The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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What makes an American "classic"?
No full textAmerican “classics,” and “classic” definitions of America and its people, are often tied to an apparently inescapable, ineffable sense of greatness. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN has resurfaced as the mantra of 2025, with the newly elected President’s promise to restore a broken nation, elevating it above time, and in defiance of his own criminal record, even above the law. The slogan echoes some of the tones, if not the politics, of the preface of Leaves of Grass (1855), when Walt Whitman wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem…
Trends in News Intermediary Preferences among Internet Users in Canada and Spain
No full textThe social distancing imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the digitalisation of societies, which also influenced habits related to the consumption and dissemination of news. In this context, older individuals are often blamed for contributing to disinformation, which is associated with the echo chambers fostered by social media. Mass media, social media and personal communication tools act as mass, social or personal intermediaries when it comes to keeping up to date with the news. This paper analyses the preferred intermediaries of older online adults (aged 60 and over) for following the news and how they change over time. We analysed two waves of an online survey-based longitudinal study conducted in Canada and Spain, before Covid-19 pandemic (2016/17), and during Covid-19 (in 2020). We found that most participants exclusively use mass intermediaries or combine mass with social and personal intermediaries to keep abreast of the news. However, only 28% of respondents inform themselves exclusively through the alleged echo chambers of social and personal intermediaries. Results also show that media ecologies evolve in different directions, and, despite the forced digitalisation driven by the pandemic, digital media usage did not always increase or evolve towards newer technologies. This paper contributes to understanding the diverse intermediaries used by older adults to obtain news and how such media ecologies can contribute to contrasting different sources of information beyond the alleged echo chambers of social media
A Conversation with Professor Willard Spiegelman
No full textIn recent years, Professor Willard Spiegelman has devoted himself to one American poet above others, Iowa-born Amy Clampitt (1920–1994), whom Spiegelman knew personally and whose correspondence he edited in 2005 for a volume of selected letters, Love, Amy. In our conversation, we discussed his recent biography of the poet, Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (2023), the cumulation of many years spent engaging with her five extant poetry collections and his efforts to piece together biographical fragments from remaining archival materials in order to compile a narrative of her life. Tracing her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, her childhood in Iowa and early adult life in Manhattan, his biography narrates the surprise appearance of The Kingfisher, Clampitt’s first book of poems, published by Knopf in 1983 when she was sixty-three. All but overnight, Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, winning Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, accepting prestigious writer positions at Amherst and Smith, and endearing herself to critics like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler for a whirlwind eleven years before a premature death from ovarian cancer in 1994
A Corpus-Pragmatic Analysis of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English
No full textThis paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic marker eh , which is typical of spoken discourse, in written online discourse from nine varieties of English using the Corpus of Global Web-based English. The analysis focuses on sentence-final eh and considers variation in terms of variety, punctuation, text type, and function. This paper also includes a variationist analysis of eh in contrast to huh . Although there are cross-variety differences, eh is used across all nine varieties in similar ways. Eh is mostly combined with a question mark, it is more frequent in blogs than in general websites, and emphatic functions dominate over narrative and interrogative uses. A qualitative analysis of the indexicalities demonstrates that eh mainly signals orality and informality in online writing but also has specific local meanings. The variationist analysis shows that eh is preferred over huh in the Canadian and New Zealand components. This preference is even more pronounced for the British and Philippine components. In contrast, huh dominates in the US component. These results show that eh is well integrated into online writing and can be characterized as a translocal pragmatic marker as it is used globally but has developed local characteristics.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (3094
A Global Perspective on Social Stratification in Science
