Publishing of Political Communication Methods Sourcebook

"The Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods, Measures, and Analytical Techniques" has been published by Routledge (2011 publication date). COPS member R. Lance Holbert is a co-editor for the volume. In addition, this work is littered with contributions from former and current COPS members. COPS-related chapter topics include survey panel designs (Eveland and Morey), current trends in survey research (Hoffman), secondary analysis (Holbert and Hmielowski), structural equation modeling (Holbert and LaMarre), mediation (Hayes and Myers), and general methods trends within the field (Kosicki).

COPS Publication: "E-Democracy writ small: The impact of the Internet on citizen access to local elected officials"

COPS member Kelly Garrett has a co-authored article in Information, Communication & Society that is now available online.  Below is the citation and abstract. 

Garrett, R. & Jensen, M. J. (2010). E-Democracy writ small: The impact of the Internet on citizen access to local elected officials. Information, Communication & Society

Abstract
This article examines how elected officials' interactions with neighborhood groups, business interests, issue groups, and other stakeholders are shaped by their use of the Internet and by characteristics of local e-government infrastructure. The study utilizes data from a nationwide survey of local elected officials and from an analysis of corresponding local government websites. Results show that Internet use is associated with a significant increase in contact with stakeholders and with increasingly diverse types of communication partners, even after controlling for officials' general propensity to communicate. Both time spent on official duties and city size moderate the influence of Internet use. However, local government web sites do not appear to have a substantive influence on citizen's participation in policy making.

Geidner heading to University of Tennessee

Please join me in congratulating Nick Geidner on accepting a tenure-track assistant professor position within the School of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. Nick has been a member of COPS since joining the OSU PhD program in 2007. Nick and his wife, Shelby, will be heading down to Knoxville this summer after Nick wraps up the last stages of his doctoral program. He will be missed within our School of Communication, but we are very pleased that he will begin the next stage of his career in a fine program. With this being stated, we hold some reservations about his becoming affiliated with the SEC, especially given Ohio State's recent track record in football when coming up against opponents from that conference. Nick, we hold out much hope that you will remain true to the scarlet & gray within the sea of orange you are about to become enveloped within. Congrats on accepting the UT position! It is a fitting end to what has been a most exciting year.

Movember Contest (Part II)

Since the book I’m writing is two or three months behind schedule, I decided I’d spend all my time this week working on that instead of writing another irrelevant theory about potentially being murdered by a drifter. As always, if you have a problem with this, you can suck it. Besides, the Movember contest (that officially ended two weeks ago) and The Belt contest obviously matter more to the Trillion Man March than anything I write. And if they don’t, well, they absolutely should.

After analyzing the comments for the last blog post, I noticed that there were over 350 “nominations” for the mustache contest from probably no more than 20 people. When I said that you could vote for more than one person, I apparently forgot to request that you not submit the same nomination 50 different times. Oh well. I sorted through all of them as best I could and decided on the six that I thought got the most votes, and threw in my bonus pick (Nicolas Cage) because doing so gives me a feeling of authority I can’t get anywhere else in my life. Anyway, listed below (in no particular order other than alphabetical) are the pictures of the seven finalists. The poll is in the top right corner of the blog. Make yourself useful and vote for someone. As a reminder, whoever gets the most votes wins a free pack of Barbasol for being so manly and a free shirt for being so awesome. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to playing FIFA writing my book.

CHRIS MULLIN

JOHN STOCKTON

LEE GREENWOOD

LUTHER VANDROSS

NICOLAS CAGE

WALTER SOBCHAK

GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

___________________________________________________

A few quick points regarding the rules for The Belt:

1. Ties will be settled by looking at the total minutes played in achieving the trillions. For example, a player putting up a 4 trillion and 3 trillion will beat out a player putting up a 2 trillion and 1 trillion. In other words, Nate Schwarze has one helluva tiebreaker in his back pocket by getting an 11 trillion earlier in the season. I’ll post a tiebreaker column with the leaderboard next time to make this easier to follow.
2. I’m only considering the stats from ESPN box scores. In order for it to be considered a trillion, every statistic listed for the game other than minutes played must be zero. For a visual, here’s the game log for Wake Forest's Brooks Godwin (who is currently tied for the lead).

That’s all I got for now.

Things are getting much more interesting now that we have four people atop the leaderboard (one of which just recently submitted their name and is new to the contest).

