The extraordinary developments at Fairfax have been well-covered throughout the Australian media and blogosphere. In particular, the Jonathan Green on The Drum, Andrew Jaspan in The Conversation and Eric Beecher in Crikey are very good articles, full of insight and context. But, if Fairfax falls, what will become of rural and regional papers? Or, perhaps […]
UPDATE: If you’ve come to this post looking for information about content analysis, you might be better served looking here, where I’ve written up a more detailed and logical post. I have been doing some considerable reading for the last fortnight and I came across one text that has thrown me a bit. The problem […]
UPDATE: If you’ve come to this post looking for information about content analysis, you might be better served looking here, where I’ve written up a more detailed and logical post. A key data collection method for my thesis will be content analysis. Basically (and I could well be shot for simplifying it this much) content […]
I published a version of this post a couple of days ago. This one is much more detailed and refined. I wrote it up for The Drum, but it wasn’t wanted. You get it here instead 🙂 The Simpsons fan world is abuzz with the news Matt Groening has revealed the real Springfield is near […]
The Simpsons fan world is abuzz with the news Matt Groening has revealed the real Springfield is near his hometown in Oregon. This is probably unsurprising news as many people have guessed Springfield, Oregon was where Groening got the name. However, it seems to have been slightly more complex, with Groening telling the Smithsonian Magazine: […]
In his seminal work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson wrote of the ways nations are constructed – of the common symbols and artefacts that define peoples within national borders. Equally potent are the symbols used to define others within those borders, or to signify they are outsiders. It is the symbols used in The Simpsons to […]
Visual.ly has just released a bunch of tools that allow users to display stats from Twitter and Facebook in infographics. I used one of the tools to compare the Twitter accounts @Rotary and @Rotaract. Rotary monstered Rotaract on almost all the measurements. While on one hand the results were unsurprising, on the other hand they […]
In the course of reading up to ground myself in Springfield’s esteemed academic circles, I came across a work called Atomistic Politics and the Nuclear Family. The article presents a case – though it has a few holes – that The Simpsons actually presents a strong image of family. The family values are couched in […]
I’m going to update this post as I go with useful resources for my thesis. Springfieldians Twitter List: I set up this list and added to it tweeps who are: “Inhabitants, observers and contributors of Springfield.” That is, the tweeps on the list are either Simpsons fans, accounts (claiming) to be Simpson’s characters, or people […]