Journal articles: 'United States National Archives Record Service' – Grafiati (2024)

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Abstract. The statistical analysis of wildfire activity is a critical component of national wildfire planning, operations, and research in the United States (US). However, there are multiple federal, state, and local entities with wildfire protection and reporting responsibilities in the US, and no single, unified system of wildfire record keeping exists. To conduct even the most rudimentary interagency analyses of wildfire numbers and area burned from the authoritative systems of record, one must harvest records from dozens of disparate databases with inconsistent information content. The onus is then on the user to check for and purge redundant records of the same fire (i.e., multijurisdictional incidents with responses reported by several agencies or departments) after pooling data from different sources. Here we describe our efforts to acquire, standardize, error-check, compile, scrub, and evaluate the completeness of US federal, state, and local wildfire records from 1992–2011 for the national, interagency Fire Program Analysis (FPA) application. The resulting FPA Fire-Occurrence Database (FPA FOD) includes nearly 1.6 million records from the 20 yr period, with values for at least the following core data elements: location, at least as precise as a Public Land Survey System section (2.6 km2 grid), discovery date, and final fire size. The FPA FOD is publicly available from the Research Data Archive of the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (doi:10.2737/RDS-2013-0009). While necessarily incomplete in some aspects, the database is intended to facilitate fairly high-resolution geospatial analysis of US wildfire activity over the past two decades, based on available information from the authoritative systems of record.

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Abstract. The statistical analysis of wildfire activity is a critical component of national wildfire planning, operations, and research in the United States (US). However, there are multiple federal, state, and local entities with wildfire protection and reporting responsibilities in the US, and no single, unified system of wildfire record-keeping exists. To conduct even the most rudimentary interagency analyses of wildfire numbers and area burned from the authoritative systems of record, one must harvest records from dozens of disparate databases with inconsistent information content. The onus is then on the user to check for and purge redundant records of the same fire (i.e. multijurisdictional incidents with responses reported by several agencies or departments) after pooling data from different sources. Here we describe our efforts to acquire, standardize, error-check, compile, scrub, and evaluate the completeness of US federal, state, and local wildfire records from 1992–2011 for the national, interagency Fire Program Analysis (FPA) application. The resulting FPA Fire-occurrence Database (FPA FOD) includes nearly 1.6 million records from the 20 yr period, with values for at least the following core data elements: location at least as precise as a Public Land Survey System section (2.6 km2 grid), discovery date, and final fire size. The FPA FOD is publicly available from the Research Data Archive of the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (doi:10.2737/RDS-2013-0009). While necessarily incomplete in some aspects, the database is intended to facilitate fairly high-resolution geospatial analysis of US wildfire activity over the past two decades, based on available information from the authoritative systems of record.

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This article describes the National Park Service's (NPS) progress in an ongoing effort to develop museum collection significance criteria for its geology, paleontology, biology, archeology, ethnography/ethnology, history, and archival collections. The goal is to create sets of significance criteria that are practical, flexible, recognize the associative value of the NPS's collections, and provide continuity and context for the stewardship of collections over time. Effective significance criteria will increase the intellectual understanding of collections; inform and record collection acquisition and deaccession; and assist in management decisions related to collections. This is an immense undertaking complicated by differences among disciplines and a large geographic scope. The significance criteria effort requires agency support through a national staff coordinator and funding for the final development and implementation phases.

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This paper reports on activities undertaken by the National Municipal League (NML) and the Public Administration Service (PAS) during the 1950’s and 1960’s to counter libelous and slanderous actions taken by grass roots activists in opposition to efforts to reform metropolitan governance across the United States. I utilize records from the NML archives—and give special attention to their “Smear File”—to chronicle and analyze the key events and actors. Specifically, I focus on the ideas of opponents of metropolitan government reform from the South and West in the United States including Jo Hindman, Dan Smoot, and Don Bell. These individuals used right-wing idea distribution vehicles including magazines, small-town newspapers, and subscription newsletters to disseminate their arguments and rally support for their cause. I also analyze the actions of their foes at the NML and PAS—namely those of Alfred Willoughby, Executive Director of the National Municipal League; H.G. Pope, President of the Public Administration Service;Richard S. Childs, former President of the National Municipal League; and Karl Detzer,Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest and contributing writer for the National Municipal Review, the academic and professional journal of the National Municipal League. This study adds to the literature explaining the lack of metropolitan governmental frameworks at the local level in the United States, which has been built on the work of Charles Tiebout, Vincent Ostrom, Robert Bish, Ronald Oakerson, and Roger Parks. Although this analysis is idiographic and historical in perspective, it does not necessarily challenge the core empirical results of the nomothetic modeling of these scholars.

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AbstractThis article examines the historical and cultural significance of the attempted ban on the Beatles’ concerts in the US by the American Federation of Musicians and the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States government in 1964. While there has been much attention given to the court case against John Lennon waged by the INS and the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, much less is known about the earlier case brought against the Beatles by the INS and the Department of Labor on behalf of the AFM, which became a national scandal in 1964, pitting fans of the Beatles against the AFM and the INS. Fans framed the controversy over the Beatles as a cultural conflict between generations, while the AFM framed the problem as a labour market issue. My examination of the incident reveals the way in which a submerged cultural problem embedded in a putatively economic discourse rose to the surface through conflicts over the discursive framing of the Beatles controversy. This case is important not only in terms of expanding our empirical knowledge of the internal history of the Beatles and rock and roll music, but also more generally as an episode that foreshadowed the cultural conflict between the American labour union bureaucracy and the counter-culture that emerged in the late 1960s. This essay analyses heretofore-unexamined documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration.

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In 2006, the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project began a cooperative effort between the US Forest Service (USFS) and the U.S.Geological Survey (USGS) to map and assess burn severity all large fires that have occurred in the United States since 1984. Using Landsat imagery, MTBS is mandated to map wildfire and prescribed fire that meet specific size criteria: greater than 1000 acres in the west and 500 acres in the east, regardless of ownership. Relying mostly on federal and state fire occurrence records, over 15,300 individual fires have been mapped. While mapping recorded fires, an additional 2,700 "unknown" or undocumented fires were discovered and assessed. It has become apparent that there are perhaps thousands of undocumented fires in the US that are yet to be mapped. Fire occurrence records alone are inadequate if MTBS is to provide a comprehensive accounting of fire across the US. Additionally, the sheer number of fires to assess has overwhelmed current manual procedures. To address these problems, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Applied Sciences Program is helping to fund the efforts of the USGS and its MTBS partners (USFS, National Park Service) to develop, and implement a system to automatically identify fires using satellite data. In near real time, USGS will combine active fire satellite detections from MODIS, AVHRR and GOES satellites with Landsat acquisitions. Newly acquired Landsat imagery will be routinely scanned to identify freshly burned area pixels, derive an initial perimeter and tag the burned area with the satellite date and time of detection. Landsat imagery from the early archive will be scanned to identify undocumented fires. Additional automated fire assessment processes will be developed. The USGS will develop these processes using open source software packages in order to provide freely available tools to local land managers providing them with the capability to assess fires at the local level.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower's legacy as President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 has experienced a dramatic reversal in scholarly assessment. Previously denounced as a "do-nothing" president whose ignorance and complacency tarnished the prestige of the executive office, the declassification of National Security Archives, the publication of Eisenhower's memoirs, and the memoirs of those closest to the president has contributed to a shift in Eisenhower's reputation from animosity to admiration. Scholars now praise Eisenhower for his modesty, wisdom, and resourcefulness. This paper contributes to the ongoing historiographical revaluation of Eisenhower's presidential legacy by examining his handling of an overlooked episode of American history - the Sputnik Crisis of 1957. Upon receiving word of the successful launch of the Soviet satellite in October 1957, Eisenhower surrounded himself with scientists, academics, and engineers to formulate the most appropriate policy responses to Sputnik, and to refute Congressional calls for increased military spending. As such, Eisenhower accelerated the American satellite program, established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), reorganized the Department of Defense to eliminate inter-service rivalry, and provided for moderate infusions of federal funding into post-secondary education via the National Defense Education Act. Indeed, Eisenhower's strategic handling of the Sputnik Crisis cements Eisenhower's reputation as an effective, proactive, and overall effective president.

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Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States. There is a wealth of US wildfire activity data available for such analyses, but users must be aware of inherent reporting biases, inconsistencies and uncertainty in the data in order to maximise the integrity and utility of their work. Data for analysis are generally acquired from archival summary reports of the federal or interagency fire organisations; incident-level wildfire reporting systems of the federal, state and local fire services; and, increasingly, remote-sensing programs. This paper provides an overview of each of these sources and the major reporting biases, inconsistencies and uncertainty within them. Use of national fire reporting systems by state and local fire organisations has been rising in recent decades, providing an improved set of incident-level (documentary) data for all-lands analyses of wildfire activity. A recent effort to compile geospatial documentary fire records for the USA for 1992–2013 has been completed. The resulting dataset has been evaluated for completeness using archival summary reports and includes a linkage to a widely used, remotely sensed wildfire perimeter dataset.

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Abstract The authors identify the flashiest watersheds in the contiguous United States based on frequency of discharge peaks exceeding 1 m3 s−1 km−2. The entire digitized record of USGS instantaneous discharge data is used for all stream gauging stations with over 10 years of data. Using the 1 m3 s−1 km−2 threshold, the flashiest basins in the contiguous United States are located in urban areas along a swath of states from the south-central United States to the mid-Atlantic and in mountainous areas of the West Coast, especially the Pacific Northwest. The authors focus on small watersheds to identify the flashiest cities and states across the country and find Tulsa, Oklahoma; Baltimore, Maryland; and St. Louis, Missouri, to be the flashiest cities in the contiguous United States. Thunderstorms are major agents for peak-over-threshold flood events east of the Rocky Mountains, and tropical cyclones play a secondary role, especially in the Southeast. West Coast flood events are associated with winter storms. Flooding west of and within the Rockies is linked to steeply sloped terrain and compact watersheds. East of the Rockies, urban areas dominate flashy watersheds. The authors find that watersheds northeast (downwind) of city centers are flashier than other urban watersheds, consistent with the downwind maximum in rainfall found in many urban regions. They examine anomalous flood response in the Illinois–Missouri region; St. Louis is among the flashiest cities in the United States, while Chicago is among the least flashy. Their flashiness map is compared with other measures of flooding, including flood damage and National Weather Service flash flood reports.

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Abstract. The United States government has operated Dobson ozone spectrophotometers at various sites, starting during the International Geophysical Year (1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958). A network of stations for long-term monitoring of the total column content (thickness of the ozone layer) of the atmosphere was established in the early 1960s and eventually grew to 16 stations, 14 of which are still operational and submit data to the United States of America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Seven of these sites are also part of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC), an organization that maintains its own data archive. Due to recent changes in data processing software the entire dataset was re-evaluated for possible changes. To evaluate and minimize potential changes caused by the new processing software, the reprocessed data record was compared to the original data record archived in the World Ozone and UV Data Center (WOUDC) in Toronto, Canada. The history of the observations at the individual stations, the instruments used for the NOAA network monitoring at the station, the method for reducing zenith-sky observations to total ozone, and calibration procedures were re-evaluated using data quality control tools built into the new software. At the completion of the evaluation, the new datasets are to be published as an update to the WOUDC and NDACC archives, and the entire dataset is to be made available to the scientific community. The procedure for reprocessing Dobson data and the results of the reanalysis on the archived record are presented in this paper. A summary of historical changes to 14 station records is also provided.

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The cooling during the Pliocene that preceded major continental glaciation in North America is recorded by thick fluvial and lacustrine sequences at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument (HAFO) in southcentral Idaho (McDonald et al., 1996). Fossiliferous beds at HAFO occur within the nearly 200 m of exposed Glenns Ferry Formation west of the Snake River. This formation extends from southwestern Idaho into easternmost Oregon (Malde and Powers, 1962). The Glenns Ferry Formation within HAFO contains hundreds of localities that are within the Blancan North American Land Mammal Age. Collection of specimens from these localities since the late 1920s has resulted in large repositories of fossils currently housed, in part, at the United States National Museum, the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology (UMMP), and the Idaho Museum of Natural History (IMNH); additionally, smaller collections were accumulated by other museums (McDonald et al., 1996). Today the paleontological resources of HAFO are stewarded by the National Park Service. In spite of the extensive previous collections, significant new discoveries are still being made at HAFO.

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Background Providing HIV/STD testing and prevention education, medical and nonmedical case management, housing assistance, transportation services, and patient navigation are just a few examples of how community-based HIV/AIDS service organizations will help the United States realize the goals of the updated National HIV/AIDS Strategy. Objective In this study, the aim was to assess electronic data security confidence level, electronic communication behaviors, and interest in using eHealth communication tools with clients of staff at community-based HIV/AIDS service organizations. Methods Staff were recruited from 7 community-based HIV/AIDS service organizations in the southern United States (3 in South Carolina and 4 in Texas). The principal investigator used state department of health websites to identify community-based HIV/AIDS service organizations. Staff were included if they provided HIV/STD prevention education to clients. A recruitment letter was sent to community-based HIV/AIDS service organization leaders who then used snowball sampling to recruit eligible staff. Chi-square tests were used. Results Among staff (n=59) who participated in the study, 66% (39/59) were very or completely confident that safeguards are in place to keep electronically shared information from being seen by other people; 68% (40/59) used email, 58% (34/59) used text messages, 25% (15/59) used social media, 15% (9/59) used a mobile app, 8% (5/59) used web-enabled videoconferencing, and 3% (2/59) used other tools (eg, electronic medical record, healthnavigator.com website) to communicate electronically with their clients. More than half were very interested in using eHealth communication tools in the future for sharing appointment reminders (67%, 38/59) and general health tips (61%, 34/59) with their clients. Half were very interested in using eHealth communication tools in the future to share HIV medication reminders with their clients (50%, 29/59). Forty percent (23/59) were very interested in using eHealth communication tools to share vaccination reminders with their clients. Conclusions Community-based HIV/AIDS service organization staff had some level of confidence that safeguards were in place to keep electronically shared information from being seen by other people. This is critically important given the sensitivity of the information shared between community-based HIV/AIDS service organization staff and their clients, and because many staff were very interested in using eHealth communication tools with their clients in the future. It is very likely that eHealth communication tools can be used in community settings to improve health outcomes across the HIV care continuum; in the interim, more research is needed to better understand factors that may facilitate or impede community-based HIV/AIDS service organization staff use and client acceptability.

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The article examines evolution of scholarly approaches towards the phenomenon of the “national security.” By the early 21st century this notion found its way in the official strategic documents of a wide range of states. The authors examine the Russian and international record of analysis in the field of national security, and assess the adequacy of existing views on this subject taking in the account emerging threats, risks and challenges, as well as the tasks of sustainable development of a country in the social, economic, political, information, spiritual and other areas. They start by presenting the early conceptualizations of this term in the debates of American experts in the 1950s and the 1960s. An important innovation of that period was disentanglement of the national security from purely territorial and military threat, by preparing for other types of contingencies. The article additionally examines the struggle between two alternative approaches towards protecting the national security in the United States: the one founded on unilateral domination and the other prioritizing collective actions. It demonstrates that the one important result of the Western debates was the emergence of a new field of study defined by policy relevant studies, which produce useful, original, and verifiable inferences, which are then injected in decision-making process. In order to promote a similar institutionalized expertise, the article suggests seceding the study of the national security in a separate discipline. This step will enable to further promote the training of specialists not only in the field of national security and strategic planning, but also political scientists and future specialists for the public service. The need for this is obviously related to the tasks of improving the quality of policy making and strategic planning in the Russian Federation, the implementation of national projects in an extremely complex international environment.

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This historical review explores Harvey Cushing's difficulties with both the British and American armies during his World War I service to definitively examine the rumor of his possible court martial. It also provides a further understanding of Cushing the man. While in France during World War I, Cushing was initially assigned to British hospital units. This service began in May 1917 and ended abruptly in May 1918 when the British cashiered him for repeated censorship violations. Returning to American command, he feared court martial. The army file on this matter (retrieved from the United States National Archives) indicates that US Army authorities recommended that Cushing be reprimanded and returned to the US for his violations. The army carried out neither recommendation, and no evidence exists that a court martial was considered. Cushing's army career and possible future academic life were protected by the actions of his surgical peers and Merritte Ireland, Chief Surgeon of the US Army in France. After this censorship episode, Cushing was made a neurosurgical consultant but was also sternly warned that further rule violations would not be tolerated by the US Army. Thereafter, despite the onset of a severe peripheral neuropathy, probably Guillian Barré's syndrome, Cushing was indefatigable in ministering to neurosurgical needs in the US sector in France. Cushing's repeated defying of censorship regulations reveals poor judgment plus an initial inability to be a “team player.” The explanations he offered for his censorship violations showed an ability to bend the truth. Cushing's war journal is unclear as to exactly what transpired between him and the British and US armies. It also shows no recognition of the help he received from others who were instrumental in preventing his ignominious removal from service in France. Had that happened, his academic future and ability to train future neurosurgical leaders may have been seriously threatened. Cushing's foibles notwithstanding, all realized that he contributed greatly to both British and US war neurosurgery. United States Army surgeons who operated upon brain wounds in France recognized Cushing as their leader.

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Wildfire danger assessment is essential for operational allocation of fire management resources; with longer lead prediction, the more efficiently can resources be allocated regionally. Traditional studies focus on meteorological forecasts and fire danger index models (e.g., National Fire Danger Rating System—NFDRS) for predicting fire danger. Meteorological forecasts, however, lose accuracy beyond ~10 days; as such, there is no quantifiable method for predicting fire danger beyond 10 days. While some recent studies have statistically related hydrologic parameters and past wildfire area burned or occurrence to fire, no study has used these parameters to develop a monthly spatially distributed predictive model in the contiguous United States. Thus, the objective of this study is to introduce Fire Danger from Earth Observations (FDEO), which uses satellite data over the contiguous United States (CONUS) to enable two-month lead time prediction of wildfire danger, a sufficient lead time for planning purposes and relocating resources. In this study, we use satellite observations of land cover type, vapor pressure deficit, surface soil moisture, and the enhanced vegetation index, together with the United States Forest Service (USFS) verified and validated fire database (FPA) to develop spatially gridded probabilistic predictions of fire danger, defined as expected area burned as a deviation from “normal”. The results show that the model predicts spatial patterns of fire danger with 52% overall accuracy over the 2004–2013 record, and up to 75% overall accuracy during the fire season. Overall accuracy is defined as number of pixels with correctly predicted fire probability classes divided by the total number of the studied pixels. This overall accuracy is the first quantified result of two-month lead prediction of fire danger and demonstrates the potential utility of using diverse observational data sets for use in operational fire management resource allocation in the CONUS.

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Cloud cover data from ground-based weather observers can be an important source of climate information, but the record of such observations in the United States is disrupted by the introduction of automated observing systems and other artificial shifts that interfere with our ability to assess changes in cloudiness at climate time scales. A new dataset using 54 National Weather Service (NWS) and 101 military stations that continued to make human-augmented cloud observations after the 1990s has been adjusted using statistical changepoint detection and visual scrutiny. The adjustments substantially reduce the trends in U.S. mean total cloud cover while increasing the agreement between the cloud cover time series and those of physically related climate variables. For 1949–2009, the adjusted time series give a trend in U.S. mean total cloud of 0.11% ± 0.22% decade−1 for the military data, 0.55% ± 0.24% decade−1 for the NWS data, and 0.31% ± 0.22% decade−1 for the combined dataset. These trends are less than one-half of those in the original data. For 1976–2004, the original data give a significant increase but the adjusted data show an insignificant trend from −0.17% decade−1 (military stations) to 0.66% decade−1 (NWS stations). Trends have notable regional variability, with the northwest United States showing declining total cloud cover for all time periods examined, while trends for most other regions are positive. Differences between trends in the adjusted datasets from military stations and NWS stations may be rooted in the difference in data source and reflect the uncertainties in the hom*ogeneity adjustment process.

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In this publication, an overview of the American-Ukrainian collection of scientific articles and materials «Sharing America’s Story With Ukraine: The Voice of America’s Ukrainian Service, 1949–2019», presented in Ukraine and the United States is carried out. Collection, prepared on the initiative of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Foreign Countries of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, of the Ukrainian Museum-Archive in Cleveland and the Ukrainian Association of American Studies, dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Ukrainian Service «Voice of America». It first reviewed the history of the Ukrainian service «Voice of America» from the appearance of until now. Attention is accentuated in the most important milestones and aspects of its activities, in particular in the conditions of ideological and information struggle of the USA and the USSR in the Cold War, coverage of independent Ukraine, its socio-political transformations and revolutionary events of the modern time, the contribution of Ukrainian service «Voice of America» in the formation of Ukrainian democratic media, etc. Also the collection included general research on the history of service, an overview of the context of its work and research on several directors. Particularly valuable are the memoirs of Adrian Karmazyn about his almost 30-years work for the «Voice of America» and a number of documents of Soviet special services associated with Western radio voices. Articles included in the collection prepared primarily on the basis of unique documents on personal archives, as well as the Sectocal state archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, memoirs of participants in fateful events, the most significant video materials and publications placed on the official website of the Ukrainian service «Voice of America». The importance of the appearance of such publications, and in particular this collection certifies attention to it and positive reviews of Ukrainian and American scientists, media, representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States. As well as the spread of a collection on authoritative websites, for example, in one of the largest resources of the Ukrainian diaspora «Diasporiana.org.ua». And although the collection of articles and materials «Sharing America’s Story With Ukraine: The Voice of America’s Ukrainian Service, 1949-2019» came out quite voluminous, many aspects of the history of the Ukrainian «Voice of America» remained unproven and need further research. Thus, the publication should be considered as a peculiar foundation for a further purposeful comprehensive study of the history of the Ukrainian service «Voice of America», published in it articles and materials, undoubtedly will be useful to the next researchers. The presentation of the collection took place on February 12, 2020 at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv on the basis of the Department of New and Contemporary History of Foreign Countries. Members of the author’s team, teachers and students – аmericanists of historical faculty, correspondents of «Voice of America» took part in it, as well as in video conference – one of the compilers and editors of the collection Adrian Karmazyn from Washington and the director of the Ukrainian Archive-Museum in Cleveland Andriy Fedynskiy. During the discussion about the role and place of «Voice of America» in the Ukrainian and world information space, the presentation participants emphasized the relevance and prospects of further research of the history of its Ukrainian service.

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In Antarctica an astonishing more than 300 ‘medical’ place-names record the lives of surgeons and physicians who have served as leaders, clinicians and scientists in the field of polar medicine and other doctors memorialized for their service to medicine. These enduring medical memorials are to be found in the names of glaciers, mountains, capes and islands of the vast frozen Southern Continent. This Antarctic Medical Gazetteer features, inter alii, doctor-expedition leaders, including Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1867–1936) of France and Desmond Lugg (b. 1938) of Australia. The Medical Gazetteer lists 43 geographical features on Brabant Island that were named after famous doctors. This Gazetteer also includes a collection of medical place-names on the Loubet Coast honouring Dr John Cardell (1896–1966) and nine other pioneers who worked on the prevention of snow blindness and four islands of the Lyall Islands Group, including Surgeon Island, named after United States Antarctic Medical Officers. Eleven geographic features (mountains, islands, nunataks, lakes and more) are named after Australian doctors who have served with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions based at Davis Station. Biographic memorials in Antarctica comprise a collective witness of esteem, honouring in particular those doctors who have served in Antarctica where death and injury remains a constant threat.

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Abstract Abstract 173FN2 Introduction: Multiple government organizations (i.e. the Joint Commission in the United States and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the United Kingdom) mandate venous thrombosis (VT) risk assessment for hospitalized patients and provision of VT prophylaxis, however there are no validated VT risk assessment models (RAM) available for use in medical inpatients. Methods: Between January 2002 and June 2009 all cases of VT complicating medical admissions were identified using ICD-9 codes and confirmed by medical record review at a 500 bed teaching hospital. Two controls without VT were frequency matched to each case by admission service (medicine, cardiology, and oncology) and admission year. VT required positive imaging or autopsy. Medical history, presenting conditions, and use of VT prophylaxis in cases and controls were assessed by chart review. Weighted logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (OR) and the Taylor series method for 95% confidence intervals (CI) accounting for VT prophylaxis use (both mechanical and pharmacologic). A RAM was developed using clinical judgment and sequentially adding risk factors into a multivariable model. A point value was assigned for each risk factor by dividing the b coefficients' by the lowest b coefficient value and rounding to the nearest integer. To validate the model, the 95% CI for the C-statistic was calculated using bootstrapping with 1000 replicate samples. Results: 299 cases of VT and 601 matched controls were reviewed. The rate of VT per 1000 admissions (95% CI) was 4.6 (3.9, 5.4). Table 1 presents the RAM with the point value for each risk factor. The c-statistic for the model was 0.73 (95% CI 0.70, 0.76). Using a cut-off of ≥2 points as high risk, 79% of cases and 39% of controls were classified as high risk. The probability of VT in the absence of VT prophylaxis for a score <2 was 1.5 (95% CI 1.0, 2.3) per 1000 admissions and for a score ≥2 was 8.8 (95% CI 4.1, 18.8) per 1000 admissions. To evaluate a score assessed by clinical characteristics only, we assessed a score with the same risk factors but removing platelet count and white cell count from the model. The C-statistic was 0.71 (95% CI 0.68, 0.74) and 74% of cases and 39% of controls were high risk. Stratification by admission service or admission to an intensive care unit did not affect interpretation of the results. Conclusion: We present an internally validated RAM that assesses the risk of VT complicating medical admission. The score is simple, relies only on information easily known at the time of admission, and could be incorporated into an electronic medical record. It will allow clinicians to assess VT risk at admission for medical inpatients and weigh the risks and benefits of pharmacologic VT prophylaxis. The RAM will enable further studies to determine optimal VT prevention strategies in medical inpatients. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

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A Review of: Reeves, R., & Hahn, T. (2010). Job advertisem*nts for recent graduates: Advising, curriculum, and job-seeking implications. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 51(2), 103-119. Objective – To analyze the current state of the job market for recent MLS or MLIS graduates. Design – Content analysis of job postings. Setting – Online library or archival job advertisem*nts published between 15 April, 2006 and 10 May, 2009 and collected from two national library publications (American Libraries and Library Journal), two electronic lists (Maryland's iSchool Discussion list and the Archives and Archivists list sponsored by the Society of American Archivists), two Internet job banks (USAJobs.gov and LISJobs.com), and several local chapters of library and archival organizations in the South Atlantic region of the United States. Subjects – 1,042 online library or archival job advertisem*nts. Salary data were obtained from 401 available online job advertisem*nts. Methods – The methodology for collection and content analysis of job ads was adapted from earlier studies, with slight modification wherever appropriate. The following criteria for selecting the ads were applied: • Ad says "entry-level" • No mention of professional experience • No experience or duties impossible for entry-level librarians to gain • Only ads that required an MLS or MLIS degree from an ALA-accredited institution • Part-time or temporary positions of less than nine months were excluded The authors removed duplicated job postings and identified three major areas of content analysis. Table 1 lists a brief summary of these areas and further sub-categories for each area. The content analysis was performed using a custom Microsoft Access database for data organization and storage and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for data manipulation. SPSS was used for statistical analysis. Main Results – The two largest represented institution types for library positions were academic (63.6%) and public (17.5%). For archival positions, the academic (62.7%) and “other” (25.4%) institutions rank first and second. When the job ads were broken down into the position types, which were covering a wide range of responsibilities, the greatest numbers of entry-level library positions are found to be public service (52.2%) and technical services (23.9%) positions. The two largest represented position types in archives are technical services (50.7 %) and generalist (40.5%). While average salaries increased slightly over the four years of study, there is a more significant increase in the salaries of positions posted in 2009. The highest average salaries were found to be $43K for archivists working for government and $60K for library positions in the “other” category. In addition, the number of entry-level positions has increased from year to year over this period. Social competencies such as communication, collaboration and team work, and service orientation were the most emphasized traits for novice librarians and archivists. General information technology skills and knowledge of technical services were the most common skills required for both library and archive positions. Overall, the entry-level job postings did not require non-professional experience. However, 13.6% of the library and 18.7% of the archival positions required supervisory experience. Experience with preservation of physical objects and the knowledge of programming and mark-up languages were also common requirements for archives positions. Instructional and reference experience ranks the second and third essential skills for librarians. Conclusion – Based on the research results, a graduate degree in library or information science is required, but not sufficient, to enter the profession. Practical experience, either through internships, co-op programs, or part-time or full-time employment, is essential for new graduates seeking employment, but the majority of postings do not require a subject expertise, second Master’s degree, or knowledge of a foreign language. Since the job content analysis in this study only evaluated broad components of library services and archival operation, it might not provide sufficient data on new trends in the job market for the MLS curriculum review.

