General Editor's Acknowledgments

A project like this is not the result of any individual's effort. It is the collective output of a team of people working together in different capacities to conclude an idea, something that originally seemed like a distant fantasy and is now a real, material set of volumes, with dozens of authors of original work apiece and with the editorial thrust of a major publishing house. Yet if there has to be a tale of origin, then this encyclopedia began over a decade ago, when I met Jayne Fargnoli at a lunch in Timpone's, a little “Northern Italian” restaurant in Urbana, Illinois. At that point she convinced me to edit A Companion to Media Studies, which eventually came out in 2003. I thank all involved with that edited collection – authors, research assistants, host institutions during my first sabbatical, and my home departments – because it was, and remains, a widely used source of reference, teaching, and research. Just a couple of months ago I had the pleasure of meeting a fellow scholar in Bogota, Colombia, who brought that volume along, for me to autograph and for him to share with me how useful it continues to be in his teaching and research.

I begin with that volume and with Jayne because, as a result of the success of that volume – if success can be measured by the number of copies that are sold and by the number of colleagues who have told me they use the book – we began to talk about expanding it into a larger project. Jayne floated the idea of expanding each of the sections in the Companion into a stand-alone book, each the size of the entire original volume. This meant having six separate volumes – history, production, content and representation, audience and interpretation, effects and cognition, and futures. Later we decided that adding an entire volume on methods was necessary, and that is the volume you are reading right now.

Deciding who was going to edit each of those volumes was as totally pleasurable a process as an intellectually focused academic ever hopes to have. In sum, I had to ask myself who would best compose each of these volumes. I have had the fortune, in my career as a media studies scholar, to be schooled by and to work and collaborate with fabulous colleagues. They are my role models in that I strive to some day become the caliber of scholar that they already are. Thus I thank all the editors to the volumes for taking time away from each of their own very busy schedules of teaching, single-authored publications, journal editorships, and administrative duties to contribute to this major encyclopedia. For, in case any of you do not know this, editing these (or any volume) is a labor of love for the field. It takes a major scholar time to gather and shepherd the precise collection that is delivered to every reader as a fait accompli. Like all cultural products, the labor and negotiation that go behind the scenes of an edited collection are erased with the presentation of the finished volume. Most of us will never know how assiduously and ethically each of the editors gathered their contributors; shaped the tone of their volume; and begged, cajoled, and begged again, so that chapters would come in time, or at all.

I thank the following editors, all of them my esteemed colleagues and dear friends, for agreeing to work with me on this encyclopedia. A great big hug, shout out, and massive and effusive amounts of gratitude go to John Nerone, Vicki Mayer, Sharon Mazzarella, Radhika Parameswaran, Erica Scharrer, Kelly Gates, and Fabienne Darling-Wolf. John Nerone was my dissertation adviser, if you ever look up these things online. I arrived a green little student at Illinois at the same time he arrived as an assistant professor. Now, as this project wraps up, he has retired! I am not sure we are surviving his departure from ICR. He is so sorely missed and truly irreplaceable. He was, along with Cliff ord Christians, the moral compass to an entire institution, at a time when morality takes a back seat to the bottom line. Sharon Mazzarella and I were in the same ICR student cohort, partners in fear in that first year when we both thought we would never comprehend the field. I met both Vicki Mayer and Radhika Parameswaran when they were graduate students: Vicki at UCSD and Radhika at Iowa. Life is fortuitous and meeting these two great scholars since the time they were developing their first major research project is one of the many lucky breaks I have had in the field. I met Kelly Gates when she was an undergraduate advertising student at Penn State. “You'll be back,” I told her when she got her BA and headed out to the professional world. I had no idea she would come back to ICR – yet another of those amazing strokes of fortune! I am so thankful she agreed to edit her volume as she was coming up for tenure. Needless to say, of course, she has been promoted and tenured. Erica Scharrer was introduced to me by Sharon Mazzarella. What an introduction this was! Erica turned her volume in ahead of time. I am not sure I know anyone else who works like she does, and I am surrounded by workaholics. Finally, Fabienne Darling-Wolf joins this stellar group of editors. I met Fabienne in conferences and, through a process of triangulation, other volume editors and I agreed that she was the ideal editor for a volume on methods. Together, this dream team of scholars worked to produce this excellent encyclopedia. I thank them again and also beg their forgiveness for all the needling I subjected them to as we sought to get this encyclopedia out in the time we had promised.

At home, in my little piece of academic heaven that is called the Institute of Communications Research (ICR), I have drawn extensively on the work and fellowship of my fellow faculty. None of us in the ICR faculty could really do what we do without the expert assistance of a brilliant cadre of doctoral students, who are destined to become members of the next generation of the professoriate. I have had the distinct fortune and pleasure to work with three of them as assistants contributing to this project: Stephen Hocker, Christina Ceisel, and Michelle Rivera. Their organization and insight form part of the unnamed labor that makes this a superior scholarly effort. The creation of the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and administrative changes in our college have had the indirect, and unwelcome, result of a drastically shrunk faculty since the first six volumes were published. Remaining with me from that core are James Hay, Isabel Molina, and C. L. Cole, who challenge me to catch up with their brilliance and to nurture the very best PhD students in our field. An incredibly promising group of junior faculty: Anita Say Chan, Amanda Ciafone, Safiya Noble, and Julie Turnock have already began to make their mark on the field. Either as emeriti or from afar, Clifford Christians, Norman Denzin, John Nerone, Paula Treichler, Kent Ono, Sara Projansky, Lisa Nakamura, and Christian Sandvig continue to meet their commitment to the ICR students who still work with them. I am indeed fortunate to be in their midst or the recipient of their responsible stewardship of students and the doctoral program. Deftly handling all the details big and small of two academic programs, our secretary Denise Davis is indispensable.

The Wiley team, in addition to the incredible Jayne Fargnoli, includes Tiff any Mok, who gathered and organized the upload of the hundreds of chapters. I am positive there is a bigger team of personnel at Wiley who deserve immense gratitude.

In my little home, I have to thank my little family. My youngest daughter Ailín del Carmen wants me to dedicate this entire project to her because she claims she is the bestest sibling. I do not pick favorites so Rhiannon is also very much part of the female circle, made up by my own daughters, that nurtures me. I remember Tobin daily and look forward to the time he will come home again. I now have the pleasure of having baby Lucas Angel be part of our family. Finally, I cannot forget condensed milk and Carmenere wine, and the lovely Bajan man who watched aghast as I consumed the former and joined me in enjoying the latter, Cameron.

Angharad N. Valdivia