April 2009

Caveat: I have not been published by these venues. I am just repeating what was told to me by managing editors and acquisition editors of two book publishers and two journals at PCA.

This is a live blogging of the session.

Most useful information for newbies: Write the editors of a journal in your field and offer to write reviews. This is better if you have a book in mind, but the editors said they often have books and no one to write for them.

To propose a book for McFarland or Greenwood:
Go to the website.
Find the area contact for your research area.
Send an email. A brief email.
This should include a description of your project in no more than 15 words.
It should also indicate your willingness to write accessible prose.

What you will have to submit for a book:
The press sends a proposal form.
This requests info about the author and the book.
An annotated table of contents is required.
They also like to know what kind of effort the author can put in.

Will you be able to get reviews? Will you make appearances? Is someone important in the field willing to give endorsements? How many students will you require to use the book each semester?

Shop the competition:
As an author, you need to know what’s out there.
If it’s good, what will your work add?
If it’s bad, how will your work fill a need?
But, they said, you should find a publisher first. (Not sure why. It’s what I wrote in my notes.)

When signing on with a publisher:
You should know what is the support you can expect.
Who has to get permissions? (Usually you.)
Who has to pay for images? (Usually you.)
Who indexes the work?
What support is there for an author?

Important things to remember:
Academic book publishers do not mind simultaneous submissions. But do let them know that you are submitting elsewhere.
Work with publishers who work online.
If the book is previously published (even self-published), tell the publisher that.

Fair Use:
You can usually use a total of 400 words from a full-length book in your book without permission.
You can use one line or less of lyrics or a single poem.
You can use up to 3 stills from a movie (or none, based on the publisher).

How to get permissions:
Ask.
Make sure that you say it is for an academic work.
Know that if you ask for permission and are turned down, you cannot even use the 400 words listed above.
Lyrics are almost never given permission for use, even in academic works.
Same for television stills.
But comics are often given permissions, if you make sure to state that you are doing academic work and that your purpose is not to defame the work.
If you need a picture, two places were recommended: Getty and Photofest Digital.
Often there is a cost for images, but sometimes you can get them to lower it for academics. (They know most of us don’t make gobs of money.)

How to know what permissions you need:
Ask your publisher.
McFarland wants worldwide publishing rights, so North American rights does no good for them.
Find out how long the rights last. McFarland books stay in print.
Get rights for print and/or online. Those change.

For journals:
Read the submission guidelines.
Works are not read if they do not correspond to the submission guidelines.
Familiarize yourself with what the journals cover.
Know the kinds of things they do and accept.
Do NOT submit simultaneous submissions for journals.

Blind peer review:
According to the two journals at the conference, blind peer review will only be looking at your work.
AND, if they don’t accept it, they will send the work back with comments, so that you will know why they didn’t accept it.

Step outside the box.
Look for opportunities to publish.
Look at online journals.
Check out CFPs regularly. (I find more the more I look.)

Graduate student assignment:
One attendee said that her professor made them read ten years’ worth of ten journals in their fields.
It’s an excellent idea that I intend to pursue next time I have six weeks free.

Recently when I have found a conference I want to speak at, I make multiple submissions, because I really want to speak there.

There is a conference in October, which I thought I would be allowed to give two presentations for. I had two accepted.

Today I had a third accepted and was informed that only a single reading is allowed.

So I applied to too many… And I have to think about which to accept of the two I had previously agreed to. (And I have to think about the possibility that they will be upset that I have to turn one of them down. And I’m fairly sure I’m sorry which one I decided on and…)

The good news, on the other hand, is that my poetry was accepted. Even if I do not get to read it, I was pleased about that. It stinks that I don’t get to read it, but I was thrilled it was accepted.

Conferences should make it a bit more obvious how many presentations can be made.

I hate to see students, parents, or universities suffer, but I have to say this: we desperately needed a kick in the rear to get us to reassess our higher education system. Just as the financial markets were out of control, the student debt loads have become so obscene that $100,000 in loans now seems like a pretty good deal. (Or at least, that’s what university officials say to reassure us.)

So says Maya Frost.

