Marshall McLuhan on YouTube

I'm going to show some of these videos in tomorrow's session on theories of the information society. I thought I'd put them here so I can find them more easily tomorrow

Graeme Turner on celebrity and Princess Diana

Next Wednesday we're going to be looking at the rise of celebrity coverage and the subsequent response of media theorists (and journalists) to that rise.

We'll look at the whole debate over dumbing down. Many traditional press watchers argue that increasing celebrity coverage (part of larger trends - tabloidisation and the the rise of infotainment) has led to a dumbing down of the news media and, by extension, the public that consumes it.

We'll also look at some ideas from the growing area of celebrity studies - the efforts by different theorists to define celebrity and to explain/analyse its increasing hold over the public...

If you dip into celebrity studies, you'll learn that Princess Diana, in particular her death and the public reaction to it, is a key case study for media theorists who want to explain what celebrity is and how it's changing/changed our culture.

If you want a taster, try 'Diana and The Cult of Celebrity', a recent web forum hosted on the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. Held to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana's death, it features various mini-essays by journalists, academics and theorists on royalty and celebrity.

One essay that's worth a look is 'Diana and the Celebrity Culture We Enjoy' by Graeme Turner, who's a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia and author of Understanding Celebrity, which is worth looking at if you're interested in this subject. (The library has a couple of copies).

Turner's essay for the EB forum introduces some of the ideas he develops in more detail in his book. Here's a couple of quotes from Turner's essay:

"Interest in celebrity is driven by the desire to find out what these prominent people are really like. For the celebrity to feed that desire, there has to be more than just a catalogue of successful professional activities – hit movies, successful albums or a TV show. There must also be some element of an invitation to investigate their private life: a hint at the existence of another, usually more ordinary and familiar, persona beneath the public face. One of the defining features of celebrity, then, is the capacity to sustain interest in their private life. When the audience for a prominent person becomes more interested in their private life than in the activities which made them prominent in the first place, then that person has become a celebrity"

"There has been plenty written by academics about the way that celebrities such as Diana provide opportunities for people to do what has been called ‘life work’: that is, to think about their own behaviour, ethics, and relationships through a continuing engagement with the narrative of their favourite celebrity’s life. Others have pointed to the usefulness of celebrity gossip as a form of common social currency in communities where personal connections are reduced or attenuated. Still more have pointed to the changing structure of communities today, where social networks seem to be less cohesive and where the circle of friends and relations may well have shrunk as the extended family becomes a less common component of everyday life. In all of these accounts, the celebrity becomes a kind of proxy for earlier and now less available forms of social relations."

Turner goes on to talk about the fact that celebrities are, in some sense, socially useful to the people who consume endless coverage about them and describes the connection some feel with celebs as a 'para-social relationship'. This isn't the same as a relationship with a friend you can phone up, but it does have some sort of reality and is invested with real emotions.The essay's worth a look if you want a quick intro to some of the ideas we'll talk about on Wednesday.

(BTW - the pic is from EB's forum page - where you can find the credits)

Female Chauvinist Pigs

In the lecture on feminism and media theory, I talked a bit about 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' by Ariel Levy, which came out in 2006. I think we talked about it as an example of third wave feminism or as a response to/critique of the way post-feminism had developed/been trivialised and commercialised over the last decade.

Levy's target in her book is 'raunch culture', the hypersexualised in which, as she suggests, genuine liberation for women has been sidelined by the freedom to be sexually provocative. Post-feminism pushed a view of women as 'sex subjects', not sex objects. It celebrated female desire and pleasure. But Levy argues this has been co-opted and commercialised, that women now feel they have to go along with this attitude or risk being labelled prudes.

There's more to it all than that, of course. You can get a flavour of her argument in a short comment piece she wrote for The Guardian when the book came out. That paper also ran a good interview with Levy, in which she defined 'female chauvinist pigs' as "women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves" and suggested that the big thing driving raunch culture was consumerism. Here's a quote from the piece:

"When you talk to people about raunch culture in terms of a specific company or corporation they just say: 'Oh, well, sex sells.' That's our justification for everything." And Barbie-doll images of women - long legs, fake breasts, blonde hair - are a glossy advertising shorthand that simultaneously appeals to everyone and no one, shifting units in a way that more complex, varied and substantive sexual images never could. "My book is not an attack on the sex industry," says Levy. "It's about how the sex industry has become every industry."