Thanks to Alex in the Trillion Man March, I’ve recently learned that Wake Forest only has seven scholarship guys available right now, which means Brooks Godwin should have a lot more chances than the rest of the guys to put up trillions. I’ve said all along that I like one of the Purdue guys to ultimately win it, but I’ve recently suggested that Nate Schwarze of Rice is a serious darkhorse contender. So if you’re scoring at home, Godwin is probably the favorite, the Purdue guys are my pick(s), and Schwarze has a shot (especially considering that if he ties for the lead, his 11 trillion will probably propel him to victory). But, there’s obviously still a lot of basketball to not be played, so we’ll just have to wait and see. ___________________________________________________

Let me make it perfectly clear that I’m always impressed by basketball trick shot videos that feature kids who are considerably younger than me. When guys haven’t even hit puberty yet but can still make insane shots, I’m always going to give them some props. Especially when the video has one kid riding a unicycle and another kid repeatedly giving the “suck it” crotch chop. Anyway, keeping that in mind, your awesome YouTube was sent in to me by Travis W. and his friends. There’s your shout-out, Travis. And here’s your video.

Proud To Be An American But Even Prouder To Be A Buckeye,

Mark Titus

Club Trillion Founder

AAPOR Student Paper Competition Deadline

Seymour Sudman Student Paper Competition

2011 American Association for Public Opinion Research Annual Conference

Arizona Grand Resort

Phoenix, Arizona

May 12-15, 2011

http://www.aapor.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Sudman_Student_Paper_Competition_Information&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=2678

Movember Contest

Scary thought: I’m fully convinced that anybody can get away with murder one time. I’ve made this argument to my friends and family for years, but last night I lost a ton of sleep because I started thinking about it again (probably because I get too emotionally attached when I watch Dexter). Let me explain.

First of all, when I say that anybody can get away with one murder, I obviously don’t mean that you can just walk in on your ex-girlfriend and her new man and just stab him in the balls with no consequence. So please, put the knife down and keep reading before you do something you’ll forever regret. What I really mean is that anybody can get away with one random murder.

Think about it. When cops are investigating a murder, there are always three things they seriously consider– motive, evidence, and possible witnesses. Keeping this in mind, (we need to give our hypothetical murderer a name – “Evan” will do the trick) Evan could get away with murder, provided that he has absolutely no connection to the victim, he doesn’t leave a trail, and nobody sees him do it (or at least nobody gets a good look at him). This means that if Evan was to get bloodthirsty for some reason, all he’d have to do is break into a random house in the middle of nowhere (also known as the rural Midwest), unleash a meat cleaver on whoever he sees, and then take the weapon with him as he quickly flees the scene.

So long as the entire crime is random and unpredictable, and as long as he has no criminal record (so DNA testing can’t nail him), I’m convinced the cops would never figure out that Evan did it. This, more than anything else, is why I was so terrified of Christopher Lloyd in Dennis The Menace when I was little. Dude was a drifter who just jumped off a train in Dennis’ town. He could have easily slit Mr. Wilson’s throat and anally penetrated Dennis with his own slingshot, then jumped backed on the next train and disappeared into oblivion. There’s no way in hell the cops would’ve figured that one out.

Now, I know some of you might think that bringing this up makes me some dark, creepy guy. My response to this is twofold – A) this is what a dark, creepy guy looks like, and B) I’m not bringing it up because I plan on killing someone, but rather because I’m scared of someone doing it to me. It’s terrifying to know that some hobo could stalk me for a few days and gut out my insides while I’m sleeping without the cops having any idea of where to even start looking.

Even worse, “Evan” could stage the murder to look like a suicide and the cops wouldn’t investigate it at all. This is why I’m adamant about my concept of a non-suicide note. It’s basically a note that happy, mentally-healthy people write that says, “I assure you that I would never commit suicide, so if it looks like I did, please know that someone murdered me and tried to cover it up. Please investigate this and don’t just assume things.”

Obviously I’d ideally want the cops to find my note immediately. But I also wouldn’t mind if they didn’t, so long as my murder happened when my wife was pregnant and my unborn son found the note 20 years later. That way there would be a 100% chance he would feel obligated to avenge my death, which would be all sorts of badass because it’d more than likely mean he would somehow turn into a superhero. And when you think about it, having your child avenge your death and become a superhero is all a father could ever really ask for.

Now that I’ve got you all paranoid and creeped out, let’s ease things up a little bit by looking at pictures of guys with mustaches.

There’s no way you’re falling asleep tonight.

