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Background: Through a close reading of the four issues of The Bowater Papers, this article aims to understand the rise of a paper modernity and to reinsert it--as material and infrastructure-- into media studies. Analysis: Producing wood paper is a strain on the landscape and the environment. The Bowater Papers showcases the histories and material possibilities of paper media products. A paper-dependent modernity can be understood as an infrastructural assemblage of harvesting, production, circulation, and consumption. Conclusion and implications: Paper calls for a natural history and geography of media. Thinking about the mediations from tree to paper through the encompassing notion of "xylomedia" is a way of articulating the intersection of the material, environmental, and infrastructural in media studies. Today is still a paper world, one that is also the age of lignin, package, and Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Internet scholars are uncovering and connecting histories of early internets across the globe, but the Canadian context remains underexplored. Drawing on unpublished and declassified documents of the Canadian Armed Forces at Ottawa's Directorate of History and Heritage, this article investigates the history and significance of SAMSON (Strategic Automatic Message Switching Operational Network), an early Canadian internet that experienced a series of setbacks beginning almost immediately at its advent in 1965, until the project was completed in 1984. Analysis: Canada's internet infrastructural techno-politics are examined through Brian Larkin's framework of examining technical ways through which the political is constituted. Conclusions and implications: This paper shows how this early internet was a techno-political system that shaped and was shaped by Canada's pursuit of its national identity amid fears of U.S. influence and rising demands for self-determination within the Québécois and Indigenous nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses papers published within the issue, including one on the facets of cybernetics that have been neglected, another on intellectual movements overshadowed by the visibility of cybernetics and lastly on the marginal nature of loans in agriculture.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the guest editor discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on the Yi Jing as a philosophical examination of the interological origin and inclination of the Chinese way of thinking, one on the use of interology in exploring the affinities and resonances between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the Zen sensibility and another on the constitutive effect of jazz.

In this article, I explore how Montréal-area community newspaper The Suburban represented the 2012 Printemps érable and, more specifically, the educational issues at the core of this uprising, which was sparked by a historic student strike. A qualitative framing analysis was conducted on the visual and textual content of the newspaper's front pages from February 13 to August 1, 2012. Results suggest that the paper framed the Printemps érable as an illegitimate series of individual protest actions worthy of derision. Students were represented as lazy, self-centred, directionless consumers, and authoritarian government action as desirable in forcing them to submit to the realities of a neoliberal economy and corresponding education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Canadian reporting on suicide and the ways it changed over 150 years. Archival research on the reporting practices of two long-standing newspapers presented here shows that suicide was not always taboo in the media. In fact, the silencing and tip-toeing around reporting on suicide only began in the mid-twentieth century. Early newspaper accounts frequently included reports on suicides, both local and far removed, including details on the exact manner of death. As public perceptions of suicide, and the laws surrounding it, gradually shifted from considering the act a crime to an aspect of psychiatric malady, reporting on suicide changed. Once suicide became an untouchable subject in newsrooms the stigma became entrenched, making it hard to address in any meaningful way for decades [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early efforts of CBC Radio to promote Canadian literature through programs such as Canadian Short Stories and its successor, Anthology, gave rise to various issues related to media integrity, including the selection of content, the use of language, and the format of presentation. Even before Robert Weaver retired in 1985, the approach he developed in the 1950s gave way to a different philosophy of literary arts programming, one focusing less on the needs of CanLit and more on the contingencies of radio. As in other cases of textual migration across media, the ontological requirements of the destination medium eventually took precedence. The process by which this shift occurred is examined using the relatively unexplored papers of Weaver and Howard Engel and other documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade, urban planners and city councilors across the country have taken the "cultural turn." In Montréal, this has led authorities to focus on citywide culture as a tool for enhancing creativity and for developing the economy of their municipality through the concept of "cultural poles." But in the past few years, the attention of authorities has shifted from "poles" to "cultural quarters" (or "neighborhoods"), particularly through a new proposed action plan for cultural quarters. Basing itself on municipal documents, comments in the media, papers and reports, this article retraces the transformation from one concept to another as well as the interpretations and decisions that resulted from it. Echoing a larger process of municipalization of culture, the growing interest of Montréal's authorities in policies that use quarters as an explicit object demonstrates a renewed and changing spatialization of cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2012, the Canadian Heritage Minister announced that the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country's largest and most popular museum, would be renamed the Canadian Museum of History. In addition to the new name, three strategies—a strategy of engagement, a strategy of authority, and a strategy of expansion—were elaborated by museum and government officials as part of the transformation. We examine these three strategies as an example of the Harper government's attempt to "brand" Canadian identity and history in its own image, arguing that the strategies were designed expressly to paper over near-unilateral changes in the museum's mandate and transformation. Ultimately, these changes have problematic implications for the democratic management of cultural production in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the media construction of a certain form of Islamic public visibility by analyzing the French regional and national press coverage of the "Burqa affair" (2009-2010) . By means of a semiotic approach, and with reference to the notions of "visibility-invisibility," "face," and "iconocrisis," the paper seeks to demonstrate how the Burqa affair raises questions about contemporary regimes of visibility and publicity (making public). Considering the media staging of Islam as a site of deployment of strategies of visibility, the article demonstrate show the niqab is (re) presented as both an ostentatious and an opaque sign, and as such, as the antithesis of a French Republican conception of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]