A comparative analysis of Decide Madrid and vTaiwan, two Digital Platforms for Political Participation

This thesis is a comparative examination of the impacts of two so-called ‘Digital Platforms for Political Participation’ (DPPPs) — Decide Madrid and vTaiwan — on urban policymaking and citizen empowerment. DPPPs are a novel subset of digital platforms which are focused on facilitating online political participation and are designed and implemented by governmental institutions: the two cases under study here are designed by Madrid City Council and the Taiwanese government respectively. This thesis utilises what I term a situated lens, which fuses the idea of relational comparative urbanism, Deleuzian assemblage thinking and theories of empowerment. This situated lens allows me to evaluate, compare and identify the similarities in the forms of digital political participation provided by the two DPPPs under study. It does this by breaking each DPPP down into three sets of assemblages: (1) the design process; (2) the dynamic User Interface (UI); and (3) the process of algorithmic decision-making. The term ‘situated’ is coined to highlight the dynamic and mutating nature of digital political participation. Via this situated lens, I stress that digital empowerment is highly changeable, constrained and opened up by rules set at design stage, the dynamic UI, contingencies introduced by algorithmic interactions with users, and the changing human/institutional contexts in which these processes are embedded. This thesis demonstrates that my comparative study of the two DPPPs can enrich existing studies in digital urbanism and digital participation. Firstly, drawing from theories of empowerment, the situated lens allows me to indicate the level of empowerment a DPPP provides should not be seen just as the provision of a fixed static set of participatory capacities. Rather, a DPPP should be seen as a fluid space in which empowerment is present to a greater or lesser extent, affected by a fast-moving environment in which a user can be disabled or enabled in making informed and collective decisions due to various contingencies (such as the dynamic UI and the processes of user data interacting with algorithms to produce decisions). The wider institutional context also drives this fluidity: the citizen/user’s ability to impact on policymaking through reaching collective decisions through DPPPs is constrained or promoted by subsequent processes of governmental allocation of political legitimacy and resources. Secondly, the situated lens offers a new view in digital urbanism, by deploying an innovative hybrid method to produce ‘flashbacks’ on specific processes of digital political participation. In doing so it reveals and question the ways in which political decisions on legitimating urban issues are mutably (re)configured by algorithmic interactions with users and by subsequent human interpretation in institutional policymaking processes. This serves to question what constitutes fairer and more empowered political decisions by pointing out exclusions which emerge during the decision-making processes of DPPPs

Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022. After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown

The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology

After being dominant during about a century since its invention by Baudouin de Courtenay at the end of the nineteenth century, morpheme is more and more replaced by lexeme in contemporary descriptive and theoretical morphology. The notion of a lexeme is usually associated with the work of P. H. Matthews (1972, 1974), who characterizes it as a lexical entity abstracting over individual inflected words. Over the last three decades, the lexeme has become a cornerstone of much work in both inflectional morphology and word formation (or, as it is increasingly been called, lexeme formation). The papers in the present volume take stock of the descriptive and theoretical usefulness of the lexeme, but also adress many of the challenges met by classical lexeme-based theories of morphology

The Arabic (Re)dubbing of Wordplay in Disney Animated Films

Although audiovisual translation (AVT) has received considerable attention in recent years, evidence suggests that there is a paucity of empirical research carried out on the dubbing of wordplay in the Arabophone countries. This piece of research sets to identify, describe and assess the most common translation techniques adopted by translators when dubbing English-language animated films into Arabic. The focus is on the special case of dubbing Disney animated films into Egyptian Arabic (EA) and their subsequent redubbing into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), during the 1975-2015 period. The ultimate goal is to ascertain the similarities as well as the differences that set the two versions apart, particularly when it comes to the transfer of wordplay. To reach this objective, the methodological approach adopted for this study is a corpus of instances of wordplay that combines a quantitative phase, which has the advantage of identifying correlations between the types of wordplay and particular translation techniques and results and is then followed by a qualitative analysis that further probes the results and determines the different factors that contribute to the way wordplay is translated. The analysis reveals that, in their attempt to render this type of punning humour, in both Arabic dubbed versions, Arabic translators resort to a variety of translation techniques, namely, loan, direct translation, explication, paraphrase, substitution and omission. The examination of the data shows that achieving a humorous effect in the target dialogue is the top priority and driving factor influencing most of the strategies activated in the process of dubbing wordplay into EA. Dissimilarly, there is a noticeable lower amount of puns crossing over from the original films to the MSA dubbed versions, highlighting the fact that the approach generally taken by the dubbing teams seems to give priority to the denotative, informative dimension rather than the socio-pragmatic one. By shedding light on the intricacies of dubbing, it is hoped that this study would contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the translation of wordplay in the Arabophone countries and, more specifically, in the field of dubbing children’s programmes

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2016

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2016 initiates a new series of collective volumes on formal Slavic linguistics. It presents a selection of high quality papers authored by young and senior linguists from around the world and contains both empirically oriented work, underpinned by up-to-date experimental methods, as well as more theoretically grounded contributions. The volume covers all major linguistic areas, including morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and their mutual interfaces. The particular topics discussed include argument structure, word order, case, agreement, tense, aspect, clausal left periphery, or segmental phonology. The topical breadth and analytical depth of the contributions reflect the vitality of the field of formal Slavic linguistics and prove its relevance to the global linguistic endeavour. Early versions of the papers included in this volume were presented at the conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12 or at the satellite Works