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84 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 4 of 5

Reading Peer Review

Reading Peer Review
  • PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia
  • Martin Paul Eve, Cameron Neylon, Daniel Paul O'Donnell, Samuel Moore, Robert Gadie, Victoria Odeniyi, Shahina Parvin
  • Published online:
    01 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021
    • Element
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  • This Element describes for the first time the database of peer review reports at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world, to which the authors had unique access. Specifically, this Element presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which the authors had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This unique work thereby yields a compelling and unprecedented set of insights into the evolving state of peer review in the twenty-first century, at a crucial political moment for the transformation of science. It also, though, presents a study in radicalism and the ways in which PLOS's vision for science can be said to have effected change in the ultra-conservative contemporary university. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online
  • Stephen H. Gregg
  • Published online:
    23 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 January 2021
    • Element
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  • This is a history of Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, a database of over 180,000 titles. Published by Gale in 2003 it has had an enormous impact of the study of the eighteenth century. Like many commercial digital archives, ECCO's continuing development obscures its precedents. This Element examines its prehistory as, first, a computer catalogue of eighteenth-century print, and then as a commercial microfilm collection, before moving to the digitisation and development of the interfaces to ECCO, as well as Gale's various partnerships and licensing deals. An essential aspect of this Element is how it explores the socio-cultural and technological debates around the access to old books from the 1930s to the present day: Stephen Gregg demonstrates how these contexts powerfully shape the way ECCO works to this day. The Element's aim is to make us better users and better readers of digital archives. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Underdevelopment and African Literature

Underdevelopment and African Literature
  • Emerging Forms of Reading
  • Sarah Brouillette
  • Published online:
    23 December 2020
    Print publication:
    28 January 2021
  • People looking for works in cities are immersed in English as the lingua franca of the mobile phone and the urban hustle – more effective instigations to reading than decades of work by traditional publishers and development agencies. The legal publishing industry campaigns to convince people to scorn pirates and plagiarists as a criminal underclass, and to instead purchase copyrighted, barcoded works that have the look of legitimacy about them. They work with development industry officials to 'foster literacy' – meaning to grow the legal book trade as a contributor to national economic health, and police what and how the newly literate read. But harried cash-strapped audiences will read what and how they can, often outside of formal economies, and are increasingly turning to mobile phone platforms that sell texts at a fraction of the price of legally printed books.
African Literature and the CIA

African Literature and the CIA
  • Networks of Authorship and Publishing
  • Caroline Davis
  • Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021
  • During the period of decolonisation in Africa, the CIA covertly subsidised a number of African authors, editors and publishers as part of its anti-communist propaganda strategy. Managed by two front organisations, the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the Farfield Foundation, its Africa programme stretched across the continent. This Element unravels the hidden networks and associations underpinning African literary publishing in the 1960s; it evaluates the success of the CIA in secretly infiltrating and influencing African literary magazines and publishing firms, and examines the extent to which new circuits of cultural and literary power emerged. Based on new archival evidence relating to the Transcription Centre, The Classic and The New African, it includes case studies of Wole Soyinka, Nat Nakasa and Bessie Head, which assess how the authors' careers were affected by these transnational networks and also reveal how they challenged, subverted, and resisted external influence and control.
The Network Turn

The Network Turn
  • Changing Perspectives in the Humanities
  • Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, Scott B. Weingart
  • Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021
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  • We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. This Element contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and commercial gain. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Publishing against Apartheid South Africa

Publishing against Apartheid South Africa
  • A Case Study of Ravan Press
  • Elizabeth le Roux
  • Published online:
    08 December 2020
    Print publication:
    07 January 2021
  • In many parts of the world, oppositional publishing has emerged in contexts of state oppression. In South Africa, censorship laws were enacted in the 1960s, and the next decade saw increased pressure on freedom of speech and publishing. With growing restrictions on information, activist publishing emerged. These highly politicised publishers had a social responsibility, to contribute to social change. In spite of their cultural, political and social importance, no academic study of their history has yet been undertaken. This Element aims to fill that gap by examining the history of the most vocal and arguably the most radical of this group, Ravan Press. Using archival material, interviews and the books themselves, this Element examines what the history of Ravan reveals about the role of oppositional print culture.
Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850–1920s

Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850–1920s
  • Archie L. Dick
  • Published online:
    10 November 2020
    Print publication:
    26 November 2020
  • Voluntary societies and government initiatives stimulated the growth of reading communities in South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. A system of Parliamentary grants to establish public libraries in country towns and villages nurtured a lively reading culture. A condition was that the library should be open free-of-charge to the general public. This became one more reading space, and others included book societies, reading societies, literary societies, debating societies, mechanics institutes, and mutual improvement societies. This Element explains how reading communities used these spaces to promote cultural and literary development in a unique ethos of improvement, and to raise political awareness in South Africa's colonial transition to a Union government and racial segregation.
The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business

