the start of the new year. I should also have some updates on pre-conference possibilities, either for next year or beyond.

Finally, I wanted to end with a shout out to our newsletter team, Rachel Grant, Brian Creech and Kathryn McGarr—thank you, for keeping us informed! I am proud of them and the rest of our volunteers, and membership, during a tough time. Congratulations, too, to AJHA, for their successful conference last month.

As we head into the last month or so of the quarter/semester, don’t forget our media-history campaign, #mediahistorymatters—I’m having my students tweet out their observations for their various projects. Think about the podcast competition for your students, as well. As always, you can reach me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter.

Take care,

Will

September Chair Column: ‘Clio:’ surviving this fall right now with teaching: how to use digital archiving projects in class

By Will Mari

Hi again, folks,

I don’t know about you, but so far, a month into this semester, it feels like it’s been three (or four) months. And so knowing that things are hard out there for a lot of us, I wanted to offer some practical, “off-the-shelf” teaching ideas that you can use in your media-history classes.

If you don’t teach media history right now, these could work in other journalism or mass-comm courses that either feature a history component or even just a section on the use of the college/university library or digital archives. They can be part of a lecture day, an activity-oriented day, either synchronous, asynchronous, or as a standalone out-of-class activity.

I’ll focus on a short list of volunteer public-history projects that are interactive, engaging and rewarding for undergraduate and graduate students alike and that use transcription as their main vehicle. I’ve used these to invite conversation about the role of media history in the ongoing, complex, American story. You might find them helpful, too.

1) Freedom on the Move

A project led by Cornell, it guides volunteers through scanned but-as-yet transcribed ads for enslaved people from before the Civil War, and has them either do the actual transcription or check the work of others. I was a bit hesitant to ask students to do this, but many felt that it was a way to give back and give voice to previously unheard people. I’ll talk a bit more about how I structured this assignment below.

2) Digital Volunteer at the Smithsonian

3) Citizen Archivist with the National Archives

4) By the People with the Library of Congress

5) Papers of the War Department

6) Digital Newberry

7) Various other projects: including this portal, and this list by the American Historical Association.

The Smithsonian, National Archives and Library of Congress’ projects tend to be trickier in that they sometimes require the ability to read cursive, which might be challenging for some students. That same challenge is present with the War Department and Digital Newberry projects, but some later-in-the-20th-century efforts are more straightforward, and just involve tagging images versus transcribing writing. One immensely popular project with the New York Public Library transcribes menus (“What’s on the Menu?”), but it often has more volunteers than it has un-transcribed material!

One alternative is to have students look at finished projects and their curated artifacts, online, and talk about the long journeys these physical things have taken to survive to the present, or what they meant, perhaps, for the people who once used them.

But the initiative I’ve had the most success with this semester is Freedom on the Move, which offers helpful tutorials, videos and other “explainer” material, and is perhaps the most user friendly. I had students take a screenshot of a finished contribution and respond to just two prompts: first, why did they pick their project, and second, what did they learn while working on it? Most of my students choose Freedom on the Move and reported feeling convicted and surprised. They hadn’t realized that slavery was such an embedded part of American society—“even” in the northern part of the country—for so long. At least a few said that doing the transcription drove home that lesson more than reading our textbook.

I would add that it’s good to let students pick, to a certain degree, what project they want to help out on, and to make sure that they have enough time to complete them (I gave my students an extra day). But I highly recommend this as a way to enhance an existing class, and to give yourself some mental space, if you need the support.

A final idea: some university and public libraries are documenting the pandemic and are encouraging students to contribute (this is happening at Louisiana State, where I work). But that might require another conversation to unpack more fully.

If you do have your students use an interactive, volunteer project for an activity, I would invite you to have them tweet about it to our fall media-history awareness campaign, #mediahistorymatters.

Please reach out to me with suggestions or ideas, to wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. We’ll have more updates later in the fall on our panel line-up for next year’s conference, as well as other initiatives and efforts.

Until then, take care,

Will


Chair column: A thank you, hello, and review of goals for the year ahead

Will Mari

Hi folks—I wanted to first thank everyone for their keen involvement and support of our online conference, particularly our officers and volunteer reviewers, moderators and discussants, as well as our members who showed up to so many sessions and made our presenters feel welcomed and supported.

We also had members who could not make the conference this year due to funding concerns, but who still cheered us on from Facebook and Twitter—thank you, too.

We had high attendance and participation (with 20, 30 or even 40 people engaged in our audiences) on Zoom for our sessions, and we were the only division to actually grow our numbers—up to about 290 people—despite the pandemic. While we might have some fluctuation next year, this is a solid place to be starting from, especially considering the good position we are in financially, as well.

I am honored to be your new chair, but I would be remiss if I did not thank our past chairs, especially Dr. Teri Finneman, for their leadership and example. I have very large boots to fill, but I will do my best.

In terms of what I’d like to do as your chair, I will work to:

1) Support our members during a challenging year

2) Build on/reinforce existing initiatives and programs

3) Increase our outreach/connection(s) to the international media-history community

4) Increase our outreach to related fields and the community of historians of media technology

5) Hold a 2021 AEJMC pre-conference at a HBCU campus

Supporting our people will be my first goal for a reason. We’re living in the midst of an ongoing pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen in a century. And many of us are at institutions that have curtailed support for conferences and professional development, or at least reduced it, for this next season. I want to make sure that we offer robust resources, including innovative ways to teach online, as well as ideas for digital archives, that will help us get through the tough academic year ahead. Look for these in this newsletter (thank you, Dr. Rachel Grant!) and on our soon-to-be-revamped site, including our #mediahistorymatters campaign and the upcoming Journalism History Student Podcast Competition.

