Professor Rice is a co-principal investigator on a recently-funded $100,000 planning proposal.

Gaines, S., Melack, J., Penley, C., & Rice, R. E. (2008). University of California, Santa Barbara Digital Ocean Project Planning Phase. Funded by The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, January - September 2008, $100,000. The overall final product of this planning phase will be a full-blown, detailed proposal for initial funding of the DigitalOcean Project. The DigitalOcean Project (DO) will use collaborative digital technologies to inspire public engagement in preserving the world's oceans. Recent studies have demonstrated the massive human impacts that are accumulating in ocean ecosystems. Without public support for change, we will lose vital biocomplexity in our oceans. DO will seed leading social networking and media sites with science-rich content and compelling stories. When fully realized, participants will include scientists, educators, students, policy makers, communicators, and the general public. DO will offer them knowledge, tools, and a community base for becoming active supporters of sustainable ocean uses.

Choice Scholar Lecture

Ronald Rice is the editor of a new book, Media Ownership: Research and Regulation (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008).

Trends and developments in social values, political ideologies, media policies, economic conditions, globalization, media technologies, and telecommunications networks, have all interacted to generate significant changes in the nature of media industries, production, content, distribution, exhibition, and use. This book considers a wide variety of interdisciplinary discussion and analysis of historical, legal, cultural, policy, research, professional, oppositional and ethical perspectives on the media ownership question. The sections include: I. Overview and Public Interest Issues; II. Historical and Political Issues; III. Ownership and Influence Issues; IV. Regulatory and Legal Issues; and V. Ethical and Access Issues.Howard Giles, a professor of communication at UC Santa Barbara since 1989, has been selected to be a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association.

Five International Communication Association Presidents were at this year's Department of Communication Holiday Party -- Howard Giles, Linda Putnam, Ronald E. Rice, Jon Nussbaum, and Ken Harwood.

Howard Giles Wins Distinguished Scholar Award

Howard Giles, a professor of communication at UC Santa Barbara since 1989, has been selected to be a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association. Giles received the award November 17th at the NCA's annual convention in Chicago.

Article Title: Networks of Terror: Theoretical Assumptions and Pragmatic Consequences (Communication Theory 17, 2007: 93-124)

René Weber has been elected ICA Video Game Interest Group Secretary

René Weber Weber has been elected as secretary of ICA’s Video Game Interest Group. He joins Robin Nabi, Mass Communication Chair, Walid Afifi, Interpersonal Division Vice Chair, and Cynthia Stohl, Organizational Communication Chair as elected officers of the organization.

Katy Pearce Receives U.S. Student Fulbright Award

Katy Pearce of University of California, Santa Barbara has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student scholarship to Armenia in Communication, the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board announced recently. She will be based at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan http://www.aua.am

Pearce is one of over 1,300 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2007-2008 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. The Fulbright Program, AmericaÕs flagship international educational exchange program, is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has provided approximately 279,500 people 105,400 Americans who have studied, taught or researched abroad and 174,100 students, scholars and teachers from other countries who have engaged in similar activities in the United States with the opportunity to observe each others' political, economic, educational and cultural institutions, to exchange ideas and to embark on joint ventures of importance to the general welfare of the world's inhabitants. The Program operates in over 150 countries worldwide.

Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.

Top Paper, Organizational Communication Division, NCA 2007 awarded to Karen Myers

Paper title: Toward an Integrative Theory of Membership Negotiations: Socialization, Assimilation, and the Duality of Structure

Authors: Clifton W. Scott, University of North Carolina, Charlotte and Karen K. Myers, UCSB

Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Interaction, named book of the month by RCCS

Professor Rice's co-authored book (with J. Katz, 2002, The MIT Press), Social consequences of Internet use: Access, involvement and interaction, has been translated into Chinese by the Commercial Press in Beijing, 2007, and selected as Book of the Month for December 2007 by the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, with three substantial reviews (http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?BookID=372), and a response by Rice & Katz. RCCS receives plenty of traffic, including many professors and instructors looking for books to include in their courses.

National Program in Health Games Research to be Based at UC Santa Barbara

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has announced the selection of UC Santa Barbara as the home for a new $8.25-million national research program to examine how interactive games can be used to improve health.