The Observer ran a more critical review of the book and The Guardian commissioned Kate Taylor, who used to write the Sex Life column for men's mag GQ, to argue against Levy. Taylor's argument is that raunch culture is not about feminism; it's about fun and fashon. Another Gurdian columnist, Madeleine Bunting dismissed Taylor as 'naive' and agreed with Levy that money and consumer capitalism are driving raunch culture - we're all sex slaves to the market now, she suggested.

Clearly, there's a debate going on within feminist circles about the arguments of post-feminism, about invididual sexual empowerment vs collective political liberation. Others have picked up on Levy's general point.

Late last year, The Observer's Amelia Hill interviewed Carol Platt Liebau, an American academica and editor of the Harvard Law Review, about her new book 'Prude'. Here's a quote from the beginning of the piece.

"Women have fought for decades to be treated as men's equals. Yet today's girls are being told that female empowerment simply comes from being 'sexy', according to a new book by the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. In Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau says popular culture is undermining girls' sense of worth in their most vulnerable, formative years and glorifying destructive behaviour . 'The overwhelming lesson teenagers are now learning from the world around them is that being "sexy" is the ultimate accolade, trumping intelligence, character and all other accomplishments at every stage of a woman's life,' said Liebau, a political analyst and the review's first female managing editor."

If you're interested in feminist media theory, you could perhaps look at Levy's book and the debate it's sparked and perhaps link it to ladette magazines like More or the new lad's mags and the debate over whether they represent something positive for women or just the same old sexist attitudes.

Chris Atton on alternative media

If you want to do some reading in advance of Rod's lecture next week on alternative media, look for books by Chris Atton. He's one of the leading academics covering the field. The library should have copies of his standard text, Alternative Media, and also his book on the net, An Alternative Internet. You can get a flavour of his ideas from this review of his book on the net (PDF). Victor Pickard's attempt to define alternative media is also worth a look (PDF)

Glenn Close or Rocky - which one is Hillary Clinton?

In the lecture on feminism and media studies, I suggested it might be a good idea to look at some of the press coverage of Hillary Clinton's current campaign to win the nomination as the Democratic candidate in this year's US Presidential election.

You may not like Clinton or approve of some of the dodgy moves she, Bill and her campaign team have pulled in the campaign. Even so, it's hard to disagree with those who suggest that she gets a certain level of criticism/vitriol from some press commentators merely because she is a woman running for high office.

As I said in the class, the general assumption behind some of this coverage is that it's ok for a man to be ambitious, to want power, but when a woman wants the same thing then there must be something wrong with her - she must be scheming, untrustworthy, unnatural...

A monster even - that's what an aide in the Obama team called her a while back and it's the line taken by Andrew Sullivan, a political pundit/blogger and long time critic of the Clintons, in a piece he wrote for The Times in early March.

Sullivan compares the Clintons to a horror movie monster you can't kill, to zombies, to Glenn Close at the end of 'Fatal Attraction'. Remember that, for some media theorists, that film and its representation of a career woman as unbalanced and dangerous is a key part of an argument about attempts to roll back the gains made by feminism in the seventies.

Initially, Hillary Clinton's campaign against Barack Obama stressed policy. She was all about the nitty gritty details of politics, about experience, whereas he was about mythical imagery (inspiring speeches, first black man to run for President etc).

But over the last month, Clinton's campaign has gone symbolic too - first she started to play the feminist card, perhaps spying an opportunity in some of the sexist stereotyping flung her way by press pundits.

More recently, she compared herself to Rocky Balboa from the Rocky films. Not sure if that latter is that good an idea. Perhaps she should have tried to refer to a Hollywood film that portrayed a battling woman in a positive, sympathetic way. But are there any, besides those that show heroic mums?

Journalism, Science and the MMR panic

Looking at the health panics sparked by media coverage of medical issues could make for a good subject for a dissertation. Journalists are often accused of simplifying complex issues when it comes to science. Journalism's habitual suspicion of authorities can also lead to a kneejerk rejection of what scientists and doctors say and a rather over-eager desire to unearth conspiracies and embrace maverick outsiders.

