The link below is to an article that takes a look at the pros and cons of a Kindle device and the Kindle App. Which should you use?
For more visit:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/buy-kindle-just-use-free-app/
I have both a Kindle device and I use the Android app. Given my Kindle is getting on in years, I started using the Android app on my tablet and I am exceedingly pleased with it – in fact, I have no intention currently to buy another Kindle.
Gillian James, University of Salford
At the Hay Festival on June 2, Melvin Burgess received the Andersen Press Young Adult Book Prize Special Achievement Award for his novel Junk, first published 20 years ago. Since then, the young adult novel has come of age.
Burgess and his publisher, Andersen Press, took a risk when Junk was first released in 1996, when books for teenagers were hardly as gritty as the typical dystopian fare of today. A book about drug addiction and prostitution aimed at “young adults” was then a very daring thing, and many thought that this was a book that was simply too depressing for the market and would languish on the library shelves. It was, after all, one in which 14- and 15-year-olds take high risks, living away from home in a squat and fuelling their heroin addiction through theft.
Actually, it didn’t languish on the library shelves at all. It became a bestseller and was translated into 28 languages. Unsurprisingly, it received some negative commentary, but as Burgess himself has pointed out (in the latest edition of Junk), most of that came from people who had not read the book. There was also plenty of positive commentary: “An honest, authentic look at the drug culture,” said Time Out. “May just be the best YA book ever,” thought Robert Muchamore. “It is the real thing – a teenage novel for teenage readers,” argued The Scotsman. Burgess was awarded the Carnegie medal for Junk in 1997.
As its title hints, it’s a grim story, and now slightly dated. The young people involved have to make phone calls from phone boxes and have little access to computers. Yet the main characters, Gemma and Tar, are believable and rounded. The addiction is real. Homelessness is still an issue. It was Burgess’s aim to tell an authentic story but by his own admission, “authentic is informative”.
Arguably, the young adult and the young adult novel have existed for some time. Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens and even Goethe featured them and wrote them, of a kind. The Bildungsroman, or coming of age story, was aimed at all ages (think David Copperfield).
More recently, in the 1970s, Judy Blume and Christine Nöstlinger wrote for the older teen. These books featured some of the challenges facing young people: growing sexual awareness, peer pressure and the need to take responsibility for the world. But the young people in these novels do not take such high risks as Burgess’s characters nor is the description of their activity as explicit. Not quite (young) adult.
The term “young adult” did not come into common parlance until sometime after the appearance of Junk (though some educationalists have used the word since 1957 when the Young Adult Library Division, now known as the Young Adult Services Association (YALSA), was formed).
The bookshop chain Ottakar’s relabelled their teen fiction “young adult” in 1999. Waterstone’s changed the description back to “teen fiction” in 2006. At this point, the book-producing industry could not quite define what was meant by “young adult”. But Junk is often considered to have launched the Young Adult novel. Burgess may not have seen this as permission to write for this newly defined reader. He just wanted to write that particular story. Now he admits, however, that “the time was ripe for YA to grow up, and I was the right person in the right place at the right time”.
Other writers began to write for this newly defined reader. Kate Cann and Louise Rennison started writing what might be termed “Chicklet-Lit” – chick lit for a slightly younger readership. Jacqueline Wilson and Judy Waite gradually started writing for older teenagers. Several vampire and other paranormal romance books began to appear.
Other novels by Burgess push boundaries, too: Lady, My Life as a Bitch (2001) tells the story of a girl who becomes a dog and enjoys being promiscuous. Doing It (2003) is a frank examination of young male sexuality at the same time as showing the vulnerability of his three main characters. Nicholas Dane (2009) raises the issue of abuse but Burgess keeps the protagonist human. The Hit (2013) includes drugs again and violence on the streets of Manchester (yet is really about something else).
The young adult novel, after all, is a story told by one invented young adult (Burgess and many other writers of young adult literature are certainly not young adults) to another. In Junk, Burgess uses a series of close first person narratives, most of them from the point of view of two main characters. He offers us a character closeness, high stakes and risk-taking in our young people that was innovative at the time. After Junk, these were identified as traits of the young adult novel. He also offers us the young adult’s voice:
Maybe if I get off, I’ll get back with Gemma again. I know, I know. She didn’t chuck me because I was using … I was as clean as a whistle at the time, more or less. But you have to have hope.
Junk is 20 years old – and it still speaks to us. As Malorie Blackman, former Children’s Laureate, says in her introduction: “It may not be real but as with every great fictional story – every word is true.”
Gillian James, Senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing, University of Salford
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
David Glance, University of Western Australia
The impact of the Internet on the newspaper industry has been starkly highlighted by a graph released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It shows how employment in that industry in the US has declined by 60% over the past 25 years, from 458,000 in 1990 to 183,000 in March 2016.
This statistic reflects the decline both in the number of newspapers and the shift to reducing the number of journalists and other staff required to produce increasingly digital output from a newsroom. From 1990 to 2014, nearly 300 newspapers closed in the US.
What the data also shows is that at least part of the job decline in the newspaper industry has been taken up by the rapid growth in Internet publishing and broadcasting.
Another growth area in that time has been in the massive increase in the number of people working in public relations which peaked first in 2000 at the height of the Internet “Bubble” to regain those heights in the subsequent years.
The numbers are more stark than they appear because in that same time, overall employment has increased by 23% with the US labour market adding 35 million new jobs.