The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business
  • Beth Driscoll, Claire Squires
  • Published online:
    28 September 2020
    Print publication:
    22 October 2020
  • The Frankfurt Book Fair is the leading global industry venue for rights sales, facilitating business-to-buzzness deals and international networks. In this Element, we pursue an Ullapoolist approach to excavate beneath the production of bestsellers at the Fair. Our investigation involved three consecutive years of fieldwork (2017–2019) including interviews and autoethnographic, arts-informed interventions. The Element argues that buzz at the Fair exists in two states: as market-ready media reports and partial, lived experiences linked to mood. The physical structures and absences of the Fair enact its power relations and direct the flow of books and buzz. Further, the Fair is not only a site for commercial exchange but a carnival of sorts, marked by disruptive historical events and problematic socio-political dynamics. Key themes emerging from the Element are the presence of excess, the pseudo(neo)liberal self-satisfaction of book culture, and the interplay of optimism and pessimism in contemporary publishing.
London and the Modernist Bookshop

London and the Modernist Bookshop
  • Matthew Chambers
  • Published online:
    17 April 2020
    Print publication:
    14 May 2020
  • The modernist bookshop, best exemplified by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. and Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, has received scant attention outside these more prominent examples. This writing will review how bookshops like David Archer's on Parton Street (London) in the 1930s were sites of distribution, publication, and networking. Parton Street, which also housed Lawrence & Wishart publishers and a briefly vibrant literary scene, will be approached from several contexts as a way of situating the modernist bookshop within both the book trade and the literary communities which it interacted with and made possible.
The Edited Collection

The Edited Collection
  • Pasts, Present and Futures
  • Peter Webster
  • Published online:
    15 April 2020
    Print publication:
    04 June 2020
  • Edited collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible to potential readers once published. It is also often taken as axiomatic that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding do so agree. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format before even a word is read. After examining the origins of this critique, this Element explores the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. It examines each component part of the critique, showing that they are either largely unfounded or susceptible of solution. It proposes the edited collection as a model of one possible idea of scholarly community: collaboration, trust, and mutual obligation in pursuit of a wider good.
Book Clubs and Book Commerce

Book Clubs and Book Commerce
  • Corinna Norrick-Rühl
  • Published online:
    30 December 2019
    Print publication:
    13 February 2020
    • Element
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  • In the twentieth century, cumulative millions of readers received books by mail from clubs like the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Book Society or Bertelsmann Club. This Element offers an introduction to book clubs as a distribution channel and cultural phenomenon, and shows that book clubs and book commerce are linked inextricably. It argues that a global perspective is necessary to understand the cultural and economic impact of book clubs in the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. It also explores central reasons for book club membership, condensing them into four succinct categories: convenience, community, concession and, most importantly, curation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Adapting Bestsellers

Adapting Bestsellers
  • Fantasy, Franchise and the Afterlife of Storyworlds
  • Ken Gelder
  • Published online:
    07 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020
  • This Element looks at adaptations of bestselling works of popular fiction to cinema, television, stage, radio, video games and other media platforms. It focuses on 'transmedia storytelling', building its case studies around the genre of modern fantasy: because the elaborate storyworlds produced by writers like J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin have readily lent themselves to adaptations across various media platforms. This has also made it possible for media entertainment corporations to invest in them over the long term, enabling the development of franchises through which their storyworlds are presented and marketed in new ways to new audiences.
The Canons of Fantasy

The Canons of Fantasy
  • Lands of High Adventure
  • Patrick Moran
  • Published online:
    30 November 2019
    Print publication:
    05 December 2019
  • Despite publishing endeavours such as the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series in the 1970s and Fantasy Masterworks in the early 2000s, the canon of modern fantasy is still very much in flux. This Element examines four key questions raised by the prospect of a fantasy canon: the way in which canon and genre influence each other; the overwhelming presence of Tolkien in any discussion of the classics of fantasy; the multi-media and transmedia nature of the field; and the push for a more inclusive and diverse canon.
Christmas Books for Children

