My research is centered upon my ongoing project GenderFail, a publishing and programming initiative featuring the perspectives of queer and trans people and people of color. GenderFail: The Queer Ethics of Dissemination is a collection of writings on queer collaboration, archiving as a collective act, and publishing as a site of queer community. The following text also illustrates the importance of creating and maintaining an intersectional platform as a non-binary white queer subject. I examine and define the role of “queer identity” in my own work while mapping the history of failure by white queers, including myself, in the of articulation of intersectionality. By understanding how intersectionality is important in a queer-focused collaborative practice, I seek to emphasize the messiness of citation, collaboration, and community in relation to my discursive uses of printed matter.

Manga, or Japanese comic books, are one of the newest popular media imports from Japan to garner a sizable following in the U.S. Shortly before the establishment of an American manga publishing industry and the investment in resources to publish manga legally, fans calling themselves scanslators or scanlators (scan + translators) began translating Japanese manga themselves and distributing it to other fans through the Internet. This dissertation focuses on the manga importation process from several different angles, comparing within each the struggles and similarities between the actions and motives of scanslators and publishers. Comparing and contrasting the practices and norms of scanslators with those of the American manga publishing industry, this case study will provide insight into the ways that fans of transnational texts are involved in a system of global media flows whose paths are determined by legal, cultural, economic, and political forces. This work focuses on three stages in the manga importation process: selection, translation, and distribution. This study is based on the textual analysis of trade journal articles and web sites, informed by interviews with scanslators and manga industry workers. I conducted interviews over a six-month period in 2008, focusing on two groups, the publishing company Tokyopop and the scanslation group "Paradise." I carried out follow-up interviews a year later. I supplemented these interviews with interviews from freelance manga translators. I demonstrate principles influencing the flow of other kinds of media across borders. Manga serves as a prime example of the rise and transformation of a genre in the book market, and more broadly as a form of media. This case also serves as a snapshot of a moment of change within the publishing industries as they move towards increased digitization.

My dissertation tracks the development of literary advertising in the United States during the late-nineteenth century through the emergence and evolution of Walt Whitman as a recognizable brand name. Situating the strategies of Whitman and his publishers within the broader context of nineteenth-century literary advertising, I trace the roots of modern publishing practices back to the experiments of a generation of American authors and would-be promoters. At the intersection of the professional author's ascent in the United States and the growing centralization and sophistication of the advertising trade, a new anxiety surfaces in the world of nineteenth-century American publishing: how best to sell the literary text and, in turn, market its author. Whitman's attempts to promote himself and Leaves of Grass--efforts that were sometimes prescient, occasionally ludicrous--focus this study of a period in literary advertising when professional authorship was a relatively new reality, poetry was widely read, and the rise of the literary celebrity was in the making. The multiple publications of Leaves of Grass may not, in their time, have defined this moment of American literary history, but retrospectively they invite us to consider how poets and publishers distinguished their literary commodities and authorial personas in rapidly expanding and increasingly unpredictable literary markets. This dissertation develops an important new dimension to the study of Whitman and the culture of literary celebrity: an in-depth examination of the promotional artifacts circulating in and around Leaves of Grass--the newspaper advertisements, circulars, print ornaments, promotional schemes, posters, broadsides, engravings, book covers, and critical annexes that were as central to Whitman's brand as his poetry. This book-studies oriented methodology challenges us to consider the role "non-literary" elements have played in the reception and consumption of literary works, especially in establishing the iconic status of authors like Whitman. Each chapter is devoted to a marker of the Whitman brand--an image, symbol, or promotional strategy that served as a metaphoric trademark of the poet and his distinct textual product. Chapter 1, "`No other matter but poems': Promotion Paratexts and Whitman's Gymnastic Reader," examines the use of promotion paratext to advertise the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and the sophisticated reading practice these texts recruited. Chapter 2, "'I announce a man or woman coming': The Poet as Printer's Fist," looks at Whitman's use of the "manicule" (a small pointing hand) as a symbol of the poet's function reproduced in and on Leaves of Grass. Chapter 3, "`Anything honest to sell books': Autograph-hunting and the Whitmanian Imprimatur," considers Whitman's relationship to the culture of autograph collecting and his innovative use of his own signature as a promotional device. Chapter 4, "Am I Not a Man and a Poet?: Branding Walt Whitman," examines the two most famous faces of the Whitman brand--Whitman the Bowery boy rough and Whitman the Good Gray Poet--revealing how those seemingly conflicting personas became the target of racialized critiques during the 1860s.