This data simply confirms what has been obvious to everyone that with a disappearing business model for print newspapers, there is little room for the industry as a whole to continue to the same degree. The consequences of this are again not really going to be that surprising because in the end, it will be dictated by newspapers, who become predominantly digital, can make money. For a very few, this may be through digital subscribers. The New York Times, one of the few news sites that may pull off this transition with over a 1.2 million digital subscribers, still loses money. For most other sites however, digital revenue will come from advertising, driven by the types of content that drives clicks.
The Internet has not just impacted the print newsroom however. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data also shows significant declines in both the magazine and book industries. Again, this decline has been driven by falling audiences and revenue in the switch from the more lucrative print market to digital.
The disruption of the paper-based media industries by the Internet hasn’t just been a question of doing the same thing with fewer people on a different medium. What has also changed is society’s need and desire for this specific type of content. The disruption of these industries isn’t a question of simply not moving quickly enough to adapt to a new presentation format, it is that the content produced has far less appeal to the current audience who are increasingly spending less time on news sites and more time accessing content through social media and in particular, as video.
The disruption of the news industry has been not so much like the shift from typewriters to computers but more like disappearance of the whaling industry as the products of that industry were no longer of importance to society and alternatives were found.
To that extent, all discussions of paywalls and the desperate but illusive search for alternative business models for news organisations are in the end going to prove redundant. It is hard to convince people to pay for something that they have simply decided they don’t want to buy. It is not that the public won’t pay for content on the Internet. They are only too happy to pay for video content through services like Netflix and other video streaming sites and for the equivalent services that stream music. News and opinion, on the other hand is something that increasingly is valued only when it is free.
David Glance, Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Gretchen Gerzina, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Two years ago, I was in the United Kingdom working on a follow-up project for my books “Black London” and “Black Victorians/Black Victoriana.” While looking through old British newspapers, I was astonished to read an 1893 announcement in The Daily Telegraph proclaiming Sarah E. Farro to be “the first negro novelist” with the publication of her novel “True Love.”
I wondered: who was this woman? And why didn’t we know about this reportedly groundbreaking novel?
The Daily Telegraph didn’t get it exactly right: we know now that Farro wasn’t the first African-American novelist. Nonetheless, she appears nowhere in the canon of African-American literature.
After doing more research, I soon realized that Farro had made her mark writing about white people – and that this may also be the reason her work was forgotten. Learning of a black woman whose race was documented, whose novel was published – but who disappeared in the historical record – can change how we think about African-American literature.
Searches of American census records show that Sarah E. Farro was born in 1859 in Illinois to parents who moved to Chicago from the South. She had two younger sisters, and her race is given as “black” on the 1880 census.
Her novel, “True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life,” was published in 1891 by the Chicago publishing house Donohue & Henneberry. It was one of 58 books by Illinois women writers exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exhibition (World’s Fair) in 1893. Newspapers in the U.K. and the U.S. heralded the book. Toward the end of her life, in 1937, Farro was feted at a celebration of Chicago’s “outstanding race pioneers.” Apparently, she never wrote another novel.
“True Love” disappeared from the historical record, and for decades historians recognized only three other 19th-century novels written and published by African-Americans.
One other, “The Bondswoman’s Narrative,” was recently found in manuscript and published, even though the author, Hannah Crafts, is only circumstantially (although convincingly) identified. With my discovery, Farro becomes only the second known African-American woman novelist published in the 19th century. And she now joins William Wells Brown, Frances Harper, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frank J. Webb as the only African-American published novelists in the entire century.
When I returned to the U.S. from the U.K., I was able to track down only two copies of “True Love” in libraries – one at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago and the other at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – and headed to Chicago to read it. To briefly summarize: the novel tells the story of a man whose quest to marry his love, Janey, is thwarted by Janey’s selfish sister and mother. Generous and beloved Janey nurses her sister through a fever, only to catch it herself and die.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign later digitized it for me, and now it’s available online for anyone to read. Just two weeks ago I found an original copy on eBay and immediately bought it for US$124.
The eBay listing makes no mention of her race; nowhere except in early newspaper pieces is she identified as a black woman, so this important piece of history has remained invisible until now.
The reason for “True Love’s” disappearance might be simple: it takes place in England, a place Farro probably never visited, and all of its characters are white.
As literary scholar Elizabeth McHenry has shown, 19th-century black women’s literary clubs, which catered to mostly middle-class members and aspirants, primarily read prominent white English and American authors, in addition to black political writers. It was natural, then, that when Farro took up her pen she emulated her stated favorite novelists: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Oliver Wendell Holmes – writers of popular fiction admired by black and white readers alike.
Had Farro’s role models been black female authors who had written novels about black women, she may have crafted a different kind of novel.
Today we assume that early African-American writers inevitably wrote about race, that 19th-century writers necessarily referred to experiences of slavery and struggle and that their access to literacy – let alone the Victorian literary canon – must have been limited. Finding Farro’s novel changes that. Because we didn’t realize that authors like Farro existed, we had limited our perspective on their work.
As McHenry writes, “the danger of privileging [slave narratives] is that we risk overlooking the many other forms of literary production that coexisted alongside [them].”
We have much to learn about what black women read, what they wrote, and for whom. In this case, it seems that many of Farro’s readers must have been white women.
Ironically, though Farro was first celebrated and brought to public attention precisely because of her race, she doesn’t fit the mold of familiar early African-American writers. Nor is she similar to those who have been revived and “rediscovered.” Perhaps the aforementioned Brown, Webb and Wilson were noticed and celebrated not just because of their race, but because they all wrote about race.