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In the midwestern United States, the summertime rise in infection rate by the West Nile virus is associated with a seasonal shift in the abundance of two mosquito populations, Culex restuans and Culex pipiens. This seasonal shift usually precedes the time of the peak infection rate in mosquitoes by 2–3 weeks and generally occurs earlier in the summer with above normal temperatures and later in the summer with below-normal temperatures. Two empirical models were developed to predict this seasonal shift in mosquito species, or the “crossover,” and have been run operationally since 2004 by the Midwestern Regional Climate Center located at the Illinois State Water Survey. These models are based on daily temperature data and have been verified by use of a unique dataset of daily records of mosquito species abundance collected by the Illinois Natural History Survey. An unfortunate characteristic of the original temperature models was that the crossover date often was reached with little or no lead time. In 2009, the models were modified to incorporate National Weather Service (NWS) model output statistics (MOS) 10-day temperature forecasts. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of these models to predict the crossover date and thus the period of increased risk of West Nile virus in the Midwest. For the 8-yr period from 2002 to 2009, 6 yr had at least one model predicting the crossover within one week of the actual crossover date, and for 7 yr at least one of the model predictions was within 2 weeks of the actual crossover date. Incorporation of MOS temperature forecasts for a 10-day period, although not substantially changing the predicted crossover date, greatly improved the forecast lead time by about 9 days. From a disease management point of view, this improvement in advanced notice is significant. In 2009, there was an unprecedented early crossover date and a failed forecast. The poor forecast was likely caused by an unusually early summer prolonged and intense heat wave, followed immediately by a record cold July.

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AbstractThe development of databases to track the outcomes of children with cardiovascular disease has been ongoing for much of the last two decades, paralleled by the rise of databases in the intensive care unit. While the breadth of data available in national, regional and local databases has grown exponentially, the ability to identify meaningful measurements of outcomes for patients with cardiovascular disease is still in its early stages.In the United States of America, the Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Performance System (VPS) is a clinically based database system for the paediatric intensive care unit that provides standardized high quality, comparative data to its participants [https://portal.myvps.org/]. All participants collect information on multiple parameters: (1) patients and their stay in the hospital, (2) diagnoses, (3) interventions, (4) discharge, (5) various measures of outcome, (6) organ donation, and (7) paediatric severity of illness scores. Because of the standards of quality within the database, through customizable interfaces, the database can also be used for several applications: (1) administrative purposes, such as assessing the utilization of resources and strategic planning, (2) multi-institutional research studies, and (3) additional internal projects of quality improvement or research.In the United Kingdom, The Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network is a database established in 2002 to record details of the treatment of all critically ill children in paediatric intensive care units of the National Health Service in England, Wales and Scotland. The Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network was designed to develop and maintain a secure and confidential high quality clinical database of pediatric intensive care activity in order to meet the following objectives: (1) identify best clinical practice, (2) monitor supply and demand, (3) monitor and review outcomes of treatment episodes, (4) facilitate strategic healthcare planning, (5) quantify resource requirements, and (6) study the epidemiology of critical illness in children.Two distinct physiologic risk adjustment methodologies are the Pediatric Risk of Mortality Scoring System (PRISM), and the Paediatric Index of Mortality Scoring System 2 (PIM 2). Both Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM 2) and Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM 3) are comprised of clinical variables that include physiological and laboratory measurements that are weighted on a logistic scale. The raw Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM) score provides quantitative measures of severity of illness. The Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM) score when used in a logistic regression model provides a probability of the predicted risk of mortality. This predicted risk of mortality can then be used along with the rates of observed mortality to provide a quantitative measurement of the Standardized Mortality Ratio (SMR). Similar to the Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM) scoring system, the Paediatric Index of Mortality (PIM) score is comprised of physiological and laboratory values and provides a quantitative measurement to estimate the probability of death using a logistic regression model.The primary use of national and international databases of patients with congenital cardiac disease should be to improve the quality of care for these patients. The utilization of common nomenclature and datasets by the various regional subspecialty databases will facilitate the eventual linking of these databases and the creation of a comprehensive database that spans conventional geographic and subspecialty boundaries.

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Why should international educators encourage research abroad? The work of the students represented in this Special Volume of Frontiers exemplifies the best of undergraduate research abroad. Their research shows an achievement of one, or all, of the goals international educators typically set for learning abroad: linguistic competence, cross-cultural skills, cultural competence, and disciplinary learning. Research abroad often holds strong incentives for successful student learning. Students choose their own research topics, providing intrinsic motivation to move beyond superficial explorations of their topic. Fulfilling faculty expectations for student learning, whether in the form of a paper, thesis, data collection or ethnographic study provides extrinsic motivation. The value of disciplinary learning abroad, especially in course-based programs, disputed on home campuses. Undergraduate research abroad can demonstrate that the cultural context of learning enhances the disciplinary knowledge gained. Disciplinary learning in another cultural context can correct culturally-ingrained research biases. Students gain knowledge difficult to capture without the cultural exposure provided by the experience abroad, which informs their work with nuances of first-hand research, moving it beyond the intellectual. Home-campus faculty may be less skeptical of the merits of sending students abroad for disciplinary learning if that experience results in an increase in knowledge or a demonstration of the application of previously gained disciplinary knowledge in a new context. Developing research skills in an international context means that students must learn how to navigate in another culture. Students must interact with people who are not their peers and who are outside a traditional classroom setting. By approaching organizations and individuals that inform their research, students learn much about the workings of the culture. And success in one attempt to navigate a host-culture can lead to success in further attempts. For the student-researcher, persistence is necessary because their research goal depends on successfully gaining access to the information they require. Cross-cultural skills are the tools that enable student-researchers to accomplish their goals and finish their projects. In order to achieve this in non-English language locations, students must develop a certain level of linguistic competence or, if using an interpreter, basic forms of communication in the host language. They must develop these competencies not only in everyday topics, but also in their fields of research. How will they ask about their topic if they do not learn some of the vocabulary? How will they obtain the help or information they need if they cannot ask people for it in appropriate forms? Since a research project typically requires a number of weeks to complete, student-researchers are likely to use these linguistic skills on an on-going basis. As a result, the linguistic competency gained is reinforced, and becomes more permanent. This cultural and linguistic learning can lead students to develop generalized cross-cultural skills with the assistance of international educators. We can provide valuable help to students doing research by asking them questions that will encourage them to realize that these skills transfer into other cultural situations. Often it requires simple queries: “What did you do to get this information? Did you have someone specific in the culture that gave you good advice? How did you find this person? What steps did you take when you succeeded in doing a piece of your research? When you did not succeed how did you figure out what went wrong? What did you do to try again? Beyond these basic questions, there are larger ones that can spur on student learning: “What did you learn from doing this project that would allow you to do another one in a completely different culture? How did you make sure your project was culturally appropriate? Did you think about making your project useful for local people? How would you share these results in the most effective way?” In posing these questions, we encourage students to examine the specific context of their research, and also to consider a meta-level analysis that places their research in a broader context. The hope is that students will see these skills in the wider global context, and that future cultural learning will be analyzed in a similar manner and transferred into other cross-cultural situations. If we achieve this, then we have certainly met the highest goals of encouraging students to learn to transcend cultural differences in constructive ways and to adapt to differing cultural modes as appropriate. Student research abroad can be a powerful way to accomplish all types of cultural learning. Supporting Undergraduate Research Abroad Even with these benefits, not many undergraduate students undertake research opportunities abroad. Faculty may advise students that research in their chosen discipline is better done at home, given the resources of the home campus. Students may be told that their language skills are not strong enough or that they are simply not mature enough as scholars in their disciplines to conduct relevant research. Students may be encouraged to conduct research or participate in directed study, but not to do field work or participate in experiential learning. A student may be able to receive credit for an internship that requires a substantial paper, but not for an ethnographic study. Moreover, the very idea of conducting research may be daunting to some students. Efforts should be made to advertise existing research opportunities abroad and to encourage new ideas for conducting research. If undergraduate research is endorsed by the highest academic officers of our institutions, our Presidents, Provosts and Academic Deans, faculty are more likely to provide encouragement and support, and then students will be more likely to pursue these options. International educators can assist these efforts by creating programs that offer research options, advertising such programs, and, most importantly, finding funding sources for such efforts. In order for students to take advantage of possible opportunities, it may be necessary to find ways to register students who might otherwise travel abroad independently (and thereby not be registered at their home institutions) in credit-bearing programs that would make them eligible for funding. The National Security Education Program David L. Boren Undergraduate Scholarships provides a model that allows advanced undergraduates with strong language skills to apply for funding for individually-arranged, supervised independent study. International educators may also help by designing processes on the home campus that support student research abroad. Research can take many forms, from the use of original documents and artifacts in libraries, archives, and museums, to service-learning, conducting field work, joining a research group, conducting interviews, doing a creative project, or interning or volunteering for an organization. On-campus administrative processes should make clear to students what types of projects are eligible to receive credit. If a student expects to receive credit at their home institution, they need to be able to review easily the criteria for determining whether credit will be granted with the appropriate on-campus authority (e.g. academic dean, department head, or registrar). Receiving credit helps to motivate the student and to validate the undertaking; making the credit-granting process clear can make a big difference to students exploring these options. It also assures that there will be faculty input, if not throughout the project, at least in the determination of granting credit on the home campus. In designing programs abroad with research components, faculty involvement is essential. Indeed, faculty supervision and support can make or break such projects for students. Faculty supervisors on the home campus or abroad will be more likely to agree to support a student researcher if they feel that this is a recognized part of their teaching. The supervision of an independent study can be time-consuming. Do departments consider this supervision when assigning workloads? Is extra compensation provided? Should these financial concerns be addressed in the budgets of the abroad programs? Can students continue follow-up work with faculty after they return home? Faculty supervision of student research abroad may follow various models. In some cases, research is an integral part of a study abroad program. Arrangements may be made to train the student on-site, perhaps as part of a course. The student conducts the research on-site, under the supervision of a resident director, or an on-site faculty member, and the course ultimately becomes a part of the student’s academic record, along with all other courses taken abroad. Another model has a faculty member at the student’s home institution supervising the student, along with some support given by a local faculty member. This model requires effective communication between the student and the faculty member on the home campus. In both cases clear goals need to be established about the nature of the project, research methods, and the final product. Fortunately, many of these formats can follow timelines and processes already developed on the home campus. However, once in the host country, parameters may change. Students may discover new opportunities, or their original ideas and plans may not be feasible. The logistics of conducting research in an international setting may make it impossible to keep to the original goals. In addition to guiding research and assessing the final product, faculty can serve in other important roles. They may introduce students to opportunities to submit their work for publication, present it at professional conferences, or compete for academic awards. Undergraduate research funding from the home institution might require a student to present their findings. Some institutions organize annual opportunities for students to give oral presentations or poster sessions during research fairs or conferences on campus. Others have a journal of student research. Resources and opportunities that are provided to students who conduct research on campus should also be extended to those whose work is done overseas. In many cases students may use the research conducted abroad as the foundation for a senior thesis. Students may choose to conduct independent research abroad. If students do research and are not enrolled in a program (e.g., during the summer) and have been encouraged to do so by their institution, have received funds from their institution, and will perhaps receive credit, their home institution should prepare them for the experience. Faculty and administrators should conduct seminars, orientation programs, and research methodology sessions to prepare students. Institutions should consider offering benefits to individual students that they would normally offer to students going abroad on registered study abroad programs (i.e., access to emergency services). By regularizing these aspects of going abroad, even to conduct independent research, institutions will be better able to track students who are conducting research abroad. At the minimum, students going abroad independently should be directed to information sources on health, safety, and security preparations when traveling to the host country. Additionally, students should be made aware of any legal issues related to doing research, and have their proposals vetted through the usual campus channels such as institutional review boards. Outcomes of Student Research Little data exists on how many students conduct research abroad, or on how this experience affects their academic work when they return to campus as well as their career decisions after graduation. Currently the national data on study abroad from the Institute of International Education’s annual Open Doors report documents only participation in credit-bearing programs. No statistics are kept on the numbers of students conducting research abroad who will not receive credit for their research. Among the questions this lack of data raises are: Are these students more likely to attend graduate school in their major discipline and to look for opportunities to conduct research abroad? Are they more likely to pursue independent research in sites that are less common as study abroad destinations? If they conducted research in a foreign language, are they more likely to study this language at an advanced level? The Lincoln Commission articulates the need for more in-depth international educational experiences, of which research can play an important part: An understanding of the diverse cultures of the world, especially those of developing countries, should be an essential component of the 21st-century education of our nation’s students. Direct exposure to foreign languages and other aspects of these cultures can best be achieved through a meaningful study abroad experience. Broader global awareness among America’s future leaders will, in turn, lead to more effective U.S. foreign policy, greater security from terrorism and economic resilience in the increasingly competitive world of trade. The research benefits discussed above mesh well with the current national interests that call for broader global awareness, and international educators should seriously consider designing and supporting research opportunities as one of their efforts to increase such competencies. Conducting research abroad can be one of the most personally satisfying parts of a student’s undergraduate academic career. These undertakings can also be frustrating and fraught with difficulties unless there is good planning and communication with a students’ academic advisors. International educators can assist in making these opportunities as effective, safe, and rewarding as possible. Faculty and administrators should look for ways to help students overcome the potential barriers to a successful experience, including the credit-approval process, organizing faculty supervision, and accessing information about opportunities, as well as funding. Since undergraduate student research abroad can lead to improved linguistic competence, cross-cultural skills, cultural competence, and disciplinary knowledge, we should do everything we can to develop and promote it. Mell C. Bolen~ Brown University Pat Martin~ University of Pennsylvania About the IFSA Foundation: The IFSA Foundation was founded to assist the continuing advancement of international education through direct and indirect support of study abroad by undergraduate students from U.S. colleges and universities. This is the first foundation whose mission focuses exclusively on the advancement of study abroad as a major component of higher education in the United States The Directors of the Foundation believe that effective study abroad for U.S. students involves minimally a semester length experience and, wherever possible, close academic integration with recognized universities abroad and, in all cases, the provision by the program sponsors of comprehensive student services to maximize the academic and cultural benefit of the experience and provide for the welfare and security of students. The IFSA Foundation intends to concentrate on projects that will provide muchneeded strength to undergraduate study abroad in the United States: scholarships to extend opportunities (particularly among underrepresented groups); start-up funding for underdeveloped areas of semester and full year study abroad programs; and support for the development of innovative projects designed to broaden the scope of the undergraduate study abroad experience. The IFSA Foundation grants are given only to institutions; scholarship grants are not tied to participation of students on any particular program. For more information: http://www.theifsafoundation.org

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Background: Recent reports of the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), and the Office of Inspector General (OIG) expressed significant concern with overall fiscal sustainability of Medicare and exponential increase in costs for interventional pain management techniques. Interventional pain management (IPM) is an evolving specialty amenable to multiple influences. Evaluation and isolation of appropriate factors for increasing growth patterns have not been performed. Study Design: Analysis of the growth of interventional techniques in managing chronic pain in Medicare beneficiaries from 1997 to 2006. Objective: To evaluate the use of all interventional techniques. Methods: The standard 5% national sample of the CMS carrier claim record data for 1997, 2002, and 2006 was utilized. This data set provides information on Medicare enrollees in the feefor-service Medicare program. Current procedural technology (CPT) codes for 1997, 2002, and 2006 were used to identify the number of procedures performed each year, and trends in expenditures. Results: Interventional techniques increased significantly in Medicare beneficiaries from 1997 to 2006. Overall, there was an increase of 137% in patients utilizing IPM services with an increase of 197% in IPM services, per 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries. The majority of the increases were attributed to exponential growth in the performance of facet joint interventions. There was a 13.9-fold difference in the increase between the state with the lowest rate and the state with the highest rate in utilization patterns of interventional techniques (California 37% vs. Connecticut 514%), with an 11.6-fold difference between Florida and California (431% vs. 37% increase). In 2006, Florida showed a 12.7-fold difference compared to Hawaii with the lowest utilization rate. Hospital outpatient department (HOPD) expenses constituted the highest increase with fewer patients treated either in an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) or in-office setting. Overall HOPD payments constituted 5% of total 2006 Medicare payments, in contrast to 57% of total IPM payments, an 11.4-fold difference. Limitations: The limitations of this study include a lack of inclusion of Medicare participants in Medicare Advantage plans and potential documentation, coding, and billing errors. Conclusion: This study shows an overall increase of IPM services of 197% compared to an increase of 137% in patients utilizing IPM services from 1997 to 2006. Key words: Interventional techniques, interventional pain management, facet joint injections, epidural steroid injections, sacroiliac joint injections, chronic pain, chronic spinal pain, ambulatory surgery center (ASC), hospital outpatient department (HOPD)

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The article is dedicated to one of the “blank pages” in the historiography of Latvian libraries − the beginnings of children’s departments in public libraries and independent children’s libraries, from the idea, its implementation and the first twenty years of operation in the independent Republic of Latvia (1918−1940). As there are no academic or popular publications on this topic, the so-called historical method is used in the research, which allows the reconstruction of the emergence and development of Children’s departments in public libraries and children’s libraries in the context of the library sector’s development in Europe and the United States. The main base of the research: press articles and books of the respective period, as well as documents in the National Archives of Latvia on the children’s departments of Rīga public libraries. The study shows that the ideological justification for free children’s libraries in Latvia was the same as in Russia and Sweden: the public’s desire to protect children and young people from the harmful effects of “pulp” literature (at that time even the term “dirty” literature was used) and to offer them “good” books instead. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, Latvia lacked the main precondition – a network of free public libraries, within which children’s departments in public libraries or independent children’s libraries could be organised. The first children’s department in a public library was only opened in December 1919 in Liepāja (the largest city in Latvia’s Kurzeme region), thanks to the enthusiasm of publicist and politician, library manager Voldemārs Caune and his conviction of the need for such a service. Until the Soviet occupation, it was the only children’s department at a public library in the province. The situation in the capital Rīga was different. Here, the first children’s department aimed at reducing the “book famine” was established by the State Library of Latvia in February 1922, but soon other organisations became involved in the provision of library services to the younger gene­ration. During the first period of independence of the Republic of Latvia, ten Children’s departments were opened in the public library system and at least ten more children’s libraries were opened by charity organisations in different city districts. The encouragement of Caune and like-minded enthusiasts, mostly members of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Hermanis Kaupiņš, Teodors Līventāls, Emma Kalniņa, etc.) also played an important role in their establishment, as did the municipality’s readiness to provide the necessary financial support. Although the Liepāja and Rīga children’s libraries were used very actively, insufficient state and local government funding for libraries hindered the establishment of special library services for children in the rest of Latvia. Thus, until the Soviet occupation in 1940, a network of children’s departments at public libraries and children’s libraries was created only in Rīga. The Soviet occupation saw a new phase in the development of children’s library services, as the establishment of children’s departments at public libraries or separate children’s libraries became mandatory throughout Latvia.

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The forest volumes are essential as they are directly related to the economic and environmental values of the forests. Satellite-based forest volume estimation was first developed in the 1990s, and the accuracy of the estimation has been improved over time. One of the satellite-based forest volume estimation issues is that it tends to overestimate the large volume class and underestimate the small volume class. Free availability of the major satellite imagery and the development of cloud-based computational platforms facilitate an immense amount of satellite imagery in the estimation. In this paper, we set three objectives: (1) to examine whether the long Landsat time series contributes to the improvement of the estimation accuracy, (2) to explore the effectiveness of forest disturbance record and land cover data as ancillary spatial data on the accuracy of the estimation, and (3) to apply the bias correction method to reduce the bias of the estimation. We computed three Tasseled-cap components from the Landsat data for preparation of short (2014–2016) and long (1984–2016) time series. Each data entity was analyzed with harmonic regressions resulting in the coefficients and the fitted values recorded as pixel values in a multilayer raster database. Data included Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) unit field inventory measurements provided by the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the National Land Cover Database and disturbance history data added as ancillary information. The totality of the available data was organized into seven distinct Random Forest (RF) models with different variables compared against each other to identify the ones with the most satisfactory performance. A bias correction method was then applied to all the RF models to examine the effectiveness of the method. Among the seven models, the worst one used the coefficients and fitted values of the short Landsat time series only, and the best one used coefficients and fitted values of both short and long Landsat time series. Using the Out-of-bag (OOB) score, the best model was found to be 34.4% better than the worst one. The model that used only the long time series data had almost the same OOB score as the best model. The results indicate that the use of the long Landsat time series improves model performance. Contrary to the previous research employing forest disturbance data as a feature variable had almost no effect on OOB. The bias correction method reduced the relative size of the bias in the estimates of the best model from 3.79% to −1.47%, the bottom 10% bias by 12.5 points, and the top 10% bias by 9.9 points. Depending on the types of forest, important feature variables were differed, reflecting the relationship between the time series remote sensing data we computed for this research and the forests’ phenological characteristics. The availability of Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data and accessibility of the precise locations of the FIA data are likely to improve the model estimates further.

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The forest volumes are essential as they are directly related to the economic and environmental values of the forests. Satellite-based forest volume estimation was first developed in the 1990s, and the accuracy of the estimation has been improved over time. One of the satellite-based forest volume estimation issues is that it tends to overestimate the large volume class and underestimate the small volume class. Free availability of the major satellite imagery and the development of cloud-based computational platforms facilitate an immense amount of satellite imagery in the estimation. In this paper, we set three objectives: (1) to examine whether the long Landsat time series contributes to the improvement of the estimation accuracy, (2) to explore the effectiveness of forest disturbance record and land cover data as ancillary spatial data on the accuracy of the estimation, and (3) to apply the bias correction method to reduce the bias of the estimation. We computed three Tasseled-cap components from the Landsat data for preparation of short (2014–2016) and long (1984–2016) time series. Each data entity was analyzed with harmonic regressions resulting in the coefficients and the fitted values recorded as pixel values in a multilayer raster database. Data included Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) unit field inventory measurements provided by the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the National Land Cover Database and disturbance history data added as ancillary information. The totality of the available data was organized into seven distinct Random Forest (RF) models with different variables compared against each other to identify the ones with the most satisfactory performance. A bias correction method was then applied to all the RF models to examine the effectiveness of the method. Among the seven models, the worst one used the coefficients and fitted values of the short Landsat time series only, and the best one used coefficients and fitted values of both short and long Landsat time series. Using the Out-of-bag (OOB) score, the best model was found to be 34.4% better than the worst one. The model that used only the long time series data had almost the same OOB score as the best model. The results indicate that the use of the long Landsat time series improves model performance. Contrary to the previous research employing forest disturbance data as a feature variable had almost no effect on OOB. The bias correction method reduced the relative size of the bias in the estimates of the best model from 3.79% to −1.47%, the bottom 10% bias by 12.5 points, and the top 10% bias by 9.9 points. Depending on the types of forest, important feature variables were differed, reflecting the relationship between the time series remote sensing data we computed for this research and the forests’ phenological characteristics. The availability of Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data and accessibility of the precise locations of the FIA data are likely to improve the model estimates further.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is as follows: the first objective is to help illuminate part of the international archival sector’s initial responses to the crisis at its commencement, particularly by thematically analyzing the announcements made by national archives, which are arguably the leading archival institutions in their respective countries and the second objective is to help establish a joint contemporary understanding and historical snapshot of the positions of national archives during the first few months of the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach A comparative thematic analysis of national archives’ first formal public-facing COVID-19 announcements, released between March and May 2020, is conducted, specifically from the official websites of Australia’s National Archives of Australia, Canada’s Library and Archives Canada, New Zealand’s Archives New Zealand, the United Kingdom’s (UK) The National Archives and the United States of America’s (USA) National Archives. Findings Notwithstanding their diverse contexts, all the announcements thematically converge in discussing the closure of physical locations and spaces, as well as maintaining (reduced) services and offering remote access. Another theme appearing across most announcements is the concern for the protection of the health, welfare and safety of their communities. Additional themes featured in some of the announcements include considerations about the handling of paper records and physical materials, the removal and/or return of materials and the provision of further COVID-19 information. Unique themes appearing only once include steps for enacting precautions, furloughing staff and reopening and post-pandemic planning. Research limitations/implications Limitations to the article’s purview include its small sample size, focus on mainly English-speaking contexts and analysis of only official websites. Nevertheless, this sample arguably includes some of the major and leading archival institutions, not only in their respective countries but also internationally, namely, two national archives from North America (Canada and the USA), one from the wider European region (the UK) and two from Oceania (Australia and New Zealand). Further studies could expand the cohort size, diversify the focus for instance by analyzing social media postings and metrics and extend the timeframe. Practical implications This study could be of interest to archival academics and professionals, as well as library and information science scholars and practitioners, public health researchers and policymakers, cultural studies scholars and historians, exploring international and intersectional initiatives that have informed or are currently informing, approaches to and understandings of this pandemic and other similar health crises. It is further hoped that this study will humbly show support and supply solidarity with the wider archival community as it continues responding to and dealing with COVID-19. Social implications Capturing and analyzing aspects of national archives’ communication strategies related to the coronavirus pandemic is a topic of interest, not only for contemporary attempts for dealing with and understanding the crisis but also as a historical snapshot of their responses at this particular point in time. Originality/value By contributing to ongoing conversations about the coronavirus pandemic, this study provides the beginning of an analysis of the international archival sector’s initial interventions within it. As the first article in the archival literature on this topic, a baseline and point of reference are established for other studies that will hopefully follow on this topic. In these ways, it can also contribute to debates on how archives and other cultural memory institutions including libraries, museums and galleries, have reacted to the coronavirus pandemic and their resulting communication strategies and impacts upon their institutions, missions, collections, services and communities.