Nineteenth-century periodical literature, recognised today as a distinctive and significant feature of Victorian public communication, is voluminous. Yet in order to argue that the editor-publisher Elizabeth Hayes made a significant contribution to evangelising journalism, this thesis finds it imperative to situate her work within the enormous outpourings of the Victorian periodical press. For a Victorian woman to succeed in journalism was impressive and this investigation argues that Hayes capably led an international journal of religious ideas to stability and longevity. The investigation will show that Hayes, foundress of an organisation which edited, published and distributed a Franciscan monthly journal - to date scarcely investigated- was prepared prior to 1872 for her subsequent journalistic mission. The argument that Hayes made a significant contribution to nineteenth-century Catholic journalism appears strongest when evidence of the immense power of the press for good and evil is provided. This is accomplished hopefully though an examination of both secular and religious periodical literature and in particular by situating Hayes’ output within this milieu. The argument is further strengthened through a detailed examination of the actual contents of Hayes’ Annals of Our Lady of the Angels, of the numerous contributions to her Annals and of the editing, publishing and distribution methods which she employed in her mission. The argument shows Hayes’ publication to be a significant contribution in the literary field to a growing body of research on late nineteenth-century professional women who enriched society with religious periodicals. The thesis argues that Hayes provided matter of interest to general readers and presented the progress and development of the Franciscan Order. The journal’s range of themes adds weight to the growing body of evidence of how women’s topics varied in the Victorian religious periodical press. It is argued that Hayes’ diffusion of good literature was an authentic medium of evangelisation over twenty-one years. As writer, editor, publisher, manager of printing and distribution, it is argued that Hayes was a significant contributor to the Apostolate of the Press and that she used her journal as a tool of both adult education and entertainment. NOTE: See hard copy of thesis at St Patrick’s Campus Library for the illustrations to appendix 2.

Open access (OA) to scholarly publishing is encouraged and enabled by new technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, their standards and protocols, and search engines. Institutional repositories (IR) as the most recent technological incarnations of OA enable researchers and their institutions to make accessible the outputs of research. While many OA repositories are being implemented, researchers are surprisingly slow in adopting them. While activists promote OA as emanating from the ideals of scholarship, others revile OA as undermining of scholarly publishing's economic base and therefore undermining quality control and peer review. Change is occurring but there are contested views and actions. This research seeks to increase understanding of the issues by addressing the research questions: "How and why is open access reassembling scholarly publishing?" and "What role does introducing an open access institutional repository to researchers play in this reassembly?" This thesis contributes to answering these questions by investigating two IR implementations and the research communities they serve. The research was conducted as an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) field study, where the actors were followed and their relations and controversies explored in action as their landscape was being contested. The research found that central to our understanding of the reassembling of scholarly publishing is the agency emerging from the sociomaterial relations of the OA vision, IR technology and researchers. Being congruent with the aims of scholarship, and also being flexible and mutable, the OA vision enrols researchers to enact it through OA IR, thus transforming scholarly communications. This is counteracted by publishers aligned with the academic reward network within traditional publishing networks. In this delicate choreography the OA IR, its developers, researchers, university administrators and policy makers are merging as critical actors with their more or less congruent vision of OA enacted in their network. The comparative ANT account of the two IR life stories shows how such enactment depends on the degree to which different OA visions could converge, enrol and mobilise other actors, in particular institutional actors, such as a mandate, in transforming researchers' publishing behaviour. This thesis contributes to a novel and in-depth understanding of OA and IR and their roles in reassembling scholarly publishing. It also contributes to the use of ANT in information systems research by advancing a sociomaterial ontology which recognises the intertwining of human and material agency.