Farro’s novel, on the other hand, is a domestic romance that tends toward melodrama. Although she explicitly sets it in England, she also betrays her unfamiliarity with that country. For instance, she gives British incomes in dollars and mentions that a character wants his wedding to take place before Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, a Chicago publisher saw fit to bring out her book.
Sarah E. Farro’s rediscovered novel tells us that black women of her time read, discussed and emulated the works of people who were not like them. Farro lived in the North through the end of slavery, preceded the Great Migration, published a novel as an American Victorian and lived through – and past – the Harlem Renaissance.
Surely those writers owe her a debt of gratitude, just as we have an obligation to bring her back into the fold of African-American and women novelists and to think about how these discoveries change our views of the African-American experience.
Gretchen Gerzina, Professor of English, Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography, University of Massachusetts Amherst
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Elizabeth Hale, University of New England
Gorgon: a vicious female monster with sharp fangs. Her power was so strong that anyone attempting to look upon her would be turned to stone. The Gorgon wore a belt of serpents that intertwined as a clasp, confronting each other. There were three Gorgons, and each one had hair made of living snakes.
In The Gorgon in the Gully (2010), Melina Marchetta’s delightful book for 10-12 year olds, no one has ever seen a Gorgon. But one apparently lives in a small valley near the sports fields at the school attended by a boy called Danny. When Danny looks up Gorgon on the internet, he finds the above definition. And his local Gorgon’s reputation for fierceness is only equalled by its record as a hoarder of balls.
So when Danny’s ball goes into the gully, and Simmo, the School Bully, dares him to go in after it, Danny is caught between his fear of the Gorgon, and his fear of being a “gutless wonder”.
His mother advises him to:
look at whatever you’re scared of from a different angle. Look at it up really close. Find a friend at school who’s not afraid to look at things up close with you.
Which is what Danny does. Gradually, he becomes friends with Simmo, and they work together to confront the Gorgon. When they finally do, they discover it is nothing like their imaginings. Indeed it’s not a Gorgon at all. It is a gentle old man who has been wondering when the children are going to retrieve their balls. In conquering his fear, Danny conquers the Gorgon, gets his ball back and becomes known as “Gorgon-buster”.
The Gorgon in the Gully goes neatly to the core of the Medusa allegory: if fear is petrifying, one needs to know how to look at it “up close”.
And like the hero Perseus assisted by the goddess Athena, who used a reflective shield to deflect Medusa’s stare and avoid being petrified, Danny finds a way to look closely at his fears from different angles, and to overcome them.
Monsters from classical myth have been lurking in the gullies of Western literature for a long time – in retellings and adaptations, and acting as symbols and metaphors for aspects of the human experience.
They’ve been surfacing recently in fantasy for children and young adults. Imaginary Medusas, realistically drawn Minotaurs, as well as a multitude of many-headed Scyllas, Hydras and Cerberuses: they all appear in Australian children’s and YA fiction.
Why are so many contemporary writers reconnecting with the monsters of classical myth? I think it’s partly because they provide profound connections to issues of identity, coming of age, and finding one’s place in the world. These are fundamental matters in children’s literature, which aims to educate and socialise children to fit in, and also to express their concerns about the world and their place in it.
And writers are working now in a globalised context, with a rich cornucopia of referents. The mash-up culture of film, television, gaming and comic book franchises is a case in point, in which protagonists connect with figure after figure from myth and legend.
It’s fun to play with mythical beasts. And it’s interesting to connect to them as well.
Connecting with Medusa can mean confronting her monstrous powers, facing the fear she represents. It can also mean sympathising with her.
As Ovid tells it, in one version of the myth (which like all classical myth has many variants), Medusa was seduced (or raped) by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and Athena transformed her beautiful hair into snakes as a punishment for this defilement. Like many monstrous tales in Greek mythology, it doesn’t seem fair.
Today, some Australian writers are more sympathetic to Medusa, as can be seen in The Gaze of the Gorgon (2002), by Karen R. Brooks. This is the second novel in a four-part portal fantasy in which a magic necklace takes 13 year old Cassandra Klein to Morphea, a mystical realm in which myths and fairytales are living and real. There, she does battle with the witch Hecate, who is trying to get control over this fantasy world, and who forces Medusa to use her powers to turn the Morpheans to stone.
But when Caz meets Medusa, she discovers that she is, in fact, an unwilling tool of Hecate. Together, they agree to “reverse the evil” that has been done, and give the petrified ones back their lives. This means that Caz has to kill Medusa.
Gazing at the bowed head of the Gorgon, Caz took a deep breath. ‘I am so sorry,’ she whispered. And before she could change her mind, raised the sword above her head and dropped her arms.
Caz and her friends gather the blood spurting from Medusa’s neck, and use it to heal wounds and revive the petrified. By willingly submitting to Caz’s blade, Medea’s death-dealing monstrosity is transformed into healing powers. It’s a revisionist take on the subject that comments on and compensates for the essential unfairness of Medusa’s treatment, both at the hands of Brooks’s Hecate, and Poseidon and Athena.
This revisionist approach, which challenges the original myths, can also be seen in treatments of the Minotaur. To summarise the famously tangled myth: it is half-bull, half-man, the product of a union between Pasiphae, the queen of Crete, and a snow-white bull sent to the King (Minos) by Poseidon for sacrifice.