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Introduction Presidents “define who Americans are—often by declaring who they aren’t”, and “by their very utterances […] have shaped our sense of who we are as Americans” (Stuckey, front cover). This advocacy of some groups and policies to the exclusion of others has been facilitated in the United States’ political culture by the country music industry. Indeed, President Richard Nixon said of country music that it “radiates a love of this nation—a patriotism,” adding that it “makes America a better country” (Bufwack and Oermann 328). Country music’s ardent support of American military conflict, including Vietnam, has led to its long-term support of Republican candidates. There has been a general lack of scholarly interest, however, in how country music has promoted Republican definitions of what it means to be an American. Accordingly, we have two primary objectives. First, we will demonstrate that Republicans, aided by country music, have used the theme of defence of “country,” especially post-9/11, to attempt to intimidate detractors. Secondly, Republicans have questioned the love of “country,” or “patriotism,” of their electoral opponents just as country musicians have attempted to silence their own critics. This research is timely in that little has been done to merge Presidential advocacy and country music; furthermore, with the election of a new President mere days away, it is important to highlight the tendencies toward intolerance that both conservatism and country music have historically shared. Defence of ‘Country’ After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the nation before a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001. During this speech, the president threatened the international community and raised the spectre of fear in Americans both while drawing distinctions between the United States and its enemies. This message was reflected and reinforced by several patriotic anthems composed by country artists, thus enhancing its effect. In his remarks before Congress, Bush challenged the international community: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists;” thus “advocating some groups to the exclusion of others” on the international stage (20 September 2001). With these words, the President expanded the definition of the United States’ enemies to include not only those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but also anyone who refused to support him. Republican Senator John McCain’s hawkishness regarding the attacks mirrored the President’s. “There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” McCain said the next morning on ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News. Within a month he made clear his priority: “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. Later he yelled to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/america/mccain.php). Bush’s address also encouraged Americans at home to “be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat” (20 September 2001). The subtle “us vs. them” tension here is between citizens and those who would threaten them. Bush added that “freedom and fear” had always “been at war” and “God is not neutral between them” (20 September 2001) suggesting a dualism between God and Satan with God clearly supporting the cause of the United States. Craig Allen Smith’s research refers to this as Bush’s “angel/devil jeremiad.” The President’s emphasis on fear, specifically the fear that the American way of life was being assailed, translated into public policy including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. This strategic nomenclature strengthened the power of the federal government and has been used by Republicans to suggest that if a candidate or citizen is not a terrorist then what does he/she have to fear from the government? The impact of Bush’s rhetoric of fear has of late been evaluated by scholars who have termed it “melodrama” in international affairs (Anker; Sampert and Treiberg). To disseminate his message for Americans to support his defence of “country,” Bush needed look no further than country music. David Firestein, a State Department diplomat and published authority on country music, asserted that the Bush team “recognised the power of country music as a political communication device” (86). The administration’s appeal to country music is linked to what Firestein called the “honky-tonk gap” which delineates red states and blue states. In an analysis of census data, Radio-Locator’s comprehensive listing by state of country music radio stations, and the official 2004 election results, he concluded that If you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region. (84) And country musicians were indeed powerful in communicating the Republican message after 9/11. Several country musicians tapped into Bush’s defence of country rhetoric with a spate of songs including Alan Jackson’s Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning), Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American), and Darryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten? to name a few. Note how well the music parallels Bush’s attempt to define Americans. For instance, one of the lines from Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American) speaks of those who have given their lives so that other Americans may rest peacefully. This sentiment is reiterated by the theme of Worley’s Have You Forgotten? in which he talks of spending time with soldiers who have no doubts about why they are at war. Both songs implicitly indict the listener for betraying United States soldiers if his/her support for the Iraqi war wanes or, put in Bush terms, the listener would become a supporter of “terrorism.” Country music’s appeal to middle-America’s red state conservatism has made the genre a natural vehicle for supporting the defence of country. Indeed, country songs have been written about every war in United States history; most expressing support for the conflict and the troops as opposed to protesting the United States’ action: “Since the Civil War and Reconstruction, ‘Dixie’ has always been the bellwether of patriotic fervour in time of war and even as the situation in Vietnam reached its lowest point and support for the war began to fade, the South and its distinctive music remained solidly supportive” (Andresen 105). Historically, country music has a long tradition of attempting to “define who Americans were by defining who they weren’t” (Stuckey). As Bufwack and Oermann note within country music “images of a reactionary South were not hard to find.” They add “Dixie fertilized ‘three r’s’ – the right, racism, and religion” (328). Country musicians supported the United States’ failed intervention in Vietnam with such songs as It’s for God and Country and You Mom (That’s Why I’m Fighting In Vietnam), and even justified the American massacre of noncombatants at My Lai in the Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley (328). Thus, a right-wing response to the current military involvement in Iraq was not unexpected from the industry and the honky-tonk state listeners. During the current election, Republican presidential nominee McCain has also received a boost from the country music genre as John Rich, of Big and Rich, wrote Raising McCain, a musical tribute to McCain’s military service used as his campaign theme song. The song, debuted at a campaign rally on 1 August 2008, in Florida, mentions McCain’s ‘Prisoner of War’ status to keep the focus on the war and challenge those who would question it. Scholars have researched the demographics of the country music listener as they have evaluated the massification theory: the notion that the availability of a widespread media culture would break down social and cultural barriers and result in a “hom*ogenised” society as opposed to the results of government-controlled media in non-democratic countries (Peterson and DiMaggio). They have determined that the massification theory has only been partially demonstrated in that regional and class barriers have eroded to some extent but country music listeners are still predominately white and older (Peterson and DiMaggio 504). These individuals do tend to be more conservative within the United States’ political culture, and militarism has a long history within both country music and conservatism. If the bad news of the massification theory is that a mass media market may not perpetuate a hom*ogenous society, there is good news. The more onerous fears that the government will work in tandem with the media to control the people in a democracy seem not to have been borne out over time. Although President Bush’s fear tactics were met with obsequious silence initially, resistance to the unquestioning support of the war has steadily grown. In 2003, a worldwide rally opposed the invasion of Iraq because it was a sovereign state and because the Bush doctrine lacked United Nations’ support. Further opposition in the United States included rallies and concerts as well as the powerful display in major cities across the nation of pairs of combat boots representing fallen soldiers (Olson). Bush’s popularity has dropped precipitously, with his disapproval ratings higher than any President in history at 71% (Steinhauser). While the current economic woes have certainly been a factor, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain can also be viewed as a referendum on the Bush war. The American resistance to the Bush rhetoric and the Iraq war is all the more significant in light of research indicating that citizens incorrectly believe that the opposition to the Vietnam War was typified by protests against the troops rather than the war itself (Beamish). This false notion has empowered the Republicans and country musicians to challenge the patriotism of anyone who would subsequently oppose the military involvement of the United States, and it is to this topic of patriotism that we now turn. Patriotism Patriotism can be an effective way for presidential candidates to connect with voters (Sullivan et al). It has been a particularly salient issue since the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, George W. Bush, a man whose limited military service had been the subject of debate in 2000, was able to employ the persistent patriotic themes of country music to his electoral advantage. In fact, Firestein argued that country music radio had a greater effect on the 2004 election than any ads run by issue groups because it “inculcated and reinforced conservative values in the red state electorate, helped frame the issues of the day on terms favourable to the conservative position on those issues, and primed red state voters to respond positively to President Bush’s basic campaign message of family, country, and God” (Firestein 83). Bush even employed Only in America, a patriotic anthem performed by Brooks and Dunn, as a campaign theme song, because the war and patriotism played such a prominent role in the election. That the Bush re-election campaign successfully cast doubt on the patriotism of three-time Purple Heart winner, Democratic Senator John Kerry, during the campaign is evidence of Firestein’s assertion. The criticism was based on a book: Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (O’Neill and Corsi). The book was followed by advertisem*nts funded by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth which included unsubstantiated claims that Kerry lied or exaggerated his combat role in Vietnam in order to obtain two of his Purple Hearts and his Bronze Star; the testimony of Kerry’s crewmen and Navy records notwithstanding, these ads were effective in smearing Kerry’s service record and providing the President with an electoral advantage. As far as country music was concerned, the 2004 election played out against the backdrop of the battle between the patriotic Toby Keith and the anti-American Dixie Chicks. The Dixie Chicks were berated after lead singer Natalie Maines’s anti-Bush comments during a concert in London. The trio’s song about an American soldier killed in action, Travelin’ Soldier, quickly fell from the top spot of the country music charts. Moreover, while male singers such as Keith, Darryl Worley, and Alan Jackson received accolades for their post 9/11 artistic efforts, the Dixie Chicks endured a vitriolic reaction from country music fans as their CDs were burned, country radio refused to play their music, their names were added to an internet list of traitors, their concerts were protested by Bush supporters, and their lives were even threatened (http://www.poppolitics.com/archives/2003/04/Bandwagon). Speaking from experience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Kerry addressed the issue of patriotism stating: This election is a chance for America to tell the merchants of fear and division: you don’t decide who loves this country; you don’t decide who is a patriot; you don’t decide whose service counts and whose doesn’t. […] After all, patriotism is not love of power or some cheap trick to win votes; patriotism is love of country. (http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/08/27/full-text-john-kerry-speech-democratic-national-convention/) Kerry broached the issue because of the constant attacks on the patriotism of Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama. At the most basic level, many of the attacks questioned whether Obama was even an American. Internet rumours persisted that Obama was a Muslim who was not even an American citizen. The attacks intensified when the Obamas’ pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for comments made during a sermon in which he stated “God damn America.” As a result, Obama was forced to distance himself from his pastor and his church. Obama was also criticised for not wearing a United States flag lapel pin. When Michelle Obama stated for the “first time [she was] proud of her country” for its willingness to embrace change in February of 2008, Cindy McCain responded that she “had always been proud of her country” with the implication being, of course, a lack of patriotism on the part of Michelle Obama. Even the 13 July 2008 cover of the liberal New Yorker portrayed the couple as flag-burning Muslim terrorists. During the 2008 election campaign, McCain has attempted to appeal to patriotism in a number of ways. First, McCain’s POW experience in Vietnam has been front and centre as he touts his experience in foreign policy. Second, the slogan of the campaign is “Country First” implying that the Obama campaign does not put the United States first. Third, McCain’s running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, insisted in a speech on 4 October 2008, that Barack Obama has been “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” Her reference was to Obama’s acquaintance, Bill Ayers, who was involved in a series of Vietnam era bombings; the implication, however, was that Obama has terrorist ties and is unpatriotic. Palin stood behind her comments even though several major news organisations had concluded that the relationship was not significant as Ayers’ terrorist activities occurred when Obama was eight-years-old. This recent example is illustrative of Republican attempts to question the patriotism of Democrats for their electoral advantage. Country music has again sided with the Republicans particularly with Raising McCain. However, the Democrats may have realised the potential of the genre as Obama chose Only in America as the song played after his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He has also attempted to reach rural voters by starting his post-convention campaign in Bristol, Virginia, a small, conservative town. Conclusion Thus, in the wake of 9/11, Republicans seized the opportunity to control the culture through fear and patriotic fervour. They were facilitated in this endeavor by the country music industry with songs that that would questions the motives, defence of “country,” and patriotism, of anyone who would question the Bush administration. This alliance between country music and the right is an historically strong one, and we recommend more research on this vital topic. While this election may indeed be a referendum on the war, it has been influenced by an economic downturn as well. Ultimately, Democrats will have to convince rural voters that they share their values; they don’t have the same edge as Republicans without the reliance of country music. However, the dynamic of country music has changed to somewhat reflect the war fatigue since the 2004 campaign. The Angry American, Toby Keith, has admitted that he is actually a Democrat, and country music listeners have grown tired of the “barrage of pro-troop sentiment,” especially since the summer of 2005 (Willman 115). As Joe Galante, the chief of the RCA family of labels in Nashville, stated, “It’s the relatability. Kerry never really spent time listening to some of those people” (Willman 201). Bill Clinton, a Southern governor, certainly had relatability, carrying the normally red states and overcoming the honky-tonk gap, and Obama has seen the benefit of country music by playing it as the grand finale of the Democratic Convention. Nevertheless, we recommend more research on the “melodrama” theory of the Presidency as the dynamics of the relationship between the Presidency and the country music genre are currently evolving. References Andreson, Lee. Battle Notes: Music of the Vietnam War. 2nd ed. Superior, WI: Savage Press, 2003. Anker, Elisabeth. “Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11th.” Journal of Communication. 55.1 (2005): 22-37. Baker, Peter and David Brown. “Bush Tries to Tone Down High-Pitched Debate on Iraq.” Monday, 21November 2005, Page A04. washingtonpost.com Beamish, Thomas D., Harvey Molotch, and Richard Flacks. “Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory.” Social Problems. 42.3 (1995): 344-60. Brooks and Dunn. Only in America. Arista Records, 2003. Bufwack, Mary A. and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. Dixie Chicks. “Travelin Soldier.” Home. Columbia. 27 August 2002. Firestein, David J. “The Honky-Tonk Gap.” Vital Speeches of the Day. 72.3 (2006): 83-88. Jackson, Alan. Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning) Very Best of Alan Jackson. Nashville: Arista, 2004. Keith, Toby. Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). Nashville: Dreamworks. November 9, 2004. Olson, Scott. “Chicago remembers war dead with 500 pairs of empty boots.” 22 January 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-22-chicago-boots_x.htm O’Neill, John E. and Jerome L. Corsi. “Unfit for Command Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. and Peter Di Maggio. “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music. A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces. 53.3 (1975): 497-506. Rich, John. Raising McCain. Production information unavailable. Sampert, Shannon, and Natasja Treiberg. “The Reification of the ?American Soldier?: Popular Culture, American Foreign Policy, and Country Music.” Paper presented at the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 28 February 2007. Smith, Craig Allen. “President Bush’s Enthymeme of Evil: The Amalgamation of 9/11, Iraq, and Moral Values.” American Behavioral Scientist. 49 (2005): 32-47. Steinhauser, Paul. “Poll: More disapprove of Bush that any other president.” Politics Cnn.politics.com. 1 May 2008. Stuckey, Mary E. Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2004. Sullivan, John L., Amy Fried, Mary G. Dietz. 1992. “Patriotism, Politics, and the Presidential Election of 1988.” American Journal of Political Science. 36.1 (1992): 200-234. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: The New Press, 2005. Worley, Darryl. Have You Forgotten? Nashville: Dreamworks, 2003.

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Abstract Background Australia has eight state-based ambulance services and New Zealand (NZ) has two. Significant variation between their datasets compromises cross-border research opportunities and translation of research to improve patient care. Ambulance data harmonisation has occurred in the United States and United Kingdom however, to-date no data harmonisation has occurred in Australia. This study aims to compare ambulance service variables in Australia and NZ to identify opportunities and barriers for harmonisation. Method Available 2019 variables were mapped to each other and several international standardized terminology systems to identify variations and similarities in variable names and definitions, and harmonisation opportunities. Results Four Australian ambulance services used one electronic patient care record (ePCR) system, three used other ePCR systems, one used paper-based records and both NZ services used one ePCR system. Only the NZ services had mapped their variables to two international standardised terminology systems. Barriers to harmonisation included the variables collected, the variable definitions and the variable naming convention. The core variables available for mapping varied and numbered from 27-69. Differences included similar variable names having different definitions, variables that should have different definitions having the same, and naming convention for similar/same variables differing between services. Conclusions Ambulance service data harmonisation in Australia and NZ is possible and presents significant opportunities for improvement in patient outcomes and performance audit. It would facilitate quality, large-scale, high-impact collaborative national and international research. Key Message There is an opportunity for Australian and NZ ambulance services to harmonise their data to conduct large scale international research.

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The SEINet Portal Network has a complex social and development history spanning nearly two decades. Initially established as a basic online search engine for a select handful of biological collections curated within the southwestern United States, SEINet has since matured into a biodiversity data network incorporating more than 330 institutions and 1,900 individual data contributors. Participating institutions manage and publish over 14 million specimen records, 215,000 observations, and 8 million images. Approximately 70% of the collections make use of the data portal as their primary "live" specimen management platform. The SEINet interface now supports 13 regional data portals distributed across the United States and northern Mexico (http://symbiota.org/docs/seinet/). Through many collaborative efforts, it has matured into a tool for biodiversity data exploration, which includes species inventories, interactive identification keys, specimen and field images, taxonomic information, species distribution maps, and taxonomic descriptions. SEINet’s initial developmental goals were to construct a read-only interface that integrated specimen records harvested from a handful of distributed natural history databases. Intermittent network conductivity and inconsistent data exchange protocols frequently restricted data persistence. National funding opportunities supported a complete redesign towards the development of a centralized data cache model with periodic "snapshot" updates from original data sources. A service-based management infrastructure was integrated into the interface to mobilize small- to medium-sized collections (&lt;1 million specimen records) that commonly lack consistent infrastructure and technical expertise to maintain a standard compliant specimen database. These developments were the precursors to the Symbiota software project (Gries et al. 2014). Through further development of Symbiota, SEINet transformed into a robust specimen management system specifically geared toward specimen digitization with features including data entry from label images, harvesting data from specimen duplicates, batch georeferencing, data validation and cleaning, generating progress reports, and additional tools to improve the efficiency of the digitization process. The central developmental paradigm focused on data mobilization through the production of: a versatile import module capable of ingesting a diverse range of data structures, a robust toolkit to assist in digitizing and managing specimen data and images, and a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) compliant data publishing and export toolkit to facilitate data distribution to global aggregators such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and iDigBio. a versatile import module capable of ingesting a diverse range of data structures, a robust toolkit to assist in digitizing and managing specimen data and images, and a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) compliant data publishing and export toolkit to facilitate data distribution to global aggregators such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and iDigBio. User interfaces consist of a decentralized network of regional data portals, all connecting to a centralized shared data source. Each of the 13 data portals are configured to present a regional perspective specifically tailored to represent the needs of the local research community. This infrastructure has supported the formation of regional consortia, who provide network support to aid local institutions in digitizing and publishing their collections within the network. The community-based infrastructure creates a sense of ownership – perhaps even good-natured competition – by the data providers and provides extra incentive to improve data quality and expand the network. Certain areas of development remain challenging in spite of the project's overall success. For instance, data managers continuously struggle to maintain a current local taxonomic thesaurus used for name validation, data cleaning, and to resolve taxonomic discrepancies commonly encountered when integrating collection datasets. We will discuss the successes and challenges associated with the long-term sustainability model and explore potential future paths for SEINet that support the long-term goal of maintaining a data provider that is in full compliance with the FAIR use principles of making the datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (Wilkinson et al. 2016).

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The global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020. In February, many academic and research institutions began to move to a telework environment. By March, many borders had been closed and nearly all institutions fully transitioned to telework. With their institutions closed and travel shut down, researchers lacked access to both specimen collections as well as the library and archives material needed to continue productive research. Preliminary research on the impact of COVID-19 on the research enterprise has been published. In the United States, the impact on federally funded research has been documented in Effects of COVID-19 on the Federal Research and Development Enterprise (Morgan and Sargent Jr. 2020). Likewise, What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise? (Coalition for Networked Information 2020) is an initial appraisal of issues and concerns within the North American academic and research environment. Library and archives staff were limited in their access to collections-based work and needed valuable and impactful telework. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) was founded as a global, dispersed, and virtual library and thus was well-suited to continue to provide service to teleworking researchers as well as telework tasks for staff at BHL's partner institutions. Examples of the telework projects include enhancing BHL metadata, and uploading BHL illustrations to the BHL Flickr collection. BHL makes critical information available thanks to all of the partners' efforts to digitize for open access. The natural strengths of the BHL virtual organization include social distancing, virtual collaboration and opening up science; the pandemic world is a natural ecosystem for BHL partners. Initial analyses of BHL use have shown a significant increase in year-over-year usage of BHL content. The preliminary statistics have shown an approximate 25% increase in usage of the BHL site. BHL has also collected anecdotal evidence in the form of user comments and direct conversations with research staff at BHL partner institutions. Many national or pan-national organizations and projects were instigated to examine the impact of COVID-19 on library and archives materials. One key project that some BHL partners participated in is Reopening Archives, Libraries, and Museums (REALM) Information Hub: A COVID-19 Research Project. With most BHL partners pausing all digitization around the February-March 2020 time period, outcomes from studies such as REALM will assist partners in understanding when it will be safe for digitization to restart. This presentation will cover how usage of BHL changed from early 2020 to the present, showing trends and significant impact. The pivot of many BHL partner staff to improve BHL content and metadata for their local users as well as the global biodiversity community will be documented. Also covered will be the enhanced impact of digital libraries, such as BHL, in both the short and long terms along with lessons learned for expanded virtual open access for library collections supporting biodiversity and museum research.

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Introduction A snapshot, not unlike countless photographs likely to be found in any number of family albums, shows two figures sitting on a park bench: an elderly and amiable looking man grins beneath the rim of a golf cap; a young boy of twelve smiles wide for the camera — a rather banal scene, captured on film. And yet, this seemingly innocent and unexceptional photograph was the site of a remarkable and wide ranging discourse — encompassing American conservatism, celebrity politics, and the end of the Cold War — as the image circulated around the globe during the weeklong state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States. Taken in 1997 by the young boy’s grandfather, Ukrainian immigrant Yakov Ravin, during a chance encounter with the former president, the snapshot is believed to be the last public photograph of Ronald Reagan. Published on the occasion of the president’s death, the photograph made “instant celebrities” of the boy, now a twenty-year-old college student, Rostik Denenburg and his grand dad. Throughout the week of Reagan’s funeral, the two joined a chorus of dignitaries, politicians, pundits, and “ordinary” Americans praising Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” the man who defeated Communism, the popular president who restored America’s confidence, strength, and prosperity. Yes, it was mourning in America again. And the whole world was watching. Not since Princess Diana’s sudden (and unexpected) death, have we witnessed an electronic hagiography of such global proportions. Unlike Diana’s funeral, however, Reagan’s farewell played out in distinctly partisan terms. As James Ridgeway (2004) noted, the Reagan state funeral was “not only face-saving for the current administration, but also perhaps a mask for the American military debacle in Iraq. Not to mention a gesture of America’s might in the ‘war on terror.’” With non-stop media coverage, the weeklong ceremonies provided a sorely needed shot in the arm to the Bush re-election campaign. Still, whilst the funeral proceedings and the attendant media coverage were undeniably excessive in their deification of the former president, the historical white wash was not nearly so vulgar as the antiseptic send off Richard Nixon received back in 1994. That is to say, the piety of the Nixon funeral was at once startling and galling to many who reviled the man (Lapham). By contrast, given Ronald Reagan’s disarming public persona, his uniquely cordial relationship with the national press corps, and most notably, his handler’s mastery of media management techniques, the Reagan idolatry was neither surprising nor unexpected. In this brief essay, I want to consider Reagan’s funeral, and his legacy, in relation to what cultural critics, referring to the production of celebrity, have described as “fame games” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall). Specifically, I draw on the concept of “flashpoints” — moments of media excess surrounding a particular personage — in consideration of the Reagan funeral. Throughout, I demonstrate how Reagan’s death and the attendant media coverage epitomize this distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Furthermore, I observe Reagan’s innovative approaches to electoral politics in the age of television. Here, I suggest that Reagan’s appropriation of the strategies and techniques associated with advertising, marketing and public relations were decisive, not merely in terms of his electoral success, but also in securing his lasting fame. I conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Reagan’s legacy on historical memory, contemporary politics, and what neoconservatives, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, gleefully describe as the New American Century. The Magic Hour On the morning of 12 June 2004, the last day of the state funeral, world leaders eulogized Reagan, the statesmen, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the A-List political stars invited to speak were Margaret Thatcher, former president George H. W. Bush and, to borrow Arundhati Roi’s useful phrase, “Bush the Lesser.” Reagan’s one-time Cold War adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also on hand, but did not have speaking parts. Former Reagan administration officials, Supreme Court justices, and congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle rounded out a guest list that read like a who’s who of the American political class. All told, Reagan’s weeklong sendoff was a state funeral at its most elaborate. It had it all—the flag draped coffin, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, and the procession of mourners winding their way through the Rotunda of the US Capitol. In this last regard, Reagan joined an elite group of seven presidents, including four who died by assassination — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — to be honored by having his remains lie in state in the Rotunda. But just as the deceased president was product of the studio system, so too, the script for the Gipper’s swan song come straight out of Hollywood. Later that day, the Reagan entourage made one last transcontinental flight back to the presidential library in Simi Valley, California for a private funeral service at sunset. In Hollywood parlance, the “magic hour” refers to the quality of light at dusk. It is an ideal, but ephemeral time favored by cinematographers, when the sunlight takes on a golden glow lending grandeur, nostalgia, and oftentimes, a sense of closure to a scene. This was Ronald Reagan’s final moment in the sun: a fitting end for an actor of the silver screen, as well as for the president who mastered televisual politics. In a culture so thoroughly saturated with the image, even the death of a minor celebrity is an occasion to replay film clips, interviews, paparazzi photos and the like. Moreover, these “flashpoints” grow in intensity and frequency as promotional culture, technological innovation, and the proliferation of new media outlets shape contemporary media culture. They are both cause and consequence of these moments of media excess. And, as Turner, Bonner and Marshall observe, “That is their point. It is their disproportionate nature that makes them so important: the scale of their visibility, their overwhelmingly excessive demonstration of the power of the relationship between mass-mediated celebrities and the consumers of popular culture” (3-4). B-Movie actor, corporate spokesman, state governor and, finally, US president, Ronald Reagan left an extraordinary photographic record. Small wonder, then, that Reagan’s death was a “flashpoint” of the highest order: an orgy of images, a media spectacle waiting to happen. After all, Reagan appeared in over 50 films during his career in Hollywood. Publicity stills and clips from Reagan’s film career, including Knute Rockne, All American, the biopic that earned Reagan his nickname “the Gipper”, King’s Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo provided a surreal, yet welcome respite from television’s obsessive (some might say morbidly so) live coverage of Reagan’s remains making their way across country. Likewise, archival footage of Reagan’s political career — most notably, images of the 1981 assassination attempt; his quip “not to make age an issue” during the 1984 presidential debate; and his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanding that Soviet President Gorbachev, “tear down this wall” — provided the raw materials for press coverage that thoroughly dominated the global mediascape. None of which is to suggest, however, that the sheer volume of Reagan’s photographic record is sufficient to account for the endless replay and reinterpretation of Reagan’s life story. If we are to fully comprehend Reagan’s fame, we must acknowledge his seminal engagement with promotional culture, “a professional articulation between the news and entertainment media and the sources of publicity and promotion” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 5) in advancing an extraordinary political career. Hitting His Mark In a televised address supporting Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency delivered at the 1964 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan firmly established his conservative credentials and, in so doing, launched one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American politics. Political scientist Gerard J. De Groot makes a compelling case that the strategy Reagan and his handlers developed in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign would eventually win him the presidency. The centerpiece of this strategy was to depict the former actor as a political outsider. Crafting a persona he described as “citizen politician,” Reagan’s great appeal and enormous success lie in his uncanny ability to project an image founded on traditional American values of hard work, common sense and self-determination. Over the course of his political career, Reagan’s studied optimism and “no-nonsense” approach to public policy would resonate with an electorate weary of career politicians. Charming, persuasive, and seemingly “authentic,” Reagan ran gubernatorial and subsequent presidential campaigns that were distinctive in that they employed sophisticated public relations and marketing techniques heretofore unknown in the realm of electoral politics. The 1966 Reagan gubernatorial campaign took the then unprecedented step of employing an advertising firm, Los Angeles-based Spencer-Roberts, in shaping the candidate’s image. Leveraging their candidate’s ease before the camera, the Reagan team crafted a campaign founded upon a sophisticated grasp of the television industry, TV news routines, and the medium’s growing importance to electoral politics. For instance, in the days before the 1966 Republican primary, the Reagan team produced a five-minute film using images culled from his campaign appearances. Unlike his opponent, whose television spots were long-winded, amateurish and poorly scheduled pieces that interrupted popular programs, like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Reagan’s short film aired in the early evening, between program segments (De Groot). Thus, while his opponent’s television spot alienated viewers, the Reagan team demonstrated a formidable appreciation not only for televisual style, but also, crucially, a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of television scheduling, audience preferences and viewing habits. Over the course of his political career, Reagan refined his media driven, media directed campaign strategy. An analysis of his 1980 presidential campaign reveals three dimensions of Reagan’s increasingly sophisticated media management strategy (Covington et al.). First, the Reagan campaign carefully controlled their candidate’s accessibility to the press. Reagan’s penchant for potentially damaging off-the-cuff remarks and factual errors led his advisors to limit journalists’ interactions with the candidate. Second, the character of Reagan’s public appearances, including photo opportunities and especially press conferences, grew more formal. Reagan’s interactions with the press corps were highly structured affairs designed to control which reporters were permitted to ask questions and to help the candidate anticipate questions and prepare responses in advance. Finally, the Reagan campaign sought to keep the candidate “on message.” That is to say, press releases, photo opportunities and campaign appearances focused on a single, consistent message. This approach, known as the Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy proved indispensable to advancing the administration’s goals and achieving its objectives. Not only was the IOD strategy remarkably effective in influencing press coverage of the Reagan White House, this coverage promoted an overwhelmingly positive image of the president. As the weeklong funeral amply demonstrated, Reagan was, and remains, one of the most popular presidents in modern American history. Reagan’s popular (and populist) appeal is instructive inasmuch as it illuminates the crucial distinction between “celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame” observed by historian Charles L. Ponce de Leone (13). Whereas fame was traditionally bestowed upon those whose heroism and extraordinary achievements distinguished them from common people, celebrity is a defining feature of modernity, inasmuch as celebrity is “a direct outgrowth of developments that most of us regard as progressive: the spread of the market economy and the rise of democratic, individualistic values” (Ponce de Leone 14). On one hand, then, Reagan’s celebrity reflects his individualism, his resolute faith in the primacy of the market, and his defense of “traditional” (i.e. democratic) American values. On the other hand, by emphasizing his heroic, almost supernatural achievements, most notably his vanquishing of the “Evil Empire,” the Reagan mythology serves to lift him “far above the common rung of humanity” raising him to “the realm of the divine” (Ponce de Leone 14). Indeed, prior to his death, the Reagan faithful successfully lobbied Congress to create secular shrines to the standard bearer of American conservatism. For instance, in 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that officially rechristened one of the US capitol’s airports to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. More recently, conservatives working under the aegis of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project have called for the creation of even more visible totems to the Reagan Revolution, including replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime with Reagan’s image and, more dramatically, inscribing Reagan in stone, alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore (Gordon). Therefore, Reagan’s enduring fame rests not only on the considerable symbolic capital associated with his visual record, but also, increasingly, upon material manifestations of American political culture. The High Stakes of Media Politics What are we to make of Reagan’s fame and its implications for America? To begin with, we must acknowledge Reagan’s enduring influence on modern electoral politics. Clearly, Reagan’s “citizen politician” was a media construct — the masterful orchestration of ideological content across the institutional structures of news, public relations and marketing. While some may suggest that Reagan’s success was an anomaly, a historical aberration, a host of politicians, and not a few celebrities — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them — emulate Reagan’s style and employ the media management strategies he pioneered. Furthermore, we need to recognize that the Reagan mythology that is so thoroughly bound up in his approach to media/politics does more to obscure, rather than illuminate the historical record. For instance, in her (video taped) remarks at the funeral service, Margaret Thatcher made the extraordinary claim — a central tenet of the Reagan Revolution — that Ronnie won the cold war “without firing a shot.” Such claims went unchallenged, at least in the establishment press, despite Reagan’s well-documented penchant for waging costly and protracted proxy wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Similarly, the Reagan hagiography failed to acknowledge the decisive role Gorbachev and his policies of “reform” and “openness” — Perestroika and Glasnost — played in the ending of the Cold War. Indeed, Reagan’s media managed populism flies in the face of what radical historian Howard Zinn might describe as a “people’s history” of the 1980s. That is to say, a broad cross-section of America — labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists among them — rallied in vehement opposition to Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. And yet, throughout the weeklong funeral, the divisiveness of the Reagan era went largely unnoted. In the Reagan mythology, then, popular demonstrations against an unprecedented military build up, the administration’s failure to acknowledge, let alone intervene in the AIDS epidemic, and the growing disparity between rich and poor that marked his tenure in office were, to borrow a phrase, relegated to the dustbin of history. In light of the upcoming US presidential election, we ought to weigh how Reagan’s celebrity squares with the historical record; and, equally important, how his legacy both shapes and reflects the realities we confront today. Whether we consider economic and tax policy, social services, electoral politics, international relations or the domestic culture wars, Reagan’s policies and practices continue to determine the state of the union and inform the content and character of American political discourse. Increasingly, American electoral politics turns on the pithy soundbite, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-event, and a campaign team’s unwavering ability to stay on message. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ronald Reagan’s unmistakable influence upon the current (and illegitimate) occupant of the White House. References Covington, Cary R., Kroeger, K., Richardson, G., and J. David Woodward. “Shaping a Candidate’s Image in the Press: Ronald Reagan and the 1980 Presidential Election.” Political Research Quarterly 46.4 (1993): 783-98. De Groot, Gerard J. “‘A Goddamed Electable Person’: The 1966 California Gubernatorial Campaign of Ronald Reagan.” History 82.267 (1997): 429-48. Gordon, Colin. “Replace FDR on the Dime with Reagan?” History News Network 15 December, 2003. http://hnn.us/articles/1853.html>. Lapham, Lewis H. “Morte de Nixon – Death of Richard Nixon – Editorial.” Harper’s Magazine (July 1994). http://www.harpers.org/MorteDeNixon.html>. Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Ridgeway, James. “Bush Takes a Ride in Reagan’s Wake.” Village Voice (10 June 2004). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0423/mondo5.php>. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Zinn, Howard. The Peoples’ History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Howley, Kevin. "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>. APA Style Howley, K. (Nov. 2004) "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>.

