The bibliography is hosted on CiteULike, the free citation sharing service. The bibliography contains over 1500 published works in English, which can be searched by any number of fields below. (Advanced search syntax and examples can be found here.)
Inclusion Criteria
How did we decide what to include? There are, after all, no recognized borders around the field itself. The would-be discipline’s scope, moreover, is the main issue at stake in any number of historical accounts. Even worse, a map drawn by a scholar of “film and media studies” may have nothing in common with the territory surveyed by, say, a “speech communication” researcher—except, ironically, claims for catholicity. Even the nomenclature is up for grabs.
Our solution was to erect a very big tent. For inclusion, a published work has to present itself as history, and then meet one of two criteria: (1) to self-describe its subject as “communication” research and/or (2) address research that we judge to be centered on mediated or face-to-face communication. There is, for example, an enormous body of history on the “Chicago School” of sociology. We included only those works that refer to the Chicago sociologists as communication scholars, or histories that plainly address Chicago work on media-related topics.
Tagging
We have assigned digital tags to each entry according to its relevant attributes. We deployed tags to record, when relevant, (1) historiographical approach (e.g., “biographical” or “institutional”), (2) geography (e.g., “Canada” or “Venezuela”), (3) disciplinary frame of reference, or orientation to a field-within-the-field (e.g., “sociology” or “rhetoric”) (4) substantive topic, subfield, or figure (e.g., “audience research” or “McLuhan”), (5) institutional location (e.g., “[Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies](Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)” or “Columbia”), and (6) the historical or geopolitical context (e.g., “1920s” or “Cold War”). The number of tags assigned to any single publication varies, according to its relevant attributes; some entries are tagged ten or more times, and others just once.
We faced a series of judgment calls in the tagging process too. To apply tags, we consulted abstracts, tables-of-contents, and—when necessary—full text. A mere mention of, say, a topic, name, or country would not merit a tag; the treatment needed to be more substantial than that. To earn the tag “Néstor García-Canclini,” for example, an article needed to reference the Argentinian scholar in the title, or else grant him significant billing in the article abstract.
Please report missing citations and/or errors in current entries. And won’t you consider helping to internationalize the bibliography?