Because Minos kept the bull alive, Poseidon punished the family by making Pasiphae fall in love with it. And when she gave birth to the Minotaur, King Minos had it shut away in the Labyrinth, created by the master-inventor, Daedalus. Minos demanded regular sacrifice of Athenian youths and maidens – to be sent into the Labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur.
The Athenian hero Theseus volunteered to go. Ariadne (daughter of Minos and Pasiphae) helped him find his way in and out of the labyrinth, using a ball of thread to guide him. He repaid her by abandoning her on an island, where she was discovered and taken up by Bacchus.
Jennifer Cook’s Ariadne: The Maiden and the Minotaur (2005) is set in ancient Greece, and tells this story from the point of view of a key player, the princess Ariadne, or Ari.
Cook’s Ari is an impatient, irreverent, lively modern teenager, highly critical of her family.
Here, Cook draws attention to the point that the Minotaur is Ariadne’s blood relation, recasting it as Ari’s little brother “Tori”, a disabled child, Pasiphae’s illegitimate son (born from an affair, but not an affair with a bull). To his family, Tori is a symbol of shame and disgrace, both illegitimate and disabled.
In Cook’s story, it’s the Labyrinth, designed to contain many vicious traps, and King Minos’ insistence on the sacrifices, that kill the Athenians not the Minotaur.
In conspiring with Theseus, Ari saves Tori, and escapes with him. Far from being abandoned by Theseus and taken up by Bacchus she finds true love elsewhere, fading out of recorded story, with satisfaction.
When I asked Cook what drove this depiction of a feisty Ariadne, she replied:
I remember hearing the Minotaur myth and wondering about Ariadne and thinking how typical it was of the Greek hero Theseus to get all of the help from her and then take all of the credit. To add insult to injury he dumps her and takes off with her sister. And her reward? To get ‘married’ (Greek myth parlance for raped) by Dionysos [Bacchus]. And yes, I did my honours degree in feminist history.
Cook’s feminism, coupled with her sympathy for the Minotaur as unwitting victim of a dysfunctional family (and also of the gods), influences her approach to the myth. In essence it is a coming-of-age story, in which Ariadne identifies the true monsters in her family. Tori stands for all that the family is ashamed of; the myth of the Minotaur stands for the lies people tell when the truth is too frightening. In caring for Tori and rescuing him, Ari demonstrates modern Australian ideas of love, justice, and empathy far different from the stark ironies of the Ancient Greek myths.
These modern Australian attitudes can be seen too, in Myke Bartlett’s fantasy novel for teenagers, Fire in the Sea (2012), in which a terrifying Minotaur comes to Australia on a mystical mission to restore the lost city of Atlantis to life:
All eyes were on the matted fur of his head, the exposed and bloodied teeth, and the horns. The head of a bull, the body of a man, the teeth of a lion.
In this story, fantasy elements intrude on the real world and have to be dealt with by the protagonist, a teenage orphan called Sadie. She faces a brutally bestial fighting machine in the Minotaur. Yet as the story unfolds, Sadie discovers the Minotaur is a slave to Atlantis’s head priestess, Lysandra, acting against its will to keep her in power.
In the novel’s end game, when Lysandra’s realm is disintegrating below the waves, Sadie confronts the Minotaur, believing she is ready to kill it. But she looks into its eyes, and sees flickers of humanity. Unable to slay the beast, she severs the chain around its neck, liberating it from servitude.
Here, Bartlett points to the tragedy of the Minotaur’s origins: as an unwitting byproduct of the gods’ and humans’ treachery, it is forced to act as a symbol of monstrosity.
The book also makes a point that life is worth the risk of death. As an orphan who has witnessed her parents’ death, Sadie is deeply afraid of dying. Letting the Minotaur go means risking that it will kill her: what she is most afraid of.
But perhaps there are worse things than death. And in Requiem for a Beast (2007), writer-illustrator-musician Matt Ottley uses the figure of the Minotaur to explore the pain of monstrous pasts, personal and national.
Requiem for a Beast is the story of a young stockman who confronts his own, his father’s and his country’s past. During a routine muster, he tracks down a magnificent bull that has evaded capture. He traps it in a ravine, where it falls and is badly wounded. Knowing that if he does not act, it will die a lingering death, the boy takes his knife and kills the bull.
Coming of age can mean confronting one’s demons, coming to terms with one’s past. And as the boy reflects on his encounter with the bull, his story is told through flashbacks: to his childhood, to learning of his father’s shameful story – he had been part of a group of men who had killed a young Aboriginal boy – and reflections about the Stolen Generation.
This book is shot through with iconic Australian imagery – the big sky, the harsh but beautiful landscape, the image of the drover and the muster. And linking them to the boy’s inner drama is the image of the Minotaur.
Otley anchors this specifically to a key memory from the boy’s childhood: visiting a museum with his father, they enter the mythology room, where the father explains the myth of the Minotaur.
What was it that happened that day? Why did that strange beast follow me – out of the museum and into the rest of my life? It hunted me, tracked me through the years, and slowly drew my spirit – who I was – from me until there was nothing left.
What indeed? What is Ottley’s Minotaur? A symbol of the repressed and repression? Of the violence of Australia’s past? A symbol of the demons teenagers face as they transition from childhood to adulthood, and come of age?
The book connects classical myth to the teenage experience, and also to the iconic myths and stories of Australian culture, while considering important national issues like the Stolen Generation. It runs the risk of imposing the standards of the Western canon onto the local context (as Erica Hately points out) yet it also shows the power of classical material to open up important discussions about our own culture.
