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Orthodox by Design, a groundbreaking exploration of religion and media, examines ArtScroll, the world's largest Orthodox Jewish publishing house, purveyor of handsomely designed editions of sacred texts and a major cultural force in contemporary Jewish public life. In the first in-depth study of the ArtScroll revolution, Jeremy Stolow traces the ubiquity of ArtScroll books in local retail markets, synagogues, libraries, and the lives of ordinary users. Synthesizing field research conducted in three local Jewish scenes where ArtScroll books have had an impact-Toronto, London, and New York-along with close readings of key ArtScroll texts, promotional materials, and the Jewish blogosphere, he shows how the use of these books reflects a broader cultural shift in the authority and public influence of Orthodox Judaism. Playing with the concept of design, Stolow's study also outlines a fresh theoretical approach to print culture and illuminates how evolving technologies, material forms, and styles of mediated communication contribute to new patterns of religious identification, practice, and power. Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the scholarship category, Jewish Book Council

The primary goal of the article is to present the issues of born digital sources, which have the characteristics of generic egodocuments, and the issues of their archiving. These sources contain traces related to human presence and actions in the form of text or text with images and give the researcher the opportunity to learn about the emotions, experiences, sensitivity, and personal life of their creator. The authors of the article are therefore looking for answers to the questions of whether people leave ego-documents on the Internet in the form of their traces or products, what type of sources they are, whether their archiving is possible and how it is carried out, whether archived sources are available to researchers, and then whether it is possible to use them in egodocumentary research. Ultimately, the authors decided that, due to the contributing nature of the article, two types of human creations on the Internet would be taken into account, i.e., personal home websites and blogs. Their ego-documentary nature was pointed out. Attention was also paid to the archiving processes of this part of the Web and the problems associated with them, in particular archiving methods and strategies and legal, technical, and ethical limitations. Then, issues related to access to archived resources were discussed, where two issues play a significant role: the openness of the archive and methods of searching its resources. The authors also cited selected scientific research, aiming to show the possibility of using archived Web egodocuments in research. The article uses the analysis of texts and research on the theory of egodocument and Web archiving, but above all, the comparative method, reconceptualization of the definition of egodocument, as well as the definition of digital traces defined as egodocumentary wholes — that is, born digital sources that, when archived, enable researchers of the past using text analysis (and not binary codes) to learn about the creator’s personality and life.

Issues related to information culture evoke a natural interest of Ukrainian and foreign researchers. In addition to purely technical aspects and the development of competency characteristics, the problem of the development of students’ information culture and their personal characteristics is acquiring particular relevance. Virtual space has significant advantages in terms of the speed of information distribution, communication opportunities, and the exchange of scientific data. At the same time, threats are evident, in particular the growth of cybercrime, aggression, dependence, and manipulation. This is particularly obvious in the youth environment. The creation of national elite in modern universities, the openness of the information space, globalization, and the growth of competition in the labor market require operational information for specification of educational policy and adoption of optimal managerial decisions. It becomes increasingly clear that there is a contradiction between the low level of information and analytical skills of students and the high level of requirements for the organization of work with computer technology; sufficient level of theoretical and practical knowledge and low level of skills necessary for work with information technologies; sufficient level of professional training and low level of readiness to use computer technologies in educational activities. Information culture is considered as one of the facets of the universal culture associated with the social nature of man and is the product of its various creative abilities. The need for original specialized courses, which allow quick response to new challenges and improve the quality of professional training of students is constantly increasing. The article outlines the preconditions for improving students' information culture in view of the experience of foreign countries and Ukraine.

Blogging is becoming increasingly popular as a global phenomenon. Individual blog traffic and blogosphere structure are of interest to academia and practice. Although it is difficult to get a snapshot of the blogosphere with enough blogs over a long enough period to capture the real situation, chaos theory finds underlying order in this apparent random and complex phenomenon. This study provides an overall view of blogging from micro (individual blog traffic dynamics) and macro (blogosphere structure) levels through a chaos theory lens. Key concepts of chaos theory are used to construct an interpretive framework to illustrate blog system behavior dynamics. Blog systems tend to be nonlinear, dynamic, and deterministic, as well as sensitive to initial conditions. The study also demonstrates the feasibility of applying chaos theory thinking to areas such as knowledge management and the recent global financial crisis. Implications for practice and research opportunities are presented.

