Letter from the Chair
10 November 2003

To: Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students
From: Jerry Baldasty
Re: November News in the Department of Communication

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December 3 Colloquium --- Save the Date.

Valerie Manusov will give the first colloquium of 2003-4 on Wednesday, December 3, at 3:30 in Room 126. The title of the colloquium: “Learning about nonverbal behavior from media discourse: Analyses of media coverage of the 1993 Rabin-Arafat handshake" This work extends directly from the merger and is meant to reflect some of the ways in which disparate parts of the discipline may inform one another. Valerie will present two studies, done with Nancy Bixler and Tema Milstein.

Please plan to join us for this event.

Winter Quarter colloquium speakers will include Phil Howard.

Communication Graduate Students Poster Session

Congratulations to the graduate students for an impressive research poster session on Tuesday, November 4. More than 50 faculty and students attended the session, which highlighted the work of our graduate students (including Native Voices and Digital Media students). The authors and projects:

The Department provided funds to support this event from the Laura Crowell Fund.

Laura Crowell Fund.

Our chief source of support for graduate student travel is the Laura Crowell Fund. Last autumn, when the College of Arts and Sciences offered a 3-2 match for donations, we had $4,000 in donations from 17 people.

This year, the College is offering a 1 to 1 match; for every $1 faculty and staff contribute, the College will provide another dollar. This is a great opportunity for us and I hope you will contribute to the Fund. The deadline is December 31, 2003.

We are earmarking the money for graduate student travel. We need to match last year’s total of $4,000 in contributions -- and ideally increase it.

As you know, presenting research papers at academic conferences really is extremely important for our graduate students. It gives them exposure in an important academic arena and helps build their research profile. This is important for the department’s reputation, too; having a substantial cohort of graduate students presenting research papers at major conferences is one of the best ways to demonstrate the intellectual vitality of our graduate program.

I hope that faculty and staff will contribute this year; the 1 to 1 match offered this year is a better offer than last year. Please give checks to Nancy Dosmann; make out the checks to University of Washington. You may also give online; go to the departmental web page “On Line Giving” and make a donation to the Laura Crowell Fund.

So far, we have contributions from just three people. I realize that everyone faces other demands for contributions, and that pay raises have not been generous in recent years. Still, we have a wonderful opportunity this year – when the match is more generous than last year -- to do much for our graduate students. Please make a donation. A donation of $150, after the College match, would give us $300 --- roughly enough for airfare for one student to attend a national convention. Any amount would be very helpful, particularly given the College’s generous match.

Retention Issues.

From the Dean’s office, there is news about retention issues. In this biennium’s state budget for UW, modest funds were set aside for recruitment and retention. The University will have about $2million this year and $1.4 milion next year. A portion of these funds are already committed to the recruitment of new faculty and spousal/partner hires; the remaining funds willl be used to provide counter-offers to outstanding faculty who have been recruited by other institutions.

Because the College shares the costs of retention, the “selection bar” for making counter-offers will be set high. The key guidelines are:

In the case of an outside offer, the Department of Communication will follow the guidelines approved last year: the chair, in consultation with the Executive Committee, will discuss the merits of all counter-offer requests. If the consensus is favorable, the chair will then write a letter to the College and also provide materials on the individual (e.g., CV, recent student and peer evaluations of teaching).

Under “normal” circumstances, the Department is expected to cover one third of the cost of the counter-offer. In current budget times, with just 2 percent allocated for raises, the Department will not be expected to make a financial commitment in a counter-offer.

Open House.

Thanks to faculty, staff and students who contributed to the great success of our Open House. Alumni who visited were enthusiastic about the event; many have commented on the high visibility of faculty and students. Thanks to those who helped make this such a great success.

Open House Pictures

Our student volunteers were particularly impressive; thanks to them for keeping traffic moving and for their informative tours. Special thanks to Victoria Sprang for her superb organizational leadership on the Open House.

We also received substantial advice and help from the College’s development officers, and particularly from Carolyn Black and Patricia DiPalma. This is a testament to their enthusiasm for our efforts, and particularly for Victoria’s work.

Development News.

In October, donations to the Department totaled $4,075.00. Most of this went to our discretionary accounts. This is a relatively high monthly total, and much of the revenue comes from the UW telethon. We also received several gifts from alumni we have been cultivating. We also received word that one alumnus has made us a beneficiary of his estate, with an estimated bequest of $100,000 for an endowment for discretionary spending. This alumnus indicated that the impressive Open House did much to drive his will plans.