I’ve focused here on Medusas and Minotaurs. But Australian authors explore many other mythical beasts, engaging with their entertaining, fun and scary aspects.
Geoffrey McSkimming’s energetic diesel-punk adventure series, Cairo Jim, exploits the resonant power of myths from Gorgons to Satyrs. Ian Trevaskis takes children back in time to help the ancient heroes fight ancient foes in Hopscotch: Medusa Stone.
Terry Denton finds the more cuddly aspects of the Minotaur in The Minotaur’s Maze (2004), while Phillip Gwynne turns Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog to the underworld, into a computer program in Bring Back Cerberus (2013). And in The Zoo of Magical and Mythological Creatures (2009), Sam Bowring’s hero, Zackary, becomes the keeper of a whole zoo of magical creatures.
Sulari Gentill’s Hero Trilogy retells Homer’s Odyssey from the point of view of a girl called Hero. When I asked Gentill what it was about classical myth she thought connected to young readers, she said there was an engaging familiarity to them:
I suspect that there is a kind of DNA that classical/ancient myth has contributed to all the stories that have come after them in Western literature. Consequently there’s a strange familiarity to them even if one has never heard the particular legend before. They add to our appreciation of new stories and we feel a connection even if we don’t know why.
We might think that Medusa and the Minotaur are buried in the past. But they surface in the present surprisingly often: testing our bravery; challenging our ideas about monstrosity and danger; and revealing the continued influence of classical antiquity, and its power in literature for our young readers.
This is an edited version of “Medusas and Minotaurs: Metamorphosis and Meaning in Australian Contexts,” presented at Chasing Mythical Beasts … The Reception of Creatures from Graeco-Roman mythology in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture as a Transformation Marker, hosted by the Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition in the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw (May 12-15).
Elizabeth Hale, Senior Lecturer in English and Writing (children’s literature), University of New England
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article announcing a new homepage format for Goodreads.
For more visit:
https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/652-a-new-look-for-the-goodreads-homepage
Emily Harrison, Birmingham City University
Phonics teaching in UK primary schools is rightly recognised as giving children the essential building blocks needed to become successful readers. Indeed, we are so pro-phonics that little is done to raise awareness about other methods, even those which might be seen as an accompaniment to phonics, not a replacement for it.
Schools tend to stick to what they know and, with more and more demand being put on teachers to raise standards and achieve excellent Ofsted reports, there is little in the way of “free time” to be allocated to testing out new methods, even those aimed at children who have had phonics training but who still have reading difficulties.
Phonics is based on training children’s “segmental phonological awareness” (that is, raising their awareness of letters and sounds and teaching them segmenting and blending skills). But there is a second part to phonological awareness known as “suprasegmental phonology”. It refers to the rhythmic components of spoken language that accompany the segmental elements, such as stress placement, intonation or pitch, and timing.
There is a growing body of evidence which supports the idea that awareness of, or sensitivity to, these rhythmic components is related to reading at various levels, including reading acquisition, comprehension and, more interestingly, reading difficulties. What this means is that children who have reading difficulties also tend to have poor speech rhythm sensitivity – and the better a child’s speech rhythm sensitivity is, the better their reading skills tend to be.
Surely, if we can somehow improve childrens’ speech rhythm sensitivity, their reading skills will also improve, right?
During my time at Coventry University, this question interested us enormously, yet there was no intervention that had attempted to train children on their awareness of speech rhythm as a possible way of enhancing literacy skills. So we set about designing a set of materials to help children gain better awareness of these rhythmic elements of spoken language.
We wanted the intervention to be suitable for children who were non-verbal – that is, children who do not speak, whether this is due to a disorder or just shyness – as well as children across a range of ability levels, so we decided on a picture and sound format, where children were presented with a picture card and a corresponding prerecorded audio sound for each item. This meant that children didn’t have to give a verbal response and that the format of delivery was repetitive to ensure some level of understanding between sessions. The intervention was designed to run for ten weeks, giving time for pre and post-test assessments to be administered within a school term.
We ran two experiments, one with reception children, age four to five years of age, who were just starting to learn to read – and one with children in year three, aged seven to eight years, who were falling behind in their reading. In each study, the intervention was compared to a traditional phonological awareness intervention and a control.
The results were very promising. In both the beginners and the older struggling readers, the speech rhythm intervention resulted in significantly greater gains in reading than the control intervention. This means that speech rhythm training is effective both at the beginning of reading tuition and once children have already received some formal training.
One of the things that interested us most is that the children in the second study were categorised as being struggling readers. For the speech rhythm intervention to work for these children is heartening and important. It means that this could be an alternative way in to teaching these children the skills they need to become successful readers.
Two papers describing similar findings, supporting the notion of speech rhythm training in struggling readers, have also since been published. However, there are no other studies to date which have investigated the effects of such training methods for beginner readers.
What our research adds is that speech rhythm training can also be effective in children who have yet to receive formal reading tuition, meaning that it can be implemented effectively from the start of primary education.
This is an exciting prospect for reading researchers – and it opens many doors for further investigation. It also has the potential to significantly improve reading instruction in schools – and will in fact soon be doing so, through a new programme which incorporates this speech rhythm sensitivity training.
Emily Harrison, Lecturer in Applied Psychology, Birmingham City University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article that looks at 20 signs indicating that you’re a big book nerd.