Big Arm Woman writes on the topic:

[S]tudents are incurring huge debts in order to attend college. In order for these students to ever have a hope of a debt-free future, they have to pursue careers that will at least enable them to pay off their loans and maybe one day allow them to be able to buy a home or raise a family or travel to Tahiti, or whatever. In short, if you go to college, and you pay for college with the expectation that it is supposed to raise your earning potential, then OF COURSE you are going to be more likely to choose whichever job will help you a) pay off the college debt quickly, and b) offer a return on your investment. Right now, those jobs look to be in the public sector. Perhaps it’s not so much evil avarice driving these kids as it is a desire not to spend the rest of your life in hock for a four-year stint in higher education.

I am home from PCA and will be posting more notes.  Look for how to get published especially.  I felt the conference was very helpful in that area.

Were you surprised by what you found?

I said I was. Having read the arguments against FoxNews, one would suppose that they were significantly right wing.

No headlines can be truly objective. I would expect that the raters could tell whom the headlines were about.

I said that it was possible that they would recognize, for instance, that McCain said Russia should reverse course, but I did not think that the others were too obvious.

Can you recognize the candidates?

• X Who?
• Current and Former (Opposite Party) Line up for X
• Facing Tough Re-Election, (Person) Removes Name from X Fundraiser Invitation
• Religious Vote Could Tip Scales in Battleground States
• X’s Running Mate- Analyzing the Premise Question
• X Emergency Landing More Serious Than Thought
• In Case You Were Wondering…
• X Defines Marriage
• X Praises Rick Warren’s Forum
• Could X’s VP Pick Turn Off Voters?
• X Speaks at Colorado’s Aspen Institute
• X Camp Fires at (TV Station)

These are a fairly interesting mix of headlines.  There were some that were more obvious.  X’s Hawaii, for example, would probably give it away.  That headline was rated favorably.

Only the last three were McCain. All the rest were Obama. But don’t worry if you didn’t get them right. The very politically savvy group of academicians at my talk didn’t get them either.

Though it ended up that none of paper on FoxNews.com’s bias was read (since I had five minutes), the following sections were originally deleted from the paper to make sure that I would not go over my time.

It is interesting to note that “Value-Based Leadership” was rated positively more often than “McCain Speaks at Colorado’s Aspen Institute.” There were 19 positive ratings for the first compared to 15 for the second. “Value-Based Leadership” also received more negative ratings, than the second headline, 7 as opposed to 0, for a total of 19 positive ratings and 7 negative ratings.

While it might seem that the politics and election coverage page would only contain information about the presidential candidates during a presidential election, since it was the main focus of the election, that was not true. Several senators were mentioned, John Edwards’ mistress scandal came up during this time, and a governor or two were referenced. The main page of FoxNews.com featured “Bigfoot… or Big Hoax?” and the abduction and possible murder of three-year old Caylee Anderson one day. The two presidential candidates were, however, the main focus of both the political and election coverage.

If an examination is made of only those headlines on FoxNews.com which include and pit the two candidates against each other, the headlines favor McCain.

In that situation, McCain received 8 positives, 8 negatives, and 3 neutrals, with one abstaining. Obama received 5 positives, 10 negatives, and 3 neutrals, with 2 not identifying. So with only the headlines that look at and compare both candidates, McCain received 50% more positive ratings and 20% fewer negative ratings. I would suppose that FoxNews.com’s overwhelming reputation among academics as a right wing propaganda machine comes from the reading of the juxtaposed headlines.

Conclusion

A rhetorical analysis of four days’ postings from FoxNews.com inspected for bias in the coverage of the presidential candidates gives an intriguing perspective. The analysis of digital rhetoric was limited to stories about and pictures of the two major party candidates taken from links on the homepage, the politics front page, and the election coverage main page. There were more stories about and more pictures of Obama. Headlines for stories about Obama only were more positive and less negative than headlines about McCain. However, when headlines that compared the two candidates were included, the bias towards Obama dropped and the numbers slightly favored McCain.

This paper was presented at the national conference of Popular Culture on 8 April 2009.

I think that one advantage to having a single research area, which I don’t, is that you have a certain number of meetings to go to and you are done.

