Library Research Colloquium Series

Grande Lum, J.D., Professor and Provost

February 26, 2020, 12:45-1:45PM, Bowman Library Classroom

Summary

• The 1964 Civil Rights Act created the  Community Relations Service and for more than fifty years it has been mediating civil rights conflicts. Grande Lum served as Director of the Community Relations Service from 2012-2016 and is completing a book on the history of the agency to be published by the University of Missouri Press in the fall of 2020. He will focus on CRS mediations such as the planned 1973 Nazi protest in Skokie,  the 1999 Elián González case in Miami, and the 2012 Trayvon Martin tragedy in Sanford. The discussion will include lessons learned for community civil rights conflicts of today.

Dr. Melissa Michelson, Professor, Political Science

February 10, 2020, 12:45-1:45PM, Bowman Library Classroom

Summary

• Bilingual communication is frequently used by civic and political organizations in mailings aimed at increasing Latino voter turnout because there is no interaction for the voter to express language preference, as with phones and canvassing, and because the cost is limited to a single round of translation. But are bilingual mailers more effective than monolingual English mailers? Bilingual materials may be more effective if signaling cultural awareness or less effective if seen as pandering. 

  My colleagues and I tested these competing hypotheses with two rounds of large-scale randomized field experiments in statewide general elections in New Jersey and Virginia in 2015 and North Carolina in 2016. The field experiments were conducted in partnership with a non-partisan civic organization seeking to increase turnout. In the lower salience 2015 elections, both treatments increased turnout compared to the control group, and the monolingual English version was more effective at increasing turnout than the bilingual version. These results are replicated in the high salience 2016 general election in North Carolina.

Dr. Jodie Austin, Assistant Professor, English

January 27, 2020, 12:45-1:45PM, Bowman Library Classroom

Summary

• In 2017, according to Google Trends, the phrase “fake news” shot to the top of the “interest over time” ratings as analyzed by the engine. Although search interest for the phrase has waned since then, it has remained significant as a trending term, peaking again in January 2018. Concurrently, the proliferation of digital media platforms as a means of delivering news has also seen an accompanying rise in skepticism and overall suspicion of the digital mass media. 

  Indeed, the fraught relationship between readers, news outlets, and media platforms is not a new phenomenon. As famously argued by historian Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, the ability to disseminate the printed word both rapidly and cheaply resulted in monumental changes in belief and social organization— chief among them, European readers’ relationship to scientific inquiry and the economy of knowledge. As print journalism was in its nascent stages in the 17th century, the closest analog to mass, consumable media occasionally arrived in the form of concise, sensationalist accounts of “wonderful,” “strange,” or “true” events, often involving supernatural elements and reported by anonymous authors. Short pamphlets reported the appearance of monstrous creatures, spirits who took on "horrid shapes," and the ghosts former acquaintances terrorizing the living. 

  Notably, one can frequently identify proto-journalistic strategies adopted by the writers of these apparition narratives. As I argue, these strategies functioned as a means of bolstering the authorial and narrative legitimacy of street-level reporting. In a sampling of 20 apparition narratives, for example, 9 texts attested to the credibility of witnesses during the alleged sighting, 17 listed an address or specific location for the event, and 15 contained some form of truth marker in the title— that is, a formal declaration of veracity. As my preliminary research analysis reveals, 17th century tales of the supernatural adopted discursive tactics that would come to be refined over the next few centuries as a means of asserting the credibility of authors and witnesses. In this paper I aim to demonstrate how rhetorical tactics such as source corroboration, eyewitness accounts, and truth markers represent conspicuous and historically significant attempts to quell skepticism in readers attempting to reconcile their relationship to notions of "ocular proof" in a theologically and politically fraught environment.