For more visit:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/20-signs-youre-the-biggest-book-nerd-in-your-friend-group/
Merja Myllylahti, Auckland University of Technology
Despite the shift to digital newsrooms, it is fair to say that Australian newspapers are still reliant on print for their advertising revenue.
The largest newspaper groups, representing 90% of the Australian market, made 80% of their advertising revenue from print in 2015, according to industry data. The data shows the combined advertising revenue of News Corp Australia, Fairfax Media, West Australian Newspapers and APN News & Media in 2015 was A$2.4 billion, of which print brought in A$1.9 billion.
As newspapers manage declines in print circulation and advertising revenue, many have turned to paywalls. These range from hard paywalls which The Australian has, to “freemium” models, such as that offered by the Australian Financial Review and the National Business Review. Freemium paywalls allows readers to access some content, but the papers charge for “premium content”.
My study recently published in the journal Digital Journalism confirms the Australian Financial Review (AFR) has, actually, a very hard paywall. A content analysis conducted of AFR’s homepage alongside the National Business Review (NBR) in New Zealand, reveals the AFR locks 86% of its homepage content. The number of its paywalled articles is twice as high as NBR’s.
The most locked content on afr.com and nbr.co.nz includes hard news and opinion pieces. However, both mastheads give readers a greater access to technology news, and free articles are obviously used to pull in visitors as they try to turn them into digital subscribers. Interestingly, NBR also allows people to read routine market news – such as stock and currency market reports – for free. Similarly, The Wall Street Journal lets its readers access such content without a subscription. Meanwhile, the AFR paywalls all market news.
Digital media experts Chris Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky argue that in order to survive, news publishers have to commodify production of ordinary news to “free up resources for more complex work elsewhere”. It seems that NBR has followed this advice as it has outsourced production of content which is also freely available elsewhere. A majority of the paper’s routine market news comes from the local business newswire BusinessDesk.
The different paywall strategies of AFR and NBR are linked to their publishing models. NBR is mainly published online as its print version is only published once a week. In contrast, the AFR is published in print six days a week (although its weekend print edition may soon disappear).
NBR’s income is more dependent on digital subscriptions and advertising than the AFR’s, and its hard paywall is most likely linked to print reliance in terms of revenue. In contrast to NBR, AFR’s digital subscriptions are mostly linked to its print newspapers as they are sold as a bundle. In her research paper, Andrea Carson estimates that digital subscriptions make up 33% of the the AFR’s total circulation.
However, the AFR’s readership has clearly moved to digital platforms. This suggests the paper may be wiser to have a less strict paywall. Its paywall is currently among the most expensive in the world. The latest Roy Morgan figures show that in March 2016 the AFR had 417,000 print readers and 938,000 digital readers.
Commenting on the figures, Roy Morgan Research chief executive officer Michele Levine said that “in balancing the pros and cons of reaching print and digital audiences, publishers and advertisers clearly need to have a thorough understanding of who reads only one platform or the other, who reads both, and what the proportions means”.
Yes indeed.
Fairfax doesn’t publish digital-only subscription figures for the AFR even though it does so for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Perhaps this itself is telling. It is impossible to know if the AFR is profitable or not, and how much its digital-only subscriptions contribute to its revenue. What we do know is that Fairfax is cutting 100 jobs from its Sydney and Melbourne newsrooms, and these cuts include staff from the AFR.
Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood recently said that for the Fairfax mastheads, 65% of advertising revenue is generated on the weekend, except for the AFR which was “profitable on weekdays only”.
Paywalls are not a saviour of newspapers, and even the Financial Times, which has been hailed as an example of successful paywall structure, is struggling. The paper is now facing cost cuts in its newsrooms and production despite the fact that it has 566,000 digital subscribers and growing digital revenues.
As a Fortune article points out, “the reality is that, despite its digital growth, the Financial Times is facing the same challenge as thousands of newspapers, magazines, and other traditional print publications around the world. Namely, the fact that print advertising, which still generates far more revenue than digital, continues to shrink”.
Paywalls continue to emerging, disappear and evolve. Last year, News Corp’s British tabloid The Sun abolished its hard paywall, and its traffic grew 26% as a consequence. Its experiment with the paywall was doomed.
APN’s Australian regional newspapers started to charge for digital news content last year. In New Zealand, a handful of regional newspapers have also introduced fees for their digital content.
Most recently, The Otago Daily Times (in Dunedin) introduced a metered paywall. The paper’s editor Barry Stewart commented that “we cannot win the clickbait war. We are investing in what we do best. We want to protect our journalism and this paywall is the logical way to do that”.
Perhaps the model will work better for regional papers?
Merja Myllylahti, Project manager and author for Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD) Research Center, Auckland University of Technology
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Julia Kindt, University of Sydney
It is easy to see why Herodotus’ Histories may seem overwhelming. Too much is going on, right from the start. We have only just embarked on the Histories’ central theme – the origins of the conflict between Greeks and barbarians in the fifth century BCE – when the narrative suddenly changes tack and we find ourselves in a boudoir tale of nudity, intrigue and murder, only to veer off again when a dolphin saves the singer Arion from drowning. A wild ride!
Herodotus, a Greek from the city of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor (today’s Bodrum in Turkey), published his Histories sometime between 426 and 415 BCE. His principal aim was to explain the unlikely Greek victory against the much stronger Persian army in the so-called Persian Wars that ravaged the Greek world between 500 and 449 BCE.
