Choice magazine has named Going Viral an Outstanding Academic Title (OAT) from over 7,000 works reviewed in 2014.
Less than 10 percent of publications achieve this rating, making the designation significant to academic librarians that rely on the magazine’s reviews to help make decisions about their collections and to researchers looking for important scholarly trends.
Books that make the OAT list are considered excellent in their presentation and scholarship, distinctive and important in their field, and valuable to undergraduate students.
“When we started the journey of writing Going Viral, we didn’t imagine that it will receive such attention and academic acknowledgement,” says co-author Karine Nahon. “It is an honor to have Going Viral considered as an outstanding academic title. Virality of information is one of the most fascinating phenomena in recent years as its speed, social interaction, reach and uncontrollable nature impact society daily. The book attempts to explore the process and its impact in an accessible manner.”
Associate Professor Nahon and Jeff Hemsley (Ph.D. ’14 and now Assistant Professor Syracuse University), combined qualitative and quantitative methods to study thousands of blogs, posts and the videos they link to, and more than a million tweets, blending theory from network science, social computation and communication to explore the origins and impact of virality for their book.
At the University of Washington Information School, Nahon studies the relationship between society and information technologies, while focusing on politics and policy of information. She is director of the Virality of Information research group and a member of the Social Media Lab (SoMe Lab). Her theoretical frameworks of Network Gatekeeping Theory and cultured technology were foundational to the research and conclusions reached in Going Viral.
Going Viral also garnered a Best Book award at the 2014 annual meeting of the Association of Information Science and Technology, which honors scholarly achievements in information science.
About Choice Magazine
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, published by the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, is the premier source for reviews of academic books and digital resources of interest to scholars and students in higher education. More than 22,000 librarians, faculty, and key decision makers rely on Choice magazine and Choice Reviews Online for collection development and scholarly research.