#strokesurvivor on Instagram: Conjunctive experiences of adapting to disability

This study investigates practices of sharing the experience of stroke on Instagram through use of the hashtag #strokesurvivor. The hashtag brings together people from different cultural backgrounds and professions and those who experience different kinds of healthcare and varying degrees of physical or cognitive impairment. Through a digital ethnography of #strokesurvivor, the conjunctive experiences and communicative practices of the community are reconstructed. Instagram enables specific forms of sociality and sharing, like long-term visual storytelling and influencer dynamics. Adapting to a transformed body and identity is perceived and practiced as a conjunctive experience and a struggle. A strong orientation towards a “normal life” is a recurring theme. Mourning and perseverance are put forward as two modes of coping with and adapting to a transforming body and self

Assessing vulnerability to psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of microblogging content

In recent years we have witnessed a growing interest in the analysis of social media data under different perspectives, since these online platforms have become the preferred tool for generating and sharing content across different users organized into virtual communities, based on their common interests, needs, and perceptions. In the current study, by considering a collection of social textual contents related to COVID-19 gathered on the Twitter microblogging platform in the period between August and December 2020, we aimed at evaluating the possible effects of some critical factors related to the pandemic on the mental well-being of the population. In particular, we aimed at investigating potential lexicon identifiers of vulnerability to psychological distress in digital social interactions with respect to distinct COVID-related scenarios, which could be “at risk” from a psychological discomfort point of view. Such scenarios have been associated with peculiar topics discussed on Twitter. For this purpose, two approaches based on a “top-down” and a “bottom-up” strategy were adopted. In the top-down approach, three potential scenarios were initially selected by medical experts, and associated with topics extracted from the Twitter dataset in a hybrid unsupervised-supervised way. On the other hand, in the bottom-up approach, three topics were extracted in a totally unsupervised way capitalizing on a Twitter dataset filtered according to the presence of keywords related to vulnerability to psychological distress, and associated with at-risk scenarios. The identification of such scenarios with both approaches made it possible to capture and analyze the potential psychological vulnerability in critical situations

An investigation into the use of a microblogging technology in school trips to museums

School trips to museums are an important means of introducing young people to museum collections and may have a long-term learning impact (Falk & Dierking, 1997). At the same time, activities in museum spaces can be challenging for students who are engaged in complex learning processes. The thesis considers the use of a microblogging technology (Twitter) by a Year 9 History class (13-14s) from a secondary school in Milton Keynes during a trip to the Museum of London (http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/). It draws on the view that mobile technologies can create a continuity of the learning experience despite changes in the physical and social context (Sharples, 2015) and contributes to the body of research on how such technologies can best support young people’s visit experience and extend it beyond the museum. The thesis is informed by sociocultural perspectives of learning with a focus on mediating artefacts in the development of understanding in situated learning activities. It draws on the Contextual Model of Learning which views the visit experience in relation to meaning making and situates this in visitors' personal, physical and sociocultural contexts (Falk & Dierking, 2000). This research employs a case-study methodology and adopts a research design that involved a pre- and post-visit approach. Evidence of students’ activity in the museum and the classroom while using Twitter is considered. The findings are based on video analysis (Ash, 2007), analysis of questionnaires, interviews and personal meaning maps (Falk et al., 1998). Evidence reveals that the use of microblogging reconfigures the museum space by creating an ‘interconnected space’. Evidence also shows that the content generated by the students was ‘designed’ for an audience and offered opportunities for new ways of engagement with objects within the context of a semi-formal visit. The analysis illustrates that prominent practices in the museum were ‘live’ communication, documentation and sharing, while in the classroom the microblogging supported the students to connect to meanings made in the museum by providing prompts for reflection and recollection. Learners were able to weave everyday informal practices related to the use of Web 2.0 technologies with formal museum visiting practices. However, the analysis also points out that learners faced some threats in the continuity of their experience and the development of their trajectories of meaning making as reflected in the three types of visit experience: the ‘focused’, the ‘hybrid’ and the ‘floating’. Drawing on this evidence, the thesis makes a distinction between ‘microblogging as a tool’, ‘microblogging as a space to create, review and share content’ and ‘microblogging as a practice’. The thesis also points to three intertwined areas of consideration for designing learning activities across contexts. These areas include: the technological properties of the tools in use, the types of activity the tools support and specific practices associated with the tools and the contexts. This work essentially contributes to the contemporary discourse around studying ‘seamless learning spaces’ (Chan et al., 2006) and has implications in designing approaches for technology-enhanced learning in museums

When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: a Systematic Literature Review