Case in point: the panic a few years back over whether the MMR vaccine (the jab to protect children against Measles, Mumps and Rubella) in some way caused autism. This story has been back in the news recently because the General Medical Council is currently hearing the defence of three doctors accused of serious professional misconduct in allegations made against the safety of the MMR vaccine. The best known of these doctors is Andrew Wakefield, whose claims about MMR and autism in the medical magazine The Lancet led to massive media attention and a major ongoing panic.

These days, the prevailing media opinion is that the vaccine is safe and that Wakefield has been discredited (though he still has his supporters). But a few years back the media took the opposite view, which led to lots of parents refusing to vaccinate their kids, which led to a resurgence of measles in particular (and measles can be a very dangerous disease).

Last Thursday (March 27th), Radio 4's Today Programme did a good follow-up on all this, interviewing Neil Dixon (chief exec of the medicial charity The King's Fund) and Fiona Fox (direct of the Science Media Centre, a group set up to press for better coverage of scientific issues in the media). You can listen to it again (until Thursday 3rd April) - the report's about six minutes long.

The basic angle of the report was - what have we (i.e. the media) learned from the whole MMR fuss. Dixon made the key point first - that prior to the panic we were getting to the point where measles in particular might have been eradicated in Britain, but because so many people stopped vaccinating, the disease was able to regain ground...

Fox has an interesting take on the whole thing. She criticises the media for simplifying issues but she also says scientists should have made more effort to engage with the media and correct mistakes and misapprehensions. She says that many avoided the media because they 'didn't like the way they framed the issue'. Her organisation sets out to get scientists in the media and to brief journalists on key scientific issues.

She makes one other interesting point which is very relevant to some of the issues you've been looking at with Rod. She criticises the journalistic approach of balance, suggesting that it mispresents things. For example, covering MMR and autism, journalists would give equal space to Andrew Wakefield and a scientist who disagreed with his conclusions.

Fox says that given that 99% of scientists thought the MMR vaccine was safe, balancing reports 50/50 is not appropriate. Instead, she says, out of 100 reports, one should feature Andew Wakefield and the other 99 should feature the more accepted view. That would be more representative.

If you want to look into all this further, the Science Media Centre is a good place to start. Six years ago now, they published a report (PDF) on the whole MMR panic, which is worth a look. There's a book length analysis of the whole affair, 'Health, Risk and The News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media' by Tammy Boyce, which is definitely worth reading if you're interested in this area.

(BTW - the pic is of Andrew Wakefield and is from the BBC site)

The new generation of British feminist magazines

One of the later sessions on the unit is about alternative media. There's an interesting crossover there with some of the territory we covered yesterday - specifically our discussion about Spare Rib, the feminist magazine started in 1972.

Spare Rib grew out of the alternative press and defined itself against the commercial media of the time. But it shut up shop a long time ago. However, in the last few years, a new generation of young feminists has appeared. They've started their own magazines, in print and online and, like Spare Rib, they set out to provide an alternative to the mainstream titles.

Last year, Jess McCabe (editor of the online feminist magazine The F-Word) wrote a good piece on the new magazines. She quoted Marie Berry, editor of KnockBack (probably the best known of the new titles) on her reasons for going into print:

"We don't read women's magazines. They're shit. We write KnockBack because,
fuck, someone had to."

Sarah Barnes, the editor of Uplift!, says something similar:

"I was getting increasingly annoyed by the magazines available to women. I
found them controlling and patronising, so I decided to create my own."

(Incidentally, The F-Word has a good review of Uplift!)

McCabe goes on to namecheck other magazines, in particular Subtext (they also have a MySpace page) and she mentions a whole heap of UK feminist blogs/online zines - The F-Word, which she edits, Lads Mags (which sets out to ridicule lads mags), CharlieGrrl's Blog of Feminist Activism, Mind the Gap, a blog run by a Cardiff-based activist group and Laurelin in the Rain, a more personal feminist blog.

McCabe points out, that in America, there are several well established feminist magazines that are sold on mainstream news stands - Ms (started by Gloria Steinem, who we talked about yesterday), Bust and Bitch.

But over here, since the demise of Spare Rib, there hasn't been a commercially successful feminist magazine, one that sold enough for WH Smith to stock it.

