Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Considerable debate exists over the accuracy of self-reported media use measures. This report compares three methods for studying Internet and computer use: online surveys, diaries and e-tracking. This study was conducted with undergraduate students from two universities. Participants were asked to (a) complete a survey (b) keep a diary over the course of one day, and (c) download Internet software which logs all Internet related activity. All methods assessed how frequently they engaged in Web surfing, information seeking, entertainment activities, email sending and receiving, and on and off-line video game playing. Results indicate that e-tracking estimates of Internet use are consistently lower than diary and survey estimates.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: By focusing on a narrative framework, this essay explores the prime narrative of breast cancer that is prevalent in American social discourse. Through an analysis of SELF magazine’s 1999 series, “Diane’s Diary,” which follows one woman’s real time account of her battle with breast cancer, it is possible to demonstrate the role of narrative in context, action, and interaction. Diane’s Diary both reproduces and resists the metaphors of war and hope that shape our prime narrative of breast cancer, thereby reshaping understandings of this disease for the author, her readers, and the medical community. As an investigation of how our communication about health and illness influence our understanding of a disease like breast cancer, this essay seeks to demonstrate both the power and importance of narrative ways of knowing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Mordechai Kaplan’s diaries from 1913-34 offer a window into a tormented and lonely Jewish thinker who, after arriving in America with the first great wave of East European immigrants in the 1880s, turned to his diary to work through his emerging notion of Judaism as a civilization. As a pioneering theologian, sociologist and teacher of American Judaism in the twentieth century, Kaplan stood as a towering figure at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, where he worked for a good deal of his very long life (1881-1983). His understanding of Judaism as a civilization has been broadly accepted by both the movement he founded (Reconstructionism) and the movement he left behind (Conservative Judaism). Yet even with his popular following and intellectual power, Kaplan felt marginalized and embattled throughout his life. His diaries, in turn, provided a material cure for this anxiety of presence. Kaplan personified his diary to become that material medium through which he could engage and explore his ever present desire to create something permanent. Journal writing is both a physical embodiment and performance of self in which the very pages of the diary witness to the existence of an engaged personality.

Kaplan's journal reveals how writing becomes an aesthetic performance – a material expression that leaves an enduring trace of an engaged and embodied life. But this practice was fraught with anxiety and tension, and Kaplan’s journals reflect these fears and hopes. For in Kaplan we recognize how the performance of a material embodiment of self in journal writing reflects a corresponding desire for a permanent place and home in America. Art, for Kaplan, is a salvific act of presence. But art is also a kind of archive that witnesses to the existence of personality. In this sense, Kaplan’s diaries expose a religious anxiety of presence in America, and the struggle for a material echo of self.

The art of writing is a pragmatic method for becoming American – to write oneself, as it were, into American cultural history. This paper will explore Kaplan’s understanding of writing as aesthetic performance and its relation to archiving the self in a material medium. I also want to show how these diaries reflect the cultural dilemmas facing immigrant Jews in 1920s and 30s America.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is a micro-historical sociology of a diary presumed to belong to a Mrs. M. Taylor, an African American schoolteacher in the 1930s in rural Florida. An intersectional analysis aids in locating Mrs. Taylor with regards both to the larger society as well as in relation to the mill workers she has come to educate, as she embodied both positions of privilege and oppression. Most importantly, her diary can help tell the history of those forgotten or ignored by “official” history, creating a richer and truer recollection of county, state, national and human history.