The authors describe issues related to the phenomenon of blogs as a channel of communi-cation in relation to Polish blogosphere. The main hypothesis is assuming the pursuit of the Polishblogosphere for proper technological development. The methodology of the research is based onquantitative analysis of the occurrence of Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics, within the studied 50 randomlyselected Polish blogs. The methodology is based on an analysis of the case aimed at confirming ordenying the occurrence of the heuristics. As a result of the conducted research, the occurrence levelof heuristics in the studied group was confirmed.

Purpose – The paper addresses the problem of what drives the formation of latent discussion communities, if any, in the blogosphere: topical composition of posts or their authorship? The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge about structure of co-commenting. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a dataset of 17,386 full text posts written by top 2,000 LiveJournal bloggers and over 520,000 comments that result in about 4.5 million edges in the network of co-commenting, where posts are vertices. The Louvain algorithm is used to detect communities of co-commenting. Cosine similarity and topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation are applied to study topical coherence within these communities. Findings – Bloggers unite into moderately manifest communities by commenting roughly the same sets of posts. The graph of co-commenting is sparse and connected by a minority of active non-top commenters. Communities are centered mainly around blog authors as opinion leaders and, to a lesser extent, around a shared topic or topics. Research limitations/implications – The research has to be replicated on other datasets with more thorough hand coding to ensure the reliability of results and to reveal average proportions of topic-centered communities. Practical implications – Knowledge about factors around which co-commenting communities emerge, in particular clustered opinion leaders that often attract such communities, can be used by policy makers in marketing and/or political campaigning when individual leadership is not enough or not applicable. Originality/value – The research contributes to the social studies of online communities. It is the first study of communities based on co-commenting that combines examination of the content of commented posts and their topics.

The social web provides an easy and quick medium for public communication and online social interactions. In the web log, short as a blog, the bloggers share their views in the form of creating and commenting on blog posts. The bloggers who influence other users in a blogging community are known as the influential bloggers. Identification of such influential bloggers has vast applications in advertising, online marketing and e-commerce. This paper investigates the problem of identifying influential bloggers and presents a model which consists of two modules: Activity and Recognition. The activity module takes into account a blogger’s activity and recognition module measures a blogger’s influence in his/her social community. The integration of activity and recognition modules identifies the active as well as influential bloggers. The proposed model, MIBSA (Model to find Influential Bloggers using Sentiment Analysis), takes into account the existing and novel features of sentiment expressed in content generated by a blogger. The model is evaluated against the existing standard models using the real world blogging data. The results confirm that sentiment expressed in blog content plays an important role in measuring a blogger’s influence and should be considered as a feature for finding the top influential bloggers in the blogosphere.

Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes.

Blogging has become a popular and convenient way to communicate, publish information, share preferences, voice opinions, provide suggestions, report news, and form virtual communities in the Blogosphere. The blogosphere obeys a power law distribution with very few blogs being extremely influential and a huge number of blogs being largely unknown. Regardless of a (multi-author) blog being influential or not, there are influential bloggers. However, the sheer number of such blogs makes it extremely challenging to study each one of them. One way to analyze these blogs is to find influential bloggers and consider them as the community representatives. Influential bloggers can impact fellow bloggers in various ways. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying influential bloggers. We define influential bloggers, investigate their characteristics, discuss the challenges with identification, develop a model to quantify their influence, and pave the way for further research leading to more sophisticated models that enable categorization of various types of influential bloggers. To highlight these issues, we conduct experiments using data from blogs, evaluate multiple facets of the problem, and present a unique and objective evaluation strategy given the subjectivity in defining the influence, in addition to various other analytical capabilities. We conclude with interesting findings and future work.