The Health Games Research program will make grants to support outstanding research at institutions and organizations across the country as well as conduct studies, disseminate research findings, and work to bring new knowledge of the subject to a much broader audience...

The original story can be found at: http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1686

Debra Lieberman awarded Directorship of $8.25 million Health Games Research program

Lecturer in the Department of Communication, and communication researcher at the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research (ISBER), Debra Lieberman is the Director of a $8.25-million national research program funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to examine how interactive games can be used to promote and improve players' health behaviors and health outcomes. The Health Games Research program will make grants to support outstanding research at institutions and organizations across the country as well as conduct studies, disseminate research findings, and work to bring new knowledge of the subject to a much broader audience.

Melvin Oliver, dean of social sciences at UC Santa Barbara, says of the new program: "This grant builds on the significant work of ISBER, our Communication Department, and Dr. Lieberman, and it confirms that UCSB is an important national resource for improving effective communication about health. The activities of this grant will stimulate original research, convene important scholars, and create effective tools to help create a media-savvy society where positive health outcomes are increasingly important for both personal and national well-being."

See http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1686 for more details, and listen to local media reports on the program at http://kclu.callutheran.edu.

Andrew Flanagin and Miriam Metzger awarded research grant on Credibility and Digital Media

Communication professors Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin were awarded a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to explore people’s understandings of credibility across the wide range of digital information resources available today. The working hypothesis of the project is that digital technologies have dramatically increased the burden on individuals to effectively seek, readily locate, and accurately assess the quality of information in their daily lives, for two reasons: (1) the availability of information has increased exponentially in recent decades due to networked digital technologies such as the Internet and the Web and, (2) the proliferation of information sources has made traditional notions of who is an information authority increasingly dynamic and problematic. The research project will generate detailed interview, usage, and survey data, resulting in the most comprehensive knowledge set yet available about how individuals seek, find, and use credible information today. This work extends Drs. Flanagin and Metzger’s ongoing research on digital media and credibility spanning the last decade. The most recent work in this research program is an edited volume titled Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility, due to appear in late 2007. Details on their research program on credibility can be found at www.credibility.ucsb.edu

As a result of René Weber's collaboration with UCSB’s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind and UCSB’s Brain Imaging Center, the Communication Department has been named as one of the SAGE Center’s Participating Department (http://www.sagecenter.ucsb.edu/departments.htm).

UCSB's SAGE Center integrates a wide range of scholarly endeavors and technologies in the humanities, social sciences and the sciences. These include, for example, the metaphysics and the philosophy of the mind; methodologies in the social and behavioral sciences; and the relatively recently developed tools in the sciences such as functional neuro-imaging, genetic techniques, computational modeling and immersive virtual environment technology.

One mission of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind is to support the unique inter-disciplinary culture of UC Santa Barbara. For a variety of reasons, the academic and teaching climate is unusually free of barriers to collaboration, and the faculty and administration strongly encourage and support work across academic fields.

Communication Professor René Weber is part of a two hour long documentary on video games that aired on Discovery HD and on Discovery Channel. The title of the documentary is: "Gamer Generation – The World of Computer Games" and has been produced by Discovery Times & CBC (Producer: Marc De Guerre).

Among other video game researchers' work, the documentary features René Weber's brain imaging work on violent video game playing and his work on character attachment processes in online role-playing video games. There are re-runs scheduled throughout the year. Check your TV Guide!

The award recognizes the reserve officer who has “consistently maintained an extraordinary level of dedication and service to the Reserve Corps throughout the year.”

From the Daily Nexus

This quarter about 160 lucky film studies and communication students are learning about politics, the media and journalism from a veteran - CNN’s senior political analyst Jeff Greenfield.

Greenfield, who has worked in journalism for over 40 years, is a visiting professor teaching two courses this quarter. One of the courses, called “Political Media in the United States-A Historical Survey,” is offered to both communications and film and media studies students. It traces the media’s role in politics from the days of the Federalist Papers in the 1780s to the Internet, and discusses themes such as America’s fear of foreign influences.