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Background: Through diet and exercise interventions, community centers offer an opportunity to address health-related issues for some of the oldest, most vulnerable members of our society. Objectives: The purpose of this investigation is to draw upon nationwide data to better characterize the population served by the congregate meals program and to gather more detailed information on a local level to identify opportunities for service enhancement to improve the health and well-being of older adults. Design: We examined community center data from two sources: 2015 National Survey of Older Americans Act and surveys from two New York City community centers. To assess nationwide service delivery, we analyzed participant demographics, functional status defined by activities of daily living, and perceptions of services received. Measurements: Participants from the two New York City community centers completed a four-day food record. Functional measures included the short physical performance battery, self-reported physical function, grip strength, and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. Results: Nationwide (n=901), most participants rated the meal quality as good to excellent (91.7%), and would recommend the congregate meals program to a friend (96.0%). Local level data (n=22) were collected for an in-depth understanding of diet, physical activity patterns, body weight, and objective functional status measures. Diets of this small, local convenience sample were higher in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, and lower in calcium, magnesium, and fiber than recommended by current United States Dietary Guidelines. Average time engaged in moderate physical activity was 254 minutes per week (SD=227), exceeding the recommended 150 minutes per week, but just 41% (n=9) and 50% (n=11) of participants engaged in strength or balance exercises, respectively. Conclusion: Research is warranted to test whether improvements in the nutritional quality of food served and access/supports for engaging in strength training within community centers could help older adults achieve diet and physical activity recommendations.

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ObjectiveTo discuss how clinical decision support (CDS) for electronic case reporting (eCR) will evolve over time to provide multiple deployment modelsIntroductionAs the knowledge required to support case reporting evolves from unstructured to more structured and standardized formats, it becomes suitable for electronic clinical decision support (CDS). CDS for case reporting confronts two challenges: a) While EHRs are moving toward local CDS capabilities, it will take several years for EHR systems to consistently support this capability; and b) public health-related CDS knowledge, such as Zika infection detection and reporting rules, may differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Therefore, there is an ongoing need to manage reporting rules in a distributed manner. Similarly, there is a need for more decentralized models of CDS execution to overcome some of the disadvantages of centralized deployment and to leverage local CDS capabilities as they become available over the next several years.MethodsThe Reportable Condition Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) is a project funded by the CDC, through the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), to develop a tool that allows jurisdictions to author rules that define whether a patient is reportable for certain conditions. RCKMS includes a Decision Support Service (DSS) that runs the jurisdictions’ rules and determines if a patient is reportable, for which condition(s) and to which jurisdiction(s). RCKMS currently plays a significant role in the broader Digital Bridge project that has been working to provide structure and governance around the national planning and implementation effort of eCR. RCKMS is currently a centralized CDS service that can be accessed by EHRs until they all have local CDS capabilities; and a knowledge authoring environment that allows ongoing distributed rule authoring. RCKMS supports the strategy for public health knowledge management, and it will evolve over time to provide the systems and services to satisfy short-, mid-, and long-term public health CDS requirements. In addition, RCKMS will comply with emerging technical standards that support this work.ResultsRCKMS is currently being deployed as a single, central, national service on the APHL Informatics Messaging Services (AIMS) platform, which is operated and maintained by Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL). The AIMS platform connects directly with reporters and provides a routing and validation service for incoming and outgoing messages. Two distributed CDS scenarios for decentralized eCR models have been identified. In the first scenario, the Decision Support Service component of the RCKMS software is installed within a clinical organization (as it would be in a centralized service) and executed locally. The second distributed CDS scenario for eCR involves the distribution of the Reporting Specification rules without the software. In this scenario, local electronic health record (EHR) implementations would be required to consume the Reporting Specifications and utilize them in a CDS capability within their EHR.ConclusionsIt is expected that given the diversity of organizations, systems, and architectures in the United States that multiple deployment scenarios for CDS for eCR will be simultaneously deployed for the foreseeable future. It cannot be stressed enough, however, that in all scenarios – centralized and distributed – there must be a centralized and uniform authoring of the Reporting Specification rules, since the specifications themselves originate from public health through a centralized process and must be administered nationally through a well-established process. It is also essential that all sites have all the rules available to them, since there may be multiple jurisdictions whose rules and reporting is required, with the determination of jurisdiction(s) based on where a patient lives and where they receive care.

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Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) is the United States’ (US) national resource and coordinating center for biodiversity specimen digitization and mobilization. It was established in 2011 through the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, an initiative that grew from a working group of museum-based and other biocollections professionals working in concert with NSF to make collections' specimen data accessible for science, education, and public consumption. The working group, Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA), released two reports (Beach et al. 2010, American Institute of Biological Sciences 2013) that provided the foundation for iDigBio and ADBC. iDigBio is restricted in focus to the ingestion of data generated by public, non-federal museum and academic collections. Its focus is on specimen-based (as opposed to observational) occurrence records. iDigBio currently serves about 118 million transcribed specimen-based records and 29 million specimen-based media records from approximately 1600 datasets. These digital objects have been contributed by about 700 collections representing nearly 400 institutions and is the most comprehensive biodiversity data aggregator in the US. Currently, iDigBio, DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections), GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) are collaborating on a global framework to harmonize technologies towards standardizing and synchronizing ingestion strategies, data models and standards, cyberinfrastructure, APIs (application programming interface), specimen record identifiers, etc. in service to a developing consolidated global data product that can provide a common source for the world’s digital biodiversity data. The collaboration strives to harness and combine the unique strengths of its partners in ways that ensure the individual needs of each partner’s constituencies are met, design pathways for accommodating existing and emerging aggregators, simultaneously strengthen and enhance access to the world’s biodiversity data, and underscore the scope and importance of worldwide biodiversity informatics activities. Collaborators will share technology strategies and outputs, align conceptual understandings, and establish and draw from an international knowledge base. These collaborators, along with Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), will join iDigBio and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as they host Biodiversity 2020 in Washington, DC. Biodiversity 2020 will combine an international celebration of the worldwide progress made in biodiversity data accessibility in the 21st century with a biodiversity data conference that extends the life of Biodiversity Next. It will provide a venue for the GBIF governing board meeting, TDWG annual meeting, and the annual iDigBio Summit as well as three days of plenary and concurrent sessions focused on the present and future of biodiversity data generation, mobilization, and use.

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Material samples form an important portion of the data infrastructure for many disciplines. Here, a material sample is a physical object, representative of some physical thing, on which observations can be made. Material samples may be collected for one project initially, but can also be valuable resources for other studies in other disciplines. Collecting and curating material samples can be a costly process. Integrating institutionally managed sample collections, along with those sitting in individual offices or labs, is necessary to faciliate large-scale evidence-based scientific research. Many have recognized the problems and are working to make data related to material samples FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The Internet of Samples (i.e., iSamples) is one of these projects. iSamples was funded by the United States National Science Foundation in 2020 with the following aims: enable previously impossible connections between diverse and disparate sample-based observations; support existing research programs and facilities that collect and manage diverse sample types; facilitate new interdisciplinary collaborations; and provide an efficient solution for FAIR samples, avoiding duplicate efforts in different domains (Davies et al. 2021) enable previously impossible connections between diverse and disparate sample-based observations; support existing research programs and facilities that collect and manage diverse sample types; facilitate new interdisciplinary collaborations; and provide an efficient solution for FAIR samples, avoiding duplicate efforts in different domains (Davies et al. 2021) The initial sample collections that will make up the internet of samples include those from the System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR), Open Context, the Genomic Observatories Meta-Database (GEOME), and Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History (NMNH), representing the disciplines of geoscience, archaeology/anthropology, and biology. To achieve these aims, the proposed iSamples infrastructure (Fig. 1) has two key components: iSamples in a Box (iSB) and iSamples Central (iSC). The iSC component will be a permanent Internet service that preserves, indexes, and provides access to sample metadata aggregated from iSBs. It will also ensure that persistent identifiers and sample descriptions assigned and used by individual iSBs are synchronized with the records in iSC and with identifier authorities like International Geo Sample Number (IGSN) or Archival Resource Key (ARK). The iSBs create and maintain identifiers and metadata for their respective collection of samples. While providing access to the samples held locally, an iSB also allows iSC to harvest its metadata records. The metadata modeling strategy adopted by the iSamples project is a metadata profile-based approach, where core metadata fields that are applicable to all samples, form the core metadata schema for iSamples. Each individual participating collectionis free to include additional metadata in their records, which will also be harvested by iSC and are discoverable through the iSC user interface or APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), just like the core. In-depth analysis of metadata profiles used by participating collections, including Darwin Core, has resulted in an iSamples core schema currently being tested and refined through use. See the current version of the iSamples core schema. A number of properties require a controlled vocabulary. Controlled vocabularies used by existing records are kept, while new vocabularies are also being developed to support high-level grouping with consistent semantics across collection types. Examples include vocabularies for Context Category, Material Category, and Specimen Type (Table 1). These vocabularies were also developed in a bottom-up manner, based on the terms used in the existing collections. For each vocabulary, a decision tree graph was created to illustrate relations among the terms, and a card sorting exercise was conducted within the project team to collect feedback. Domain experts are invited to take part in this exercise here, here, and here. These terms will be used as upper-level terms to the existing category terms used in the participating collections and hence create connections among individual participating collections. iSample project members are also active in the TDWG Material Sample Task Group and the global consultation on Digital Extended Specimens. Many members of the iSamples project also lead or participate in a sister research coordination network (RCN), Sampling Nature. The goal of this RCN is to develop and refine metadata standards and controlled vocabularies for the iSamples and other projects focusing on material samples. We cordially invite you to participate in the Sampling Nature RCN and help shape the future standards for material samples. Contact Sarah Ramdeen (sramdeen@ideo.columbia.edu) to engage with the RCN.

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During World War II, the Soviet Union’s food supply was in a state of crisis. Hitler’s army had occupied the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine and Southern Russia in 1941 and, as a result, agricultural production for the entire nation had plummeted. Soldiers in Red Army, who easily ate the best rations in the country, subsisted on a daily allowance of just under a kilogram of bread, supplemented with meat, tea, sugar and butter when and if these items were available. The hunger of the Red Army and its effect on the morale and strength of Europe’s eastern warfront were causes for concern for the Soviet government and its European and American allies. The one country with a food surplus decided to do something to help, and in 1942 the United States agreed to send thousands of pounds of meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. After receiving several shipments of the all-American spiced canned meat SPAM, the Red Army’s quartermaster put in a request for a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka. Pound for pound, America sent more pigs overseas than soldiers during World War II, in part because pork was in oversupply in the America of the early 1940s. Shipping meat to hungry soldiers and civilians in war torn countries was a practical way to build business for the U.S. meat industry, which had been in decline throughout the 1930s. As per a Soviet-supplied recipe, the first cans of Lend-Lease tushonka were made in the heart of the American Midwest, at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Ohio (Stettinus 6-7). Government contracts in the meat packing industry helped fuel economic recovery, and meatpackers were in a position to take special request orders like the one for tushonka that came through the lines. Unlike SPAM, which was something of a novelty item during the war, tushonka was a food with a past. The original recipe was based on a recipe for preserved meat that had been a traditional product of the Ural Mountains, preserved in jars with salt and fat rather than by pressure and heat. Thus tushonka was requested—and was mass-produced—not simply as a convenience but also as a traditional and familiar food—a taste of home cooking that soldiers could carry with them into the field. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the arrival of tushonka was instrumental in helping the Red Army push back against the Nazi invasion (178). Unlike SPAM and other wartime rations, tushonka did not fade away after the war. Instead, it was distributed to the Soviet civilian population, appearing in charity donations and on the shelves of state shops. Often it was the only meat product available on a regular basis. Salty, fatty, and slightly grey-toned, tushonka was an unlikely hero of the postwar-era, but during this period tushonka rose from obscurity to become an emblem of socialist modernity. Because it was shelf stable and could be made from a variety of different cuts of meat, it proved an ideal product for the socialist production lines where supplies and the pace of production were infinitely variable. Unusual in a socialist system of supply, this product shaped production and distribution lines, and even influenced the layout of meatpacking factories and the genetic stocks of the animals that were to be eaten. Tushonka’s initial ubiquity in the postwar Soviet Union had little to do with the USSR’s own hog industry. Pig populations as well as their processing facilities had been decimated in the war, and pigs that did survive the Axis invasion had been evacuated East with human populations. Instead, the early presence of tushonka in the pig-scarce postwar Soviet Union had everything to do with Harry Truman’s unexpected September 1945 decision to end all “economically useful” Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union (Martel). By the end of September, canned meat was practically the only product still being shipped as part of Lend-Lease (NARA RG 59). Although the United Nations was supposed to distribute these supplies to needy civilians free of cost, travelers to the Soviet Union in 1946 spotted cans of American tushonka for sale in state shops (Skeoch 231). After American tushonka “donations” disappeared from store shelves, the Soviet Union’s meat syndicates decided to continue producing the product. Between its first appearance during the war in 1943, and the 1957 announcement by Nikita Khrushchev that Soviet policy would restructure all state animal farms to support the mass production of one or several processed meat products, tushonka helped to drive the evolution of the Soviet Union’s meat packing industry. Its popularity with both planners and the public gave it the power to reach into food commodity chains. It is this backward reach and the longer-term impacts of these policies that make tushonka an unusual byproduct of the Cold War era. State planners loved tushonka: it was cheap to make, the logistics of preparing it were not complicated, it was easy to transport, and most importantly, it served as tangible evidence that the state was accomplishing a long-standing goal to get more meat to its citizenry and improving the diet of the average Soviet worker. Tushonka became a highly visible product in the Soviet Union’s much vaunted push to establish a modern food regime intended to rival that of the United States. Because it was shelf-stable, wartime tushonka had served as a practical food for soldiers, but after the war tushonka became an ideal food for workers who had neither the time nor the space to prepare a home-cooked meal with fresh meat. The Soviet state started to produce its own tushonka because it was such an excellent fit for the needs and abilities of the Soviet state—consumer demand was rarely considered by planners in this era. Not only did tushonka fit the look and taste of a modern processed meat product (that is, it was standard in texture and flavor from can to can, and was an obviously industrially processed product), it was also an excellent way to make the most of the predominant kind of meat the Soviet Union had the in the 1950s: small scraps low-grade pork and beef, trimmings leftover from butchering practices that focused on harvesting as much animal fat, rather than muscle, from the carcass in question. Just like tushonka, pork sausages and frozen pelmeny, a meat-filled pasta dumpling, also became winning postwar foods thanks to a happy synergy of increased animal production, better butchering and new food processing machines. As postwar pigs recovered their populations, the Soviet processed meat industry followed suit. One official source listed twenty-six different kinds of meat products being issued in 1964, although not all of these were pork (Danilov). An instructional manual distributed by the meat and milk syndicate demonstrated how meat shops should wrap and display sausages, and listed 24 different kinds of sausages that all needed a special style of tying up. Because of packaging shortages, the string that bound the sausage was wrapped in a different way for every type of sausage, and shop assistants were expected to be able to identify sausages based on the pattern of their binding. Pelmeny were produced at every meat factory that processed pork. These were “made from start to finish in a special, automated machine, human hands do not touch them. Which makes them a higher quality and better (prevoskhodnogo) product” (Book of Healthy and Delicious Food). These were foods that became possible to produce economically because of a co-occurring increase in pigs, the new standardized practice of equipping meatpacking plants with large-capacity grinders, and freezers or coolers and the enforcement of a system of grading meat. As the state began to rebuild Soviet agriculture from its near-collapse during the war, the Soviet Union looked to the United States for inspiration. Surprisingly, Soviet planners found some of the United States’ more outdated techniques to be quite valuable for new Soviet hog operations. The most striking of these was the adoption of competing phenotypes in the Soviet hog industry. Most major swine varieties had been developed and described in the 19th century in Germany and Great Britain. Breeds had a tendency to split into two phenotypically distinct groups, and in early 20th Century American pig farms, there was strong disagreement as to which style of pig was better suited to industrial conditions of production. Some pigs were “hot-blooded” (in other words, fast maturing and prolific reproducers) while others were a slower “big type” pig (a self-explanatory descriptor). Breeds rarely excelled at both traits and it was a matter of opinion whether speed or size was the most desirable trait to augment. The over-emphasis of either set of qualities damaged survival rates. At their largest, big type pigs resembled small hippopotamuses, and sows were so corpulent they unwittingly crushed their tiny piglets. But the sleeker hot-blooded pigs had a similarly lethal relationship with their young. Sows often produced litters of upwards of a dozen piglets and the stress of tending such a large brood led overwhelmed sows to devour their own offspring (Long). American pig breeders had been forced to navigate between these two undesirable extremes, but by the 1930s, big type pigs were fading in popularity mainly because butter and newly developed plant oils were replacing lard as the cooking fat of preference in American kitchens. The remarkable propensity of the big type to pack on pounds of extra fat was more of a liability than a benefit in this period, as the price that lard and salt pork plummeted in this decade. By the time U.S. meat packers were shipping cans of tushonka to their Soviet allies across the seas, US hog operations had already developed a strong preference for hot-blooded breeds and research had shifted to building and maintaining lean muscle on these swiftly maturing animals. When Soviet industrial planners hoping to learn how to make more tushonka entered the scene however, their interpretation of american efficiency was hardly predictable: scientifically nourished big type pigs may have been advantageous to the United States at midcentury, but the Soviet Union’s farms and hungry citizens had a very different list of needs and wants. At midcentury, Soviet pigs were still handicapped by old-fashioned variables such as cold weather, long winters, poor farm organisation and impoverished feed regimens. The look of the average Soviet hog operation was hardly industrial. In 1955 the typical Soviet pig was petite, shaggy, and slow to reproduce. In the absence of robust dairy or vegetable oil industries, Soviet pigs had always been valued for their fat rather than their meat, and tushonka had been a byproduct of an industry focused mainly on supplying the country with fat and lard. Until the mid 1950s, the most valuable pig on many Soviet state and collective farms was the nondescript but very rotund “lard and bacon” pig, an inefficient eater that could take upwards of two years to reach full maturity. In searching for a way to serve up more tushonka, Soviet planners became aware that their entire industry needed to be revamped. When the Soviet Union looked to the United States, planners were inspired by the earlier competition between hot-blooded and big type pigs, which Soviet planners thought, ambitiously, they could combine into one splendid pig. The Soviet Union imported new pigs from Poland, Lithuania, East Germany and Denmark, trying valiantly to create hybrid pigs that would exhibit both hot blood and big type. Soviet planners were especially interested in inspiring the Poland-China, an especially rotund specimen, to speed up its life cycle during them mid 1950s. Hybrdizing and cross breeding a Soviet super-pig, no matter how closely laid out on paper, was probably always a socialist pipe dream. However, when the Soviets decided to try to outbreed American hog breeders, they created an infrastructure for pigs and pig breeding that had a dramatic positive impact of hog populations across the country, and the 1950s were marked by a large increase in the number of pigs in the Soviet union, as well as dramatic increases in the numbers of purebred and scientific hybrids the country developed, all in the name of tushonka. It was not just the genetic stock that received a makeover in the postwar drive to can more tushonka; a revolution in the barnyard also took place and in less than 10 years, pigs were living in new housing stock and eating new feed sources. The most obvious postwar change was in farm layout and the use of building space. In the early 1950s, many collective farms had been consolidated. In 1940 there were a quarter of a million kolkhozii, by 1951 fewer than half that many remained (NARA RG166). Farm consolidation movements most often combined two, three or four collective farms into one economic unit, thus scaling up the average size and productivity of each collective farm and simplifying their administration. While there were originally ambitious plans to re-center farms around new “agro-city” bases with new, modern farm buildings, these projects were ultimately abandoned. Instead, existing buildings were repurposed and the several clusters of farm buildings that had once been the heart of separate villages acquired different uses. For animals this meant new barns and new daily routines. Barns were redesigned and compartmentalized around ideas of gender and age segregation—weaned baby pigs in one area, farrowing sows in another—as well as maximising growth and health. Pigs spent less outside time and more time at the trough. Pigs that were wanted for different purposes (breeding, meat and lard) were kept in different areas, isolated from each other to minimize the spread of disease as well as improve the efficiency of production. Much like postwar housing for humans, the new and improved pig barn was a crowded and often chaotic place where the electricity, heat and water functioned only sporadically. New barns were supposed to be mechanised. In some places, mechanisation had helped speed things along, but as one American official viewing a new mechanised pig farm in 1955 noted, “it did not appear to be a highly efficient organisation. The mechanised or automated operations, such as the preparation of hog feed, were eclipsed by the amount of hand labor which both preceded and followed the mechanised portion” (NARA RG166 1961). The American official estimated that by mechanizing, Soviet farms had actually increased the amount of human labor needed for farming operations. The other major environmental change took place away from the barnyard, in new crops the Soviet Union began to grow for fodder. The heart and soul of this project was establishing field corn as a major new fodder crop. Originally intended as a feed for cows that would replace hay, corn quickly became the feed of choice for raising pigs. After a visit by a United States delegation to Iowa and other U.S. farms over the summer of 1955, corn became the centerpiece of Khrushchev’s efforts to raise meat and milk productivity. These efforts were what earned Khrushchev his nickname of kukuruznik, or “corn fanatic.” Since so little of the Soviet Union looks or feels much like the plains and hills of Iowa, adopting corn might seem quixotic, but raising corn was a potentially practical move for a cold country. Unlike the other major fodder crops of turnips and potatoes, corn could be harvested early, while still green but already possessing a high level of protein. Corn provided a “gap month” of green feed during July and August, when grazing animals had eaten the first spring green growth but these same plants had not recovered their biomass. What corn remained in the fields in late summer was harvested and made into silage, and corn made the best silage that had been historically available in the Soviet Union. The high protein content of even silage made from green mass and unripe corn ears prevented them from losing weight in the winter. Thus the desire to put more meat on Soviet tables—a desire first prompted by American food donations of surplus pork from Iowa farmers adapting to agro-industrial reordering in their own country—pushed back into the commodity supply network of the Soviet Union. World War II rations that were well adapted to the uncertainty and poor infrastructure not just of war but also of peacetime were a source of inspiration for Soviet planners striving to improve the diets of citizens. To do this, they purchased and bred more and better animals, inventing breeds and paying attention, for the first time, to the efficiency and speed with which these animals were ready to become meat. Reinventing Soviet pigs pushed even back farther, and inspired agricultural economists and state planners to embrace new farm organizational structures. Pigs meant for the tushonka can spent more time inside eating, and led their lives in a rigid compartmentalization that mimicked emerging trends in human urban society. Beyond the barnyard, a new concern with feed-to weight conversions led agriculturalists to seek new crops; crops like corn that were costly to grow but were a perfect food for a pig destined for a tushonka tin. Thus in Soviet industrialization, pigs evolved. No longer simply recyclers of human waste, socialist pigs were consumers in their own right, their newly crafted genetic compositions demanded ever more technical feed sources in order to maximize their own productivity. Food is transformative, and in this case study the prosaic substance of canned meat proved to be unusually transformative for the history of the Soviet Union. In its early history it kept soldiers alive long enough to win an important war, later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritized muscle tissue over fat tissue in the disassembly of carcasses. This transformative influence reached backwards into the supply lines and farms of the Soviet Union, revolutionizing the scale and goals of farming and meat packing for the Soviet food industry, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer. References Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Where: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, Kniga O Vkusnoi I Zdorovoi Pishche. Moscow: AMN Izd., 1952. 161. Danilov, M. M. Tovaravedenie Prodovol’stvennykh Tovarov: Miaso I Miasnye Tovarye. Moscow: Iz. Ekonomika, 1964. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1970. 178. Long, James. The Book of the Pig. London: Upcott Gill, 1886. 102. Lush, Jay & A.L. Anderson, “A Genetic History of Poland-China Swine: I—Early Breed History: The ‘Hot Blood’ versus the ‘Big Type’” Journal of Heredity 30.4 (1939): 149-56. Martel, Leon. Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1979. 35. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 59, General Records of the Department of State. Office of Soviet Union affairs, Box 6. “Records relating to Lend Lease with the USSR 1941-1952”. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative reports 1940-1954. USSR Cotton-USSR Foreign trade. Box 64, Folder “farm management”. Report written by David V Kelly, 6 Apr. 1951. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative Reports 1955-1961. Folder: “Agriculture” “Visits to Soviet agricultural installations,” 15 Nov. 1961. Skeoch, L.A. Food Prices and Ration Scale in the Ukraine, 1946 The Review of Economics and Statistics 35.3 (Aug. 1953), 229-35. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Fond R-7021. The Report of Extraordinary Special State Commission on Wartime Losses Resulting from the German-Fascist Occupation cites the following losses in the German takeover. 1948. Stettinus, Edward R. Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. Penguin Books, 1944.

