By Elise Thomas, Kata Balint

This research documents how YouTube’s algorithms contribute to promoting misogynistic, anti-feminist and other extremist content to Australian boys and young men. Using experimental accounts, this research tracks the content that YouTube, and their new ‘YouTube Shorts’ feature, routinely recommends to boys and young men. This short-term, qualitative study involved analysing algorithmic recommendations and trajectories provided to 10 experimental accounts. As the study progressed, each account was recommended videos with messages antagonistic towards women and feminism. Following the recommendations and viewing and liking the suggested content resulted in more overtly misogynist ‘Manosphere’ and ‘incel’ content being recommended. The study found that while the general Youtube interface recommended broadly similar content to topics the accounts originally engaged with, the new shorter video feature, called YouTube Shorts, appears to operate quite differently. Shorts seems to optimise more aggressively in response to user behaviour and show more extreme videos within a relatively brief timeframe. On Shorts, all accounts were shown vastly similar and sometimes even the same specific content from right-wing and self-described ‘alt-right’ content creators. The algorithm did not make any distinction between the underage and adult accounts in terms of the content served.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2022. 24p.

By Henry Tuck, Jakob Guhl, Julia Smirnova, Lea Gerster and Oliver Marsh

Harmful actors use an ever-expanding range of digital spaces to spread harmful ideologies and undermine human rights and democracy online. Understanding their evolving ideas, online networks and activities is critical to developing a more comprehensive evidence base to inform effective and proportional efforts to counter them. But creating that evidence base can challenge the technical capabilities, resources, and even ethical and legal boundaries of research. We are concerned that all these may be getting worse, just as the options for spreading harm online increase. It should therefore be of concern that in many instances it is increasingly hard to conduct digital research in a systematic, ethical and legal manner. This results in a situation where difficult trade offs have to be made between competing goods, including the desire to understand and mitigate harmful content and behaviour online, the preservation of privacy and the adherence to legal agreements. We argue in this report that this does not need to be the case; solutions are available,…

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2023. 60p.

By Ciarán O’Connor

This report aims to provide an in-depth analysis on the state of extremism and hate on TikTok. It is the culmination of three months of research on a sample of 1,030 videos, equivalent to just over eight hours of content, posted on the social media platform. These videos were used to promote hatred, as well as glorify extremism and terrorism. ISD set out to examine the state of hate and extremism on TikTok in two ways. The first objective involved analysing how individuals or groups promote hateful ideologies and target people on the platform based on numerous protected attributes such as ethnicity, religion, gender or others. Second, using the same framework, ISD investigated how features on TikTok like profiles, hashtags, share functions, video effects and music are used to spread hate. This report seeks to start a conversation around how platforms like TikTok can improve their own practices to protect users from harm. Additionally, it underscores the clear need for independent oversight of such platforms, which currently leave users and the wider public open to significant risks to their health, security and rights.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2021. 57p.

By Ciarán O’Connor

In collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center, ISD conducted research to examine the use and misuse of YouTube Super Chats, a tool that allows creators to monetise comments in their livestream chat feeds, that are an increasingly important source of revenue for both YouTube and creators on the platform. The report features three case studies examining popular political commentary and content channels; Timcast IRL, The Young Turks and Right Side Broadcasting Network. In the past, Super Chats have been used by extremists on the platform as a source of generating revenue and, as this report demonstrates, Super Chats continue to enable creators and YouTube to profit from comments that promote violence, conspiracy theories, misinformation and hate. The report features three case studies of popular YouTube highlights YouTube’s failure to effectively enforce its own community guidelines on Super Chats and includes recommendations on how the platform can address this enforcement gap.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2022. 18p.

By Amy Sodaro 

Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the form: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world emerging from widely divergent forms of political violence.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 227p.

By Jason E. Pierce

In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today. 

Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016. 323p.

By Jorge Luis Borges

From the cover: ". unquestionably the most brilliant South American writing today. . .one of the genuine prose talents of our pe- riod. Written with a classical economy of means and under the control of a mind of wide culture and deep sensitivity, his stories will continue echoing in the minds of his readers as do those of Franz Kafka." -Herald Tribune Books

NY. Grove Press. 1962. 164p. USED BOOK. CONTAINS MARK-UP.