She suggests that all these blogs/zines suggest a groundswell of interest in feminism amongst young women - something that might lead to one of the new generation of mags becoming popular enough to make it into the mainstream newsagents.

Perhaps. But as I mentioned before, a lot of the commercial women's magazines here do cover what they see as feminist issues - though they do it in a rather soft way. If there is a new generation of feminism on the way, they'll start to cover it in their own way (and perhaps close down the opportunities for a genuinely new title).

As I mentioned in the last post, The Observer has just run its Radical Women special - and it's not the first time the paper has covered this territory - back in September last year, they profiled 'The New Feminists'.

Sorry - bit of a long post. But try to check out some of these links if you get time and let me know what you think. They could provide material for your log books.

Radical Women in The Observer

One of the things we didn't get chance to explore in any depth in yesterday's lecture is the way that feminism and feminist theory has become part of the vocabulary of many women's magazines.

I did briefly cover Helen Gurley Brown and the way that, in the 60s and 7os, under her editorship, Cosmopolitan was seen by some as an example of 'popular feminism'. As we discussed in the lesson, as second wave feminism gained influence, the women drawn to the ideas began to be seen as a potentially lucrative target market. Since then, women's mags have taken up feminist concerns, though not where they'd affect the basic commercial logic that drives all mag publishing. So they're happy with post-feminists like Madonnna but not with radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin.

Case in point - The special 'Radical Women' edition of Observer Woman, the paper's monthly women's mag. It came out on Sunday (March 9th) and features a package of features celebrating female radicals. Here's the blurb for the whole package:

"Mad, Bad, Briliant and Dangerous - Radical Women. They're redefining their arts, their politics, their industries, their lives - and the rules. We celebrate the most outspoken, unapologetic, successful and agenda-altering among them; from ballet's most influential diva to hip hop's new topless stars."

The package includes interviews with Candis Cayne, a transexual who stars in US soap 'Dirty, Sexy Money', Jane Shepherdson (the woman behind Topshop), Zaha Hadid (a leading architect), Jam Donaldson (a radical black lawyer/activist) and a run down on thirty 'New Radicals' (the list starts with Beth Ditto, who says 'Posing nude was a radical thing to do. I'm a fat person and I'm a femme. It felt good.)

Now, in the 70s, 'radical women' tended to mean something like Andrea Dworkin. Now, it's something much more fluid. Is this a bad thing. Well, some third wave feminists might see this as an example of the problems of post-feminism. Here, feminism becomes a useful sales tag, something that's become disconnected from a coherent politics. Then again, a lot of the women covered are doing inspiring things and pieces like this might be the way you get to find out about them.

Another thing to think about when you look at these stories - I mentioned yesterday that the newspapers were increasingly interested in targeting women readers. That's why the Observer publishes Observer Woman, which is clearly aimed at attracting thoughtful career women with lots of disposable income (because they will then attract advertisers to the paper). To draw in this group, the magazine needs to cover more serious subjects (like feminism) alongside the more standard women's mag fare, but it needs to do it in a way that doesn't upset advertisers.

One last thing about that edition of You and Yours

Before it disappears off the BBC site - it's due to go Tuesday March 4th...

It started off with with a piece setting up the discussion by Roy Greenslade, who's a well known journalist/academic. He's written an excellent history of the press, post-WW2, called 'Press Gang' - there are copies in the library. He also blogs for The Guardian and writes a lot for their Media Section. Generally he's a well respected media/press commentator.

Anyway, Greenslade's opening package tried to summarise the way the press has changed in the last fifty years or so. He talked about the move away from the age of the press baron, when owners treated papers as tools for propaganda, as a chance to push their own political agenda. He covered the rise of the tabloid and the increasing dominance of entertainment. He also talked about the increased competition the press faces from TV, radio and the net and about the commercial pressures many journalists face.

So far, so similar to the arguments Nick Davies makes in 'Flat Earth News'. But Greenslade's a journalist, so he knew he had to deliver some kind of angle on the book.

So he went with the idea that, though journalists like to pretend things have got worse and were much better in the old days, there never was a journalistic golden age. Journalism's always been a 'rackety old trade'. The implication was that Davies' book falls into this sort of 'Golden Age' thinking.