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We Break Up, I Publish: Theorising and Emotional Processing like Taylor Swift In 2007 after the rather painful end of my first long-term same-sex relationship I asked myself two questions (and like a good graduate student wrote a paper about it that was subsequently published): (1) what is love; (2) and if love exists, are queer and straight love somehow different. I asked myself the second question because, unlike my previous “straight” breakups (back when I honestly thought I was straight), this one was different, was far more messy, and seemed to have a lot to do with the fact that my then fresh ex-boyfriend and I had dramatically different ideas about how the relationship should look, work, be codified, or if it should or could be codified. It was an eye-opening experience since the truth that these different ideas existed—basically his point of view—really only “came out” in my mind through the act and learning involved in that breakup. Until then, from a Queer Theory perspective, you could have described me as a “man who had sex with men,” called himself hom*osexual, but was so hom*onormative that if you’d approached me with even a light version of Michel Foucault’s thoughts on “Friendship as a Way of Life” I’d have looked at you as queerly, and cluelessly, as possible. Mainstream Queer Theory would have put the end of the relationship down to the difference and conflict between what is pejoratively called the “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser,” represented by me, and the “radical-Queer(ness)-of-difference” represented by my ex-boyfriend, although like a lot of theory, that misses the personal (which I recall being political...), and a whole host of non-theoretical problems that plagued that relationship. Basically I thought Queer/hom*osexual/Lesbian/Transgendered and the rest of the alphabet soup was exactly the same as Straight folks both with respect to a subjective understanding of the self, social relations and formations, and how you acted or enacted yourself in public and private except in the bedroom.. I thought, since Canada had legalised same-sex marriage, all was well and equal (other than the occasional hate-crime which would then be justly punished). Of course I understood that at that point Canada was the exception and not the rule with respect to same-sex rights and same-sex marriage, so it followed in my mind that most of our time collectively should be spent supporting those south of the border or overseas who still faced restrictions on these basic rights, or out-and-out violence, persecution and even state-sanctioned death for just being who they are and/or trying to express it. And now, five years on, stating that Canada is the exception as opposed to the rule with respect to the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the codification of same-sex rights in law has the potential to be outdated as the recent successes of social movements, court rulings and the tenor of political debate and voting has shifted internationally with rapid speed. But it was only because of that breakup that these theoretical and practical issues had come out of my queer closet and for the first time I started to question some necessary link between love and codification (marriage), and how the queer in Queer relationships does or potentially can disrupt this link. And not just for Queers, but for Straight folk too, which is the primary point that should be underlined now and is addressed at the end of this paper. Because, embittered as I was at the time, I still basically agree with the theoretical position that I came to in that paper on love—based on a queering of the terms of Alain Badiou—where I affirmed that love resisted codification, especially in its queer form, because it is fidelity to an act and truth between two or more partners which resists the rigid walls of State-based codification (Potts, Love Hurts; Badiou, Ethics and Saint Paul). But as one of the peer reviewers for this paper rightly pointed out, the above distinctions between my ex and myself implicitly rely upon a State-centric model of rights and freedoms, which I attacked in the first paper, but which I freely admit I am guilty of utilising and arguing in favour of here. But that is because I am interested, here, not in talking about love as an abstract concept towards which we should work in our personal relationships, but as the state of things, and specifically the state of same-sex marriage and the discourse and images which surrounds it, which means that the State does matter. This is specifically so given the lack of meaningful challenges to the State System in Canada and the US. I maintain, following Butler, that it is through power, and our response to the representatives of power “hailing us,” that we become bodies that matter and subjects (Bodies That Matter; The Psychic Life of Power; and Giving An Account of Oneself). While her re-reading of Althusser in these texts argues that we should come to a philosophical and political position which challenges this State-based form of subject creation and power, she also notes that politically and philosophically we have yet to articulate such a position clearly, and I’d say that this is especially the case for what is covered and argued in the mainstream (media) debate on same-sex marriage. So apropos what is arguably Foucault’s most mature analysis of “power,” and while agreeing that my State-based argument for inclusion and rights does indeed strengthen the “biopolitical” (The History of Sexuality 140 and 145) control over, in this case, Queer populations, I argue that this is nonetheless the political reality with which we are working in and analyzing, and that is my concern here. Despite a personal desire that this not be the case, the State or state sanctioned institutions do continue to hold a monopoly of power in conferring subjecthood and rights. To take a page from Jeremy Bentham, I would say that arguing from a position which does not start from or seriously consider the State as the current basis for rights and subjecthood, though potentially less ethically problematic and more in line with my personal politics, is tantamount to talking and arguing about “nonsense on stilts.” “Caught in a Bad Romance?” Comparing hom*onationalist Trajectories and the Appeal of Militarist Discourse to LGBT Grassroots Organisations In comparing the discourses and enframings of the debate over same-sex marriage between Canada in the mid 1990s and early 2000s and in the US today, one might presume that how it came to say “I do” in Canada and how it might or might not get “left at the altar” in the US, is the result of very different national cultures. But this would just subscribe to one of a number of “cultural explanations” for perceived differences between Canada and the US that are usually built upon straw-man comparisons which then pillorise the US for something or other. And in doing so it would continue an obscuration that Canada, unlike the US, is unproblematically open and accepting when it comes to multicultural, multiracial and multisexual diversity and inclusion. Which Canada isn’t nor has it ever been. When you look at the current discourse in both countries—by their key political representatives on the international stage—you find the opposite. In the US, you have President Barack Obama, the first sitting President to come out in favour of same-sex marriage, and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, setting same-sex rights at home and abroad as key policy planks (Gay Rights are Human Rights). Meanwhile, in Canada, you have Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in office since 2006, openly support his Conservative Party’s “traditional marriage” policy which is thankfully made difficult to implement because of the courts, and John Baird, the badly closeted Minister of Foreign Affairs, who doesn’t mention same-sex rights at home or with respect to foreign relations—unless it is used as supplementary evidence to further other foreign policy goals (c.f. Seguin)—only showing off his sexuality outside of the press-gallery to drum up gay-conservative votes or gay-conservative fundraising at LGBTQ community events which his government is then apt to pull funding for (c.f. Bradshaw). Of course my point is not to just reverse the stereotypes, painting an idyllic picture of the US and a grim one of Canada. What I want to problematise is the supposed national cultural distinctions which are naturalised when arguments are made through them as to why same-sex marriage was legalised in Canada, while the Defense of Marriage Act still stands in the US. To follow and extend Jasbir Puar’s argument from Terrorist Assemblages, what we see in both same-sex marriage debates and discourses is really the same phenomenon, but, so far, with different outcomes and having different manifestations. Puar contends that same-sex rights, like most equalising rights for minority groups, are only granted when all three of the following conditions prevail: (1) in a state or narrative of exception, where the nation grants a minority group equal rights because “the nation” feels threatened from without; (2) only on the condition that normalisation (or hom*onormalisation in the case of the Queer community) occurs, with those who don’t conform pushed further from a place in the national-subject; (3) and that the price of admission into being the “allowed Queer” is an ultra-patriotic identification with the Nation. In Canada, the state or narrative of exception was an “attack” from within which resulted in the third criterion being downplayed (although it is still present). Court challenges in a number of provinces led in each case to a successful ruling in favour of legalising same-sex marriage. Appeals to these rulings made their way to the Supreme Court, who likewise ruled in favour of the legalisation of same-sex marriage. This ruling came with an order to the Canadian Parliament that it had to change the existing marriage laws and definition of marriage to make it inclusive of same-sex marriage. This “attack” was performed by the judiciary who have traditionally (c.f. Makin) been much less partisan in appointment or ruling than their counterparts in the US. When new marriage laws were proposed to take account of the direction made by the courts, the governing Liberal Party and then Prime Minister Paul Martin made it a “free vote” so members of his own party could vote against it if they chose. Although granted with only lacklustre support by the governing party, the Canadian LGBTQ community rejoiced and became less politically active, because we’d won, right? International Queers flocked to Canada—one in four same-sex weddings since legalisation in Canada have been to out of country residents (Postmedia News)—as long as they had the proper socioeconomic profile (which is also a racialised profile) to afford the trip and wedding. This caused a budding same-sex marriage tourism and queer love normalisation industry to be built around the Canada Queer experience because especially at the time of legalisation Canada was still one of the few countries to allow for same-sex marriages. What this all means is that hom*onationalism in Canada is much less charged. It manifests itself as fitting in and not just keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to things like community engagement and Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings, but trying to do them one better (although only by a bit so as not to offend). In essence, the comparatively bland process in the 1990s by which Canada slowly underwent a state of exception by a non-politically charged and non-radical professional judiciary simply interpreting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the provincial and then the federal level is mirrored in the rather bland and non-radical hom*onationalism which resulted. So unlike the US, the rhetoric of the LGBT community stays subdued unless there’s a hint that the right to same-sex divorce might get hit by Conservative Party guns, in which case all hell breaks loose (c.f. Ha). While the US is subject to the same set of logics for the currently in-progress enactment of legalising same-sex marriage, the state of exception is dramatically different. Puar argues it is the never-ending War on Terror. This also means that the enframings and debate in the US are exceptionally charged and political, leading to a very different type of hom*onationalism and hom*onationalist subject than is found in Canada. American hom*onationalism has not radically changed from Puar’s description, but due to leadership from the top (Obama, Clinton and Lady Gaga) the intensity and thereby structured confinement of what is an acceptable Queer-American subject has become increasingly rigid. What is included and given rights is the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier, the defender of the nation. And what reinforces the rigidity of what amounts to a new “glass closet” for queers is that grassroots organisations have bought into the same rhetoric, logic, and direction as to how to achieve equality as the Homecoming advertisem*nt from the Equal Love Campaign in Britain shows. For the other long-leading nation engaged in the War on Terror narrative, Homecoming provides the imagery of a gay member of the armed services draped in the flag proposing to his partner at the end of duty overseas that ends with the following text: “All men can be heroes. All men can be husbands. End discrimination.” Can’t get more patriotic—and heteronormative with the use of the term “husbands”—than that. Well, unless you’re Lady Gaga. Now Lady Gaga stands out as a public figure whom has taken an explicitly pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance from the outset of her career. And I do not want to diminish the fact that she has been admirably effective in her campaigning and consistent pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance. While above I characterised her input above as leadership from the top, she also, in effect, by standing outside of State Power unlike Obama and Clinton, and being able to be critical of it, is able to push the State in a more progressive direction. This was most obviously evidenced in her very public criticism of the Democratic Party and President Obama for not moving quickly enough to adopt a more pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance after the 2008 election where such promises were made. So Lady Gaga plays a doubled role whereby she also acts as a spokesperson for the grassroots—some would call this co-opting, but that is not the charge made here as she has more accurately given her pre-existing spotlight and Twitter and Facebook presence over to progressive campaigns—and, given her large mainstream media appeal and willingness to use this space to argue for queer and LGBT rights, performs the function of a grassroots organisation by herself as far as the general public is concerned. And in her recent queer activism we see the same sort of discourse and images utilised as in Homecoming. Her work over the first term of Obama’s Presidency—what I’m going to call “The Lady Gaga Offensive”—is indicative: she literally and metaphorically wrapped herself in the American flag, screaming “Obama, ARE YOU LISTENING!!! Repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and [have the hom*ophobic soldiers] go home, go home, go home!” (Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). And presumably to the same home of otherness that is occupied by the terrorist or anything that falls under the blanket of “anti-American” in Puar’s critique of this approach to political activism. This speech was modelled on her highly successful one at the National Equality March in 2009, which she ended with “Bless God and Bless the Gays.” When the highly watched speeches are taken together you literally can’t top them for Americanness, unless it is by a piece of old-fashioned American apple-pie bought at a National Rifle Association (NRA) bake-sale. And is likely why, after Obama’s same-sex “evolution,” the pre-election ads put out by the Democratic Party this year focused so heavily on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the queer patriotic soldier or veteran’s obligation to or previous service in bearing arms for the country. Now if the goal is to get formal and legal equality quickly, then as a political strategy, to get people onside with same-sex marriage, and from that place to same-sex rights and equal social recognition and respect, this might be a good idea. Before, that is, moving on to a strategy that actually gets to the roots of social inequality and doesn’t rely on “hate of ‘the other’” which Puar’s analysis points out is both a byproduct of and rooted in the base of any nationalist based appeal for minoritarian rights. And I want to underline that I am here talking about what strategy seems to be appealing to people, as opposed to arguing an ethically unproblematic and PC position on equality that is completely inclusive of all forms of love. Because Lady Gaga’s flag-covered and pro-military scream was answered by Obama with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the extension of some benefits to same-sex couples, and has Obama referring to Gaga as “your leader” in the pre-election ads and elsewhere. So it isn’t really surprising to find mainstream LGBT organisations adopting the same discourse and images to get same-sex rights including marriage. One can also take recent poll numbers from Canada as indicative as well. While only 10 percent of Canadians have trust in political parties, and 17 and 16 percent have trust in Parliament and Prime Minister Harper respectively, a whopping 53 percent have trust in the Canadian Forces (Leblanc). One aspect that undergirds Puar’s argument is that especially at a "time of war," more than average levels of affection or trust is shown for those institutions that defend “us,” so that if the face of that institution is reinscribed to the look of the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier (by advertising of the Homecoming sort which is produced not by the State but by grassroots LGBT organisations), then it looks like these groups seem to be banking that support for Gays and Lesbians in general, and same-sex marriage in specific, will further rise if LGBT and Queer become substantively linked in the imagination of the general public with the armed forces. But as 1980s Rockers Heart Asked: “But There’s Something That You Forgot. What about Love?” What these two hom*onationalist trajectories and rhetorics on same-sex marriage entirely skip over is how exactly you can codify “love.” Because isn’t that the purpose of marriage? Saying you can codify it is like grasping at a perfectly measured and exact cubic foot of air and telling it to stay put in the middle of a hurricane. So to return to how I ended my earlier exploration of love and if it could or should be codified: it means that as I affirm love, and as I remain in fidelity to it, I subject myself in my fundamental weakness constantly to the "not-known;" to constant heartbreak; to affirmations which I cannot betray as it would be a betrayal of the truth process itself. It's as if at the very moment the Beatles say the words 'All you need is love' they were subjected to wrenching heartbreak and still went on: 'All you need is love...' (Love Hurts) Which is really depressing when I look back at it now. But it was a bad breakup, and I can tend to the morose in word choice and cultural references when depressed. But it also remains essentially my position. If you impose “till death or divorce do us part” on to love you’re really only just participating in the chimera of static love and giving second wind to a patriarchal institution which has had a crappy record when it comes to equality. It also has the potential to preserve asymmetrical roles “traditional marriage” contains from when the institution was only extended to straight couples. And isn’t equality the underlying philosophical principle and political position that we’re supposedly fighting for if we’re arguing for an equal right to get married? Again, it’s important to try and codify the same rights for everyone through the State at the present time because I honestly don’t see major changes confronting the nation state system in Canada or the US in the near future. We remain the play-children of a digitally entrenched form of Foucaultian biopower that is State and Capital directed. Because while the Occupy Wall Street movements got a lot of hay in the press, I’ve yet to see any substantive or mainstreamed political change come out of them—if someone can direct me to their substantive contribution to the recent US election I’d be happy to revise my position—which is likely to our long term detriment. So this is a pragmatic analysis, one of locating one node in the matrices of power relations, of seeing how mainstream LGBT political organisations and Lady Gaga are applying the “theoretical tool kits” given to us by Foucault and Puar, and seeing how these organisations and Gaga are applying them, but in this case in a way that is likely counter to authorial intention(s) and personal politics (Power/Knowledge 145, 193; Terrorist Assemblages). So what this means is that we’re likely to continue to see, in mainstream images of same-sex couples put out by grassroots LGBT organisations, a hom*onationalism and ideological construction that grows more and more out of touch with Queer realities—the “upper-class house-holding PTA Gay”; although on a positive note I should point out that the Democratic Party in the US seems to be at least including both white and non-white faces in their pre-election same-sex marriage ads—and one that most Queers don’t or can’t fit themselves into especially when it comes down to the economic aspect of that picture, which is contradictory and problematic (c.f. Christopher). It also means that in the US the hom*onationalism on the horizon looks the same as in Canada except with a healthy dose of paranoia of outsiders and “the other” and a flag draped membership in the NRA, that is, for when the queer super-soldier is not in uniform. It’s a straightjacket for a closet that is becoming smaller because it seeks, through the images projected, inclusion for only a smaller and smaller social sub-set of the Lesbian and Gay community and leaves out more and more of the Queer community than it was five years ago when Puar described it. So instead of trying to dunk the queer into the institution of patriarchy, why not, by showing how so many Queers, their relationships, and their loving styles don’t fit into these archetypes help give everyone, including my “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser” former self a little “queer eye, for all eyes.” To look at and see modern straight marriage through the lenses and reasons LGBT and Queer communities (by-and-large) fought for years for access to it: as the codification and breakdown of some rights and responsibilities (i.e. taking care of children); as an act which gives you straightforward access to health benefits and hospital visitation rights; as an easy social signifier for others of a commitment to another person that doesn’t use diluted language like “special friend;” and because when it comes down to it that “in sickness and in health” part of the vow—in the language of a queered Badiou, a vow can be read as the affirmation of a universal and disinterested truth (love) and a moment which can’t be erased retrospectively, say, by divorce—seems like a sincere way to value at least one of those you really care for in the world. And hopefully it, as a side-benefit, it acts as a reminder but is not the actuality of that first fuzzy feeling which (hopefully) doesn’t go away. But I learned my lesson the first time and know that the fuzzy feeling might disappear as it often does. It doesn’t matter how far we try and cram it into any variety of hom*onationalist closets, since it’ll always find a way to not be there, no matter how tight you thought you’d locked the door to keep it in for good if it wants out. Because you can’t keep emotions by contract: so at the end of the day the logical, ethical and theoretically sound position is to argue for the abolition of marriage as an institution. However, Plato and others have been making that argument for thousands of years, and it still doesn’t seem to have gained popular traction. And we also need to realise, contrary to the opinion of my former self and The Beatles, that you really do need more than love as fidelity to an event of you and your partner’s making when you are being denied your partners health benefits just because you are a same-sex couple, especially when those health benefits could be saving your life. And if same-sex marriage codification is a quick fix for that and similar issues for those who can fit into the State sanctioned same-sex marriage walls, which admittedly leaves some members of the Queer community who don’t overlap out, as part of an overall and more inclusive strategy that does include them then I’m in favour of it. That is, till the time comes that Straight and Queer can, over time and with a lot of mutual social learning, explore how to recognise and give equal rights with or without State based codification to the multiple queer and sometimes polyamorous relationship models that already populate the Gay and Straight worlds right now. So in the meantime continue to count me down as a “marriage-chasing-Gay.” But just pragmatically, not to normalise, as one of a diversity of political strategies for equality and just for now. References Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. New York: Verso, 2001. ———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Bradshaw, James. “Pride Toronto Denied Federal Funding.” The Globe and Mail. 7 May. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/pride-toronto-denied-federal-funding/article1211065/›. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,1990. ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. ———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Christopher, Nathaniel. “Openly Gay Men Make Less money, Survey Shows.” Xtra! .5 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Openly_gay_men_make_less_money_survey_shows-12756.aspx›. Clinton, Hillary. “Gay Rights Are Human Rights, And Human Rights Are Gay Rights.” United Nations General Assembly. 26 Dec. 2011 ‹http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/06/383003/sec-clinton-to-un-gay-rights-are-human-rights-and-human-rights-are-gay-rights/?mobile=nc›. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. New York: Random House,1980. —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Toronto: Random House, 1977. —. The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Heart. “What About Love.” Heart. Capitol Records, 1985. CD. Ha, Tu Thanh. “Dan Savage: ‘I Had Been Divorced Overnight’.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/dan-savage-i-had-been-divorced-overnight/article1358211/›. “Homecoming.” Equal Love Campaign. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a54UBWFXsF4›. Leblanc, Daniel. “Harper Among Least Trusted Leaders, Poll Shows.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-among-least-trusted-leaders-poll-shows/article5187774/#›. Makin, Kirk. “The Coming Conservative Court: Harper to Reshape Judiciary.” The Globe and Mail. 24 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-coming-conservative-court-harper-to-reshape-judiciary/article595398/›. “Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in Portland, Maine.” 9 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4rGla6OzGc›. “Lady Gaga Speaks at Gay Rights Rally in Washington DC as Part of the National Equality March.” 11 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jepWXu-Z38›. “Obama’s Stirring New Gay Rights Ad.” Newzar.com. 24 May. 2012 ‹http://newzar.com/obamas-stirring-new-gay-rights-ad/›. Postmedia News. “Same-sex Marriage in Canada will not be Revisited, Harper Says.” 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/12/same-sex-marriage-in-canada-will-not-be-revisited-harper-says/›. Potts, Graham. “‘Love Hurts’: Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade and St. Paul Queer Alain Badiou’s Truth and Fidelity.” CTheory. rt002: 2009 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=606›. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: hom*onationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke UP, 2007. Seguin, Rheal. “Baird Calls Out Iran on Human Rights Violations.” The Globe and Mail. 22 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/baird-calls-out-iran-on-human-rights-violations/article4628968/›.

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ObjectiveUsing a syndromic surveillance system to understand the magnitude and risk factors related to heat-related illness (HRI) in Pinal County, AZ.IntroductionExtreme heat is a major cause of weather-related morbidity and mortality in the United States (US).1 HRI is the most frequent cause of environmental exposure-related injury treated in US emergency departments.2 More than 65,000 emergency room visits occur for acute HRI each summer nationwide.3 In Arizona, HRI accounts for an estimated 2,000 emergency room patients and 118 deaths each year.4 As heat-related illness becomes increasingly recognized as a public health issue, local health departments are tasked with building capacity to conduct enhanced surveillance of HRI in order to inform public health preparedness and response efforts. In Pinal County, understanding the magnitude and risk factors of HRI is important for informing prevention efforts as well as developing strategies to respond to extreme heat.MethodsTo gain a better understanding of the magnitude of HRI in Pinal County, historical cases were reviewed from hospital discharge data (HDD) from 2010-2016. Cases were included if the discharge record included any ICD codes consistent with HRI (ICD-9 codes 992 or ICD-10 codes T67 or X30) and if the patient’s county of residence was Pinal County. Recent HRI cases during the summer of 2017 were identified using the National Syndromic Surveillance Program BioSense Platform. The ESSENCE syndromic surveillance tool within the BioSense Platform includes data reported by local hospitals. This data can be used to detect abnormal activity for public health investigation. HRI cases were identified in ESSENCE based on ICD-10 codes and chief complaint terms according to a standardized algorithm developed by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.1 Both emergency department and admitted patients with a HRI were abstracted from HDD and ESSENCE. To assess HRI risk factors for the summer of 2017, a survey instrument was developed. Survey questions included the nature and location of the HRI incident, potential risk factors, and knowledge and awareness of HRI. Cases were identified in ESSENSE on a weekly basis from May 1, 2017-September 12, 2017, and follow up phone interviews were conducted with eligible cases. For HRI cases eligible for interview, three attempts were made to contact the patient by phone. Cases were excluded if the patient was incarcerated, deceased, or did not have a HRI upon medical record review. An exploratory analysis was performed for the data from HDD, ESSENCE, and interviews.ResultsPinal County Public Health Services District identified 1,321 HRI cases from 2010-2016, an average of 189 per year. Hospital discharge data suggest HRI cases are more likely to occur in males between the ages of 20-44 years old (27%). It is also notable that a sharp increase in HRI cases is observed each year in mid-to-late June, with an estimated 14% of annual cases occurring during the third week of June. Further analysis of HDD showed 31% of cases received medical treatment in Casa Grande in central Pinal County. Between May 1st and September 12th of 2017, 161 HRI cases were detected using ESSENCE. Of which 149 cases were determined to be HRI; 22 cases did not have contact information, and 4 cases were ineligible due to incarceration or death. A total of 31 HRI cases were interviewed out of the eligible 123 ESSENSE cases (25% response rate). Interview data indicated occupational exposure to extreme heat as a major risk factor for HRI. Additional risk factors reported during interviews included exposure to extreme heat while at home or traveling, although interview results are not representative due to a small sample size (n=31).ConclusionsSyndromic surveillance combined with interviews and a review of HDD provides an informative approach for monitoring and responding to HRI. Data suggest Pinal County should expect an increase in HRI cases by mid-June each year, typically coinciding with the first National Weather Service Extreme Heat Warning of the season. Preliminary results suggest that cases occur more frequently in working males ages 20-44 years old in occupations that expose workers to extreme heat conditions. Additional information is needed to assess risk factors for HRI among vulnerable populations in Pinal County who were not represented in this study, including individuals who are homeless, undocumented, elderly, or in correctional facilities. Future areas for improvement include improving the phone interview script to include English and Spanish language versions and performing medical record abstractions on all HRI cases. Enhanced syndromic surveillance is recommended to provide information on risk factors for HRI to inform prevention efforts in Pinal County.References1. Heat-Related Illness Syndrome Query: A Guidance Document For Implementing Heat-Related Illness Syndromic Surveillance in Public Health Practice. In: Epidemiologists CoSaT, ed. Vol 1.02016:1-12.2. Pillai SK, Noe RS, Murphy MW, et al. Heat illness: predictors of hospital admissions among emergency department visits-Georgia, 2002-2008. J Community Health. 2014;39(1):90-98.3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . Climate Change and Extreme Heat: What You Can Do to Prepare. 2016; Available from https://www.cdc.gov/climateandhealth/pubs/extreme-heat-guidebook.pdf4. Trends in Morbidity and Mortality from Exposure to Excessive Natural Heat in Arizona, 2012 report. In: Services ADoH, ed2012.