For his pioneering critical enquiry into the past he was named “father of history” by Cicero. His love of stories and storytelling, however, was notorious already in antiquity: Plutarch called him the “father of lies”.
Most of the tales have no clear link to the main story. They seem peripheral, if not entirely unrelated, to the account of the Persian Wars and their pre-history. Many characters appear only once, never to be seen again. To the reader accustomed to a stable cast of characters and a straightforward plot with a clear beginning, middle and end, Herodotus’ Histories read like a digression from a digression from a digression.
Yet as soon as one pauses and appreciates the stories for what they are one cannot but marvel at the events Herodotus relates. There is the conversation between King Croesus of Lydia and the Athenian statesman, reformer and poet Solon, on the true nature of human happiness. The moral is, in a nutshell: call no man happy until he is dead.
That same king consults the Delphic oracle and learns to his delight that he will bring down a great empire. Certain of victory, he wages war against the Persians; as the oracle foretells, Croesus duly ends up destroying an empire – his own.
Herodotus’ ingenuity emerges most clearly when considered in relation to Homer, who had set the benchmark and provided all writers to follow with a model for talking about the past.
Consider for example his opening statement in the beginning of the book:
Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds – some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory.
Unlike Homer, Herodotus no longer claims to be inspired by the Muses. Yet his opening lines still pay homage to the world of the Homeric hero and his perpetual striving for kleos (“glory”). After all, Homer, too, reported great deeds by Greeks and non-Greeks alike and preserved them for posterity.
Herodotus combined the two major themes of Homeric epic – travel and warfare – into a single whole. Travel and the insights they yield are as dominant a theme in the ethnographic sections of the Histories as expansion, warfare and conflict are in the historical sections. Herodotus uses the gradual expansion of the Persian Empire to delve deeply into the cultures of those who came under its influence in the century preceding the war. In his account the historical and the cultural influence each other.
While Herodotus does not dismiss the Iliad and the Odyssey, he openly takes a swipe at Homer at least once. Helen, he claims, never made it to Troy: she was diverted to Egypt due to bad weather. Homer – so runs Herodotus’ accusation – simply changed the course of the story to make it fit the genre of epic poetry. This shows an awareness of the particular demands of the kind of account Herodotus hoped to write as being different from Homeric epic.
What specifically sets Herodotus and his enquiry apart, then, is the proto-scientific way he explores the inner workings of the world. The question “why” drives this inquiry in all its aspects. It brings together the different strands of Herodotean investigation: Why did the Greeks and the barbarians go to war with each other? Why does the Nile flood? Why do the women of Cyrene abstain from eating beef?
Herodotus frequently finds the answer to these questions by looking at origins and beginnings. He takes the military conflict between Greeks and barbarians back to its roots in mythical times. In a similar vein he enquires into the source of the river Nile and traces the names of the twelve Olympians – the major deities of the Greek pantheon – back to their origins in ancient Egypt.
The quest for origins and beginnings runs deep in the Histories. It introduces a form of explanation which links the disparate strands of Herodotean enquiry by presenting them as part of an ordered cosmos. The world Herodotus outlines in the Histories ultimately and profoundly makes sense.
His efforts to establish himself as a credible researcher and narrator are tangible throughout. He is careful to tell his reader from where he derived his information on foreign lands, whether he witnessed personally or learnt from a reliable source:
As far as Elephantine I speak as an eye-witness, but further south from hearsay.
My own observation bears out the statement made to me by the priests…
Of the Pelasgian language I cannot speak with certainty…
Frequently, he gives us all the different explanations sourced from others. In the case of the flooding of the Nile he adds why he favours one (incidentally, the wrong one) over all others. By presenting views other than his own, Herodotus gives his readers the chance to form their own opinion.
The same striving for precision, exactness and authority also explains his diligence when it comes to numbers, distances and measurements.
From Heliopolis to Thebes is a nine days’ voyage up the Nile, a distance of eighty-one schoeni or 4860 states. Putting together the various measurements I have given, one finds that the Egyptian coastline is, as I have said, about 420 miles in length, and the distance from the sea inland to Thebes about 714 miles. It is another 210 miles from Thebes to Elephantine.
Why does this level of detail matter, and do we really need to know it? We do! This kind of accuracy and precision bolsters Herodotus’ authority as a credible source of information (even though some of his data verge on the fanciful).
To Herodotus, at least, measuring the world, mapping new territory, noting the features of distant lands and territories are all part of the process of “sense-making”, in which the new and unknown is related to the well-known and familiar:
The difference in size between the young and the full-grown crocodile is greater than in any other known creature; for a crocodile’s egg is hardly bigger than a goose’s, and the young when hatched is small in proportion yet it grows to a size of some twenty-three feet long or even more.
At the same time, Herodotus shows a profound interest in names and naming and the translation of words and concepts from one language into another. He tells us that the name Egypt applied first to Thebes, and that the name of the Asmach people of Egypt means those who stand on the left hand of the king.
Being able to name things in the world is part of being able to explain them. Herodotus was not just pioneering critical enquiry; along with the world he discovered, he had to invent a method and a language.
Occasionally the strive for authority and exactness falters and the reader is left wondering whether the narrator has been unreliable all along, such as when Herodotus’ observations truly defy credulity.
Take the gold-digging ants of India, “bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog”; the winged snakes of Arabia that interfere with the frankincense harvest; the Arabian sheep with tails so long they need little wooden carts attached to their hindquarters, preventing the tails from dragging on the ground.
