The Importance of Attention Diversity and How to Measure It

Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front‐page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Attention diversity is an important variable in its own right, offering insight into how agendas vary in their accessibility to policy problems and perspectives. Yet despite the importance of attention diversity, we lack a standard for how best to measure it. This paper focuses on the four most commonly used measures: the inverse Herfindahl Index, Shannon's H, and their normalized versions. We discuss the purposes of these measures and compare them through simulations and using three real‐world datasets. We conclude that both Shannon's H and its normalized form are better measures, minimizing the danger of spurious findings that could result from the less sensitive Herfindahl measures. The choice between the Shannon's H measures should be made based on whether variance in the total number of possible items (e.g., issues) is meaningful.     

The Iranian Diaspora in Sydney: Migration Experience of Recent Iranian Immigrants

Recent research has found that discrimination against Islam and Muslims is deeply rooted in Australia. This report explores whether or how recent Iranian migrants have experienced racism, discrimination, or Islamaphobia in Sydney. These questions are explored by focusing on their experiences and issues regarding their making of new lives in Australia. This article suggests that recent Iranian migrants are experiencing far less discrimination than other Muslim diasporas in Sydney. Concluding that despite recent reports by some researchers grouping various Muslim populations together as regards Islamaphobia, there is a necessity for investigating discrimination, stereotyping, and Islamaphobia against particular diasporas to determine the needs of the Muslim population at large.     

Reassessing the chronology of the Mississippian Central Illinois River Valley using Bayesian analysis

Chronology building has long served as a major focus of archaeological interest in the Central Illinois River valley (CIRV) of west-central Illinois. Previous methods have relied primarily upon relative dating techniques (e.g., ceramic seriation) as a means of sorting out temporal relationships between sites. This study represents the first investigation into the utility of Bayesian techniques (which consider radiocarbon dates in context with archaeological information) in the CIRV. We present the results of a detailed ceramic seriation of the region, data that we use as a priori information in our Bayesian models. We then offer contiguous, overlapping, and sequential models of site occupations in the Mississippian CIRV, review the output and appropriateness of each model, and consider their implications for the pace of sociopolitical change in the region.     

Plastic fantastic? Problematising post-feminism in erotic retailing in England

Sex shops in England have traditionally been perceived as masculinised consumption spaces, located at the margins of both the city and the clock (in decaying urban zones, hidden from view and frequented under the cover of darkness). Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of fashion conscious and female-orientated ‘erotic boutiques’, keen to disassociate themselves away from negative stereotypical representations of sex shops, through marketing themselves as stylish, fun, acceptable and safe, and, above all, empowering spaces for women to explore their sexuality. This article considers how erotic boutiques offer a post-feminist sexual address to women through claims of female empowerment, an embrace of traditional femininity and an endorsement of the aestheticisation of the female body. More specifically, I explore the post-feminist tensions between female sexual subjectivity and objectivity, by unpacking, and reflecting on, the relations between erotic boutiques and the space of the body. This is achieved by an analysis of how the products and services (and how they are marketed and displayed) promote idealised representations of female bodily sexual pleasure, adornment and knowledge that can apparently be obtained by the consumption of specific products and commodified sexual knowledges. The article consequently considers and questions a seeming inextricable entwinement of post-feminist sexual empowerment with sexual consumerism.     

New World Paleoethnobotany in the New Millennium (2000–2013)

This article evaluates the current state of paleoethnobotany since Hastorf’s 1999 review published in this journal. We discuss advances in methods, ancient subsistence reconstructions, the origins and intensification of agriculture, and how plants inform on issues of political economy and identity. Significant methodological developments in the extraction, identification, and analysis of starch grains and phytoliths have led to advancements in our knowledge of early plant domestication and the transition to food production. Paleoethnobotanists increasingly are using more complex quantitative techniques to characterize their data, which have resulted in more nuanced interpretations of plants that fall within the purview of social archaeology and allow us to address issues related to gender, identity, and ritual practice.     

A Two‐Tiered Method for Identifying Trends in Media Framing of Policy Issues: The Case of the War on Terror

Research on media framing of policy issues has flourished. Yet the varied approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing issue frames that make this literature rich also hinder its advancement. Here, we document the benefits of a two‐tiered method: the first level accounts for issue‐specific frames, while the second level tracks frames that generalize across issues. For this study, we draw on generalizable frames from prospect theory (loss vs. gain frames) and social identity theory (self‐referential vs. other‐referential frames). We discuss the theoretical merits of a two‐tiered approach, arguing that it should yield compound insights greater than the sum of its parts. Applying this method to newspaper coverage of the war on terror, we find a strong trend at the generalizable level: media framing of the war shifted over time from a predominant use of “fear” (self‐referential loss) frames to an increasing use of “charity” (other‐referential gain) frames. Our approach further reveals that the fear frames used in the lead‐up to the Iraq War were not driven by issue‐specific frames related to terrorism or weapons of mass destruction as we might have thought, but rather by frames related to the anticipated threats to U.S. troops. This study sharpens our understanding of how framing of the war evolved, but more broadly it suggests that a two‐tiered approach could be applied both within and across policy issues to advance our understanding of the framing process.     

James Preston,Malting and Malthouses in Kent. Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2015. 235 × 165mm, 93 pp., b/w and col. illus. throughout. £14.99. isbn 978-1-4456-5306-8

Abstract

Beehive coking ovens had virtually monopolised coke oven design by the middle of the nineteenth century and their physical remains have been described in several recent articles. The following account identifies an alternative oven arrangement on one of the smaller and less well known British coalfields.