Initially, I supported my colleague in querying yet another publisher to see if these chapters could find a home there. Simultaneously, we are living through something that feels like the very sharp immediate moment as well as something echoic of history, prior outbreaks when mass swathes of humanity were lost. People are living through rolling lockdowns, with industries shut down, and mass population self-quarantines, with people’s lives at a standstill. The viral threat is being studied by scientists from various disciplines, and government officials and policymakers are struggling to contain the viral spread through “social distancing,” hygiene, sanitation, and other measures. Humanity is living through a global pandemic, with the ravages of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus leading to the COVID-19 disease in people in over 200 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. The social world, at this moment, is roiling. Rather, this turn of events occurred because the world itself was on fire, and the publisher was acting under duress and force majeure, in the face of deep uncertainties caused by a novel zoonotic coronavirus. This is not to say that academic publishing has not always been a little touch-and-go (although I have had a good run of luck with publishers for many years). Suddenly, the publisher exercised the escape clause in the contract after the company had to lay off a fifth of their workforce. My chapters went through the double-blind peer review process, revision, and were finalized for his collection, slated to be published in April 2020. As sometimes happens with book projects, the obsession has continued even after the initial publication, and I have wanted to test the methods to see if more meaning-making may be achieved across different topics.Ī colleague of mine working in higher education on a different continent was working on a collection about the roles of social media in interweaving transnational issues. Social World Sensing via Social Image Analysis from Social Media (2020) is an extension of earlier work that I have done in exploring social imagery through manual coding in a prior book, Techniques for Coding Imagery and Multimedia: Emerging Research and Opportunities (2017).
The Remote Woo: Exploring Faux Transnational Interpersonal Romance in Social Imagery Shalin Hai-Jew.Exploring the Transnational Allure of "Street Democracy" via Twitter based on a Contemporaneous Real-World Case Shalin Hai-Jew.In Flames, In Violence, In Reverence: Physical Protest Effigies in Global and Transnational Politics from a Social Imageset Shalin Hai-Jew.
Blowing Whistles on Transnational Social Media: From Micro-to-Mass Scales, Privately and Publicly Shalin Hai-Jew.Global Citizens against Socio-Technological Incursions on Privacy, Human Rights, and Personal and Social Freedoms: Temporary Pixels and Ephemeral Voices.Transnational Meta-Narratives and Personal Stories of Plastics Usage and Management via Social Media Shalin Hai-Jew.Emergent COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 in Social Imagery and Social Video: Initial Three Months of Viral Dispersion Shalin Hai-Jew.Introduction: A World "Together Apart" Shalin Hai-Jew.