Stats / Methods for WI 2008 and Beyond

As you all know, among communication programs we have one of the strongest internal methods/stats training programs available in the country. First year students will be enrolling in Andrew Hayes' second level required statistics course in the Winter. And, as enrollment time comes, I wanted to remind senior students about Lance Holbert teaching the COMM 801 Structural Equation Modeling course this Winter as well. Those of you who took COMM 801 last year (with Andrew Hayes as "Advanced Linear Models") are permitted to take this course again since the topic shifts regularly.

Also, you might know that both Andrew and Lance have forthcoming books on advanced stats / methods. Andrew, in addition to his book Statistical Methods for Communication Science, and being an Associate Editor for the journal Communication Methods and Measures, has another book (co-authored with our own Mike Slater) coming out this fall called The Sage Sourcebook of Advanced Data Analysis Methods for Communication Research. Lance's book, which is in progress, is entitled Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods, Measures and Analytical Techniques.

So, take advantage of the resources here (as well as in OSU's Quantitative Psychology program, our Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Survey Research headed by COPS' own Jerry Kosicki, and advanced courses in Political Science and Education as well) and become a methods and stats expert today!

A bright future in a new building!

You may have heard that the Ohio Expo Center & State Fair's Cox Fine Arts Building, where Fine Arts has been located for a great number of years, is scheduled to be demolished immediately following the 2008 Ohio State Fair. We anxiously await to hear the exciting possibilities of our new location at the Ohio Expo Center & State Fair. Check back in the upcoming weeks and months to learn more.

Official News Release

OHIO STATE FAIR NAMES NEW FINE ARTS EXHIBIT CO-DIRECTORS

COLUMBUS— Columbus residents Pamela O’Loughlin and Melissa Vogley Woods have been selected as the new co-directors of the Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition.

O’Loughlin is a graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design and The Harding Graduate Internship in Art Therapy. She has ten years experience in child welfare and expressive arts therapies. O’Loughlin is a founding member of Footsteps on Wings Dance Company and was key in the development and certification of Verita Place, a supported living agency. O’Loughlin is active in the community, volunteering at Brentnell Recreation Center and the Franklin County Children’s Services Therapeutic Arts Program.

Vogley Woods graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a bachelor’s degree in Painting. She is founder and co-owner of The Painted Monkey Mural Company and co-founder of Community Arts and Mural Project (C.A.M.P), a community-based mural organization dedicated to outreach in the arts. Vogley Woods has exhibited her work extensively both locally and nationally. Melissa Vogley Woods is a recipient of Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and Greater Columbus Arts Council, International Artist Residency Program, Dresden; Germany. As well as several Franklin Country Neighborhood Arts, Artists in the Community Grants.

The Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition features the talents of Ohio’s professional and amateur artists. More than $16,000 is awarded to the winning artists in a variety of categories.

In addition to prize money, selected work is eligible for the Patron Purchase Program. The program is designed to provide new and established collectors of Ohio artworks the unique opportunity to add to their collections, while providing the artists statewide visibility and exposure.

To learn more about the Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Exhibit, visit ohiostatefair.com or call 614-644-4040. The Fine Arts Prospectus and entry form will be available at ohiostatefair.com after March 1, 2008. The deadline for entries is June 1, 2008.

The Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition is presented with support from the Ohio Arts Council.

For more information, call 1-888-OHO-EXPO or 1-614-644-FAIR. On the Web, visit us at ohiostatefair.com.

The Ohio Expo Center is proud to host the Ohio State Fair. With a spectacular midway, big-name entertainment, hundreds of exhibits and one of the largest junior shows in the nation, the 2008 Ohio State Fair will run July 30 - August 10.

Welcome new Directors, Melissa and Pam!

It is with great enthusiasm that we have appointed as the New Co- Directors of The Ohio State Fair Fine Art Exhibition, Melissa Vogley Woods and Pamela L. O’Loughlin. Melissa and Pam are very excited to take on these prestigious positions, and will strive to make to Fine Arts Exhibition the best it can be.

The Directors are optimistic and enthusiastic about foraging a new level for the Fine Arts Exhibit and have many new exciting directions, and goals. With hopes of bring more artists from all of Ohio, expand Awards for Artists, foster community connection through artist run workshops and events, in addition to developing a New Media, performance and Installation category.

COPS Alumnus on Local TV News

Recent OSU graduate and COPS alumnus Lindsay Hoffman, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware, was recently interviewed by a local news station for a story on the use of YouTube by political candidates in local elections.

Miller: Postmodern Spiritual Practices

Postmodern Spiritual Practices

The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault

Paul Allen Miller

Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy’s self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought.

On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology’s own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenschaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages.

A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers’ contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism’s chief thinkers’ debts to Plato and the ancient world.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Walsh: The Rhetoric of Fictionality

The Rhetoric of Fictionality

Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction

Richard Walsh

Narrative theory has always been centrally concerned with fiction, yet it has tended to treat fictions as if they were merely the framed or disowned equivalents of nonfictional narratives. A rhetorical perspective upon fictionality, however, sees it as a direct way of meaning and a distinct kind of communicative gesture. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction by Richard Walsh argues the merit of such a perspective and demonstrates its radical implications for narrative theory.

A new conception of fictionality as a distinctive rhetorical resource, somewhat like the master-trope of fictional narrative, cuts across many of the core theoretical issues in the field. The model, set out in chapter one, is subsequently tested and elaborated in relation to currently prevalent assumptions about narrativity and mimesis; narrative structure; the narrator and transmission; voice and mediacy; narrative media and cognition; and creativity, reception, and involvement. Throughout, the theoretical analysis seeks to vindicate readers’ intuitions about fiction without merely restating them: the result is a forceful challenge to many of narrative theory’s orthodoxies.

The rhetorical model of fictionality advanced in this book offers up new areas of inquiry into the purchase of fictiveness itself upon questions of narrative interpretation. It urges a fundamental reconception of the apparatus of narrative theory by theorizing the conditions of significance that make fictions conceivable and worthwhile.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Hall: The Academic Community

The Academic Community

A Manual for Change

Donald E. Hall

In The Academic Community: A Manual for Change, Donald E. Hall builds on his earlier The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual (2002) and confronts the most pressing issues in higher education today: the coherence of undergraduate instruction, priorities in graduate training, public perceptions of colleges and universities, and collegiality and cohesion within departments and institutions. Drawing on the dialogue-based theories of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hall urges a reinvestment in community-building by academics, with chapters examining the process of community creation and enhancement in the classroom, the department and college, and the broader regions which surround university campuses.

In offering concrete strategies for revitalizing college and university classes and campuses, Hall urges readers to become agents of change within their institutions and the larger political arena. Among the topics he addresses are undergraduate training in public intellectualism, graduate training in institutional service and collegiality, and institutional commitments to public outreach and community service. The book offers real-life examples and practical tips in its far-ranging discussion of the state of higher education in the United States today.

The Academic Community: A Manual for Change is a clarion call for a renewed optimism, energy, and focus in tackling the complex problems facing the academy in the twenty-first century.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org