All these are instances in which Herodotean inquiry – despite his own claims to the contrary – slip beyond the realm of the authentic, credible and real.
But it would be a mistake to make too much of these examples. They are memorable only because they stand in such marked contrast to the accurate pictures Herodotus sketches elsewhere of the world.
And who can say for sure that the gold-digging ants, the long-tailed sheep and the flying snakes did not, in fact, exist? Some have argued that the gold-digging ants of India were actually marmots and Herodotus applied a Greek word for ant to a creature unknown to him but reminiscent (albeit faintly) of an ant.
Other creatures, however, take the reader fully into the realm of the fantastic. In his description of Libya, Herodotus says emphatically:
There are enormous snakes there, and also lions, elephants, bears, asps, donkeys with horns, dog-headed creatures, headless creatures with eyes in their chests (at least, this is what the Libyans say) wild men and wild women and a large number of other creatures whose existence is not merely the stuff of fables.
Some of these beings belong to a different, more archaic world, where the boundary between man and beast was fluid and uncertain. We can see a whole spectrum of more or less fantastic creatures, whose ranks included the Cyclops and Sirens of the Odyssey.
Herodotus accommodates such creatures in the absence of better information, but at the very least he feels the need to explicitly confirm their place in the new world of critical inquiry.
A special category is reserved for the most startling aspects of the world. In the Histories, the concept of the wondrous (thaumastos/thaumasios) is applied to those aspects of the world which at first defy explanation and seem to fall outside the laws of nature.
A floating island is a wonder; lions who attack camels but no other creature in Xerxes’ entourage – another wonder; the complete absence of mules in Elis – again a wonder. Ultimately, many of the phenomena Herodotus considers wondrous ultimately have a rational explanation of cause and effect. Others turn out to be divinely inspired.
Beyond the question of whether any (let alone all) of the Histories’ events occurred as Herodotus relates, his stories share a common humanity. The examples of all-too-human foibles and traits like overconfidence, greed and envy but also of fate, luck and fortune reverberate down the ages. Through these stories the Histories still speak to us, 2500 years later.
Traditionally, the Histories were dismissed as anecdotal. Herodotus was seen as lacking gravitas and not on par with Homer, Euripides, Thucydides, Cicero and their like. Consequently, the Histories were not considered central to the humanist canon. Over the last three decades, however, this has changed; Herodotus’ Histories are now widely regarded as a foundational text in the Western historiographic tradition.
Classical scholars have discovered that the work has a coherence after all. Unity between the digressions and the main narrative emerges on a level other than plot: by theme. Many stories in the Histories are case studies in the nature of power.
It is not Everyman who makes history in the Histories: the focus is squarely on those at the top of the game. Yet in most instances the rise to power is followed by a sudden and catastrophic fall.
The reasons are always similar: power leads to excess. Blindness to the limitations of human action incurs the downfall of mighty kings like Candaules, Croesus, Cambyses and Xerxes. The condition they suffer from – the Greek word is hybris – is depressingly modern and familiar.
The Histories are a compilation of stories packed into each other like nesting Russian dolls. Successive stories share with each other – and the larger historical narrative of which they are part – the same insights, themes and patterns.
Once you can read one, you can read them all. New insights emerge from the way individual stories play with the formula, highlighting different aspects of the theme.
As tales of the nature of human power, the “digressions” speak directly to Herodotus’ core theme: the rise and fall of all empires, in particular the Persian Empire and its spectacular defeat by the much smaller Greek contingents in the Persian Wars.
Yet the Histories are not merely a historical source for the Persian Wars. Herodotus dwells extensively on the pre-history of the conflict and touches on the cultural and ideological issues at stake.
All this is set on the broader stage of the ancient world and includes geographical references, climatic observations, flora and fauna as well as notes on differences in the customs and lifestyle of Greeks, Persians and other peoples.
Thanks to this broad focus, it is not hyperbole to say that, in a profound sense, the Histories are about the entire world as it came to be understood and mapped out towards the end of the fifth century BCE.
The Histories stand at the transition from an older, mythical worldview – that of the heroic or archaic age as represented in Homeric epic – to a new, classical outlook that manifested in the exacting mode of enquiry into the workings of the world.
The name for this form of investigation – historia – did not yet mean “history” as we know it; it simply meant, in a general sense, “critical enquiry”. Herodotus occasionally mentions consulting written sources, but he does so mainly to distance himself, his method, and information from other authors, notably Homer and the poets.
The most subtle feature of the Histories, perhaps, is the profound sense of balance that pervades all aspects of the cosmos. In the world of Herodotus, any excess is ultimately corrected: what goes up must come down. This applies to individuals, to empires and to peoples.
The divine is central to Herodotus’ view of the world: the gods guarantee a perpetual historical cycle. This dynamic ensures that imbalances of power or greed – the too-much and the too-little – ultimately level each other out.
The traditional gods of the ancient Greek pantheon are still very much alive in the Histories. Yet in contrast to Homeric poetry, they no longer intervene directly in the world. They have receded to a transcendental distance from which they oversee and steer the workings of the world.
We may no longer share Herodotus’ view of the past, yet we delight in the richness of the world he sketched. Its stories, landscapes, characters, and insights into human nature linger long after the reading. What makes the work stand out above all is the Histories’ sense of wonder and discovery. Herodotus’ Histories remain a classic testament to the pleasures of researching and learning.
All translations are from: Marincola, J. (1996) Herodotus: The Histories. Revised edition. London. Penguin Books.
Julia Kindt, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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