Paul Lutus donated $5,000 worth of editing equipment to the department and will donate more equipment next year. Mr. Lutus is the creator of Arachnophilia, an HTML editor, and he wrote the first version of "Apple Writer." He also designed electronics for the NASA Space Shuttle in the 70s and was named Scientist of the Year in 1985 by the Oregon Academy of Science. One web site referred to him as "one of the earliest microcomputer software millionaires."

Outreach News.

Recent visitors have included Tom Hansen, a 1959 graduate, who is now Pac-10 Commissioner. He spoke to students about careers in communication on October 24. Other visitors to campus that day included alumni who were back on campus for their 50th graduate reunion: Nancy Hevly, Vic Olason, Catherine Iles, Jeanne Metzger, Robin Worthington, Joanne Arfin and Joan Mann.

Autumn 2003 Alumni Visit Pictures

Mark Allen, a 1970 alum, and director of the Washington State Association of Broadcasters, will be speaking in Richard Kielbowicz’s law class on Wednesday, November 12. Mark worked in broadcasting immediately after graduation and then became an attorney. He has headed the WSAB for a decade and is its chief lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

Gary Crocker, a long-time State Department officer and consultant, spoke on campus on Thursday, November 6, on careers in the foreign service. Gary is a Political Science alumnus, but he knew Laura Crowell when he was a student and received funding from the Crowell Fund at that time. He remains a great fan of our program.

On November 21, two other alums will be on campus to talk to students about careers. Andrew Fagan, an attorney in Santa Rosa, California, and Daniel J. Taylor, an editor at the Santa Rosa Press, will be joining us. Both attended our alumni gathering last July in San Francisco. Roger Simpson will be the departmental host for them that day.

The Department will be hosting a series of career workshops for our students in winter and spring quarters. We already have a number of alumni from both of the older departments who have volunteered to help mentor our students.

Our Visiting Committee will be on campus on Friday, November 14; they will meet with some of our faculty that afternoon. John Klockner and Nancy Dosmann will also provide a tour of our facilities for them.

Photocopying and Printing costs.

We continue to monitor all photocopying on a monthly basis. Most faculty have reduced their photocopying voluntarily, and this is greatly appreciated. Given the cut in our operations budget for 2003-4, keeping copy costs low is greatly appreciated. Particular thanks to faculty who shifted all or part of their handouts to the web; this has made a big difference – particularly in large classes. But it all adds up, so this has also been very useful in smaller classes.

As part of our over-all efforts to control costs, the graduate students have proposed that they will cut their printing costs (in the grad lab) by a third in the next month or so. This is a wonderful offer and reflects the graduate students’ dedication to helping us live within our budget. Thanks to all of those who were part of the broad discussion on printing costs, and particular thanks to those who are now cutting the volume of their printing. I realize this is not easy, but it is necessary.

President Huntsman

Interim President Lee Huntsman toured the building on Monday, November 3. As provost, he was instrumental in committing $2.2 million for our remodel; during his visit on November 3, we showed him the great results of the remodel and thanked him for his support. Showing him around the department were Valerie Manusov, Nancy Dosmann, John Klockner, Paul Ford and Jerry Baldasty. President Huntsman said he was very impressed with the facility and that he was particularly pleased that we had made such good use of limited University funds. Much of the credit goes to faculty, staff and students who worked so hard to make the remodel a success.

People.

Crispin Thurlow will be giving a keynote address at the 4th annual conference of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication in Lancaster, England this December. The talk is: “Relating to our work, accounting for our selves: The autobiographical imperative in teaching about difference." Two Communication graduate students, Saskia Witteborn and Marwa Maziad, will also be presenting papers at this conference.

David Silver spent last summer as a Visiting Fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. While there, he presented a paper entitled "Cyberculture.mil: A Cautionary Tale for an Emerging Field of Study" to the Networked Research and Digital Information Research Group; he presented a similar paper at the Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction conference in Prague and was asked to give the keynote speech for next year's conference (also in Prague). He has also had two publications out recently: "Communication, Community, Consumption: An Ethnographic Exploration of an Online City," in Virtual Publics: Policy and Community in an Electronic Age, edited by Beth E. Kolko (Columbia University Press, 2003); and, co-written with former UW graduate student Philip Garland, "'sHoP onLiNE!': Advertising Female Teen Cyberculture," in Society Online: The Internet in Context, edited by Philip Howard and Steve Jones (Sage, 2003).

