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ObjectivesThe goal of this study was to gain insights into the decision-making processes used by California public health officials during real-time crises. The decision-making processes used by California public health officials during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic were examined by a survey research team from the University of California Berkeley.MethodsThe survey was administered to local public health officials in California. Guidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had recommended school closure, and local public health officials had to decide whether to follow these recommendations. Chi-squared tests were used to make comparisons in the descriptive statistics.ResultsThe response rate from local public health departments was 79%. A total of 73% of respondents were involved in the decision-making process. Respondents stated whether they used or did not use 15 ethical, logistical, and political preselected criteria. They expressed interest in receiving checklists and additional training in decision-making.ConclusionsPublic health decision-makers do not appear to have a standard process for crisis decision-making and would benefit from having an organized decision-making model. The survey showed that ethical, logistical, and political criteria were considered but were not prioritized in any meaningful way. A new decision-making tool kit for public health decision-makers plus implementation training is warranted.

Eula Biss. Notes from No Man's Land. Graywolf Press. Rheta Grimsley Johnson. Poor Man's Provence. New South Books. Identity as a theme, however configured and expressed, has long attracted writers. [...]

This essay calls for the concerted study of editorship as a distinct mode of cultural expression. Given that the collaborative craft of editors is often invisible, the study of editorship requires attending to the practices, habits, and techniques of editing as themselves historically contingent and significant objects of inquiry. This essay analyzes a cross section of editorial practices in 1862 when a controversy during the Civil War over slavery and emancipation entangled editors from Horace Greeley and Frederick Douglass to their less conspicuous peers at L'Union (a bilingual, Black Creole weekly in New Orleans). These examples reveal the practical language of editorship expressed through serial formats. By reading editing on its own terms, in the patterns of established formats and formal innovations, it becomes possible to envision the broader study of editorship not only for nineteenth-century Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and multilingual print cultures but also in the wider firmaments of literary and cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum considers how we locate editors through brief case studies of multiethnic periodicals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A focus on editors raises new questions and prospects for making visible the often hidden craft of periodicals across a wide variety of communities, contexts, and periods. Each contributor to this forum offers a case study that challenges any easy generalization about how editors have collaborated, where editors pioneered new periodical forms, and how the craft of editorship invites or dodges our critical gaze in the archives. Together, these pieces chart challenges and opportunities for considering the cultural contributions, aesthetics, and forms of expression that transcend author-centric literary histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital collections of newspapers have drawn broader attention to the fragmented and scattered print histories of minoritized communities. Attempts to survey these histories through bibliography, however, quickly meet with a fundamental problem: the practice of bibliographic description calls for creating a static record of social affiliations. Given the overwhelming scholarly consensus that categories such as race, ethnicity, and language are socially constructed, this article introduces an experimental bibliographic method for mapping the vast landscape of historical newspapers. This method extends the machine learning affordances of a recent project called Newspaper Navigator to enumerate the newspapers in Chronicling America according to the visual similarity of their layouts. After explaining this method, the authors delve into the unsettled formats of one unruly example, a Spanish-language newspaper in Los Angeles, California, called La Crónica (1872–92). La Crónica changed its formats many times over the years as part of the paper's ambitions for political influence or commercial appeal. Experimental mapping and closer analysis demonstrate that a more iterative bibliographic approach can help us better understand the serial craft of newspapers and, by extension, the force of print in forming communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]