Epidemics and outbreaks present arduous challenges requiring both individual and communal efforts. Social media offer significant amounts of data that can be leveraged for bio-surveillance. They also provide a platform to quickly and efficiently reach a sizeable percentage of the population, hence their potential impact on various aspects of epidemic mitigation. The general objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a methodical overview of the integration of social media in different epidemic-related contexts. Three research questions were conceptualized for this review, resulting in over 10000 publications collected in the first PRISMA stage, 129 of which were selected for inclusion. A thematic method-oriented synthesis was undertaken and identified 5 main themes related to social media enabled epidemic surveillance, misinformation management, and mental health. Findings uncover a need for more robust applications of the lessons learned from epidemic post-mortem documentation. A vast gap exists between retrospective analysis of epidemic management and result integration in prospective studies. Harnessing the full potential of social media in epidemic related tasks requires streamlining the results of epidemic forecasting, public opinion understanding and misinformation propagation, all while keeping abreast of potential mental health implications. Pro-active prevention has thus become vital for epidemic curtailment and containment

(Un)filial daughters and digital feminisms in China: The stories of awakening, resisting, and finding comrades

This thesis sets out to understand Chinese feminist struggles in a so-called digital era by looking at the experiences and practices of an emerging generation of digital feminists that came into light in Chinese feminist movements. Conceptually and methodologically, this research took inspirations from an interdisciplinary body of literature including feminist theory, sociology, media and cultural studies, girlhood studies and gender studies. Inspired by online ethnography and feminist participatory methodologies, it combined an online tracking of feminist events on Weibo with semi-structured interviews and social media diary study with 21 Chinese girls and young women. This thesis explores the embedded and embodied experiences of these participants as they discover and learn about feminism, resist and challenge gender and sexual inequalities, and try to build connections with like-minded people within and beyond the digital sphere. By charting feminist responses and resistance to familial discourses and norms around girlhood and young femininity, I show the emergence of feminist subjectivities of (un)filial daughters that arises from but also comes to reconfigure gender and sexuality within a neoliberal and postsocialist context of patriarchal familism in China. I build upon the concepts of networked counterpublics and networked affects to explore how these (un)filial daughters are networked to carve out spaces for feminist discussion in social media. Employing an affective-discursive analysis, I also tune into how networked feminist resistance and alliances are formed not merely on the basis of how women and feminists talk about these issues but also how they feel

Spatial and Temporal Sentiment Analysis of Twitter data

The public have used Twitter world wide for expressing opinions. This study focuses on spatio-temporal variation of georeferenced Tweets’ sentiment polarity, with a view to understanding how opinions evolve on Twitter over space and time and across communities of users. More specifically, the question this study tested is whether sentiment polarity on Twitter exhibits specific time-location patterns. The aim of the study is to investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of georeferenced Twitter sentiment polarity within the area of 1 km buffer around the Curtin Bentley campus boundary in Perth, Western Australia. Tweets posted in campus were assigned into six spatial zones and four time zones. A sentiment analysis was then conducted for each zone using the sentiment analyser tool in the Starlight Visual Information System software. The Feature Manipulation Engine was employed to convert non-spatial files into spatial and temporal feature class. The spatial and temporal distribution of Twitter sentiment polarity patterns over space and time was mapped using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Some interesting results were identified. For example, the highest percentage of positive Tweets occurred in the social science area, while science and engineering and dormitory areas had the highest percentage of negative postings. The number of negative Tweets increases in the library and science and engineering areas as the end of the semester approaches, reaching a peak around an exam period, while the percentage of negative Tweets drops at the end of the semester in the entertainment and sport and dormitory area. This study will provide some insights into understanding students and staff ’s sentiment variation on Twitter, which could be useful for university teaching and learning management

European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information

This book focuses on the study of the remarkable new source of geographic information that has become available in the form of user-generated content accessible over the Internet through mobile and Web applications. The exploitation, integration and application of these sources, termed volunteered geographic information (VGI) or crowdsourced geographic information (CGI), offer scientists an unprecedented opportunity to conduct research on a variety of topics at multiple scales and for diversified objectives. The Handbook is organized in five parts, addressing the fundamental questions: What motivates citizens to provide such information in the public domain, and what factors govern/predict its validity?What methods might be used to validate such information? Can VGI be framed within the larger domain of sensor networks, in which inert and static sensors are replaced or combined by intelligent and mobile humans equipped with sensing devices? What limitations are imposed on VGI by differential access to broadband Internet, mobile phones, and other communication technologies, and by concerns over privacy? How do VGI and crowdsourcing enable innovation applications to benefit human society? Chapters examine how crowdsourcing techniques and methods, and the VGI phenomenon, have motivated a multidisciplinary research community to identify both fields of applications and quality criteria depending on the use of VGI. Besides harvesting tools and storage of these data, research has paid remarkable attention to these information resources, in an age when information and participation is one of the most important drivers of development. The collection opens questions and points to new research directions in addition to the findings that each of the authors demonstrates. Despite rapid progress in VGI research, this Handbook also shows that there are technical, social, political and methodological challenges that require further studies and research

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs