Subject Dictionaries & Texts
A Good Starting Point
Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks are key reference sources useful in defining your terms and concepts, understanding key words and developing synonyms, and to obtain an overview of the area you are researching.
These sources are particularly useful, not to reference in your assignments themselves, but as a way of discovering how to research a topic.
Use the Dictionaries and Thesauri terminology in conjunction with the Database Search Planner.
They should not be used as academic references, either, instead, use them as a pointer back to the original, theoretical research used to build them.
General Reference Sources
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies [e-version] by ISBN: 9781118733561Publication Date: 2014
The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies by Call Number: MTL Main 306 BARISBN: 0761973400Publication Date: 2004
The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies by Call Number: MTL Main 302.23 SAGISBN: 0761921699Publication Date: 2004
A small selection of the thousands of books/ebooks available.
The Craft of Media Criticism by Call Number: MTL Main 302.2072 KACISBN: 0415716292Publication Date: 2018With contributions from 30 leading media scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the main methodologies of critical media studies. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses emergent technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and digital humanities.
Media Today: Mass communication in a converging world (6th Ed.) [e-version] by ISBN: 1315681722Publication Date: 2016eBook
Media Today encourages a reader to consider how media content is created, distributed, and exhibited in the new world that the digital revolution has created.
Media and communications in Australia by ISBN: 9781000996845Publication Date: 2023eBook
At a time when the traditional media have been reshaped by digital technologies and audiences have fragmented, people are using mediated forms of communication to manage all aspects of their daily lives as well as for news and entertainment. The Media and Communications in Australia offers a systematic introduction to this dynamic field.
Understanding the Media (2nd Ed.) by Call Number: BUN Main 302.23 DEV / MTL Main 302.23 DEVISBN: 1412929903Publication Date: 2007Readers are invited to engage with a variety of questions about the increasingly complex media-scape in which we live our everyday lives.
Disability media studies by Publication Date: 2017This book provides a comprehensive overview for anyone interested in the study of disability and media today. Case studies include familiar contemporary examples--such as Iron Man 3, Lady Gaga, and Oscar Pistorius--as well as historical media, independent disability media, reality tv, and media technologies. The contributors consider disability representation, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about ability, the construction of disability via media technologies, and how disabled audiences respond to particular media artifacts.
The Media and Communications in Australia (3rd Ed.) by Call Number: BUN Main 302.230994 MED / MTL Main 302.230994 MEDISBN: 1742370640Publication Date: 2010
Journals for Media & Communications
- ProQuest Central (Current ECU Students & Staff) This link opens in a new window
International multidisciplinary database indexing a selection of journals in all subject disciplines. It is useful for a broad cross-disciplinary search, rather than in-depth in a subject. - SAGE Research Methods Online This link opens in a new windowSupports research at all levels by providing material to guide users through every step of the research process with 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, and instructional videos across the social sciences, including the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher.
- Taylor & Francis Online Journals This link opens in a new window
Publishes more than 2,500 journals and over 5,000 new books each year, with a books backlist in excess of 120,000 specialist titles. As well as scholarly journals and books, they also publish eBooks, text books and reference works.
Other Relevant Databases
Journal of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access online learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." The journal publishes peer-reviewed articles, review articles of scholarly books, and research material.
Culture Machine is an international open-access journal of culture and theory, founded in 1999.
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research is an academic journal for border-crossing cultural research, including cultural studies as well as other interdisciplinary and transnational currents. It serves as a forum with a wider scope than existing journals for various subfields of cultural research and is globally open to articles from all areas in this large field.
darkmatter is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal committed to producing contemporary postcolonial critique.
First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet.
A fully refereed, open-access online journal for graduate students and early-career researchers, published by the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Third Text has established its key position at the critical interface of contemporary art practice and theory with specific focus on the impact of ‘globalization’
Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived; articles about media studies; and articles about the fan community.