Christmas Books for Children
  • Eugene Giddens
  • Published online:
    15 November 2019
    Print publication:
    28 November 2019
  • This Element traces the varied and magical history of Christmas publications for children. The Christmas book market has played an important role in the growth of children's literature, from well-loved classics to more ephemeral annuals and gift books. Starting with the eighteenth century and continuing to recent sales successes and picturebooks, Christmas Books for Children investigates continuities and new trends in this hugely significant part of the children's book market.
Young Adult Fantasy Fiction

Young Adult Fantasy Fiction
  • Conventions, Originality, Reproducibility
  • Kim Wilkins
  • Published online:
    11 July 2019
    Print publication:
    08 August 2019
  • Young adult fantasy (YA fantasy) brings together two established genres - young adult fiction and fantasy fiction - and in so doing amplifies, energises, and leverages the textual, social, and industrial practices of the two genres: combining the fantastic with adolescent concerns; engaging passionate online fandoms; proliferating quickly into series and related works. By considering the texts alongside the way they are circulated and marketed, this Element aims to show that the YA fantasy genre is a dynamic formation that takes shape and reshapes itself responsively in a continuing process over time.
The Forever Fandom of Harry Potter

The Forever Fandom of Harry Potter
  • Balancing Fan Agency and Corporate Control
  • Marianne Martens
  • Published online:
    25 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019
  • Harry Potter fans contribute their immaterial and affective labor in multiple arenas: as peer-to-peer marketers via fan sites and social media; as participants in amateur fan festivals; or as activists for social change. Fans' participation in the Harry Potter universe has contributed to its success. This Element examines how fans' labor might continue to support the franchise for future readers. Starting with the context and theoretical frameworks that support a multidimensional analysis of the Harry Potter fan experience, this Element examines tensions between fans and Warner Bros., as fan participation tests the limits of corporate control.
The Anglo-Norman Historical Canon

The Anglo-Norman Historical Canon
  • Publishing and Manuscript Culture
  • Jaakko Tahkokallio
  • Published online:
    06 June 2019
    Print publication:
    06 June 2019
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  • This Element is a contribution to the ongoing debate on what it meant to publish a book in manuscript. It offers case-studies of three twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historians: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. It argues that the contemporary success and rapid attainment of canonical authority for their histories was in significant measure the result of successfully conducted publishing activities. These activities are analysed using the concept of a 'publishing circle'. This concept, it is suggested, may have wider utility in the study of authorial publishing in a manuscript culture. This Element is also available as Open Access.
Capital Letters

Capital Letters
  • The Economics of Academic Bookselling
  • J. M. Hawker
  • Published online:
    01 June 2019
    Print publication:
    06 June 2019
  • Academic bookselling inhabits a landscape fundamentally impacted by legislative and political pressure, colonised by new textual forms and new publishing ventures, experiencing constant change. Capital Letters defines the academic bookshop, text, and market, examining change drivers in the UK, the USA and Asia. Drawing on current research, inclusive of commercial publishers and publishing interest groups, Capital Letters also includes quantitative and qualitative research data from academic booksellers. In evaluating the response of academic bookshops to the changing landscape, Capital Letters argues that academic booksellers can understand, shape, and lead a sustainable and equitable future for academic text within the marketplace.
The General Reader and the Academy

The General Reader and the Academy
  • Medieval French Literature and Penguin Classics
  • Leah Tether
  • Published online:
    11 May 2019
    Print publication:
    30 May 2019
  • Penguin Classics have built their reputation as one of the largest and most successful modern imprints for 'classic' texts on the notion of 'the general reader'. Following an interrogation of this idea, Leah Tether investigates the publication of medieval French literature on this list and shines a light on the drivers, motivations, negotiations and decision-making processes behind it. Focusing on the medieval French texts published between c.1956 and 2000, Tether demonstrates that, rather than Penguin's frequently cited 'general reader', a more academic market may have contributed to ensuring the success of these titles.
Young People, Comics and Reading

Young People, Comics and Reading
  • Exploring a Complex Reading Experience
  • Lucia Cedeira Serantes
  • Published online:
    07 February 2019
    Print publication:
    07 February 2019
  • Scholars and professionals interested in the study and engagement with young people will find this project relevant to deepening their understanding of reading practices with comics and graphic novels. Comics reading has been an understudied experience despite its potential to enrich our exploration of reading in our currently saturated media landscape. This Element is based on seventeen in-depth interviews with teens and young adults who describe themselves as readers of comics for pleasure. These interviews provide insights about how comics reading evolves with the readers and what they consider a good or bad reading experience. Special attention is paid to the place of female readers in the comics community and material aspects of reading. From these readers, one begins to understand why comics reading is something that young people do not 'grow out of' but an experience that they 'grow with'.

Page 4 of 5