David Domke gave a talk last week as part of the “My Daily Constitution” Series in Seattle. "My Daily Constitution" was a series of discussions about the US Constitution led by lawyers, academics, activists and others. Discussions took place at various locations (a library, an art hall, a theatre, a shopping center, a tea house, a cultural center, a cafe,) around Seattle. Dave spoke on Nov. 6 on "Whose Free Press? The First Amendment, Democracy, and Corporate Mass Media" at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center.

Ted Prosise has two articles due out soon:
Prosise, Theodore O. (forthcoming). “Prejudiced, Historical Witness, and Responsible: Collective Meory and Liminality in The Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance,” in Communication Quarterly and Prosise, Theodore O., and Ann Johnson. (forthcoming) “Law Enforcement and Crime on Cops and World’s Wildest Police Videos: Anecdotal Form and the Justification for Racial Profiling,” in Western Journal of Communication.

Kirsten Foot had several presentations at the Internet Research 4.0 conference in Toronto in mid-October, including: "Ethics of Web Archiving as a Scholarly Practice", (authors: Kirsten Foot, Meghan Dougherty, Steve Schneider) and "Archiving Electoral Web Spheres: Theorectical and Technical Considerations" (authors: Steven Schneider and Kirsten Foot).

Kirsten has also been invited to lecture in the Virtual Methods series at the University of Surrey, UK: "Web Sphere Analysis: An Approach to Studying Online Action.” Kirsten also reports that “our research team continues to study the presidential candidates' Web campaigning practices, and we're seeing a significant amount of mobilizing activity.” Monthly updates are posted at politicalweb.info.

Phil Howard has a recent publication: "Digitizing the Social Contract: Producing American Political Culture in the Age of New Media," Communication Review 6(3), 2003, pp. 213-245.

Patricia Moy gave a talk to the UW Business School’s Visiting Executive Program on how the media affect public opinion in regard to business practices. She had an article printed recent (with Kelley McCoy, Meg Spratt, and Michael R. McCluskey): “Media effects on public opinion about a newspaper strike.” Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, 80, 391-409 (2003)..

Barbara Warnick’s paper at AIR was titled “Online Ethos: Source Credibility in an "Authorless" Environment.”

From John Klockner, good news:

Please join me in thanking Dan Hart for donating a set of filters for student use with our broadcast gear. Dan reports the value of these filters and of associated holder and case to total in excess of $2,000. The College (i.e., Michael Podlin) has also arranged a donation of video equipment to the department. The donor estimates that the value of the gear will be more than $5,000. This gear will come in two lots. Tom Colonese (AIS) has agreed to provide us with 2 VTR decks worth more than $4,500 in support of Rosemary Gibbons’ Winter quarter course. If approved by the Dean's Office, we will also charge a course fee in that class that will leave us owning about a half dozen firewire drives. The value of these total at least another $750. We have finished installing the animation software for the Extension classes. The value of the 28 installed licenses is about $4,570 With these $16.8K in additions and with the other incomes and gifts that we have received thus far this quarter, around $40K in program support has been raised this Fall.

Thanks, too, to John for his great efforts to improve our hardware and software supplies.

Congratulations to Ted Coopman for winning the Best Student Paper Award for the Association of Internet Researchers 4.0 2003 Conference, Toronto, Canada. His paper was titled: “Dissentworks: Identity and Emergent Dissent As Network Structures.”

Congratulations to Tema Milstein on her election as the student representative to the governing board of the International Communication Association. This is a significant accomplishment, given that the voting was organization-wide. Tema will serve for two years in this position. This is an important position and her work benefits the department. Thanks, Tema.

Thanks to Phil Howard for his efforts in organizing the Naomi Klein lecture. The event drew more than 500 people. Phil estimates that at least half of the attendees were from outside the university, so this represents a wonderful university/community event. The event was recorded by KUOW for broadcast on their Speaker's Forum program. Paul Ford recorded the event for rebroadcast from our departmental website. Thanks to others who helped Phil serve as host to Klein during her visit her ---including David Silver, Beth Kolko and Kathleen Woodward.

Mike Peters recently participated in the U.S. Paralympic Soccer Team World Championship series in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The U.S. team qualified for the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens. Mike scored goals in both the US v. Great Britain game and US v. Portugal game. The single goal from Mike against Portugal gave the U.S. the 1-0 victory needed to clinch a spot in next year’s Games.