No full textTo study stratification among scientists, we reconstruct the career-long trajectories of 8.2 million scientists worldwide using 12 bibliometric measures of productivity, geographical mobility, collaboration, and research impact. While most previous studies examined these variables in isolation, we study their relationships using Multiple Correspondence and Cluster Analysis. We group authors according to their bibliometric performance and academic age across six macro fields of science, and analyze co-authorship networks and detect collaboration communities of different sizes. We found a stratified structure in terms of academic age and bibliometric classes, with a small top class and large middle and bottom classes in all collaboration communities. Results are robust to community detection algorithms used and do not depend on authors’ gender. These results imply that increased productivity, impact, and collaboration are driven by a relatively small group that accounts for a large share of academic outputs, i.e., the top class. Mobility indicators are the only exception with bottom classes contributing similar or larger shares. We also show that those at the top succeed by collaborating with various authors from other classes and age groups. Nevertheless, they are benefiting disproportionately from these collaborations which may have implications for persisting stratification in academia
Sara B. Franklin. 2024. 'The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America'
No full textOpen Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Universität Münster (1056
A Multifactorial Approach to War and Corruption Metaphors in South Asian Englishes
No full textThe present paper provides a corpus‐based study of war and corruption metaphors in South Asian Englishes (specifically Indian English, Bangladeshi English, Nepali English and Pakistani English). Considering the highly news‐relevant nature of these concepts, the South Asian Varieties of English corpus (SAVE2020) serves as the database. In an initial step, we outline the source domains at different levels of schematicity used to construe war and corruption, revealing the salient domains at location and person. By pursuing a multifactorial approach, this study aims at answering the question whether the choice of source domain is governed by the sociolinguistic factors gender and variety, and intra‐linguistic factors, for example, length and semantic prosody of the metaphor‐related words. It furthermore investigates whether multifactorial analyses, which are still a novelty within research on metaphor variation, constitute a suitable methodological approach. By doing so, our research demonstrates the need to complement this quantitative approach with a qualitative one that offers a more fine‐grained description of the source domains used to structure metaphorical concepts like war and corruption
Conspiracism and Government Distrust Predict COVID-19 Vaccine Refusal
No full textVaccine hesitancy has been attributed to policy mistakes (e.g., poor communication), individual-level perceptions of risk (i.e., safety concerns about side-effects) and to structural factors, such as the politicization of public health in many countries. Institutional distrust has also been blamed for vaccine refusal, but few studies simultaneously control for possible psychological explanations such as the need for cognition, or general curiosity. A large cross-national dataset ( N = 19,037) containing a behavioral measure of respondents’ interest in facts (whereby they choose whether to confront their opinions with fact-checks), as well as psychological batteries and information about respondents’ media consumption habits is used to identify the best predictors of refusal of the vaccine against COVID. Using logistic regression models with country fixed effects, followed by country-specific analyses, we assess the relative importance of a diverse set of predictors and show that conspiracism, which captures anti-systemic views and a belief that hidden forces influence political outcomes, and distrust in government are the most prognostic indicators of vaccine refusal. Dissatisfaction with democracy also predicts vaccine refusal. Models which account for conspiracism and evaluations of democracy and the national government also indicate that news consumption via social media is associated with vaccine refusal in a subset of countries
On the Opposition to Market Institutions on Moral Grounds
No full textFrom a liberal viewpoint, voluntary trade appears to be something that should meet universal approval. If no one is obliged to trade, establishing a market institution could only make all better off. Nonetheless, specific market institutions meet substantial skepticism and criticism. This paper extends the extant literature by surveying the moral opposition towards trade in multiple dimensions and linking this to policy support measures. We provide survey results on moral opposition to trade in organs, sex services, surrogate mothers, trade in carbon permits, goods produced in poor countries, and food from countries where people suffer from hunger. These cover the potential reasons for opposing trade institutions: moral concerns, paternalism regarding risk-taking, and distributional concerns. Beyond this, we measure support for policies on unemployment benefits, risk prevention, equality goals within society, and redistribution. The survey of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the U.S. reveals significant moral opposition to trade in diverse dimensions. About a third of the participants strongly oppose trade in body items, sex services, and food imports from countries where a large proportion of the population suffers from hunger and malnutrition. Fewer participants strongly oppose trading CO2 permits, importing from developing countries, or allowing surrogate mothership. Besides other correlates (e.g., gender, education, being conservative), individuals’ attitudes towards imposing risks on others are identified as an important correlate of the opposition to trade for all the contexts of trade: those who are averse to exposing others to risk for their own advantage are more likely to oppose trading institutions. This measure of social preferences also relates to support for policies on risk prevention, equality goals within society, and redistribution. We discuss potential mechanisms behind this explanatory power of the newly identified measure