Greenfield is also leading a seminar on “Ethics in Politics” for students in the Communication and Political Science Depts. During the seminar, students discuss ethical questions that arise in politics while taking on roles such as political candidates, campaign operatives, journalists and partisan and undecided citizens in a mock campaign.

For the full story continue here http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=13045

René Weber has been awarded the Sevenone Media Research Award. Sevenone Inc. is associated with two of Germany's major TV networks (SAT1, PRO7) and is responsible for the networks’ marketing activities. According to the award letter, the award money (€20.000) goes to UCSB (ISBER) and supports "René Weber's cutting-edge media research and most innovative study during the year 2006". René Weber will use the money to fund both undergraduate and graduate research projects within UCSB's Department of Communication.

Debra Lieberman awarded research grant on Health Video Games from HopeLab

Communication lecturer Debra Lieberman was awarded a research grant on Effects of Narrative and Nurturing in a Health Video Game: A Comparative Study of Video Game Features. The granting agency is HopeLab, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health and quality of life of young people with chronic illness. With this grant, Debra is conducting a randomized experiment investigating the effects of four versions of a cancer education video game: (1) with both a narrative story line and the goal of nurturing game characters who have cancer, (2) with narrative and without nurturing, (3) with nurturing and without narrative, and (4) without narrative or nurturing so the game simply becomes a challenge to hit cancer cells with blasts of chemotherapy. The study will help explain how a narrative story line and nurturing of characters, which are key elements of many interactive health games, influence players' engagement, motivation, cancer-related emotions and attitudes, self-efficacy and confidence about cancer prevention, empathy toward cancer patients, cancer-related knowledge, and processes of health behavior change.

The January 12, 2007 Chronicle of Higher education featured a report on The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. The Department of Communication at UCSB was ranked second in productivity among all departments of communication. This was the third study of productivity in the last two years (see stories below of the Thompson Scholarly Impact study and the JOC study of productivity) to find the department in the top three department’s of communication with respect to productivity and provides additional evidence for the 2004 NCA reputational study which identified the Department of Communication as a top ranked department in the field of Communication.
The Chronicle story may be found at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i19/19a00801.htm

UCSB'S COMMUNICATION DEPARTMENT NAMED ONE OF THE TOP HIGH IMPACT U.S. UNIVERSITIES, 1999-2003

Ranked by average citations per paper, among the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities that published at least 50 papers in Thomson Scientific-indexed communication journals between 1999 and 2003.

UCSB'S COMMUNICATION DEPARTMENT RANKS HIGH IN RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY

UC Santa Barbara's Communication Department has been ranked No. 3 in the nation in terms of research productivity, according to a recent analysis of scholarly articles that have appeared in eight academic journals sponsored by the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association.
See the full article at http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1412

GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN UCSB'S COMMUNICATION DEPARTMENT RANKED BEST IN NATION BY NATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION SURVEY

Conducted in the 2003-2004 academic year, the study asked NCA members to judge the reputations of 132 doctoral programs in nine specialty areas of communication. In the five areas in which it was considered, UCSB ranked first, first, second, fourth and seventeenth.

Here are the rankings and those from 1996, the last time that NCA conducted the study.

These results are an extraordinary achievement for any department, they are truly remarkable for a department of our size. Congratulations are due to one and all.

The complete survey may be found at:
http://www.natcom.org/nca/Template2.asp?bid=415

The press release from UC Santa Barbara's website may be found here.

Department of Communication Major and Senior Honor's Student Nicole Anderson has been named a Junior Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Each year the Academy invites leading social science departments in the United States to nominate one undergraduate senior as a Junior Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science who satisfies three criteria:

* an outstanding grasp of a discipline's theories and methods, as demonstrated through prior coursework in the student's major department,
* an enthusiasm for understanding social issues, and
* the promise of making substantial contributions to the social sciences in the future.

