"Bringing these writings together for the first time, Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi provides one of the most gripping accounts of the Iraqi conflict."--Jacket.

This volume collects together Salam Pax's writings to tell the story of the war in Iraq from inside that besieged country. It provides a gripping perspective on the conflict and its aftermath.

Since the fall of Bagdad, women’s voices have been largely erased, but four months after Saddam Hussein’s statue fell, a 24 year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging. In 2003, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging about life in the city under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her passion, honesty, and wry idiomatic English made her work a vital contribution to our understanding of post-war Iraq—and won her a large following. Baghdad Burning is a quotidian chronicle of Riverbend’s life with her family between April 2003 and September of 2004. She describes rolling blackouts, intermittent water access, daily explosions, gas shortages and travel restrictions. She also expresses a strong stance against the interim government, the Bush administration, and Islamic fundamentalists like Al Sadr and his followers. Her book “offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed” (Publishers Weekly). “Riverbend is bright and opinionated, true, but like all voices of dissent worth remembering, she provides an urgent reminder that, whichever governments we struggle under, we are all the same.” —Booklist “Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.” —Kirkus

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi’s comics, and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax’s Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies. Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson’s bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nafisi’s book, and Pax’s blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West.

An overview of the weblog and blogging phenomenon - what are weblogs?, history, who creates weblogs?; types of weblogs; common features; moblogging; RSS and its use in weblogs. -- Weblogs as sources of current information - how useful are weblogs as sources of information?; evaluating weblogs as sources of information; some examples of quality weblogs (in social sciences, books and reading, news and current events, technology). -- Finding weblogs - it's not easy!; directories of weblogs; search engines for weblogs; other strategies. -- Weblogs in the field of library and information science - overview; weblogs dealing with library and information science as a topic; weblogs covering specialist topics in library and information science; weblogs created by professional associations and organisations; weblogs created by library and information schools; weblogs created by individual librarians (the 'blogging librarian'); finding weblogs in this field. -- Weblogs created by libraries: the state of the art - library weblogs; investigating library weblogs; what kinds of libraries are creating weblogs?; purposes for which libraries are creating weblogs; content of the weblogs created by libraries; how libraries are creating and maintaining their weblogs; some examples of library weblogs; evaluation of the library weblogs. -- Creating a weblog: the options - overview of the options; free weblog software options; commercial weblog software options; 'roll your own'; weblog hosting - free services; weblog hosting - commercial services; weblog hosting - the library's own web server; add-ons to spice up a weblog; moblogging; RSS feeds. -- Managing the library weblog - an overview of management issues associated with a library weblog; planning for the implementation of a library weblog; making the technical decisions; identifying the potential users of the library weblog; making decisions about and managing content and other features; making decisions about and managing interactivity; allocating staff time for weblog development and maintenance; budgeting for the weblog; promoting the weblog; evaluating the weblog project. -- Sources of information about weblogs - printed sources; web-based sources; weblogs about weblogs and blogging .

Is there more to qualitative data collection than face-to-face interviews? Answering with a resounding 'yes', this book introduces the reader to a wide array of exciting and novel techniques for collecting qualitative data in the social and health sciences. Collecting Qualitative Data offers a practical and accessible guide to textual, media and virtual methods currently under-utilised within qualitative research. Contributors from a range of disciplines share their experiences of implementing a particular technique, provide step-by-step guidance to using that approach, and highlight both the potential and pitfalls. From gathering blog data to the story completion method to conducting focus groups online, the methods and data types featured in this book are ideally suited to student projects and other time- and resource-limited research. In presenting several innovative ways that data can be collected, new modes of scholarship and new research orientations are opened up to student researchers and established scholars alike.

Online Communication provides an introduction to both the technologies of the Internet Age and their social implications. This innovative and timely textbook brings together current work in communication, political science, philosophy, popular culture, history, economics, and the humanities to present an examination of the theoretical and critical issues in the study of computer-mediated communication. Continuing the model of the best-selling first edition, authors Andrew F. Wood and Matthew J. Smith introduce computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a subject of academic research as well as a lens through which to examine contemporary trends in society. This second edition of Online Communication covers online identity, mediated relationships, virtual communities, electronic commerce, the digital divide, spaces of resistance, and other topics related to CMC. The text also examines how the Internet has affected contemporary culture and presents the critiques being made to those changes. Special features of the text include: *Hyperlinks--presenting greater detail on topics from the chapter *Ethical Ethical Inquiry--posing questions on the nature of human communication and conduct online *Online Communication and the Law--examining the legal ramifications of CMC issues Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers interested in the field of computer-mediated communication, as well as those studying issues of technology and culture, will find Online Communication to be an insightful resource for studying the role of technology and mediated communication in today's society.