Second, I want to make sure that we build on the great work that Teri and her team accomplished, including progress on our site, our journal, podcast and webinars. She’s left us in great shape, and I want to be a good steward of her work.

Third, this year, I want to reach out to our colleagues around the world, including those involved in the International Communication Association (ICA)’s Communication History division, the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST), and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA)’s Communication History Section. Some of these scholars want to get their work published in Journalism History, as well as our sister journal, American Journalism, and I will work to reach out to their leaders for future collaborations and exchanges.

Part of that will involve my fourth goal, namely, engagement with groups like the Society for the History of Technology and the Research Society for American Periodicals, among other organizations. It is important for us to break out of our silos and to find other scholars who study media history (and vice versa).

Finally, I would like to host a preconference in association with, or ideally physically at, a historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) campus, depending on the situation in the wider world. This would be right before AEJMC next year, likely on Aug. 3, 2021, in New Orleans. This also might be at Xavier, depending on their interest. This also might be online, if necessary, again depending on how things go with a vaccine in the new year.

There’s a great deal of uncertainty with this idea, but I would like any preconference to focus on race or international-media history-related issues (or both), and perhaps focus, too, on research-in-progress, in order to support our scholars who may not get as much done as they want this fall/winter/spring. I’m thinking of our scholars who are parents or caregivers, in particular, or who have high teaching loads.

While we haven’t done a preconference in quite some time, having a low-cost option for presenting our members’ scholarship, and highlighting the importance of HBCUs in the process, will remain a goal for me this year. If you’re interested in helping with that effort specifically, please reach out. We will need assistance outside of our normal reviewer cycle and likely with some logistics (I won’t be able to carry all those beignets myself!).

I would like to encourage you to attend AJHA’s free virtual conference this October, and to bring a friend in another discipline along, and then point them toward us. Dr. Maddie Liseblad, our incoming (and awesome) new research chair, would like to continue to get graduate students and our peers in related fields involved. That’s a source of strength for our division, and vital to the future of the field of media history.

Please be thinking about panel ideas for next year, as well, and let Dr. Cayce Myers, our wonderful new vice chair, know if you have questions.

I welcome suggestions, connections and ideas, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. Talk to you soon.

Thank you,

Will


How to Encourage Discussion about Diversity and Inequality in the Classroom

By Nathaniel Frederick II, PF&R Chair, frederickn@winthrop.edu

The coronavirus pandemic has forced a drastic change in the way of life in the United States. The new normal involves working from home, if possible. More importantly, we must not forget the homeless and other populations that are vulnerable during this time of uncertainty. While anyone can contract the virus, current data suggest a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.

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Engaging Graduate Students in Meaningful Ways, Improving Recruitment

Bailey Dick and Brandon Storlie

By Graduate Student Co-Liaisons Bailey Dick, Ohio University, bd764808@ohio.edu, and Brandon Storlie, University of Wisconsin, bstorlie@wisc.edu

As the graduate student co-liaisons, the largest challenges we have are engaging student members in a meaningful way and division recruitment. Graduate students are extremely busy, juggling many different tasks. Some balance taking courses with conducting research while also teaching as instructors of record. As students progress in their coursework, they prepare for and take their comprehensive exams, start working on their dissertations and navigate the job market. Graduate students tend to spread themselves thin, trying to accumulate as many lines on the CV as possible. Sometimes a commitment beyond basic membership simply isn’t feasible. These last couple of months, the added stressor has been trying to balance everything during a pandemic.

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Teaching Contest Features Original and Tested Transformative Pedagogies

  • Kristin L. Gustafson
  • Lori Amber Roessner

By Teaching Standards Chairs Kristin L. Gustafson, University of Washington Bothell, and Lori Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee

Five scholars will share their mini, hands-on teaching modules featuring original and tested transformative teaching ideas and practices that address pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and/or justice in August. These ideas include carefully curated student learning experiences, an online platform that tracks research data, and a program-wide course redesign that centers on who tells our stories. Come ready to learn more about how each teaching practice might be transferred to your institution or classes and what evidence points to marked changes for students.

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Improving Our Outreach in the New Roaring ‘20s

By Teri Finneman, Chair, University of Kansas, teri.finneman@ku.edu

Teri Finneman

It’s officially halftime in my time as your chair, so I wanted to recap the division initiatives that have occurred in the past six months.

Our primary goal has been to vastly improve our outreach to key target audiences this year. Here is a breakdown of what we’ve been working on:

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Integrating Journalism History into News Literacy

By Nathaniel Frederick II, PF&R Chair, frederickn@winthrop.edu

Creating a news literacy event in your community or on your campus is an ideal opportunity to promote and justify why journalism history matters.

The PF&R committee for 2019-2020 will emphasize diversity and inclusion, as well as offer assistance to members interested in creating public service events that help celebrate journalism history.

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Membership Committee Creates Priorities for Year

By Membership Co-Chairs Maddie Liseblad, Middle Tennessee State University, madeleine.liseblad@mtsu.edu, Rachel Grant, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu, and Perry Parks, Michigan State University, parksp@msu.edu

From left to right: Maddie Liseblad, Rachel Grant and Perry Parks.

As your 2019-2020 committee, we’d like to share our primary goals for this year. First and foremost, our overall goal is to grow our membership. We will continue our outreach work as opportunities arise. For example, when nonmembers present media history research at conferences, we reach out and invite them to join our division.

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