Edited by Eric Schaefer

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and television, recorded sound, and publishing—that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as ;Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 481p.

Edited by Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela E. Jaffé, Eryn J. Newman, and Norbert Schwarz

This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news. Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of “alternative facts”, this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.

New York; London: Routledge, 2021. 252p.

Edited by Richard Rogers

There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 246p.

By Sabine Binder

In this ground-breaking study, Sabine Binder analyses the complex ways in which female crime fictional victims, detectives and perpetrators in South African crime fiction resonate with widespread and persistent real crimes against women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of crime novels written over the last decade, Binder emphasises the genre’s feminist potential and critically maps its political work at the intersection of gender and race. Her study challenges the perception of crime fiction as a trivial genre and shows how, in South Africa at least, it provides a vibrant platform for social, cultural and ethical debates, exposing violence, misogyny and racism and shedding light on the problematics of law and justice for women faced with crime. Readership: All interested in crime fiction and its gender/racial political potential, its cultural relevance, its ethics and aesthetics, in South Africa and beyond.

Leiden, NETH: Brill. 2020. 252p.

By Mark Pizzato

From the Preface: Why do humans perform acts of violence for a watching audience? This book

explores the performance of violence in various cultures, from ancient human and animal sacrifices to modern sports and cinema, through psychoanalytic theories and theatrical paradigms. How is the sublimation of human sacrifice today, on sports fields and movie screens, like and unlike actual bloodshed in prior cultures? Does it create a current community of ritual belief in the divine powers of mythic heroes and demons? What effects might melodramatic violence have on a mass audience--with purely good and evil forces battling apocalyptically onscreen especially after September 11, 2001, and the subsequent "war on terrorism" in our new millennium? Is a fundamental catharsis of fear and desire, of terrorist paranoia and capitalist greed, still pos- sible today, through complex characters and tragic violence, involving our mass-media warriors and godlike stars?

NY. SUNY Press. 2005. 260p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

Edited By Mark Fishman and Gray Cavender

From the cover: In eleven original studies by social scientists, this is the first volume to focus on television reality crime programming as a genre. Contributors address such questions as: why do these programs exist; what larger cultural meaning do they have; what effect do they have on audiences; and what do they indicate about crime and justice in the late twentieth century? Adaptable at both undergraduate and graduate levels, Entertaining Crime wil contribute to discussions of crime and the media, as well as crime in relation to other issues, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and fear of crime.

NY. Aldine De Gruyter. 1998. 208p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Gene. D. Phillips

From the Introduction: “….In sum, this book presents an in-depth discussion of several gangster films, some of which are familiar members of the gangster genre, like John: Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, and some that deserve to be better known, for example, Stephen Frears’s The Grifters. That a few meaningful books on the gangster film have appeared throughout the years demonstrates the continued interest in the genre….in this volume, I include some overlooked crime movies that deserve more attention than they have received. In addition, I have interviewed film directors, as well as other artists and technicians, associated with the films I treat. I also focus on some more recent movies, along with some from the classic period. These later movies are reminders that the gangster genre is still with us and is not going away.

NY. Rowman & Littlefield. 2014. 204p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Franz Kafka. Translated by David Wyllie

From Wikipedia: Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrousvermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition. The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, with differing interpretations being offered. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cockroach.

With a length of about 70 printed pages over three chapters, it is the longest of the stories Kafka considered complete and published during his lifetime. The text was first published in 1915 in the October issue of the journal Die weißen Blätter under the editorship of René Schickele. The first edition in book form appeared in December 1915 in the series Der jüngste Tag, edited by Kurt Wolff.[1]

Leipzig. Kurt Wolff Verlag . 1915. 49p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Franz Kafka. : Willa and Edwin Muir, Tania and James Stern