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"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked. "What sort of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask. "Oh, things that happened in the week after next," the Queen replied in a careless tone. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass. It would seem, odd as the notion may appear at first glance, that memory can in fact be thought of as working in two directions: both backwards and forwards. Take, for example, the commonly enough expressed sentiment that one should avail of every opportunity that life presents to "learn from experience". Isn't to do so, in fact, a projection into the future of the 'memory' that has been gained in the past, and stored in the present? Isn't the implication that, with a little careful observation of last week, one can begin to 'remember' what happened in the week after next? Consider now the development of a revolutionary new communications technology. Who are its pioneers? Experience has taught that there are at least three categories of person (or organisation) which are to be found wherever tomorrow is being actualised. They are the visionaries, the enthusiasts, and the entrepreneurs -- though some may argue that this last category would better be called economic opportunists. Of course, these are not, and shouldn't be thought of as, completely distinct categories, separated by impermeable barriers; one can be in all three as easily as not. The early days of Radio fit this model. As an infant technology it was fostered by visionaries like Marconi, enthusiasts like the many around the world who cobbled together their own home-made transmitters and receivers, and entrepreneur/opportunists like Frank Conrad of Westinghouse, whose 8XK transmitted periodically during the first world war to test equipment made by the company for the American military (Mishkind). The emergence of interactive networked computing, and ultimately of the Internet, fits this model too. There were early visionaries like Douglas Engelbart, and the MIT professor J.C.R. Licklider, who were among the first to see a potential for more than simply large scale number crunching in the fledgling electronic computing industry (Rheingold 65-89). Enthusiasts include the North Carolina students who created Usenet, and the Chicago hobbyists who "triggered the worldwide BBS movement because they wanted to transfer files from one PC to another without driving across town" (Rheingold 67). As for entrepreneur/opportunists, well, organisations like Netscape, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com leap to mind. When revolutionary development is underway the potential for change is seen to be boundless. Radio was quickly recognised as a means to cross vast distances, and difficult terrain. It became a lifeline to ships in distress, bridging the dreadful isolation of the unforgiving oceans. It was put to use as a public service: the US Agriculture Department's broadcasting of weather reports as early as 1912 being some of the earliest radio broadcasts in that country (White). Similarly, Westinghouse's 8XK, along with many other fledgling stations, broadcast the results of the US presidential election on the night of November 2nd, 1920 (Mishkind). The "wireless" telegraph helped to join that huge nation together, and having done so, went on to inform and entertain it with news, concerts, lectures and the like. The democratising potential of the new medium and its easily disseminated information was soon recognised and debated: "Will Radio Make People the Government" demanded a 1924 headline in Radio Broadcast, an early industry magazine (Lappin). All this inevitably gave rise to questions of control; for a free medium could also be seen, depending on one's point of view, as a dangerous, anarchic medium. Perhaps those who pay for it should control it; but who is to pay for it, and with what? For a long time there was no clear vision anywhere of how the medium could be made to turn a dollar. In England a tax on the sale of radio hardware was introduced to fund the newly formed, and government owned, British Broadcasting Corporation. Such a model was rejected in the US, however, where large corporations -- among them AT&T, Westinghouse and General Electric -- gradually gained the upper hand. The system they put in place at first involved the leasing of airtime on large networks to commercial 'sponsors', which subsequently grew into direct on-air advertising. It won't have escaped the notice of many, I'm sure, that much of this could just as easily be about the Internet in the 1990s as Radio in the 1920s. And this is where memory comes into play. Certainly there are many, and profound, differences between the two media. The very nature of the Internet may seem to many to be just too decentralised, too anarchic, to ever be effectively harnessed -- or hijacked if you prefer -- by commercial interests. But it was, at one time, also impossible to see how Radio could ever show a profit. And sure, commercial Radio isn't the only kind of Radio out there. Radio National in Australia, for example, is a publicly funded network that does many of the good things a relatively uncoerced technology can do; but is this aspect of the medium central or marginalised, and which do we want it to be? Robert Mc Chesney considers that "to answer the question of whither the Internet, one need only determine where the greatest profits are to be found". This is a fairly bleak view but it may well be true. To find out for yourself where the Internet is likely to go, exercise the memory of the past, and you might remember the future. References Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There: The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. 166-345. Lappin, Todd. "Deja Vu All Over Again." Wired. 11 Aug. 1998 <http://www.wired.com/wired/3.05/features/dejavu.php>. McChesney, Robert. "The Internet and US Communication Policy-Making in Historical and Critical Perspective." Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 1.4 (1995). 30 May 1998 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue4/mcchesney.php>. Mishkind, Barry. "Who's On First?" 20 Aug. 1995. 11 Aug. 1998 <http://www.oldradio.com/archives/general/first.php>. Radio Museum. 11 Aug. 1998 <http://home.luna.nl/~arjan-muil/radio/museum.php>. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Surfing the Internet. London: Minerva, 1995. Surfing the Aether. 11 Aug. 1998 <http://www.northwinds.net/bchris/index.htm>. White, Thomas H. "United States Early Radio History." 25 Jul. 1998. 11 Aug. 1998 <http://www.ipass.net/~whitetho/index.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Mc Cormack. "Remembering the Week after Next." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/week.php>. Chicago style: Paul Mc Cormack, "Remembering the Week after Next," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/week.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Mc Cormack. (1998) Remembering the week after next. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/week.php> ([your date of access]).

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Introduction The scientific validity of climate change claims, how to intervene (if at all) in environmental, economic, political and social consequences of climate change, and the adaptation and mitigation needed with any given climate change scenario, are contested areas of public, policy and academic discourses. For marginalised populations, the climate discourses around adaptation, mitigation, vulnerability and resilience are of particular importance. This paper considers the silence around disabled people in these discourses. Marci Roth of the Spinal Cord Injury Association testified before Congress in regards to the Katrina disaster: [On August 29] Susan Daniels called me to enlist my help because her sister in-law, a quadriplegic woman in New Orleans, had been unsuccessfully trying to evacuate to the Superdome for two days. […] It was clear that this woman, Benilda Caixetta, was not being evacuated. I stayed on the phone with Benilda, for the most part of the day. […] She kept telling me she’d been calling for a ride to the Superdome since Saturday; but, despite promises, no one came. The very same paratransit system that people can’t rely on in good weather is what was being relied on in the evacuation. […] I was on the phone with Benilda when she told me, with panic in her voice “the water is rushing in.” And then her phone went dead. We learned five days later that she had been found in her apartment dead, floating next to her wheelchair. […] Benilda did not have to drown. (National Council on Disability, emphasis added) According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adaptation is the “Adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities” (IPCC, Climate Change 2007). Adaptations can be anticipatory or reactive, and depending on their degree of spontaneity they can be autonomous or planned (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report). Adaptations can be private or public (IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report), technological, behavioural, managerial and structural (National Research Council of Canada). Adaptation, in the context of human dimensions of global change, usually refers to a process, action or outcome in a system (household, community, group, sector, region, country) in order for that system to better cope with, manage or adjust to some changing condition, stress, hazard, risk or opportunity (Smit and Wandel). Adaptation can encompass national or regional strategies as well as practical steps taken at the community level or by individuals. According to Smit et al, a framework for systematically defining adaptations is based on three questions: (i) adaptation to what; (ii) who or what adapts; and (iii) how does adaptation occur? These are essential questions that have to be looked at from many angles including cultural and anthropological lenses as well as lenses of marginalised and highly vulnerable populations. Mitigation (to reduce or prevent changes in the climate system), vulnerability (the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, the adverse effects of climate change), and resilience (the amount of change a system can undergo without changing state), are other important concepts within the climate change discourse. Non-climate stresses can increase vulnerability to climate change by reducing resilience and can also reduce adaptive capacity because of resource deployment to competing needs. Extending this to the context of disabled people, ableism (sentiment to expect certain abilities within humans) (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”) and disablism (the unwillingness to accommodate different needs) (Miller, Parker and Gillinson) are two concepts that will thus play themselves out in climate discourses. The “Summary for Policymakers” of the IPCC 2007 report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, states: “Poor communities can be especially vulnerable, in particular those concentrated in high-risk areas. They tend to have more limited adaptive capacities, and are more dependent on climate-sensitive resources such as local water and food supplies.” From this quote one can conclude that disabled people are particularly impacted, as the majority of disabled people live in poverty (Elwan). For instance, CARE International, a humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Maplecroft, a company that specialises in the calculation, analysis and visualisation of global risks, conclude: “The degree of vulnerability is determined by underlying natural, human, social, physical and financial factors and is a major reason why poor people—especially those in marginalised social groups like women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities—are most affected by disasters” (CARE International). The purpose of this paper is to expose the reader to (a) how disabled people are situated in the culture of the climate, adaptation, mitigation and resilience discourse; (b) how one would answer the three questions, (i) adaptation to what, (ii) who or what adapts, and (iii) how does adaptation occur (Smit et al), using a disabled people lens; and (c) what that reality of the involvement of disabled people within the climate change discourse might herald for other groups in the future. The paper contends that there is a pressing need for the climate discourse to be more inclusive and to develop a new social contract to modify existing dynamics of ableism and disablism so as to avoid the uneven distribution of evident burdens already linked to climate change. A Culture of Neglect: The Situation of Disabled People As climates changes, environmental events that are classified as natural disasters are expected to be more frequent. In the face of recent disaster responses, how effective have these efforts been as they relate to the needs and challenges faced by disabled people? Almost immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the National Council on Disability (NCD) in the United States estimated that 155,000 people with disabilities lived in the three cities hardest hit by the hurricane (about 25 per cent of the cities’ populations). The NCD urged emergency managers and government officials to recognise that the need for basic necessities by hurricane survivors with disabilities was “compounded by chronic health conditions and functional impairments … [which include] people who are blind, people who are deaf, people who use wheelchairs, canes, walkers, crutches, people with service animals, and people with mental health needs.” The NCD estimated that a disproportionate number of fatalities were people with disabilities. They cited one statistic from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP): “73 per cent of Hurricane Katrina-related deaths in New Orleans area were among persons age 60 and over, although they comprised only 15 per cent of the population in New Orleans.” As the NCD stated, “most of those individuals had medical conditions and functional or sensory disabilities that made them more vulnerable. Many more people with disabilities under the age of 60 died or were otherwise impacted by the hurricanes.” As these numbers are very likely linked to the impaired status of the elderly, it seems reasonable to assume similar numbers for non-elderly disabled people. Hurricane Katrina is but one example of how disabled people are neglected in a disaster (Hemingway and Priestley; Fjord and Manderson). Disabled people were also disproportionately impacted in other disasters, such as the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan (Nakamura) or the 2003 heatwave in France, where 63 per cent of heat-related deaths occurred in institutions, with a quarter of these in nursing homes (Holstein et al.). A review of 18 US heatwave response plans revealed that although people with mental or chronic illnesses and the homeless constitute a significant proportion of the victims in recent heatwaves, only one plan emphasised outreach to disabled persons, and only two addressed the shelter and water needs of the homeless (Ebi and Meehl; Bernhard and McGeehin). Presence of Disabled People in Climate Discourse Although climate change will disproportionately impact disabled people, despite the less than stellar record of disaster adaptation and mitigation efforts towards disabled people, and despite the fact that other social groups (such as women, children, ‘the poor’, indigenous people, farmers and displaced people) are mentioned in climate-related reports such as the IPCC reports and the Human Development Report 2007/2008, the same reports do not mention disabled people. Even worse, the majority of the material generated by, and physically set up for, discourses on climate, is inaccessible for many disabled people (Australian Human Rights Commission). For instance, the IPCC report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, contains Box 8.2: Gender and natural disasters, makes the following points: (a) “men and women are affected differently in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction”; (b) “natural disasters have been shown to result in increased domestic violence against, and post-traumatic stress disorders in, women”; and (c) “women make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery.” The content of Box 8.2 acknowledges the existence of different perspectives and contributions to the climate discourse, and that it is beneficial to explore these differences. It seems reasonable to assume that differences in perspectives, contributions and impact may well also exist between people with and without disabilities, and that it may be likewise beneficial to explore these differences. Disabled people are differently affected in all phases of a disaster, from exposure to risk and risk perception; to preparedness behaviour, warning communication and response; physical, psychological, social and economic impacts; emergency response; and ultimately to recovery and reconstruction. Disabled people could also make an important contribution to disaster reduction, often informally through participating in disaster management and acting as agents of social change. Their resilience and their networks are critical in household and community recovery, important as distributors of relief efforts and in reconstruction design. The Bonn Declaration from the 2007 international conference, Disasters are always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations, highlighted many problems disabled people are facing and gives recommendations for inclusive disaster preparedness planning, for inclusive response in acute emergency situations and immediate rehabilitation measures, and for inclusive post-disaster reconstruction and development measures. Many workshops were initiated by disabled people groups, such as Rehabilitation International. However, the disabled people disaster adaptation and mitigation discourse is not mainstreamed. Advocacy by people with disability for accessible transport and universal or “life-cycle” housing (among other things) shows how they can contribute significantly to more effective social systems and public facilities. These benefit everyone and help to shift public expectations towards accessible and flexible amenities and services—for example, emergency response and evacuation procedures are much easier for all if such facilities are universally accessible. Most suggestions by disabled people for a more integrative, accessible physical environment and societal attitude benefit everyone, and gain special importance with the ever-increasing proportion of elderly people in society. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is intended to be a balanced assessment of current knowledge on climate change mitigation. However, none of the 2007 IPCC reports mention disabled people. Does that mean that disabled people are not impacted by, or impact, climate change? Does no knowledge of adaptation, mitigation and adaptation capacity from a disabled people lens exist, or does the knowledge not reach the IPCC, or does the IPCC judge this knowledge as irrelevant? This culture of neglect and unbalanced assessment of knowledge evident in the IPCC reports was recognised before for rise of a ‘global’ climate discourse. For instance, a 2001 Canadian government document asked that research agendas be developed with the involvement of, among others, disabled people (Health Canada). The 2009 Nairobi Declaration on Africa’s response to climate change (paragraph 36) also asks for the involvement of disabled people (African Ministerial Conference on the Environment). However, so far nothing has trickled up to the international bodies, like the IPCC, or leading conferences such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009. Where Will It End? In his essay, “We do not need climate change apartheid in adaptation”, in the Human Development Report 2007/2008, Archbishop Desmond Tutu suggests that we are drifting into a situation of global adaptation apartheid—that adaptation becomes a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale (United Nations Development Programme). He uses the term “adaptation apartheid” to highlight the inequality of support for adaptation capacity between high and low income countries: “Inequality in capacity to adapt to climate change is emerging as a potential driver of wider disparities in wealth, security and opportunities for human development”. I submit that “adaptation apartheid” also exists in regard to disabled people, with the invisibility of disabled people in the climate discourse being just one facet. The unwillingness to accommodate, to help the “other,” is nothing new for disabled people. The ableism that favours species-typical bodily functioning (Wolbring, “Is there an end to out-able?”; Wolbring, “Why NBIC?”) and disablism (Miller, Parker, and Gillinson)—the lack of accommodation enthusiasm for the needs of people with ‘below’ species-typical body abilities and the unwillingness to adapt to the needs of “others”—is a form of “adaptation apartheid,” of accommodation apartheid, of adaptation disablism that has been battled by disabled people for a long time. In a 2009 online survey of 2000 British people, 38 per cent believed that most people in British society see disabled people as a “drain on resources” (Scope). A majority of human geneticist concluded in a survey in 1999 that disabled people will never be given the support they need (Nippert and Wolff). Adaptation disablism is visible in the literature and studies around other disasters. The 1988 British Medical Association discussion document, Selection of casualties for treatment after nuclear attack, stated “casualties whose injuries were likely to lead to a permanent disability would receive lower priority than those expected to fully recover” (Sunday Morning Herald). Famine is seen to lead to increased infanticide, increased competitiveness and decreased collaboration (Participants of the Nuclear Winter: The Anthropology of Human Survival Session). Ableism and disablism notions experienced by disabled people can now be extended to include those challenges expected to arise from the need to adapt to climate change. It is reasonable to expect that ableism will prevail, expecting people to cope with certain forms of climate change, and that disablism will be extended, with the ones less affected being unwilling to accommodate the ones more affected beyond a certain point. This ableism/disablism will not only play itself out between high and low income countries, as Desmond Tutu described, but also within high income countries, as not every need will be accommodated. The disaster experience of disabled people is just one example. And there might be climate change consequences that one can only mitigate through high tech bodily adaptations that will not be available to many of the ones who are so far accommodated in high income countries. Desmond Tutu submits that adaptation apartheid might work for the fortunate ones in the short term, but will be destructive for them in the long term (United Nations Development Programme). Disability studies scholar Erik Leipoldt proposed that the disability perspective of interdependence is a practical guide from the margins for making new choices that may lead to a just and sustainable world—a concept that reduces the distance between each other and our environment (Leipoldt). This perspective rejects ableism and disablism as it plays itself out today, including adaptation apartheid. Planned adaptation involves four basic steps: information development and awareness-raising; planning and design; implementation; and monitoring and evaluation (Smit et al). Disabled people have important knowledge to contribute to these four basic steps that goes far beyond their community. Their understanding and acceptance of, for example, the concept of interdependence, is just one major contribution. Including the concept of interdependence within the set of tools that inform the four basic steps of adaptation and other facets of climate discourse has the potential to lead to a decrease of adaptation apartheid, and to increase the utility of the climate discourse for the global community as a whole. References African Ministerial Conference on the Environment. Nairobi Declaration on the African Process for Combating Climate Change. 2009. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.unep.org/roa/Amcen/Amcen_Events/3rd_ss/Docs/nairobi-Decration-2009.pdf ›. American Association of Retired Persons. We Can Do Better: Lessons Learned for Protecting Older Persons in Disasters. 2009. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/il/better.pdf ›. Australian Human Rights Commission. “Climate Change Secretariat Excludes People with Disabilities.” 2008. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about/media/media_releases/2008/95_08.html ›. Bernhard, S., and M. McGeehin. “Municipal Heatwave Response Plans.” American Journal of Public Health 94 (2004): 1520-21. CARE International, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Maplecroft. Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping Emerging Trends and Risk Hotspots for Humanitarian Actors. CARE International, 2008. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/reports/Human_Implications_PolicyBrief.pdf ›, ‹ http://www.careclimatechange.org/files/reports/CARE_Human_Implications.pdf ›. "Disasters Are Always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations." Bonn Declaration from the International Conference: Disasters Are Always Inclusive: Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Emergency Situations. 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ http://www.disabilityfunders.org/webfm_send/6, http://www.disabilityfunders.org/emergency_preparedness ›, ‹ http://bezev.de/bezev/aktuelles/index.htm ›. Ebi, K., and G. Meehl. Heatwaves and Global Climate Change: The Heat Is On: Climate Change and Heatwaves in the Midwest. 2007. 26 Aug. 2009 ‹ www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Regional-Impacts-Midwest.pdf ›. Elwan, A. Poverty and Disability: A Survey of the Literature. 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IntroductionThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.Recited at many Anzac and Remembrance Day services, ‘The Ode’, an excerpt from a poem by Laurence Binyon, speaks of a timelessness within the inexorable march of time. When we memorialise those for whom time no longer matters, time stands still. Whether those who died in service of their country have finally “beaten time” or been forced to acknowledge that “their time on earth was up”, depends on your preference for clichés. Time and death are natural bedfellows. War memorials, be they physical or digital, declare a commitment to “remember them”. This article will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials. It will examine whether virtual war memorials are a sign of the times – a natural response to the internet era. If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what experiences do we gain and lose through online war memorials?Physical War MemorialsDuring and immediately after the First World War, physical war memorials were built in almost every city, town and village of the Allied countries involved in the war. They served many purposes. One of the roles of physical war memorials was to keep the impact of war at the centre of a town’s consciousness. In a regional centre like Bathurst, in New South Wales, the town appears to be built around the memorial – the court, council chambers, library, churches and pubs gather around the war memorials.Similarly, in small towns such as Bega, Picton and Kiama, war memorial arches form a gateway to the town centre. It is an architectural signal that you are entering a community that has known pain, death and immense loss. Time has passed, but the names of the men and women who served remain etched in stone: “lest we forget”.The names are listed in a democratic fashion: usually in alphabetical order without their rank. However, including all those who offered their service to “God, King and Country” (not just those who died) also had a more sinister and divisive effect. It reminded communities of those “eligibles” in their midst whom some regarded as “shirkers”, even if they were conscientious objectors or needed to stay and continue vital industries, like farming (Inglis & Phillips 186).Ken Inglis (97) estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War. Jay Winter (Sites 2) goes further arguing that “almost every family” in the British Commonwealth was grieving, either for a relative; or for a friend, work colleague, neighbour or lover. Nations were traumatised. Physical war memorials provided a focal point for that universal grief. They signalled, through their prominence in the landscape or dominance of a hilltop, that it was acceptable to grieve. Mourners were encouraged to gather around the memorial in a public place, particularly on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day each year. Grief was seen, observed, respected.Such was the industrial carnage of the Western Front, that about one third of Australia and New Zealand’s fatal casualties were not brought home. Families lost a family member, body and soul, in the Great War. For those people who subscribed to a Victorian view of death, who needed a body to grieve over, the war memorial took on the role of a gravesite and became a place where people would place a sprig of wattle, poke a poppy into the crevice beside a name, or simply touch the letters etched or embossed in the stone (Winter, Experience 206). As Ken Inglis states: “the statue on its pedestal does stand for each dead man whose body, identified or missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned” to his home town (11).Physical war memorials were also a place where women could forge new identities over time. Women accepted, or claimed their status as war widows, grieving mothers or bereft fiancés, while at the same time coming to terms with their loss. As Joy Damousi writes: “mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, a lost soldier” (1). Thus, physical war memorials were transitional, liminal spaces.Jay Winter (Sites 85) believes that physical war memorials were places to both honour and mourn the dead, wounded, missing and shell-shocked. These dual functions of both esteeming and grieving those who served was reinforced at ceremonies, such as Anzac or Remembrance Day.As Joy Damousi (156) and Ken Inglis (457, 463) point out, war memorials in Australia are rarely sites of protest, either for war widows or veterans campaigning for a better pension, or peace activists who opposed militarism. When they are used in this way, it makes headlines in the news (Legge). They are seldom used to highlight the tragedy, inhumanity or futility of war. The exception to this, were the protests against the Vietnam War.The physical war memorials which mushroomed in Australian country towns and cities after the First World War captured and claimed those cataclysmic four years for the families and communities who were devastated by the war. They provided a place to both honour and mourn those who served, not just once, but for as long as the memorial remained. They were also a place of pilgrimage, particularly for families who did not have a grave to visit and a focal point for the annual rituals of remembrance.However, over the past 100 years, some unmaintained physical war memorials are beginning to look like untended graves. They have become obstacles rather than sentinels in the landscape. Laurence Aberhart’s haunting photographs show that memorials in places like Dorrigo in rural New South Wales “go largely unnoticed year-round, encroached on by street signage and suburbia” (Lakin 49). Have physical war memorials largely fulfilled their purpose and are they becoming obsolete? Perhaps they have been supplanted by the gathering space of the 21st century: the Internet.Digital War MemorialsThe centenary of the Great War heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials. Online First World War memorials focus on collecting and amassing information that commemorates individuals. They are able to include far more information than will fit on a physical war memorial. They encourage users to search the digitised records that are available on the site and create profiles of people who served. While they deal in records from the past, they are very much about the present: the user experience and their connection to their ancestors who served.The Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War asks users to “help us build the permanent digital memorial to all who contributed during the First World War”. This request deserves scrutiny. Firstly, “permanent” – is this possible in the digital age? When the head of Google, Vint Cerf, disclosed in 2015 that software programming wizards were still grappling with how to create digital formats that can be accessed in 10, 100 or a 1000 years’ time; and recommended that we print out our precious digital data and store it in hard copy or risk losing it forever; then it appears that online permanency is a mirage.Secondly, “all who contributed” – the website administrators informed me that “all” currently includes people who served with Canada and Britain but the intention is to include other Commonwealth nations. It seems that the former British Empire “owns” the First World War – non-allied, non-Commonwealth nations that contributed to the First World War will not be included. One hundred years on, have we really made peace with Germany and Turkey? The armistice has not yet spread to the digital war memorial. The Lives of the First world War website missed an opportunity to be leaders in online trans-national memorialisation.Discovering Anzacs, a website built by the National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand, is a little more subdued and honest, as visitors are invited to “enhance a profile dedicated to the wartime journey of someone who served”.Physical and online war memorials can work in tandem. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Victoria created a website that provides background information on the military service of the 159 members of the legal profession who are named on their Memorial board. This is an excellent example of a digital medium expanding on and reinvigorating a physical memorial.It is noteworthy that all of these online memorial websites commemorate those who served in the First World War, and sometimes the Boer or South African War. There is no space for remembering those who served or died in more recent wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. James Brown and others discuss how the cult of Anzac is overshadowing the service and sacrifices of the men and women who have been to more recent wars. The proximity of their service mitigates against its recognition – it is too close for comfortable, detached remembrance.Complementary But Not ExclusiveA comparison of their functions indicates that online memorials which focus on the First World War complement, but will never replace the role of physical war memorials. As discussed, physical war memorials were sites for grieving, pilgrimage and collectively honouring the men and women who served and died. Online websites which allow users to upload scanned documents and photographs; transcribe diary entries or letters; post tribute poems, songs or video clips; and provide links to other relevant records online are neither places of pilgrimage nor sites for grieving. They are about remembrance, not memory (Scates, “Finding” 221).Ken Inglis describes physical war memorials as “bearers of collective memory” (7). In a sense, online war memorials are keepers of individual, user-enhanced archival records. It can be argued that online memorials to the First World War tap into the desire for hero-worship, the boom in family history research and what Scates calls the “cult of remembrance” (“Finding” 218). They provide a way for individuals, often two or three generations removed, to discover, understand and document the wartime experiences of individuals in their family. By allowing descendants to situate their family story within the larger, historically significant narrative of the First World War, online memorials encourage people to feel that the suffering and untimely death of their forbear wasn’t in vain – that it contributed to something worthwhile and worth remembering. At a collective level, this contributes to the ANZAC myth and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s attempt to use it as a foundational myth for Australia’s nationhood.Kylie Veale (9) argues that cyberspace has encouraged improvements on traditional memorial practices because online memorials can be created in a more timely fashion, they are more affordable and they are accessible and enable the sharing of grief and bereavement on a global scale. As evidence of this, an enterprising group in the USA has developed an android app which provides a template for creating an online memorial. They compete with Memorialsonline.com. Veale’s arguments remind us that the Internet is a hyper-democratic space where interactions and sites that are collaborative or contemplative exist alongside trolling and prejudice. Veale also contends that memorial websites facilitate digital immortality, which helps keep the memory of the deceased alive. However, given the impermanence of much of the content on the Internet, this final attribute is a bold claim.It is interesting to compare the way individual soldiers are remembered prior to and after the arrival of the Internet. Now that it is possible to create a tribute website, or Facebook page in memory of someone who served, do families do this instead of creating large physical scrapbooks or photo albums? Or do they do both? Garry Roberts created a ‘mourning diary’ as a record of his journey of agonising grief for his eldest son who died in 1918. His diary consists of 27 scrapbooks, weighing 10 kilograms in total. Pat Jalland (318) suggests this helped Roberts to create some sort of order out of his emotional turmoil. Similarly, building websites or digital tribute pages can help friends and relatives through the grieving process. They can also contribute the service person’s story to official websites such as those managed by the Australian Defence Forces. Do grieving family members look up a website or tribute page they’ve created in the same way that they might open up a scrapbook and remind themselves of their loved one? Kylie Veale’s research into online memorials created for anyone who has died, not necessarily those killed by war, suggests online memorials are used in this way (5).Do grieving relatives take comfort from the number of likes, tags or comments on a memorial or tribute website, in the same way that they might feel supported by the number of people who attend a memorial service or send a condolence card? Do they archive the comments? Garry Roberts kept copies of the letters of sympathy and condolence that he received from friends and relatives after his son’s tragic death and added them to his 27 scrapbooks.Both onsite and online memorials can suffer from lack of maintenance and relevance. Memorial websites can become moribund like untended headstones in a graveyard. Once they have passed their use as a focal point of grief, a place to post tributes; they can languish, un-updated and un-commented on.Memorials and PilgrimageOne thing that online memorials will never be, however, are sites of pilgrimage or ritual. One does not need to set out on a journey to visit an online memorial. It is as far away as your portable electronic device. Online memorials cannot provide the closure or sense of identity and community that comes from visiting a memorial or gravesite.This was evident in December 2014 when people felt the need to visit the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin Place after the terrorist siege and lay flowers and tributes. While there were also Facebook tribute pages set up for these victims of violence, mourners still felt the need to visit the sites. A permanent memorial to the victims of the siege has now opened in Martin Place.Do people gather around a memorial website for the annual rituals which take place on Anzac or Remembrance Day, or the anniversaries of significant battles? In 2013, the Australian War Memorial (AWM) saw a spike in people logging onto the Memorial’s Remembrance Day web page just prior to 11am. They left the site immediately after the minute’s silence. The AWM web team think they were looking for a live broadcast of the Remembrance Day service in Canberra. When that wasn’t available online, they chose to stay on the site until after the minute’s silence. Perhaps this helped them to focus on the reason for Remembrance Day. Perhaps, as Internet speeds get faster, it will be possible to conduct your own virtual ceremony in real time with friends and family in cyberspace.However, I cannot imagine a time when visiting dignitaries from other countries will post virtual wreaths to virtual war memorials. Ken Inglis argues that the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the AWM has become the ritual centre of the Australian nation, “receiving obligatory wreaths from every visiting head of state” (459).Physical and Online Memorials to the War in AfghanistanThere are only eight physical war memorials to the Afghanistan conflict in Australia, even though this is the longest war Australia has been involved in to date (2001-2015). Does the lack of physical memorials to the war in Afghanistan mean that our communities no longer need them, and that people are memorialising online instead?One grieving father in far north Queensland certainly felt that an online memorial would never suffice. Gordon Chuck’s son, Private Benjamin Chuck, was killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2010 when he was only 27 years old. Spurred by his son’s premature death, Gordon Chuck rallied family, community and government support, in the tiny hinterland town of Yungaburra, west of Cairns in Queensland, to establish an Avenue of Honour. He knocked on the doors of local businesses, the Returned Servicemen’s League (RSL), the Australian Defence Forces and every level of government to raise $300,000. His intention was to create a timeless memorial of world standard and national significance. On 21 June 2013, the third anniversary of his son’s death, the Chief of the Defence Force and the Prime Minister formally opened the Avenue of Honour in front of “thousands” of people (Nancarrow).Diggers from Afghanistan who have visited the Yungaburra Avenue of Honour speak of the closure and sense of healing it gave them (Nancarrow). The Avenue, built on the shores of Lake Tinaroo, features parallel rows of Illawarra flame trees, whose red blossoms are in full bloom around Remembrance Day and symbolise the blood and fire of war and the cycle of life. It commemorates all the Australian soldiers who have died in the Afghanistan war.The Avenue of Honour, and the memorial in Martin Place clearly demonstrate that physical war memorials are not redundant. They are needed and cherished as sites of grief, hope and commemoration. The rituals conducted there gather gravitas from the solemnity that falls when a sea of people is silent and they provide healing through the comfort of reverent strangers.ConclusionEven though we live in an era when most of us are online every day of our lives, it is unlikely that virtual war memorials will ever supplant their physical forebears. When it comes to commemorating the First World War or contemporary conflicts and those who fought or died in them, physical and virtual war memorials can be complementary but they fulfil fundamentally different roles. Because of their medium as virtual memorials, they will never fulfil the human need for a place of remembrance in the real world.ReferencesBinyon, Laurence. “For the Fallen.” The Times. 21 Sep. 1914. 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.army.gov.au/our-history/traditions/for-the-fallen>.Brown, James. Anzac’s Long Shadow. Sydney: Black Inc., 2014.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss. Great Britain: Cambridge UP, 1999.Hunter, Kathryn. “States of Mind: Remembering the Australian-New Zealand Relationship.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 36 (2002). 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/journal/j36/nzmemorial>.Inglis, Ken. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1998.Inglis, Ken, and Jock Phillips. “War Memorials in Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Survey.” Australian Historical Studies 24.96 (1991): 179-191.Jalland, Pat. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918. London: Oxford University Press, 2002.Knapton, Sarah. “Print Out Digital Photos or Risk Losing Them, Google Boss Warns.” Telegraph 13 Feb. 2015. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410506/Print-out-digital-photos-or-risk-losing-them-Google-boss-warns.html>.Lakin, Shaune. “Laurence Aberhart ANZAC.” Artlink 35.1 (2015): 48-51.Legge, James. “Vandals Deface Two London War Memorials with ‘Islam’ Graffiti”. Independent 27 May 2013. 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/vandals-deface-two-london-war-memorials-with-islam-graffiti-8633386.html>.Luckins, Tanya. The Gates of Memory. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2004.McLuhan, Marshall. Understating Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Mentor, 1964.McPhedran, Ian. “Families of Dead Soldiers Angered after Defence Chief David Hurley Donates Memorial Plinth to Avenue of Honour.” Cairns Post 7 June 2014. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/families-of-dead-soldiers-angered-after-defence-chief-david-hurley-donates-memorial-plinth-to-avenue-of-honour/story-fnjpusyw-1226946540125>.McPhedran, Ian. “Backflip over Donation of Memorial Stone from Afghanistan to Avenue of Honour at Yungaburra.” Cairns Post 11 June 2014. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/backflip-over-donation-of-memorial-stone-from-afghanistan-to-avenue-of-honour-at-yungaburra/story-fnkxmm0j-1226950508126>.Ministry for Culture and Heritage. “Interpreting First World War Memorials.” Updated 4 Sep. 2014. <http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/interpreting-first-world-war-memorials>.Nancarrow, Kirsty. “Thousands Attend Opening of Avenue of Honour, a Memorial to Diggers Killed in Afghanistan”. ABC News 7 Nov. 2014. 2 Oct. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-22/avenue-of-honour-remembers-fallen-diggers/4773592>.Scates, Bruce. “Finding the Missing of Fromelles: When Soldiers Return.” Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War. Eds. Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. 212-231.Scates, Bruce. “Soldiers’ Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of the Great War.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 40 (2007): n.p.Scott, Ernest. Australia during the War: The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. Vol. XI. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941.Stanley, Peter. “Ten Kilos of First World War Grief at the Melbourne Museum.” The Conversation 27 Aug. 2014. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/ten-kilos-of-first-world-war-grief-at-the-melbourne-museum-30362>.Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for Remembering the Dead.” Fibreculture Journal 3 (2004). 7 Oct. 2019 <http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collective-memorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/>.Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambrigde: Cambridge UP, 1995.———. The Experience of World War I. London: Macmillan, 1988.