That’s not how I am doing this conference.  I’m not sure I’ve gone to two sessions from the same area yet, though I may have gone to two Vampire sections.  Maybe.

Having multiple research areas causes more than just a multiple personality experience at conferences.  It means that I don’t have a specialty.  I don’t know where all the conferences are for a topic.  I don’t know what all the journals are in an area.  And, when most people have a down time, because their big conference just finished, I haven’t gotten one of those this semester and won’t, either.  It keeps me from being bored, but it may poise me to be a generalist a little too much.

I went to Mindmeister and created a research areas web to show what I do.  Everything I do fits neatly into six or ten research areas.

The short version:

• religion
• popular culture
• women’s studies- trauma and gender
• teaching writing- technology, business writing, composition
• creative writing
• literature- literature and speculative fiction

The ones after the dash are what those are divided into when they are not six but are ten.

Right now I have just finished a paper on popular culture/rhetoric/politics.  I have a creative writing piece due this next week and a piece on women’s reproductive lives.  In three weeks, I have a popular culture Civil War book chapter due.  Six weeks from now I have a paper on Gilman for ALA to give…  It continues like that.

But hopefully after this year I will also have a few publications.  I don’t have many of those right now.  Unfortunately they won’t be all in the same area, which may make my work a hard sell.  How can I argue I’m a technical writing teacher if I only have three conferences on that?  If you look at my research, it certainly appears that I’m a literature and religion teacher, with popular culture becoming a strong third.

I’m going to have to think about that.  For a community college teacher, the generalist aura doesn’t matter.  And even at a SLAC it probably won’t hurt.  But I probably won’t get into a university with that, even for composition.

Thought: Are there any pop culture jobs in my area open?  What degree is required for that?  (Because I know I don’t have it.  And SACS is so picky.)

I did realize, though, that the headline itself could be positive while the person referenced in the headline could be perceived negatively and vice versa. So, while “Obama launches Another Attack in Defense of His Wife” might be perceived as a negative headline, the headline might also be perceived as positive about Obama, since he was defending his wife. Therefore I took the same 85 headlines and gave them to a different set of raters asking them to rate the titles as negative, positive, or neutral towards the redacted information, whether that was a person, place, or thing.

These raters also were given the headlines after a discussion of connotation and denotation. These raters were also from two composition classes, but they were from classes at a private university in Houston. The students were mostly from low socioeconomic backgrounds and were fairly diverse; seven of the raters were black, three were non-native speakers, five were Hispanic, and five were white. These raters received the headlines in the same semester as the other students, but after the elections were over. Again they were told that simply completing the ratings would complete their credit, with no points being taken from or added to for a particular viewpoint.

These twenty raters looked at the headlines in terms of the redacted names. So “U Accuses V of Same Old Campaign Tactics” would be given a positive, minus, or neutral rating for U and another rating for V. In that case, U- who was Obama- received 11 positives, 7 negatives, 1 neutral, with one person not marking. V- or McCain, on the other hand, received 5 positive, 13 negatives, and 2 people abstaining.

When both of the candidates were named in the headlines without differentiation, the rating average was a positive 6, a negative 4.5, and a neutral 8.5. I was surprised, since I would have expected that a political headline would be negative. This could be because I was experiencing political burnout which they did not since they weren’t highly political.

When the raters looked at the headlines which referred to McCain, the rating averages were 7.4 positive, 6.3 negative, and 5.3 neutral. This was for a total of 33 headlines which named McCain separately from Obama.

When the raters looked at the headlines referring to Obama, the rating averages were 7.1 positive, 6.1 negative, and 5.7 neutral.

What this means is that according to the twenty raters who were rating the references to redacted names, Obama’s numbers were slightly less positive and also slightly less negative when compared to McCain’s. Headlines which referred to Obama were found to be more neutral than those referring to McCain.

The differentiation is small. This could be partially because of the number of raters.

Obama wins the FoxNews.com headline race in both number of headlines and number of pictures. When rating were given relative to the person, however, MCain’s headlines were found to be more favorable by .2. They were also found to be more negative by .2, which would counteract the positive bias.

This paper was presented at the national conference of Popular Culture on 8 April 2009.