Blaise Cronin (2004). Pierce Butler's An Introduction to Library Science: A Tract For Our Times? Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 36(4), 183-188.
In considering the historic and contemporary import of Butler's work, Cronin characterizes the content of each chapter and critically analyzes the central theses, while relating Butler's positivistic premises, assumptions, and conclusions to the congeries of competing epistemological and ideological standpoints that define current thinking in library and information science research.
Herring, S.C. (2004). Intaanetto Tsuushin: Seisa/Seisabetsu no Koozoo to Minshuka no Kanoosee. In: Reynolds Akiba Katsue and Nagahara Hiroyuki (Eds.), Jendaa no Gengogaku[Current topics in the study of language and gender], (pp.145-166). Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. This is a Japanese translation of Herring's Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication, which appeared in Electronic Journal of Communication 3 (2), 1993.
Herring evaluates the claim that computers democratize communication with respect to male and female participation in two academic electronic discussion lists over a one-year period. She notes a tendency for a minority of male participants to effectively dominate discussions both in amount of talk, and through rhetorical intimidation. She argues that these circumstances represent a type of censorship, and thus that an essential condition for democratic discourse is not met.
The paper is one of the first to argue that gender differences in online communication reproduce a broader societal power imbalance between men and women. The book in which it now appears is a collection of "classic" articles on the topic of language and gender originally published in English, translated for the first time into Japanese for a Japanese audience.
Posted December 21, 2004