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Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisem*nts – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circ*mstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

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Abstract:

IntroductionThe debate about the responsibility of museums to respect Indigenous peoples’ rights (Kelly and Gordon; Butts) has caught our attention on the basis of our previous research experience with regard to the protection of the tangible and intangible heritage of the San (former hunter gatherers) in Southern Africa (Martin and Vermeylen; Vermeylen, Contextualising; Vermeylen, Life Force; Vermeylen et al.; Vermeylen, Land Rights). This paper contributes to the critical debate about curatorial practices and the recovery of Indigenous peoples’ cultural practices and explores how museums can be transformed into cultural centres that “decolonise” their objects while simultaneously providing social agency to marginalised groups such as the San. Indigenous MuseumTraditional methods of displaying Indigenous heritage are now regarded with deep suspicion and resentment by Indigenous peoples (Simpson). A number of related issues such as the appropriation, ownership and repatriation of culture together with the treatment of sensitive and sacred materials and the stereotyping of Indigenous peoples’ identity (Carter; Simpson) have been identified as the main problems in the debate about museum curatorship and Indigenous heritage. The poignant question remains whether the concept of a classical museum—in the sense of how it continues to classify, value and display non-Western artworks—will ever be able to provide agency to Indigenous peoples as long as “their lives are reduced to an abstract set of largely arbitrary material items displayed without much sense of meaning” (Stanley 3). Indeed, as Salvador has argued, no matter how much Indigenous peoples have been involved in the planning and implementation of an exhibition, some issues remain problematic. First, there is the problem of representation: who speaks for the group; who should make decisions and under what circ*mstances; when is it acceptable for “outsiders” to be involved? Furthermore, Salvador raises another area of contestation and that is the issue of intention. As we agree with Salvador, no matter how good the intention to include Indigenous peoples in the curatorial practices, the fact that Indigenous peoples may have a (political) perspective about the exhibition that differs from the ideological foundation of the museum enterprise, is, indeed, a challenge that must not be overlooked in the discussion of the inclusive museum. This relates to, arguably, one of the most important challenges in respect to the concept of an Indigenous museum: how to present the past and present without creating an essentialising “Other”? As Stanley summarises, the modernising agenda of the museum, including those museums that claim to be Indigenous museums, continues to be heavily embedded in the belief that traditional cultural beliefs, practices and material manifestations must be saved. In other words, exhibitions focusing on Indigenous peoples fail to show them as dynamic, living cultures (Simpson). This raises the issue that museums recreate the past (Sepúlveda dos Santos) while Indigenous peoples’ interests can be best described “in terms of contemporaneity” (Bolton qtd. in Stanley 7). According to Bolton, Indigenous peoples’ interest in museums can be best understood in terms of using these (historical) collections and institutions to address contemporary issues. Or, as Sepúlveda dos Santos argues, in order for museums to be a true place of memory—or indeed a true place of recovery—it is important that the museum makes the link between the past and contemporary issues or to use its objects in such a way that these objects emphasize “the persistence of lived experiences transmitted through generations” (29). Under pressure from Indigenous rights movements, the major aim of some museums is now reconciliation with Indigenous peoples which, ultimately, should result in the return of the cultural objects to the originators of these objects (Kelly and Gordon). Using the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) as an illustration, we argue that the whole debate of returning or recovering Indigenous peoples’ cultural objects to the original source is still embedded in a discourse that emphasises the mummified aspect of these materials. As Harding argues, NAGPRA is provoking an image of “native Americans as mere passive recipients of their cultural identity, beholden to their ancestors and the museum community for the re-creation of their cultures” (137) when it defines cultural patrimony as objects having ongoing historical, traditional or cultural importance, central to the Native American group or culture itself. According to Harding (2005) NAGPRA’s dominating narrative focuses on the loss, alienation and cultural genocide of the objects as long as these are not returned to their originators. The recovery or the return of the objects to their “original” culture has been applauded as one of the most liberating and emancipatory events in recent years for Indigenous peoples. However, as we have argued elsewhere, the process of recovery needs to do more than just smother the object in its past; recovery can only happen when heritage or tradition is connected to the experience of everyday life. One way of achieving this is to move away from the objectification of Indigenous peoples’ cultures. ObjectificationIn our exploratory enquiry about new museum practices our attention was drawn to a recent debate about ownership and personhood within the context of museology (Busse; Baker; Herle; Bell; Geismar). Busse, in particular, makes the point that in order to reformulate curatorial practices it is important to redefine the concept and meaning of objects. While the above authors do not question the importance of the objects, they all argue that the real importance does not lie in the objects themselves but in the way these objects embody the physical manifestation of social relations. The whole idea that objects matter because they have agency and efficacy, and as such become a kind of person, draws upon recent anthropological theorising by Gell and Strathern. Furthermore, we have not only been inspired by Gell’s and Strathern’s approaches that suggests that objects are social persons, we have also been influenced by Appadurai’s and Kopytoff’s defining of objects as biographical agents and therefore valued because of the associations they have acquired throughout time. We argue that by framing objects in a social network throughout its lifecycle we can avoid the recurrent pitfalls of essentialising objects in terms of their “primitive” or “traditional” (aesthetic) qualities and mystifying the identity of Indigenous peoples as “noble savages.” Focusing more on the social network that surrounds a particular object opens up new avenues of enquiry as to how, and to what extent, museums can become more inclusive vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples. It allows moving beyond the current discourse that approaches the history of the (ethnographic) museum from only one dominant perspective. By tracing an artwork throughout its lifecycle a new metaphor can be discovered; one that shows that Indigenous peoples have not always been victims, but maybe more importantly it allows us to show a more complex narrative of the object itself. It gives us the space to counterweight some of the discourses that have steeped Indigenous artworks in a “postcolonial” framework of sacredness and mythical meaning. This is not to argue that it is not important to be reminded of the dangers of appropriating other cultures’ heritage, but we would argue that it is equally important to show that approaching a story from a one-sided perspective will create a dualism (Bush) and reducing the differences between different cultures to a dualistic opposition fails to recognise the fundamental areas of agency (Morphy). In order for museums to enliven and engage with objects, they must become institutions that emphasise a relational approach towards displaying and curating objects. In the next part of this paper we will explore to what extent an online museum could progressively facilitate the process of providing agency to the social relations that link objects, persons, environments and memories. As Solanilla argues, what has been described as cybermuseology may further transform the museum landscape and provide an opportunity to challenge some of the problems identified above (e.g. essentialising practices). Or to quote the museologist Langlais: “The communication and interaction possibilities offered by the Web to layer information and to allow exploration of multiple meanings are only starting to be exploited. In this context, cybermuseology is known as a practice that is knowledge-driven rather than object-driven, and its main goal is to disseminate knowledge using the interaction possibilities of Information Communication Technologies” (Langlais qtd. in Solanilla 108). One thing which shows promise and merits further exploration is the idea of transforming the act of exhibiting ethnographic objects accompanied by texts and graphics into an act of cyber discourse that allows Indigenous peoples through their own voices and gestures to involve us in their own history. This is particularly the case since Indigenous peoples are using technologies, such as the Internet, as a new medium through which they can recuperate their histories, land rights, knowledge and cultural heritage (Zimmerman et al.). As such, new technology has played a significant role in the contestation and formation of Indigenous peoples’ current identity by creating new social and political spaces through visual and narrative cultural praxis (Ginsburg).Online MuseumsIt has been acknowledged for some time that a presence on the Web might mitigate the effects of what has been described as the “unassailable voice” in the recovery process undertaken by museums (Walsh 77). However, a museum’s online engagement with an Indigenous culture may have significance beyond undercutting the univocal authority of a museum. In the case of the South African National Gallery it was charged with challenging the extent to which it represents entrenched but unacceptable political ideologies. Online museums may provide opportunities in the conservation and dissemination of “life stories” that give an account of an Indigenous culture as it is experienced (Solanilla 105). We argue that in engaging with Indigenous cultural heritage a distinction needs to be drawn between data and the cognitive capacity to learn, “which enables us to extrapolate and learn new knowledge” (Langlois 74). The problem is that access to data about an Indigenous culture does not necessarily lead to an understanding of its knowledge. It has been argued that cybermuseology loses the essential interpersonal element that needs to be present if intangible heritage is understood as “the process of making sense that is generally transmitted orally and through face-to-face experience” (Langlois 78). We agree that the online museum does not enable a reality to be reproduced (Langlois 78).This does not mean that cybermuseology should be dismissed. Instead it provides the opportunity to construct a valuable, but completely new, experience of cultural knowledge (Langlois 78). The technology employed in cybermuseology provides the means by which control over meaning may, at least to some extent, be dispersed (Langlois 78). In this way online museums provide the opportunity for Indigenous peoples to challenge being subjected to manipulation by one authoritative museological voice. One of the ways this may be achieved is through interactivity by enabling the use of social tagging and folksonomy (Solanilla 110; Trant 2). In these processes keywords (tags) are supplied and shared by visitors as a means of accessing museum content. These tags in turn give rise to a classification system (folksonomy). In the context of an online museum engaging with an Indigenous culture we have reservations about the undifferentiated interactivity on the part of all visitors. This issue may be investigated further by examining how interactivity relates to communication. Arguably, an online museum is engaged in communicating Indigenous cultural heritage because it helps to keep it alive and pass it on to others (Langlois 77). However, enabling all visitors to structure online access to that culture may be detrimental to the communication of knowledge that might otherwise occur. The narratives by which Indigenous cultures, rather than visitors, order access to information about their cultures may lead to the communication of important knowledge. An illustration of the potential of this approach is the work Sharon Daniel has been involved with, which enables communities to “produce knowledge and interpret their own experience using media and information technologies” (Daniel, Palabras) partly by means of generating folksonomies. One way in which such issues may be engaged with in the context of online museums is through the argument that database and narrative in such new media objects are opposed to each other (Manovich, New Media 225). A new media work such as an online museum may be understood to be comprised of a database and an interface to that database. A visitor to an online museum may only move through the content of the database by following those paths that have been enabled by those who created the museum (Manovich, New Media 227). In short it is by means of the interface provided to the viewer that the content of the database is structured into a narrative (Manovich, New Media: 226). It is possible to understand online museums as constructions in which narrative and database aspects are emphasized to varying degrees for users. There are a variety of museum projects in which the importance of the interface in creating a narrative interface has been acknowledged. Goldblum et al. describe three examples of websites in which interfaces may be understood as, and explicitly designed for, carrying meaning as well as enabling interactivity: Life after the Holocaust; Ripples of Genocide; and Yearbook 2006.As with these examples, we suggest that it is important there be an explicit engagement with the significance of interface(s) for online museums about Indigenous peoples. The means by which visitors access content is important not only for the way in which visitors interact with material, but also as to what is communicated about, culture. It has been suggested that the curator’s role should be moved away from expertly representing knowledge toward that of assisting people outside the museum to make “authored statements” within it (Bennett 11). In this regard it seems to us that involvement of Indigenous peoples with the construction of the interface(s) to online museums is of considerable significance. Pieterse suggests that ethnographic museums should be guided by a process of self-representation by the “others” portrayed (Pieterse 133). Moreover it should not be forgotten that, because of the separation of content and interface, it is possible to have access to a database of material through more than one interface (Manovich, New Media 226-7). Online museums provide a means by which the artificial hom*ogenization of Indigenous peoples may be challenged.We regard an important potential benefit of an online museum as the replacement of accessing material through the “unassailable voice” with the multiplicity of Indigenous voices. A number of ways to do this are suggested by a variety of new media artworks, including those that employ a database to rearrange information to reveal underlying cultural positions (Paul 100). Paul discusses the work of, amongst others, George Legrady. She describes how it engages with the archive and database as sites that record culture (104-6). Paul specifically discusses Legrady’s work Slippery Traces. This involved viewers navigating through more than 240 postcards. Viewers of work were invited to “first chose one of three quotes appearing on the screen, each of which embodies a different perspective—anthropological, colonialist, or media theory—and thus provides an interpretive angle for the experience of the projects” (104-5). In the same way visitors to an online museum could be provided with a choice of possible Indigenous voices by which its collection might be experienced. We are specifically interested in the implications that such approaches have for the way in which online museums could engage with film. Inspired by Basu’s work on reframing ethnographic film, we see the online museum as providing the possibility of a platform to experiment with new media art in order to expose the meta-narrative(s) about the politics of film making. As Basu argues, in order to provoke a feeling of involvement with the viewer, it is important that the viewer becomes aware “of the plurality of alternative readings/navigations that they might have made” (105). As Weinbren has observed, where a fixed narrative pathway has been constructed by a film, digital technology provides a particularly effective means to challenge it. It would be possible to reveal the way in which dominant political interests regarding Indigenous cultures have been asserted, such as for example in the popular film The Gods Must Be Crazy. New media art once again provides some interesting examples of the way ideology, that might otherwise remain unclear, may be exposed. Paul describes the example of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s project How I learned. The work restructures a television series Kung Fu by employing “categories such as ‘how I learned about blocking punches,’ ‘how I learned about exploiting workers,’ or ‘how I learned to love the land’” (Paul 103) to reveal in greater clarity, than otherwise might be possible, the cultural stereotypes used in the visual narratives of the program (Paul 102-4). We suggest that such examples suggest the ways in which online museums could work to reveal and explore the existence not only of meta-narratives expressed by museums as a whole, but also the means by which they are realised within existing items held in museum collections.ConclusionWe argue that the agency for such reflective moments between the San, who have been repeatedly misrepresented or underrepresented in exhibitions and films, and multiple audiences, may be enabled through the generation of multiple narratives within online museums. We would like to make the point that, first and foremost, the theory of representation must be fully understood and acknowledged in order to determine whether, and how, modes of online curating are censorious. As such we see online museums having the potential to play a significant role in illuminating for both the San and multiple audiences the way that any form of representation or displaying restricts the meanings that may be recovered about Indigenous peoples. ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Bal, Mieke. “Exhibition as Film.” Exhibition Experiments. Ed. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu. Malden: Blackwell Publishing 2007. 71-93. Basu, Paul. “Reframing Ethnographic Film.” Rethinking Documentary. Eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008. 94-106.Barringer, Tim, and Tom Flynn. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998. 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Bush, Martin. “Shifting Sands: Museum Representations of Science and Indigenous Knowledge Traditions.” Open Museum Journal 7 (2005). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://archive.amol.org.au/craft/omjournal/volume7/docs/MBush_ab.asp?ID=›.Busse, Mark. “Museums and the Things in Them Should Be Alive.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008): 189-200.Butts, David. “Māori and Museums: the Politics of Indigenous Recognition.” Museums, Society and Inequality. Ed. Richard Sandell. London: Routledge, 2002. 225-43.Casey, Dawn. “Culture Wars: Museums, Politics and Controversy.” Open Museum Journal 6 (2003). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume6/casey.pdf›.Carter, J. “Museums and Indigenous Peoples in Canada.” Museums and the Appropriation of Culture. Ed. Susan Pearce. London: Athlone P, 1994. 213-33.Carolin, Clare, and Cathy Haynes. “The Politics of Display: Ann-Sofi Sidén’s Warte Mal!, Art History and Social Documentary.” Exhibition Experiments. Eds. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 154-74.Cooper, Jonathan. “Beyond the On-line Museum: Participatory Virtual Exhibitions.” Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings. Eds. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. Albuquerque: Archives & Museum Informatics, 2006. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/cooper/cooper.html›.Daniel, Sharon. “The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity.” Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Ed. Victoria Vesner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 142-82.Daniel, Sharon, and Casa Segura. “Need_ X_ Change.” 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://arts.ucsc.edu/sdaniel/need/›.Daniel, Sharon. “Palabras” 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://palabrastranquilas.ucsc.edu/›.Daniel, Sharon, and Erik Loyer. “Public Secrets.” Vectors. Winter (2007). 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7&projectId=57›.Dietz, Steve. “Curating (on) the Web.” Museums and the Web 1998: Proceedings. Eds. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1998. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/papers/dietz/dietz_curatingtheweb.html›.Dietz, Steve. “Telling Stories: Procedural Authorship and Extracting Meanings from Museum Databases.” Museums and the Web 1999: Proceedings. Eds. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. New Orleans: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1999. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/papers/dietz/dietz.html›.Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998.Geismar, Haidy. (2008) “Cultural Property, Museums, and the Pacific: Reframing the Debates.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15: 109-22.Ginsburg, Faye. “Resources of Hope: Learning from the Local in a Transnational Era.” Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. Ed. Claire Smith & Graeme Ward. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000. 27-47.Goldblum, Josh, Adele O’Dowd, and Traci Sym. “Considerations and Strategies for Creating Interactive Narratives.” Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Ed. Jennifer Trant and David Bearman. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, 2007. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/goldblum/goldblum.html›.Guenther, Matthias. “Contemporary Bushman Art, Identity Politics, and the Primitive Discourse.” The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice. Ed. Jacqueline Solway. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. 159-88. Harding, Sarah. “Culture, Commodification, and Native American Cultural Patrimony.” Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture. Ed. Martha Ertman and Joan Williams. New York: New York U P, 2005. 137-63.Herle, Anita. “Relational Objects: Connecting People and Things through Pasifika Styles.” International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008): 159-79.Hoopes, John. “The Future of the Past: Archaeology and Anthropology on the World Wide Web.” Archives and Museum Informatics 11 (1997): 87-105.“South African National Gallery.” Iziko: Museums of Cape Town. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.iziko.org.za/iziko/ourname.html›.Jones, Anna. “Exploding Canons: The Anthropology of Museums.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 201-20. Kelly, Lynda, and Phil Gordon. “Developing a Community of Practice: Museums and Reconciliation in Australia.” Museums, Society and Inequality. Ed. Richard Sandell. London: Routledge, 2002. 153-74.Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1986. 64-91. Kreps, Christina. Theorising Cultural Heritage. Indigenous Curation as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Thoughts on the Relevance of the 2003 UNESCO Convention. Washington: Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, 2005.Langlois, Dominique. “Cybermuseology and Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Intersection Conference 2005. York U: Toronto, 2005. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://yorku.ca/topia/docs/conference/langlais.pdf›.“Life after the Holocaust.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 8 Oct. 2008 ‹http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/life_after_holocaust/›.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.———. Making Art of Databases. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003.Martin, George, and Saskia Vermeylen. “Intellectual Property, Indigenous Knowledge, and Biodiversity.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 (2005): 27-48. Martínez, David. “Re-visioning the Hopi Fourth World: Dan Namingha, Indigenous Modernism, and the Hopivotskwani.” Art History 29 (2006): 145-72. 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Our capacity to tell stories is a skill that can be considered both natural and learned. Storytelling and oral history are parts of all human societies, and we seek to understand ourselves and each other through our stories. Our individual and collective memories collide in our stories, and reconcile to construct what Kansteiner calls our "collectively shared representations of the past" (182). It is our personal narratives that are the building blocks to public understanding, and as Harter, Japp and Beck maintain in Narratives, Health and Healing, "narrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience" (3). Adding to this idea of narrative as way of illuminating meaning, Goodall posits narrative as also being a way of knowing and as a research methodology, stating "narrative provides us with a range of forms and styles for discovering meaning and communicating it to readers through stories. It is an epistemology" (13). This re-imaging and re-purposing of narrative and storytelling has the capacity to significantly influence and shift the ways in which cultural and social research is carried out. This emerging approach can also influence the ways we understand the experiences of marginalised groups, and consequently how we respond to issues around social inclusion through policy and community based solutions. For researchers personal stories and narratives have the capacity to illuminate the nuances of broad issues; this potential also means that seemingly intractable social problems are given a human face with which to engage. It is in this way that personal narratives energise public narratives and shape our ways of thinking and collective understandings (Harter et al. 4). This paper investigates a digital storytelling project conducted in late 2009 with a group of Forgotten Australians in the months leading up to the public apology in the Australian Parliament, and how the personal stories of the participants brought to life previous research about the marginalisation of individuals who had experienced out-of-home care as children. This paper also explores how the endemic, institutionalised abuse of a group of people was translated to the broader community and galvanised support through the impact of their personal stories. Digital Storytelling As a dynamic practice storytelling, in all its forms, must be nurtured and developed if it is to contribute to the lives of individuals and communities. The number of storytelling, and in particular digital storytelling, initiatives and projects in Australia has increased rapidly since the early 2000s, and are utilised by various public and community organisations for a variety of reasons. Digital technology has had a profound impact on the ability for "ordinary" people to tell their stories, and research has identified the potential of digital storytelling in these contexts to assist in the representation of multiple voices and viewpoints in society through inclusive processes of co-creation (cf. see Burgess; Hartley, Uses and "TV"; Klaebe and Burgess). The storytelling project that forms the basis for this paper used some traditional written storytelling practices but was mainly concerned with digital storytelling. Digital stories are generally a two to four minute multi-media story that uses photographs, film and drawings to convey a personal story which the author narrates in their own voice over the series of images. Much has been, and continues to be written, about digital storytelling as a site of participatory culture and as a means of improving digital literacy in pockets of the community traditionally absent in the realm of digital citizenship (cf. Hartley, Uses; Hartley and McWilliam; Burgess; Meadows; Lundby). As Hartley points out digital storytelling has become such a compelling medium in which to record stories in communities because it "fills a gap between everyday cultural practice and professional media" (Uses 122). As a means of creating narratives digital storytelling has proven to be a significant mode, due in part to its ability to reach a large number of people relatively easily. The rise of digital storytelling partially mirrors the broad shift towards more participatory online culture that privileges user generated content and ordinary voices over official content. The origins of digital storytelling lie in a response to the absence of "ordinary" voices in mainstream media and policy making and grew with the increasing affordability of digital technology. The potential for social inclusion and participation along with the promise of self-representation is implicit in the discourse surrounding digital storytelling. "The ability to express oneself in digital media and in the case of digital storytelling using digital video editing, has become a central literary for full participation in society" (Lambert 85). Social Inclusion in an Australian context is defined by the Australian Government as all Australians feeling valued and having "the opportunity to participate fully in the life of our society. Achieving this vision means that all Australians will have the resources, opportunities and capability to" learn, work, engage in the community and have a voice (Social Inclusion Unit). The aims articulated by Lambert in the previous paragraph and the philosophy of social inclusion and the belief that individual stories have the capacity to impact on national agendas and policy lay at the heart of the digital storytelling project outlined later in this paper. The Forgotten Australians As cohort the Forgotten Australians are defined as individuals who were removed from their families, or were orphaned or child immigrants from the United Kingdom. These children were placed in institutions where they suffered abuse or neglect between 1930 and 1970, and it is estimated that up approximately 500,000 children were placed in out of home care during this time. In November 2009 the Australian Parliament delivered a bi-partisan apology to the Forgotten Australians for the pain and suffering they experienced in church and state run institutions. The stories of the Forgotten Australians were beginning to make their way into the consciousness of the Australian public in the lead up to the apology through documentaries on the national broadcasting service and stories in the mainstream media. Like most large groups the demographic of the Forgotten Australians is diverse, within those who identify as part of this group are successful and well-known Australians, along with ordinary Australians many of whom have struggled significantly as a direct result of their childhood experiences. Those involved in this project were considered to be individuals who were quite profoundly marginalised in mainstream society. A number lived with mental illness, the majority lacked stable housing and all had been severely emotionally, physically and sexually abused during their time in State or Church run institutions as children. The apology to the Forgotten Australians was preceded many years of advocacy and activism by community groups and individuals. They utilised personal stories, the digitisation of records and as the apology drew closer a number of digital storytelling projects to bring the personal narratives into the public arena in the hope of affecting change. Stories from these projects were broadcast across a variety of platforms such as YouTube, the websites for the major advocacy groups and community organisations and more recently the National Library Australia website. The stories differed from site to site and served different functions depending on the place from which they were disseminated. Hildebrand identifies the role of YouTube as a site for the intersection of personal experience, popular culture and historical narratives, and, as such, a vehicle for cultural memory "allow[ing] users to seek out the media texts that have shaped them and that would otherwise be forgotten in 'objective' histories" (54). YouTube videos relevant to the Forgotten Australians ranged from locally made stories and documentation, news items and presentations recorded by major organisations, but uploaded by individuals, and also those posted by these institutions themselves. A notable feature of all of these contributions is their role in the representation of witnesses' stories. In the case of reports on Forgotten Australians from major news organisations the commentary they attracted was largely from those who identified as fellow forgotten Australians attesting to—and corroborating—the interviewees' stories. Whether they were posted by survivors themselves or by mainstream media or other institutions, they exhibited a unity around a particular will to memory: setting the record straight through testimony. Here, the clips and posts were characterised by the provision of information as evidence for the assertion of cultural trauma as a shared experience and focus of identification (Adkins et al. 15). Storytelling functions as one of our most powerful forms for experiencing, expressing, and enacting sorrow and pain...it is pivotal in the process of sense making, allowing individuals to cope with chaotic, equivocal, and confusing conditions of everyday life, including illness and suffering. (152) Advocacy and community groups such as CLAN were focused on creating a sense of community amongst survivors with no story or artefact too small or insignificant to be included, which differed slightly from the agenda of the National Library of Australia—the institution of public memory that has been most closely involved in recording and disseminating the stories of the Forgotten Australians. The Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project conducted by the National Library Australia was one of the recommendations of the two Senate Community Affairs References Committee reports following the Senate Inquiries and receives funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. According to the National Library Australia website, this oral history project will run for three years and aims to document a rounded history of the experiences of the children in institutional care and the lifelong impact of these experiences on their lives and their families. This project will also interview a selection of advocates, and allied professionals including welfare officers, employees of institutions and administrators. (Project Team) In many important ways the purposes served in this project were those of the governments—previous and present, which was to capture and keep the stories, memories, documents and artefacts, and to share the officially selected stories with the rest of the nation, and those stories would support and affirm the government's roadmap for moving on from the apology. These digital storytelling projects, to varying degrees and levels of impact, served to provide the public with the personal narratives behind the issue being presented in the media and by advocacy groups as a large scale issue concerning hundreds of thousands of victims. Although the sheer size of the numbers of children affected was confronting, it was the personal stories that created a momentum towards the public apology. The findings of both Senate Inquiries recommended a formal apology; however this did not occur until the individual experiences of the Forgotten Australians were translated and represented in narratives and, through this, the construction of a sense of cultural memory resulting in formal recognition. Many Australians were sceptical about the importance of a public apology to the Forgotten Australians, as they had been of the apology to the Stolen Generation in 2008. To be a genuine act of reconciliation an apology requires the act of listening as much as speaking, fittingly Prime Minister Rudd quoted predominantly from personal oral history testimonies that had been collected over the years and that were of public record, but had not been digitally accessible to all, as many stories now are in the Bringing Them Home report. The Case Study In August 2009 I was funded by the Australasian Centre for Interactive Design (ACID) to conduct a series of digital storytelling and writing workshops in conjunction with Micah Projects, a community building and social justice organisation based in Brisbane. Micah delivers services for people experiencing homelessness, runs programmes for young mothers and is responsible for the Historical Abuse Network which is a network servicing the Forgotten Australians. After some discussion with the CEO of Micah it was decided that the clients involved with the Historical Abuse Network would benefit most from this project. Many of the participants had been involved in the 2003 senate inquiry into the treatment of children in institutional care. In the intervening years they had told the story of their abuse many times in official contexts and provided statements of harm for the inquiry. However, for this project we wanted to encourage the participants to create stories that allowed them some agency in their own lives rather, to re-claim some of their story from the official framework of abuse, and to use digital storytelling as a tool for this. The participants were between 45 and 65 in age, and were divided equally between women and men. There were a number of complexities inherent in this project, some of which were specific to this particular cohort and some specific to all marginalised individuals and groups. The most significant problem arose out the expectation that the "authors" will bring with them photographs and keepsakes from their lives to use in the stories. Many of the participants did not have photographs of their childhoods or of their families; some did not know how old they were (in many institutions all birthdays were celebrated on a single day, and consequently most lost track of their age and birth date) or had not had contact with their biological family for decades and as a result had few keepsakes. These hallmarks of legitimate biography were absent from their pasts and their presents. The combination of these factors meant that for many the ability to create a coherent narrative about their life or to feel ownership over their life had been seriously compromised. However, it became apparent that by using sounds and images in the digital story the technology was able to create a materiality out of memory for the participants. As it became clearer that the foundation of the stories was memory rather than a narrative arc, the more it became imperative to embrace the fragmentation, inconsistency and incoherence of the memories, and to incorporate these aspects into the digital stories. Instead of being easy to follow or emotionally satisfying narratives, some of the stories had much more in common with what is referred to in psychology and health frameworks as "chaos narratives". A chaos narrative has a sense of disconnected events characterised by a lack of closure and the presence of day-to-day uncertainty (Harter 4). Often such stories seem too incoherent to be told and too painful to be heard by others, as was certainly the case with some of the stories created for this project. Conclusion The Finding a Voice digital storytelling project led by Professor Jo Tacchi aligns with the aims of this project in its social innovation, and the role of storytelling and voice as having the genuine potential to impact on the understanding of poverty and disadvantage. Tacchi states that it "is an approach that allows those who are living in conditions that might constitute 'poverty' to tell those who are not what this experience is like, in their own words. Such an approach might challenge our 'expert' conceptions of poverty itself" (170), and confront mainstream or approved versions of social issues. Carabas posits that the agency embedded in the narrative act reforms or reframes the meanings of events through counter narratives and the act of telling transformed personal and social suffering. Those who had been objects of other's reports started to tell their own stories and rewrite official history in the first person singular (154). For the Forgotten Australians, those involved in this project and in similar ones the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words allowed them to push past the detached, impersonal representation of their experiences. Instead they could re-position the debate to being about individuals and the effect of government policy on their lives, and in doing so agitate for a formal apology. Storytelling and narrative as a research methodology, and as a way of knowing, is continuing to be refined by social and cultural researchers and by community organisations. Despite the emerging and nebulous nature of this field one thing is clear: our human desire to tell stories has the ability to be harnessed to build narratives which create understanding and insight and consequently demand that as communities and nations we respond to injustice and disadvantage accordingly. References Adkins, Barbara, Donna Hancox, and Helen Klaebe. "The Role of the Internet and Digital Technologies in the Struggle for Recognition of the Forgotten Australians." Proceedings of the A Decade in Internet Time: OII Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, 21-24 September 2011. Oxford U of Oxford, 2011: 1-23. Burgess, Jean. "Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling." Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201-14. Carabas, Teodora, and Lynn Harter. "State-Induced Illness and Forbidden Stories: The Role of Storytelling in Healing, Individual and Social Traumas in Romania." Narratives, Health and Healing. Eds. Lynn Harter, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005. 149-69. Harter, Lynn, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck, eds. Narratives, Health & Healing. New York: Taylor & Francis. 2005. Hartley, John. "TV Stories: From Representation to Productivity." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 16-37.———. Uses of Digital Literacy. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P. 2009. Hildebrand, Lucas. "YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57. Kansteiner, Wolf. "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies." History & Theory 41 (2002): 179-97. Klaebe, Helen, and Jean Burgess. "Mediatisation and Institutions of Public Memory: Digital Storytelling and the Apology." Australian Historical Studies 41 (2002): 149-65. Lambert, Joe. "Where It All Started: The Centre of Digital Storytelling in California." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 79-90. Lundby, Kunt. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-Representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Meadows, Daniel. "Digital Storytelling - Research Based Practice in New Media." Visual Communication 2.2 (2003): 189-93. McWilliam, Kelly. "The Global Diffusion of a Community Media Practice: Digital Storytelling Online." Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 37-77. Project Team. "Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project." National Library of Australia. 16 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.nla.gov.au/oral-history/forgotten-australians-and-former-child-migrants-oral-history-project›. Social Inclusion Unit. "The Social Inclusion Agenda." Social Inclusion. Australian Government, 2011. 19 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/›. Tacchi, Jo. "Finding a Voice: Participatory Development in Southeast Asia." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 167-75.

