Welcome back, SOC’ers! It’s the beginning of Fall semester, which means lots of new classes and new adventures in communication studies and research. For those of you new to the field, here are a few tips to get you started on the right foot in your School of Communication courses and projects. If you have … Continue reading
As most of you know by now, today the Supreme Court issued it’s long-awaited ruling on the Affordable Care Act, upholding its core mandate in a surprising 5-4 decision. Because of the high degree controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act — according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for People & the … Continue reading
It’s January 2012, folks. A brand new year. A brand new semester. And the perfect time to highlight a brand new database purchased specifically for communication majors! (Well, it’s not a bad time at least.) ComAbstracts (CIOS) is an OpenURL-enabled database of article abstracts, books, bibliographic records, and other sources of relevance to researchers, scholars, … Continue reading
I’m a communication studies student interested in doing a research project on Occupy Wall Street and related “Occupy” movements. What resources do you recommend I use to get started? *** Ah yes, the “Occupy” research challenge. This is a topic that I’ve been hearing about a lot from students this semester — and for good … Continue reading
To librarians at academic institutions across the country, it’s increasingly clear that microblogging tools like Twitter are changing the ways that people consume and communicate scholarly and professional information. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in the realm of communication studies— where scholars and practitioners alike are turning regularly to Twitter for everything from … Continue reading
In the world of polls and public data, few institutions have better name recognition than Gallup. This is primarily due to the historical relevance of the Gallup Poll, which has chronicled public reaction to key events and issues in the U.S. since the 1930s. At the same time, credit is also due to the Gallup … Continue reading
As some of you may recall, a few weeks ago I gave a brief workshop for AU faculty on “Using Free Online Tools to Promote Student Learning and Collaboration.” Today, I’ll be giving an informal follow-up talk to the AU Career Center on the use of online tools for student job-seekers, external promotion, and internal … Continue reading
Of all the research struggles that communication faculty and students face, probably the most visible is the lack of authoritative, quantitative information on current topics of social media. Social media studies, as a subset or overlap of general media studies, is a rapidly expanding field of scholarly inquiry. Certainly it’s very possible today to find … Continue reading
I’m gathering articles for a class assignment and don’t know whether to use Communication Abstracts or Communication & Mass Media Complete for my initial search. What’s the practical difference between these two databases? *** This is a great question that I typically get from students who are new to communication studies, but which is actually … Continue reading
Tomorrow is the Undergraduate Research Workshop, an event that will highlight the work of eight AU students who recently received summer research support, and which will include a few brief presentations by faculty on “how to best present your research.” Bad PowerPoint slides, such as this one, have even been the topic of NYT articles. … Continue reading
Communication Librarian 