However, it doesn't really. As Davies points out on the show in response, he's not saying things have got much worse, he's just saying they've changed. Things were bad in a certain way in the past (when proprietors could stop certain stories running). Things are bad in a different way now, when over-stretched journalists have no time and increasingly rely on material from PRs and the Press Association, which they never check or add to in any significant way.

What Greenslade was doing was coming up with a line. Journalists often do this - it's a key skill. Faced with a complex mess of facts, they conjure up an angle on it all, a line that people can take away from the piece. Greenslade's 'Golden Age' line was in fact used by The Guardian's columnist Simon Jenkins when he dismissed 'Flat Earth News', along with other recent criticisms of journalism, claiming that the press was just fine.

Coming up with lines, developing angles, is one of the things journalists have to learn to do. I wonder if you can draw links with this professional skill/practice and the more general theoretical analysis of framing - the way that the news media frame discussions in certain ways.

Developing an angle is a conscious way of framing a discussion. In a way, it's about spinning a story a particular way. Framing is a larger, often more unconscious process - it's about fitting stories into certain narrative frames, that determine the way people read and respond to the news...

Rod's going to talk some more about framing this week, I think.

I've been thinking about that edition of Your and Yours devoted to the Nick Davies book, Flat Earth News. As I said before, it's a good intro to Davies' crticisms of the current news media and is worth a listen.

But if you wanted to take a more analytical view, it's worth stepping back and thinking how the issue is framed by the show as a whole. You and Yours is Radio 4's consumer phone in show. Standard territory for them might be complaints about banks or estate agents or schools. They often interview experts to set up the issue then take calls from the public, who call to air specific grievances.

So the show has a consumerist/individualist approach. It moves towards personalising issues. The idea's there in the title. So the show as whole moves from the expert view (in this case, Davies and various ex-hacks/academics (Roy Greenslade, Peter Preson, Eve Pollard) to contributions from callers, who often personalise the issue in question. So in this episode you get contributions from people who say things like:

• The press covered something involving me and got it all wrong
• I turned up an interesting story (involving me) and the press refused to cover it
• I work for the press and I don't do the things Davies says

So the discussion gets kind of randomised and personalised. It kind of stops having a political dimension and stars becoming a kind of consumerist 'are you being properly served' discussion...

Is that the best way to cover this issue? How does this kind of framing affect the way you see the book (I guess it makes you perhaps want to buy the book and maybe stop buying newspapers - but could it encourage a more political response?).

Interestingly enough, the presenter begins the show by noting that Davies is highly critical of the influence of PRs on the news agenda and that it's therefore kind of ironic that his book is being heavily promoted by various PRs. And, of course, that promotion is the reason You and Yours are covering 'Flat Earth News' in the first place.

PCC investigates journalists' use of social networking sites

One side issue relating to the Bridgend story - yesterday, on the Radio 4 teatime news magazine show PM, I heard a report saying that the Press Complaints Commission is investigating the way journalists use social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo. You'll be able to hear the report via the BBC's Listen Again til next Tuesday - it starts around 47 minutes in to the show and is about five minutes long.

The hook for the package, it seems, was the way journalists reporting the suicides in Bridgend have used social networking sites. They've trawled pages on Bebo and the others, reading messages and helping themselves to photos which are then run in the newspapers. Relatives and friends of the deceased have said they find this upsetting.

We've talked a little bit about this subject in general in the Online Journalism 3 class I do on Mondays. Increasingly, journalists see Facebook and the rest as useful tools - they go there looking for material and (often) have no qualms about using photos, arguing that people chose to make their pages 'publicly available'. But is this really ok? The PCC is looking into it and trying to develop some guidelines.

In the meantime, there's a certain irony in the way journalists who have suggested that social networking sites might have played some role in the suicides rely on them at the same time for material and take that material without asking for permission or thinking about the effects their publication of it might have.

Bridgend, journalists and social networking

One of the things I want to look at on this blog is the way the news media, in particular the press, has covered the recent spate of suicides in Bridgend. Parents, relatives and people living in the area have recently said that they think media coverage of this has, in some way, glamourised suicide. Some have said they think the coverage may be responsible for the continuing suicides.

It's a sad story, overall. It raises lots of interesting points about journalistic ethics and about the effects that the media (and journalism) have on people's behaviour. I'd like to look at it over the next few weeks.