In this thesis I analyze the Dutch frontispiece to Francois Valentijn?s 1726 book Oud en Nieuw Oost Indien and demonstrate that it is a significant artistic statement, original in its rich and imaginative iconography and emblematic program. I describe and explain the image and its iconographic program and emblematic structure. I compare the frontispiece to many other Dutch frontispieces and artworks that likewise feature the four continent allegories and other iconographic elements. I demonstrate the ways in which the frontispiece superbly and comprehensively summarizes and visualizes the text, which is the primary purpose of frontispieces. I also show how the image emulates early eighteenth-century Dutch culture by reflecting the period?s nostalgia for Golden Age styles and subjects. In conclusion I clarify the way in which the image functions emblematically and explain the twofold meaning of the emblem and proving that the image is exceptional and unique within the context of the historiography of Dutch frontispieces.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-310). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

In an attempt to identify motivating factors involved in decisions to publish in Open Access (OA) journals, individual interviews with biomedical faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a major research university, were conducted. The interviews focused on faculty identified as early adopters of OA/free full-text publishing. Searches conducted in PubMed and PubMed Central identified faculty from UNC-Chapel Hill who have published works in OA/free full-text journals. The searches targeted authors with multiple OA citations during a specified 18 month period. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the most prolific OA authors. Individual interviews attempted to determine whether the authors were aware they published in OA journals, why they chose to publish in OA journals, what factors influenced their publishing decisions, and their general attitude towards OA publishing models. Interview questions were based on a review of the literature and consultation with a scholarly communication working group. The interview results were analyzed to see whether these faculty members made conscious efforts to publish in OA/free full-text journals, and if so why.

Recently the technological and organizational infrastructures of institutional repositories have been questioned. For example the British so-called Finch report  from last summer argued that further development, as well as higher standards of accessibility of repositories, are needed in order to make them better integrated and interoperable to ultimately bring greater use by both authors and readers. Not only the technical frameworks and presumably low usage levels are criticized but also the lack of “clear policies on such matters as the content they will accept, the uses to which it may be put, and the role that they will play in preservation”. The report concludes that: “In practice patterns of deposit are patchy”. As in the UK, today, all universities and university colleges in Sweden, except a couple of very small and specialized ones, do have an institutional repository. A majority (around 80%) are working together on a co-operative basis within the DiVA Publishing System with the Electronic Publishing Centre at Uppsala University Library acting as the technical and organizational hub. Because the system is jointly funded, and the members contribute according to their size, it has been possible even for smaller institutions with limited resources to run a repository with exactly the same functionalities as the biggest universities. In this presentation we want to demonstrate the ever-increasing importance of institutional repositories in Sweden. Starting more than a decade ago the DiVA Consortium has, for some time, been addressing the problems now raised by the Finch report in a number of areas.

This creative project investigates a method for translating a run-length encoded data file of letterforms into bit mapped images. Each letterform is broken (cracked) into primitive strokes. Each primitive stroke is represented by equally spaced runlength spline points within a 72 unit counting system. The strokes are ordered from left to right, allowing a direct scan-line conversion using an on-off character fill. Most commercial letterforms are stored in an outline format. Outline letterfomrs must be converted to vector edges, and then quick sorted into two dimensional arrays of edges for scan-line conversion (no overlapping outlines are allowed). The author's method stores primitives in a left to right ordered format that eliminates the sorting routine.In order to display the letterforms as a body of text, an interpreted description language was developed. The language command structure is embedded in the text file and interpreted at run time. The language controlls the sizing and placement of letterforms at five levels. The page attributes controlls the placement of page margins, column margins, windows, headers, footers, etc. The Paragraph attributes controlles first word indents, paragraph indents, widow lines, etc. The line attributes controlles the text line length, inter word and character spacing, line leading, additional line indents, type of line justification and hyphenation, etc. No attributes were established at the word level. The character attributes controlles the type size, type style, degree of slant (poor man's italic), expansion or contraction, etc.Ball State UniversityMuncie, IN 47306