This study is a descriptive research project which examines a purposeful census of the best selling children's books for 0-8 year olds in the United States in 2003. This cross-sectional study of these social artifacts evaluates the extent to which the ideologies of the environmental movement have been inculcated into culture. It evaluates how the environment is represented in children’s literature and the extent to which children's literature meets the goals of environmental education. Through narrative semeiotic analysis of the themes, as well as the manifest (text) and latent (pictures) content, varying degrees of pro and antienvironmental ideologies reflected by these representations emerged. Analytic induction revealed that these representations reflected ideologies of human domination over nature. In addition, in most cases, the representation of the environment did not reflect or meet the goals of environmental education. This finding sheds light on the role children's books play in the environmental socialization of America's youth.

Audiobook reading has traditionally been used for educational purposes but has in recent times grown into a popular alternative to the more traditional means of consuming literature. In order to differentiate themselves from other players in the market, but also provide their users enjoyable literature, several audiobook companies have lately directed their efforts on producing own content. Creating highly rated content is, however, no easy task and one reoccurring challenge is how to make a bestselling story. In an attempt to identify latent features shared by successful audiobooks and evaluate proposed methods for literary quantification, this thesis employs an array of frameworks from the field of Statistics, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing on data and literature provided by Storytel - Sweden’s largest audiobook company. We analyze and identify important features from a collection of 3077 Swedish books concerning their promotional and literary success. By considering features from the aspects Metadata, Theme, Plot, Style and Readability, we found that popular books are typically published as a book series, cover 1-3 central topics, write about, e.g., daughter-mother relationships and human closeness but that they also hold, on average, a higher proportion of verbs and a lower degree of short words. Despite successfully identifying these, but also other factors, we recognized that none of our models predicted “bestseller” adequately and that future work may desire to study additional factors, employ other models or even use different metrics to define and measure popularity. From our evaluation of the literary quantification methods, namely topic modeling and narrative approximation, we found that these methods are, in general, suitable for Swedish texts but that they require further improvement and experimentation to be successfully deployed for Swedish literature. For topic modeling, we recognized that the sole use of nouns provided more interpretable topics and that the inclusion of character names tended to pollute the topics. We also identified and discussed the possible problem of word inflections when modeling topics for more morphologically complex languages, and that additional preprocessing treatments such as word lemmatization or post-training text normalization may improve the quality and interpretability of topics. For the narrative approximation, we discovered that the method currently suffers from three shortcomings: (1) unreliable sentence segmentation, (2) unsatisfactory dictionary-based sentiment analysis and (3) the possible loss of sentiment information induced by translations. Despite only examining a handful of literary work, we further found that books written initially in Swedish had narratives that were more cross-language consistent compared to books written in English and then translated to Swedish.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala University, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-194) and index.

由於目前台灣圖書出版業受到各種因素的影響，像是景氣持續衰退、原物料上漲、新書出版量增加但同時退書率卻也升高、出版業家數眾多、替代品的威脅、網路科技帶來的閱讀習慣改變等等因素，讓業者的經營陷入更困難的環境之中。而高退書率與高暢銷書銷售數字，讓圖書的銷售也朝向兩極化的發展。 本研究以圖書出版業為中心，暢銷書本身的價值流程作為研究對象，試圖透過資料收集、訪談、歸納整理、分析等等方式與步驟，找出價值鏈中暢銷書之關鍵成功因素(key success factor)。同時，也以實際的《藍海策略》一書為個案，透過深度訪談來了解該書從「市場調查」、「選書與作者」、「圖書編務」、「印務工作」、「行銷活動」及「物流/資訊流」等價值鏈活動中，運用了哪些關鍵成功因素讓個案本身成為暢銷書。 暢銷書的關鍵成功因素大致分為評估方式與行銷手法兩大類。 (一) 評估方式 一本書是否能具有成為暢銷書的潛力，可以從以下的四個方面來進行評估與衡量：一是目標市場；二是作者與書；三是與環境和需求的連結程度；四是與出版社屬性的關聯性。 1. 目標市場：包含目標市場規模、競爭品的供應量、價格和型式為主要的評估依據。 2. 作者與書：作者的知名度、書名和主題、封面設計、推薦人的知名度、內容特色與扎實、國外暢銷程度，以及特殊榮譽的加持等則為考量能否為暢銷書的重要因素。 3. 與環境和需求連結：包含要能滿足實質或心理需求以及打造說服主題。 4. 出版社本身的屬性：以出版社本身的目標策略、條件與資源作為選擇暢銷書內容物的依據。 (二) 行銷手法 暢銷書的行銷手法，以話題性書籍為主要考量的前提下，可以透過：製造話題來引發報導、密集曝光用來刺激購買意願、舉辦系列論壇演講、異業結盟藉此擴大市場規模，還有藉由慎選通路將資源集中在多數目標客源聚集的管道上等等方式來做。 透過對個案《藍海策略》一書的研究後發現，該書在書名和主題、封面設計、內容特色與扎實，以及國外暢銷程度上面具有一定的優勢；該書的主題獨特，作者寫的內容簡潔有條理，並且在國外出版後造成熱銷。而在行銷手法上面，則是具備強有力的行銷活動，讓書本身在上市後短時間內能夠引起很多人以及企業主的注意；透過雜誌、報紙還有電視等媒體做宣傳，結合國內產業的實際個案以及當時的社會現況，把該書的主要論述加以結合起來，作為一個報導的題材，能夠引發顧客的注意與引起顧客的共鳴，進而產生想要購買的慾望。也就是說，在價值鏈上，個案在「行銷活動」上產生極高的暢銷價值，再來就是在「選書與作者」這價值活動上也有不錯的表現。

This thesis provides the first rigorous history of the concept of midlife crisis. It highlights the close connections between understandings of the life course and social change. It reverses accounts of popularization by showing how an idea moved from the public sphere into academia. Above all, it uncovers the feminist origins of the concept and places this in a historically little-studied tradition of writing about middle age that rejected the gendered "double standard of aging." Constructions of middle age and life-planning were not always oppressive, but often used for feminist purposes. The idea of midlife crisis became popular in the United States with journalist Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976), a critique of Erik Erikson's male-centered model of ego development and psychoanalytic constructions of gender and identity more generally. Drawing on mid-century notions of middle life as the time of a woman's entry into the public sphere, Sheehy's midlife crisis defined the onset of middle age, for men and women, as the end of traditional gender roles. As dual-earner families replaced the male breadwinner model, Passages circulated widely, read by women and men of different generations, including social scientists. Three psychoanalytic experts-Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Roger Gould-rebutted Sheehy by putting forward a male-only concept of midlife as the end of a man's family obligations; they banned women from reimagining their lives. Though this became the dominant meaning of midlife crisis, it was not universally accepted. Feminist scholars, most famously the psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, drew on women's experiences to challenge the midlife crisis, turning it into a sign of emotional instability, immaturity, and egotism. Resonating with widespread understandings of mental health and social responsibility, and confirmed by large-scale surveys in the late 1990s, this relegated the midlife crisis to a chauvinist cliché. It has remained a contested concept for negotiating the balances between work and life, production and reproduction into the present day.