Nicole was the department's nominee this year and she has been selected for the honor. She will receive a certificate from the Academy that acknowledges their appointment as a Junior Fellow, as well as one year's free online subscription to the Academy's bimonthly journal, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Nicole's senior honor's thesis (in progress under the direction of Professor Michael Stohl) will examine the effects of news and entertainment television programs on attitudes towards Arab Americans. She will investigate how different portrayals of Arab-Americans on television affect viewers' attitudes towards people of Arab descent, how different portrayals of Arab Americans on television affect viewers' opinions on public policy regarding race, immigration, and national security and whether news or entertainment television depictions of Arab-Americans have the larger effect on viewers' attitudes towards ethnicity and public policy.

The American Academy’s website and story may be found at http://www.aapss.org/section.cfm/3/16

Aula, P., Rice, R.E., Aslama, M., & Siira, K. (2006-2008). State-of-the-art of media industries and related research: Case USA (mass media, digital media, organizational communication), 2006-2008. Principal investigator Dr. Pekka Aula, Department of Communication, University of Helsinki, P.O.Box 54 (Unioninkatu 37), FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, FINLAND. Funder: The Helsingin Sanomat Foundation; Total: 283000 Euros; US-subproject: 78000 Euros.

Kenneth Harwood presented a "A Century of Consumer Expenditures for Entertainment in the United States: Analysis and Forecast"

Kenneth Harwood presented a "A Century of Consumer Expenditures for Entertainment in the United States: Analysis and Forecast" at Temple University in Philadelphia on November 2. Ken was also in New York to attend the half-yearly meeting of the Editorial Board of Television Quarterly, which is a publication of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

In Summer 2006 he was elected to the Board of Directors of The Elverhoj Museum of Art and Historyin Solvang.

3RD ANNUAL JAMES J. BRADAC MEMORIAL LECTURE, OCTOBER 27TH, 2006

Please save October 27th, 4:00-5:00pm, Life Science Building, Room 1001, for the 3rd Annual James J. Bradac Memorial Lecture sponsored by the Communication Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Charles Berger from the University of California, Davis, will be presenting a lecture titled "A Tale of Two Communication Modes: When Rational and Experiental Processing Systems Encounter Statistical and Anecdotal Depictions of Threat."

Charles R. Berger, Ph.D. , received his BS in Psychology from the Pennsylvania State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication from Michigan State University. Dr. Berger has conducted a long-term research program focused on the role cognitive planning and social interaction processes play in the production of messages. In addition, he is concerned with the ways in which informationabout risk influences individuals judgments of their vulnerability to threatening phenomena and is well known for his pioneering work in uncertaintyreduction theory. Professor Berger was co-author with Jim Bradac of the 1982 book Language and Social Knowledge: Uncertainty in Interpersonal Relations whichwas awarded the International Communication Association Fellows Book Award in?2002, an award which recognizes those books that have made a substantial contribution to the scholarship of the communication field and have stood the test of time. Dr. Berger has edited Human Communication Research and more recently Communication Research. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and he has served as President of the Association. Professor Berger has taught courses concerned with communication and cognitive processes at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Walid Afifi has been elected ICA Interpersonal Division Vice-Chair

Walid Afifi has been elected ICA Interpersonal Division Vice-Chair
And Mikaela Marlow, graduate student, has been elected ICA Student Board Member

They join Ron Rice, the President of ICA and Robin Nabi, Mass Communication Vice Chair and Cynthia Stohl, Chair of Organizational Communication as elected leaders of the organization.

Four superb scholars are joining the department this year

CYNTHIA STOHL AWARDED GRANT WITH PROFESSOR SHIV GANESH

DR. DAVID SEIBOLD AWARDED THE UCSB OFFICE OF STUDENT LIFE ACTIVITIES AWARD FOR 2005-06

DR. DAVID SEIBOLD AWARDED THE OUTSTANDING DIVISION MEMBER AWARD FOR 2006

DR. TAMARA AFIFI RECEIVED THE 2006 OUTSTANDING YOUNG SCHOLAR AWARD

DR. KAREN MYERS RECEIVED THE 2006 W. CHARLES REDDING OUTSTANDING DISSERTATION AWARD

DR. RONALD RICE WON TOP PAPER AT THE RUSSIAN COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION

DR. RONALD RICE AWARDED THE 2006 DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD

GRADUATE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS

The Graduate Students Association awarded Paul Kang the Outstanding GSA TA Award in Social Sciences and Education.