It's interesting that, when the story began to reach the national media, the press in particular began to point the finger at new media - in particular social networking sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook. For example, the Daily Mail ran with a big front page splash about 'The Internet Suicide Cult' back in January (they were responding to some remarks by a coroner investigating the deaths). The newspapers have a history of this - suggesting that new media technologies - from the net to video games - can affect behaviour (especially the behaviour of the young) in all sorts of interestingly problematic ways.

However, what's becoming apparent as people look at the Bridgend case is that it's the old media - basic newspaper reporting in fact, which may be part of the problem. The Media Guardian's columnist Peter Wilby looked at this on Monday (you'll need to register to read it). After having a pop at the Mail, he looked at academic research on this subject.

"Oxford University's centre for suicide research looked at 90 studies across the world. More than half had found evidence that suicides covered inthe media - whether in newspapers, films or TV news and drama - were followed by an increase in the number of cases. None had identified a fall."

Wilby talks about possible reasons for this. I'll post some more on this soon. But it's an interesting way into the whole debate about 'media effects'. A lot of research has been done over the years into trying to decide what effects media coverage (and journalism) have on the people who consume it. A lot of it is inconclusive - it's often hard to point to definite occasions where the media seems to have a clear, direct causal effect on the way someone behaves or thinks. But on the other hand, we all feel like it plays some sort of role... So we'll look at this over the next few weeks.

Journalists criticising journalism

To kick things off, it might be interesting to look at the fuss surrounding 'Flat Earth News', the new book by the well known investigative journalist, Nick Davies. Over the years, he's done lots of really interesting work for The Guardian, covering things like crime, drugs and education.

This time round, his subject is the current state of journalism. In his new book, he talks about the way newspapers in particular are being undermined by commercial pressures - mainly the desires of big media companies to cut costs and maximise profites.

In particular, he focuses on the way journalists increasingly rely on wire agencies and prs for stories. They rework press releases, often without checking facts, often because they're under pressure to fill more and more space and have less and less time to do it properly. Davies' term for this is 'churnalism'.

The problem with this is that increasingly it's PRs and press agents, not journalists, who are setting the news agenda, who are doing the original reporting and writing. And of course PRs usally have a particular agenda, a particular line to push...

I'm simplifying a little. We can go into more detail over the coming weeks. But I think 'Flat Earth News' sounds like a really interesting example of journalistic criticisms of journalism.

Lots of journalists, once they get too old/tired to put with late nights and deadlines, sit back and start to worry about what they've been doing for the last twenty/thirty years of their lives. And they sometimes get round to writing books that explore those worries. It's interesting to set this kind of thing against the kind of critique made by academics and theorists.

For example, Davies is concerned about the effects of commerce, the way big businesses, governments and the PRs they use increasingly set the public agenda and how all this undermines journalism's 'fourth estate role'. In some respects, there are links to the arguments made by Chomsky and Herman about the propoganda model, an attempt to account for systemic bias in the news media.

You should be looking at Chomsky in one of the next two sessions with Rod. Wikipedia has a reasonable introduction to the Propaganda model, if Rod hasn't got to it yet, though a better bet would be to get 'Manufacturing Consent', the book in which Chomsky and Herman develop the idea, out of the library (there are lots of copies in there).

If you want a quick introduction to 'Flat Earth News', there's a basic summary and an extract on the promotional web site. Alternatively, try this introduction to the argument which Davies wrote for The Guardian.

Alternatively, have a listen to today's episode of the Radio 4 phone-in/consumer show, You and Yours. It's devoted to Davies' book and features him and various other ageing Fleet Street notables arguing over the book. I'll post more on this tomorrow.

Testing, testing

Weclome to the unit blog. I never quite know what to write first when I start a blog. And in general, I think first posts on blogs are always a bit random. Someone once said they're like the moment before a gig when someone steps up to the microphones, taps it and drones 'Testing, testing, one, two, one, two.'

Anyway, as the blurb in the sidebar says, the idea here is to link to stories that relate to some of the ideas and theories you'll look at during the course of the unit. Think of it as an online version of the research logs you're doing.

We also want to link to some useful resources online and put up some advice about researching your essays and dissertations. It's also a space where you can ask questions relating to the unit or comment on the stories we link to or add stories of your own.

That's the plan, anyway. We'll see how it develops.