6,415 research outputs found

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

    Get PDF
    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    Small firms and industrial districts

    Get PDF
    Editor's notes. By Margherita Russo. Sebastiano Brusco's collection of essays Piccole imprese e distretti industriali (Tori-no, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1989) was translated in English by Tim Keats in 1990, unless three chapters that were already available in English and chapter 7 that was too long for a publication as a book chapter. Having abandoned the project of publishing a vol-ume in English, Sebastiano Brusco asked me to share a photocopy of the English transla-tion with scholars who requested it, and so several copies arrived in the hands of re-searchers in various countries: South Africa, Norway, Denmark, the United States, France and the United Kingdom. Twenty years after Sebastiano Brusco passed away, and me approaching to retirement, a working paper edition - in the DEMB Working Paper Series - will make the document freely available online. This digital document has been created, in 2012, drawing on a folder of Sebastiano Brusco's digital archive "Backup of EnglishBook" that contained Lotus MS files. These files have been converted by Patrizio Magagni in a txt format and then inserted by me in a single Word file: "Backup of EnglishBook_from files converted by Patrizio_22.01.2012 Some graphs and tables have been added as images, taken from the Italian edition. The text is all flag-formatted, whereas in the Italian edition only the main introduction, chapter introduction and afterword were flag-formatted. The text is not justified be-cause, in the conversion of the original files, a manual line break was automatically inserted at the end of each line. To differentiate those parts of the text written by Brusco specifically for the publi-cation of the 1989 collection of essays, they are reproduced here in two columns, with a smaller font. A complete list of Sebastiano Brusco's publication is available online at:https://www.economia.unimore.it/site/home/dipartimento-di-economia---sebastiano-brusco-web-page.htm

    Special Topics in Information Technology

    Get PDF
    This open access book presents thirteen outstanding doctoral dissertations in Information Technology from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Information Technology has always been highly interdisciplinary, as many aspects have to be considered in IT systems. The doctoral studies program in IT at Politecnico di Milano emphasizes this interdisciplinary nature, which is becoming more and more important in recent technological advances, in collaborative projects, and in the education of young researchers. Accordingly, the focus of advanced research is on pursuing a rigorous approach to specific research topics starting from a broad background in various areas of Information Technology, especially Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics, Systems and Control, and Telecommunications. Each year, more than 50 PhDs graduate from the program. This book gathers the outcomes of the thirteen best theses defended in 2020-21 and selected for the IT PhD Award. Each of the authors provides a chapter summarizing his/her findings, including an introduction, description of methods, main achievements and future work on the topic. Hence, the book provides a cutting-edge overview of the latest research trends in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano, presented in an easy-to-read format that will also appeal to non-specialists

    Sustainability Analysis and Environmental Decision-Making Using Simulation, Optimization, and Computational Analytics

    Get PDF
    Effective environmental decision-making is often challenging and complex, where final solutions frequently possess inherently subjective political and socio-economic components. Consequently, complex sustainability applications in the “real world” frequently employ computational decision-making approaches to construct solutions to problems containing numerous quantitative dimensions and considerable sources of uncertainty. This volume includes a number of such applied computational analytics papers that either create new decision-making methods or provide innovative implementations of existing methods for addressing a wide spectrum of sustainability applications, broadly defined. The disparate contributions all emphasize novel approaches of computational analytics as applied to environmental decision-making and sustainability analysis – be this on the side of optimization, simulation, modelling, computational solution procedures, visual analytics, and/or information technologies

    Ludotopia

    Get PDF
    Where do computer games »happen«? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of »space«, »place« and »territory« featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these

    The Anthropocene Hypothesis

    Get PDF
    • 

    corecore