___________________________________________________

My original plan for this contest was to pick out a few of my favorites and have the Trillion Man March vote on a winner. But when you all started sending in your stache pics, it became obvious to me that I couldn’t just pick a handful. After all, I’m the same guy who used to like emo music, turtlenecks, and Rick Reilly (to be fair, though, there’s no denying that ESPN Rick Reilly is a completely different person than SI Rick Reilly was), which is another way of saying I’m clearly not that great at making decisions, so picking just a few staches out of the 29 that were sent in was always going to be an impossible task for me.

So here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve decided to post every picture that was emailed to me (except for a few that were pics of guys with full beards) and I’m going to leave it up to the Trillion Man March to decide which staches are the best. If you see a mustache you like, leave a comment in the comment section of this blog entry and it will serve as a nomination. After a week or so, I’ll tally up the nominations and post the five or six best again and we’ll have a final vote to decide the winner. Remember that anything can be taken into account when judging these mustaches – creativity, manliness, or the lack of both if your heart desires (I think a couple guys could end up winning just because the TMM will pity them).

Just so we’re clear, it’s okay to nominate more than one stache, but please don’t be a Singler and nominate 20 or something. Also, to make the identification process easier, I’ve decided to assign each picture a name of a great American hero (the name appears ABOVE the picture it corresponds with – I’ll say it again: the name appear ABOVE the picture it corresponds with). When you leave a comment with your nominations, list the names of the great American heroes that correspond to the pictures. So instead of writing, “I like both the guy who looks like a child molester and the guy with the fu manchu/soul patch combo,” write, “I like Rod Beck and Lee Greenwood.” Hopefully that makes sense.

By the way, don’t forget that the ultimate winner of the contest gets a CLUB TRIL or FUNDAMENTALS MONTAGE!!! shirt, as well as a pack of Barbasol shaving cream. In other words, there’s a lot at stake, so please take this as seriously as I know you will. Like Derek Anderson said: “You think this is funny, but I take this s*** serious. Real serious.”

Now on to the staches…

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY

LEX LUGER

LEE GREENWOOD

RICHARD BELDING

GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON

CHRIS MULLIN

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

WALTER SOBCHAK

ABRAHAM ZAPRUDER

BRIAN BOSWORTH

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

HOLDEN CAULFIELD

BENNY “THE JET” RODRIGUEZ

JOHN STOCKTON

ARTHUR FONZARELLI

WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON

DR. JONAS SALK

CARL SPACKLER

ROD BECK

CLINT EASTWOOD

GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

TRENT WALKER

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Edit: I just realized that Ernest Hemingway took this picture in December of 2007. Clearly he didn't follow the rules, so I'm disqualifying him from the contest. However, his mustache is unfathomably manly, so I'll leave the picture on here.

SALVATORE GIUNTA

JOHN WAYNE

BATMAN

NICOLAS CAGE

CHARLIE CONWAY

LUTHER VANDROSS

God bless America. __________________________________________________

Now that college basketball is in full swing, the race for The Belt is getting much more heated. There’s a new name atop the leaderboard this time around (and a few names added to the list as well), but it’s too early to pick a favorite as there’s still a lot of basketball to be played (or in the case of these guys, not be played). Here are the current standings.

I still say that one of the Purdue guys will end up winning it, but my dark horse pick is Nate Schwarze of Rice, mostly because he put up an 11 trillion in his last game. Yes, you read that right. Eleven. Trillion.

What a badass. ___________________________________________________

Your awesome YouTube celebrates the holiday season and was sent in to me by Marc L. There’s your shout-out, Marc. And here’s your video.

Don’t forget to nominate your favorite mustaches.

Proud To Be An American But Even Prouder To Be A Buckeye,

Mark Titus

Club Trillion Founder

Sixth Graders Learn Shakespeare Desk-Free

The first thing Sandy Guinto (above) did when the school year started was to remove every desk from her 6th grade language arts classroom at Waggoner Road Middle School in Reynoldsburg. Out in the hallway the desks went. Inside the room she arranged all of the students’ chairs in a big circle with ample room in the center for active learning.

Guinto is one of 38 Columbus-area teachers involved in a program that’s at the heart of a partnership between The Ohio State University and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Spearheaded by The Arts Initiative at Ohio State, the professional development program is transforming the way children are taught and is based on the RSC’s renowned “Stand Up for Shakespeare” program, which advocates “Doing Shakespeare on Your Feet; Seeing it Live; and Starting it Earlier.”