This is a 1971 collection of all Kafka’s finished works. It contains all the amazing, weird and wonderful unsettling stories from Metamorphisis to In the Penal Colony.From Wikipedia: “In 1912, Kafka wrote Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, or The Transformation),[150] published in 1915 in Leipzig. The story begins with a travelling salesman waking to find himself transformed into an ungeheures Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin, Ungezieferbeing a general term for unwanted and unclean pests, especially insects. Critics regard the work as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century.[151][152][153] The story "In der Strafkolonie" ("In the Penal Colony"), dealing with an elaborate torture and execution device, was written in October 1914,[82] revised in 1918, and published in Leipzig during October 1919. The story "Ein Hungerkünstler" ("A Hunger Artist"), published in the periodical Die neue Rundschau in 1924, describes a victimized protagonist who experiences a decline in the appreciation of his strange craft of starving himself for extended periods.[154] His last story, "Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse" ("Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"), also deals with the relationship between an artist and his audience.[155]

NY. Schoken. 1971. 487p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Kingsley Amis

From the cover: Throughout his notable career as a novelist, poet and literary critic, Kingsley Amis was often concerned — the less understanding some might say obsessed--with the use and abuse of the English language. Do we know what the words we employ really mean? Do we have the right to use them fi we don't? Should an "exciting" new program be allowed to "hit” your television screen? When is it acceptable to split an infinitive? And just when is one allowed to begin a sentence with "and"? The enemies of fine prose may dismiss such issues as tiresome and pedantic, but Kingsley Amis, like all great novelists, depended upon these very questions to separate the truth from the lie, both in literature and in life. A Parthian shot from one of the most important figures in postwar British fiction, this volume represents Amis's last word on the state of the language. More frolicsome than Fowler's Modern Usage, lighter than the Oxford English Dictionary, and replete with the strong opinions that have made Amis so popular- and so controversial….”

NY. St. Martin’s Press. 1997. 272p.

By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Translated from the Russian by Michael Guybon. “*The First Circle asks to be compared to Dostoevsky. Solzhenitsyn is in the great story-telling tradition. When he introduces a character, he fills in the complete background. His portrait of a Soviet prosecutor and his family circle is unforgettable. So are chapters devoted to the brooding Stalin. A future generation of Russians will be able to come to terms with their history through books like Dr. Zhivago and The First Circle.'“ David Pryce-Jones, Financial Times.

London Collins. Fontana Books. 1970. 680P.

Prepared by the Editorial Staff of the University of Chicago Press.

For over seventy-live years the University of Chicago Press Manual of Style has been the standard reference tool for authors, editors, copywriters, and proofreaders. Updated many times since 1906, it now goes into its thirteenth edition—the first revision since 1969, and the first to introduce a change in title. Bowing to what has become nearly universal usage, we now call the Manual what everybody else calls it. The Chicago Manual of Style—or, for short, The Chicago Manual.

Two pervasive features characterize the present edition: it reflects the impact of the new technology on the entire editing and publishing process, and it spells out, in greater detail and with many more examples, the procedures with which it deals. It is, in short, much more a “how-to” book for authors and editors than was its predecessor. In chapter 2, on manuscript preparation and copyediting, for example, new sections have been added on how to mark a manuscript and how to mark type specifications on a script. Chapter 12 (“Tables”), completely rewritten, begins with advice on how to make a table from raw data. Chapters 15 through 17, on documentation, have been reorganized and greatly expanded, offering many more alternative methods of citation and a wealth of examples. In chapter 18 (“Indexes”), clear step-by-step
procedures for the mechanics of index making are set forth. The terminology and methodology of technological advances (in word processing, computerized electronic typesetting, and the like) are reflected most prominently in chapter 20, “Composition, Printing, and Binding” (new to this edition), and in the Glossary. Other notable features of the present edition are chapter 4 (“Rights and Permissions”), rewritten in light of the new copyright law, and chapter 9 (“Foreign Languages”), which includes a new table of diacritics, a pinyin (Chinese) conversion chart, and data on several more languages.

Throughout, The Chicago Manual aims to give clear and straightforward guidelines for preparing and editing copy—with the emphasis on the sensible, the practical, and the economical. As did its predecessors, the thirteenth edition of the Manual states the style preferences of the University of Chicago Press and reflects the current practices and requirements of the great majority of American publishers.

Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1982. 718p.

By Christiana Gregoriou

This book explores the three aspects of deviance that contemporary crime fiction manipulates: linguistic, social, and generic. Gregoriou conducts case studies into crime series by James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, and investigates the way in which these novelists correspondingly challenge those aforementioned conventions.

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 189p.