Tenzin Dorjee received the award as the 2006 Outstanding TA from the Office of Residential Life and Residence Hall Association.

Paul Myers, Kasim Alimahomed, Lucy Popova, Grace Anderson, Mirit Shoham and Tenzin Dorjee received a TA Instructional Grant from the Office of Academic Programs.

Kim Stoltzfus received a fellowship to TA for UCDC Washington Center for summer 2007.

Paul Myers received an Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation Fellowship to attend the training program last summer.

KIER WALLIS RECEIVED THE LUIS LEAL SOCIAL SCIENCES UNDERGRADUATE AWARD AT COMMENCEMENT

FIVE SENIOR COMMUNICATION MAJORS INDUCTED INTO UCSB CHAPTER OF PHI BETA KAPPA

The Department of Communication congratulations five senior communication majors who were recently inducted into the UCSB chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest honorary academic society.

Sarah Noel Burke-Gorewitz, Communication and Sociology
Emily A. Donner, Communication and Psychology
Robin Laura McClelland, Communication and Psychology
Irina Agnes Schabram, Communication and German
Maria Belen Vaccaro, Global Studies and Communication and French

Phi Beta Kappa was founded in 1776 and currently includes more than 500,000 members nationwide.

Original story: http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1479

JAKE HARWOOD, PhD, 1994, FIRST OF THE DEPARTMENT PhDs TO BECOME FULL PROFESSOR

DEPARTING FACULTY MEMBERS

We had two faculty members depart, including one of the three founding members of the department, Tony Mulac, who arrived here in 1968 and retired this year. Tony will not go far away and in January 07 will present a colloquium on his research.

We also had a wonderful visiting lecturer with us this year, Maggie Pitts, who will be joining the faculty of Old Dominion University.

THE 2ND ANNUAL JAMES J. BRADAC MEMORIAL LECTURE, OCTOBER 2005

COPPAC DIRECTED BY DR. HOWARD GILES SPONSORS FILM, AFTER INNOCENCE

STEVE CHAFEE INAUGURAL MEMORIAL LECTURE PRESENTED BY BYRON REEVES, MAY 2006.

The Steven H. Chaffee Memorial Lecture was established at the University of California, Santa Barbara to honor the scholarship and personal qualities of Steven Chaffee, one of the most influential communication scholars of the 20th century.

Steve Chaffee came to UCSB from Stanford University in 1999, when he was appointed to the Arthur N. Rupe Chair in the Social Effects of Mass Communication. His research focused on a wide range of issues dealing with the effects of media, with particular emphasis on political communication and the impact of the news. He wrote extensively on the role of mass media in political campaigns, voter behavior and child development.

Byron Reeves is Paul C. Edwards Professor, Department of Communication and Director, Center for the Study of Language and Information, an interdisciplinary group of faculty working at the intersection of computing and social sciences. He is also co-founder of the Media X Program that brings together industry partners with university researchers across the campus working on innovations in interactive technology.

Professor Reeves has published widely on such topics as children and television, physiological responses to media, attention, memory, and emotion, the history of media effects research, political advertising, television news, and multi-player interactive games. He is co-author of The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and the New Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge University Press).

Professor Reeves is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and was Steve Chaffee’s colleague at both the University of Wisconsin and Stanford.

DR. RONALD RICE RECEIVES FULBRIGHT AWARD FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH IN FINLAND

DR. HOWARD GILES ELECTED TO APA DIVISION 20 AND RECEIVED THE FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURESHIP AWARD

DR. BRUCE BIMBER AND DR. DAVID SEIBOLD PRINCIPALS ON LARGE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AWARD

DR. SCOTT REID SELECTED AS THE ASSOCIATION OF THE PACIFIC RIM UNIVERSITIES FELLOW

DR. CYNTHIA STOHL SELECTED AS PRIMO PROFESSOR

Kier Wallis, who majored in Communication, received the Luis Leal Social Sciences Undergraduate Award for outstanding interdisciplinary achievement in the social sciences. The award was established in honor of Don Luis Leal, a distinguished visiting professor of Chicano Studies whose presence and scholarship have greatly enriched the Santa Barbara campus.