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The need to sustain and/or create a collective identity is regularly seen as one of the cultural priorities of diasporic peoples and this, in turn, depends upon the existence of a uniquely diasporic form of communication and connection with the country of origin. Today, digital media technologies provide easy information recording and retrieval, and mobile IT networks allow global accessibility and participation in the redefinition of identities. Vis-à-vis our understanding of the proximity and connectivity associated with globalisation, the role of ICTs cannot be underestimated and is clearly more than a simple instrument for the expression of a pre-existing diasporic identity. Indeed, the concept of “e-diaspora” is gaining popularity. Consequently, research into the role of ICTs in the lives of diasporic peoples contributes to a definition of the concept of diaspora, understood here as the result of the dispersal of all members of a nation in several countries. In this context, I will demonstrate how members of the Bulgarian diaspora negotiate not only their identities but also their identifications through one of the most popular community websites, Facebook. My methodology consists of the active observation of Bulgarian users belonging to the diaspora, the participation in groups and forums on Facebook, and the analysis of discourses produced online. This research was conducted for the first time between 1 August 2008 and 31 May 2009 through the largest 20 (of 195) Bulgarian groups on the French version of Facebook and 40 (of over 500) on the English one. It is important to note that the public considered to be predominantly involved in Facebook is a young audience in the age group of 18-35 years. Therefore, this article is focused on two generations of Bulgarian immigrants: mostly recent young and second-generation migrants. The observed users are therefore members of the Bulgarian diaspora who have little or no experience of communism, who don’t feel the weight of the past, and who have grown up as free and often cosmopolitan citizens. Communist hegemony in Bulgaria began on 9 September 1944, when the army and the communist militiamen deposed the country’s government and handed power over to an anti-fascist coalition. During the following decades, Bulgaria became the perfect Soviet satellite and the imposed Stalinist model led to sharp curtailing of the economic and social contacts with the free world beyond the Iron Curtain. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the communist era and the political and economic structures that supported it. Identity, Internet, and Diaspora Through the work of Mead, Todorov, and boyd it is possible to conceptualise the subject in terms of both of internal and external social identity (Mead, Todorov, boyd). In this article, I will focus, in particular, on social and national identities as expressions of the process of sharing stories, experiences, and understanding between individuals. In this respect, the phenomenon of Facebook is especially well placed to mediate between identifications which, according to Freud, facilitate the plural subjectivities and the establishment of an emotional network of mutual bonds between the individual and the group (Freud). This research also draws on Goffman who, from a sociological point of view, demystifies the representation of the Self by developing a dramaturgical theory (Goffman), whereby identity is constructed through the "roles" that people play on the social scene. Social life is a vast stage where the actors are required to adhere to certain socially acceptable rituals and guidelines. It means that we can consider the presentation of Self, or Others, as a facade or a construction of socially accepted features. Among all the ICTs, the Internet is, by far, the medium most likely to facilitate free expression of identity through a multitude of possible actions and community interactions. Personal and national memories circulate in the transnational space of the Internet and are reshaped when framed from specific circ*mstances such as those raised by the migration process. In an age of globalisation marked by the proliferation of population movements, instant communication, and cultural exchanges across geographic boundaries, the phenomenon of the diaspora has caught the attention of a growing number of scholars. I shall be working with Robin Cohen’s definition of diaspora which highlights the following common features: (1) dispersal from an original homeland; (2) the expansion from a homeland in search of work; (3) a collective memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealisation of the supposed ancestral homeland; (5) a return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries; and (9) the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host countries (Cohen). Following on this earlier work on the ways in which diasporas give rise to new forms of subjectivity, the concept of “e-diaspora” is now rapidly gaining in popularity. The complex association between diasporic groups and ICTs has led to a concept of e-diasporas that actively utilise ICTs to achieve community-specific goals, and that have become critical for the formation and sustenance of an exilic community for migrant groups around the globe (Srinivasan and Pyati). Diaspora and the Digital Age Anderson points out two key features of the Internet: first, it is a heterogeneous electronic medium, with hardly perceptible contours, and is in a state of constant development; second, it is a repository of “imagined communities” without geographical or legal legitimacy, whose members will probably never meet (Anderson). Unlike “real” communities, where people have physical interactions, in the imagined communities, individuals do not have face-to-face communication and daily contact, but they nonetheless feel a strong emotional attachment to the nation. The Internet not only opens new opportunities to gain greater visibility and strengthen the sense of belonging to community, but it also contributes to the emergence of a transnational public sphere where the communities scattered in various locations freely exchange their views and ideas without fear of restrictions or censorship from traditional media (Appadurai, Bernal). As a result, the Web becomes a virtual diasporic space which opens up, to those who have left their country, a new means of confrontation and social participation. Within this new diasporic space, migrants are bound in their disparate geographical locations by a common vision or myth about the homeland (Karim). Thanks to the Internet, the computer has become a primary technological intermediary between virtual networks, bringing its members closer in a “global village” where everyone is immediately connected to others. Thus, today’s diasporas are not the diaspora of previous generations in that the migration is experienced and negotiated very differently: people in one country are now able to continue to participate actively in another country. In this context, the arrival of community sites has increased the capacity of users to create a network on the Internet, to rediscover lost links, and strengthen new ones. Unlike offline communities, which may weaken once their members have left the physical space, online communities that are no longer limited by the requirement of physical presence in the common space have the capacity to endure. Identity Strategies of New Generations of Bulgarian Migrants It is very difficult to quantify migration to or from Bulgaria. Existing data is not only partial and limited but, in some cases, give an inaccurate view of migration from Bulgaria (Soultanova). Informal data confirm that one million Bulgarians, around 15 per cent of Bulgaria’s entire population (7,620,238 inhabitants in 2007), are now scattered around the world (National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria). The Bulgarian migrant is caught in a system of redefinition of identity through the duration of his or her relocation. Emigrating from a country like Bulgaria implies a high number of contingencies. Bulgarians’ self-identification is relative to the inferiority complex of a poor country which has a great deal to do to catch up with its neighbours. Before the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union, the country was often associated with what have been called “Third World countries” and seen as a source of crime and social problems. Members of the Bulgarian diaspora faced daily prejudice due to the bad reputation of their country of origin, though the extent of the hostility depended upon the “host” nation (Marcheva). Geographically, Bulgaria is one of the most eastern countries in Europe, the last to enter the European Union, and its image abroad has not facilitated the integration of the Bulgarian diaspora. The differences between Bulgarian migrants and the “host society” perpetuate a sentiment of marginality that is now countered with an online appeal for national identity markers and shared experiences. Facebook: The Ultimate Social Network The Growing Popularity of Facebook With more than 500 million active members, Facebook is the most visited website in the world. In June 2007, Facebook experienced a record annual increase of 270 per cent of connections in one year (source: comScore World Metrix). More than 70 translations of the site are available to date, including the Bulgarian version. What makes it unique is that Facebook positively encourages identity games. Moreover, Facebook provides the symbolic building blocks with which to build a collective identity through shared forms of discourse and ways of thinking. People are desperate to make a good impression on the Internet: that is why they spend so much time managing their online identity. One of the most important aspects of Facebook is that it enables users to control and manage their image, leaving the choice of how their profile appears on the pages of others a matter of personal preference at any given time. Despite some limitations, we will see that Facebook offers the Bulgarian community abroad the possibility of an intense and ongoing interaction with fellow nationals, including the opportunity to assert and develop a complex new national/transnational identity. Facebook Experiences of the Bulgarian Diaspora Created in the United States in 2004 and extended to use in Europe two or three years later, Facebook was quickly adopted by members of the Bulgarian diaspora. Here, it is very important to note that, although the Internet per se has enabled Bulgarians across the globe to introduce Cyrillic script into the public arena, it is definitely Facebook that has made digital Cyrillic visible. Early in computer history, keyboards with the Cyrillic alphabet simply did not exist. Thus, Bulgarians were forced to translate their language into Latin script. Today, almost all members of the Bulgarian population who own a computer use a keyboard that combines the two alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, and this allows alternation between the two. This is not the case for the majority of Bulgarians living abroad who are forced to use a keyboard specific to their country of residence. Thus, Bulgarians online have adopted a hybrid code to speak and communicate. Since foreign keyboards are not equipped with the same consonants and vowels that exist in the Bulgarian language, they use the Latin letters that best suit the Bulgarian phonetic. Several possible interpretations of these “encoded” texts exist which become another way for the Bulgarian migrants to distinguish and assert themselves. One of these encoded scripts is supplemented by figures. For example, the number “6” written in Bulgarian “шест” is applied to represent the Bulgarian letter “ш.” Bulgarian immigrants therefore employ very specific codes of communication that enhance the feeling of belonging to a community that shares the same language, which is often incomprehensible to others. As the ultimate social networking website, Facebook brings together Bulgarians from all over the world and offers them a space to preserve online memorials and digital archives. As a result, the Bulgarian diaspora privileges this website in order to manage the strong links between its members. Indeed, within months of coming into online existence, Facebook established itself as a powerful social phenomenon for the Bulgarian diaspora and, very soon, a virtual map of the Bulgarian diaspora was formed. It should be noted, however, that this mapping was focused on the new generation of Bulgarian migrants more familiar with the Internet and most likely to travel. By identifying the presence of online groups by country or city, I was able to locate the most active Bulgarian communities: “Bulgarians in UK” (524 members), “Bulgarians in Chicago” (436 members), “Bulgarians studying in the UK” (346 members), “Bulgarians in America” (333 members), “Bulgarians in the USA” (314 members), “Bulgarians in Montreal” (249 members), “Bulgarians in Munich” (241 members), and so on. These figures are based on the “Groups” Application of Facebook as updated in February 2010. Through those groups, a symbolic diasporic geography is imagined and communicated: the digital “border crossing,” as well as the real one, becomes a major identity resource. Thus, Bulgarian users of Facebook are connecting from the four corners of the globe in order to rebuild family links and to participate virtually in the marriages, births, and lives of their families. It sometimes seems that the whole country has an appointment on Facebook, and that all the photos and stories of Bulgarians are more or less accessible to the community in general. Among its virtual initiatives, Facebook has made available to its users an effective mobilising tool, the Causes, which is used as a virtual noticeboard for activities and ideas circulating in “real life.” The members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to adhere to different “causes” that may be local, national, or global, and that are complementary to the civic and socially responsible side of the identity they have chosen to construct online. Acting as a virtual realm in which distinct and overlapping trajectories coexist, Facebook thus enables users to articulate different stories and meanings and to foster a democratic imaginary about both the past and the future. Facebook encourages diasporas to produce new initiatives to revive or create collective memories and common values. Through photos and videos, scenes of everyday life are celebrated and manipulated as tools to reconstruct, reconcile, and display a part of the history and the identity of the migrant. By combating the feelings of disorientation, the consciousness of sharing the same national background and culture facilitates dialogue and neutralises the anxiety and loneliness of Bulgarian migrants. When cultural differences become more acute, the sense of isolation increases and this encourages migrants to look for company and solidarity online. As the number of immigrants connected and visible on Facebook gets larger, so the use of the Internet heightens their sense of a substantial collective identity. This is especially important for migrants during the early years of relocation when their sense of identity is most fragile. It can therefore be argued that, through the Internet, some Bulgarian migrants are replacing alienating face-to-face contact with virtual friends and enjoying the feeling of reassurance and belonging to a transnational community of compatriots. In this sense, Facebook is a propitious ground for the establishment of the three identity strategies defined by Herzfeld: cultural intimacy (or self-stereotypes); structural nostalgia (the evocation of a time when everything was going better); and the social poetic (the strategies aiming to retrieve a particular advantage and turn it into a permanent condition). In this way, the willingness to remain continuously in virtual contact with other Bulgarians often reveals a desire to return to the place of birth. Nostalgia and outsourcing of such sentiments help migrants to cope with feelings of frustration and disappointment. I observed that it is just after their return from summer holidays spent in Bulgaria that members of the Bulgarian diaspora are most active on the Bulgarian forums and pages on Facebook. The “return tourism” (Fourcade) during the summer or for the winter holidays seems to be a central theme in the forums on Facebook and an important source of emotional refuelling. Tensions between identities can also lead to creative formulations through Facebook’s pages. Thus, the group “You know you’re a Bulgarian when...”, which enjoys very active participation from the Bulgarian diaspora, is a space where everyone is invited to share, through a single sentence, some fact of everyday life with which all Bulgarians can identify. With humour and self-irony, this Facebook page demonstrates what is distinctive about being Bulgarian but also highlights frustration with certain prejudices and stereotypes. Frequently these profiles are characterised by seemingly “glocal” features. The same Bulgarian user could define himself as a Parisian, adhering to the group “You know you’re from Paris when...”, but also a native of a Bulgarian town (“You know you’re from Varna when...”). At the same time, he is an architect (“All architects on Facebook”), supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama, a fan of Japanese manga (“maNga”), of a French actor, an American cinema director, or Indian food. He joins a cause to save a wild beach on the Black Sea coast (“We love camping: Gradina Smokinia and Arapia”) and protests virtually against the slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands (“World shame”). One month, the individual could identify as Bulgarian, but next month he might choose to locate himself in the country in which he is now resident. Thus, Facebook creates a virtual territory without borders for the cosmopolitan subject (Negroponte) and this confirms the premise that the Internet does not lead to the convergence of cultures, but rather confirms the opportunities for diversification and pluralism through multiple social and national affiliations. Facebook must therefore be seen as an advantageous space for the representation and interpretation of identity and for performance and digital existence. Bulgarian migrants bring together elements of their offline lives in order to construct, online, entirely new composite identities. The Bulgarians we have studied as part of this research almost never use pseudonyms and do not seem to feel the need to hide their material identities. This suggests that they are mature people who value their status as migrants of Bulgarian origin and who feel confident in presenting their natal identities rather than hiding behind a false name. Starting from this material social/national identity, which is revealed through the display of surname with a Slavic consonance, members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to manage their complex virtual identities online. Conclusion Far from their homeland, beset with feelings of insecurity and alienation as well as daily experiences of social and cultural exclusion (much of it stemming from an ongoing prejudice towards citizens from ex-communist countries), it is no wonder that migrants from Bulgaria find relief in meeting up with compatriots in front of their screens. Although some migrants assume their Bulgarian identity as a mixture of different cultures and are trying to rethink and continuously negotiate their cultural practices (often through the display of contradictory feelings and identifications), others identify with an imagined community and enjoy drawing boundaries between what is “Bulgarian” and what is not. The indispensable daily visit to Facebook is clearly a means of forging an ongoing sense of belonging to the Bulgarian community scattered across the globe. Facebook makes possible the double presence of Bulgarian immigrants both here and there and facilitates the ongoing processes of identity construction that depend, more and more, upon new media. In this respect, the role that Facebook plays in the life of the Bulgarian diaspora may be seen as a facet of an increasingly dynamic transnational world in which interactive media may be seen to contribute creatively to the formation of collective identities and the deformation of monolithic cultures. References Anderson, Benedict. L’Imaginaire National: Réflexions sur l’Origine et l’Essor du Nationalisme. Paris: La Découverte, 1983. Appadurai, Ajun. Après le Colonialisme: Les Conséquences Culturelles de la Globalisation. Paris: Payot, 2001. Bernal, Victoria. “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online.” Global Network 6 (2006): 161-79. boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” Knowledge Tree (May 2007). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University College London Press. 1997. Goffman, Erving. La Présentation de Soi. Paris: Editions de Minuit, Collection Le Sens Commun, 1973. Fourcade, Marie-Blanche. “De l’Arménie au Québec: Itinéraires de Souvenirs Touristiques.” Ethnologies 27.1 (2005): 245-76. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychologie des Foules et Analyses du Moi.” Essais de Psychanalyse. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2001 (1921). Herzfeld, Michael. Intimité Culturelle. Presse de l’Université de Laval, 2008. Karim, Karim-Haiderali. The Media of Diaspora. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. Marcheva, Marta. “Bulgarian Diaspora and the Media Treatment of Bulgaria in the French, Italian and North American Press (1992–2007).” Unpublished PhD dissertation. Paris: University Panthéon – Assas Paris 2, 2010. Mead, George Herbert. L’Esprit, le Soi et la Société. Paris: PUF, 2006. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Vintage, 2005. Soultanova, Ralitza. “Les Migrations Multiples de la Population Bulgare.” Actes du Dolloque «La France et les Migrants des Balkans: Un État des Lieux.” Paris: Courrier des Balkans, 2005. Srinivasan, Ramesh, and Ajit Pyati. “Diasporic Information Environments: Reframing Immigrant-Focused Information Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58.12 (2007): 1734-44. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les Autres: La Réflexion Française sur la Diversité Humaine. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

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“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basem*nt—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. 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