“It was very scary to start this process,” Guinto admits. “As an educator, we are taught how to arrange desks so that classroom management is easier. When the desks were gone, all of the safety of what I had known for management went out the window. But I jumped in and have been learning ever since.”

She adds, “It is unbelievably amazing as I watch students – who consider school to be extremely hard – work with Shakespeare’s text and understand it. They have debates about why a character says or does things. They are challenged to have an opinion and be able to justify it. They beg to do Shakespeare! How many times does a teacher get to hear that?”

One of her students had a similar reaction to the reconfigured classroom. “At the beginning of the year I was a little confused when I walked into Mrs Guinto’s room and there were no desks. I was like, where are the desks? But now I realize it’s really fun (to be active) without desks. And Shakespeare is fun!”


Guinto’s class is studying Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and using the play as a springboard for various school subjects. For example, they are just starting to work on their first quarter essay about their own “four personal worlds” based on the overlapping worlds that the fairy Puck experiences in the play.

They also are investigating Shakespeare’s characters. While Guinto was in Stratford-upon-Avon last summer, 10 master of fine arts acting students from Ohio State also went through the RSC training program, and are now visiting the schools to help with acting processes. One Ohio State student, Alison Vasquez, (right) recently came to Waggoner Road Middle School.

“Alison came to my classroom as Hippolyta so the students could interview the character,” Guinto explains. “She did an awesome job fielding some difficult questions posed to the Queen of the Amazon. The students were mesmerized when Alison ‘became’ Hippolyta and demonstrated how she can switch her voice to different dialects. One student was so captivated with an actor being in our room that she declared she wants to act when she grows up.”

Sandy Guinto is one of 38 Columbus-area teachers in grades 1-12 who are part of an intensive teacher professional development program called Stand Up for Shakespeare America, which is at the core of the unique partnership between The Ohio State University and the UK’s Royal Shakespeare Company.

Notable News

The for/word company, in association with Whistling in the Dark Theatre Co., presents a staged reading of a new play by Jen Schlueter. The Little Book, featuring Christina Ritter, Christopher Roche and Emily Bach, will be presented Sunday, Dec 5, at 3 pm in the Arts Initiative space in the South Campus Gateway alley (across from OAL and the Green Room). The play chronicles the story of EB White, once best known as the voice of The New Yorker, and later as the author of Stuart Little. It follows White's professional and personal experiences with two powerful women, and takes a look at the clash of the modern world with the Victorian, the tension between style and sentiment, and a battle over a book about a little mouse. Admission is free.

Don't forget the award winning Sketch by Number troupe presents The Eight Reindeer Monologues, a play by Jeff Goode, at 7:30 pm on Dec 9, 11 and 12 at the Green Room, in the South Campus Gateway alley. Cost is $10 at the door.

And Artillery Ohio presents its Holiday Art Market on Saturday, Dec 11, from 10 am to 5 pm at the Gateway Film Center at South Campus Gateway. Plenty of artist vendors will be offering items for your gift-buying browsing, from paintings and ornaments to pottery, glass and jewelry.

COPS Student Publications in November

Current and former student members of COPS have peer-reviewed publications that recently appeared in November. Current COPS doctoral candidate Ivan Dylko has an article appearing in the November issue of International Journal of Public Opinion Research entitled "An Examination of Methodological and Theoretical Problems Arising from the Use of Political Participation Indexes in Political Communication Research." Teresa Myers, a former student member of COPS who is now a post-doctoral researcher, has a co-authored article in the November issue of Political Communication entitled "Challenging the State: Transnational TV and Political Identity in the Middle East." Congrats to both!

COPS Profs at "Political Communication: The State of the Field in the 21st Century" Conference

COPS professors Andrew Hayes, Lance Holbert, and William "Chip" Eveland are attending the "Political Communication: The State of the Field in the 21st Century" three-day conference at the Annenberg Public Policy Center this week. This conference is designed to produce a subsequent handbook of political communication that will benefit not only from a large group of scholars working independently, but also by working together to make each individual contribution better through deliberation and feedback from the larger group.

Hayes is part of a group on "Interpersonal and Small Group Political Communication" and will be writing a subsequent chapter on the "Spiral of Silence." Holbert is part of a group on "Psychological Theories of Media Effects" and will be writing a subsequent chapter on "Uses and Gratifications." Eveland is part of the group on "Political Information Processing and Processing Models" and will be writing a subsequent chapter on "Communication Modalities and Political Knowledge." In total, approximately 60 scholars from communication, political science, psychology, and sociology are attending this event and contributing to the resulting book to be published by Oxford University Press.