Specialised Languages and Multimedia. Linguistic and Cross-cultural Issues

none2noThis book collects academic works focusing on scientific and technical discourse and on the ways in which this type of discourse appears in or is shaped by multimedia products. The originality of this book is to be seen in the variety of approaches used and of the specialised languages investigated in relation to multimodal and multimedia genres. Contributions will particularly focus on new multimodal or multimedia forms of specialised discourse (in institutional, academic, technical, scientific, social or popular settings), linguistic features of specialised discourse in multimodal or multimedia genres, the popularisation of specialised knowledge in multimodal or multimedia genres, the impact of multimodality and multimediality on the construction of scientific and technical discourse, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of language, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of translation, new multimedia modes of knowledge dissemination, the translation/adaptation of scientific discourse in multimedia products. This volume contributes to the theory and practice of multimodal studies and translation, with a specific focus on specialized discourse.Rivista di Classe A - Volume specialeopenManca E., Bianchi F.Manca, E.; Bianchi, F

Sexual Labor and Human Rights

In this Article, we engage the current human rights debate that dichotomizes prostitution either as a modern form of slavery or as the exercise of the right to work. This framework effectively sets up a coercion/consent polarity. These poles raise fundamental human rights issues; both the prohibition against slavery and the right to work are matters addressed by and central to the international human rights paradigm. Yet we argue in this Article that the human rights issues raised by prostitution cannot properly be studied nor moved towards meaningful resolution in the context of the prevailing polarity. Prostitution in its current forms rightfully can be understood as having aspects both of work and of servitude

Sexual Labor and Human Rights

In this Article, we engage the current human rights debate that dichotomizes prostitution either as a modern form of slavery or as the exercise of the right to work. This framework effectively sets up a coercion/consent polarity. These poles raise fundamental human rights issues; both the prohibition against slavery and the right to work are matters addressed by and central to the international human rights paradigm. Yet we argue in this Article that the human rights issues raised by prostitution cannot properly be studied nor moved towards meaningful resolution in the context of the prevailing polarity. Prostitution in its current forms rightfully can be understood as having aspects both of work and of servitude

Can cyber technology be resilient and green?

There are some key events that have characterised the recent period one of these is the so-called digital transformation considered the natural evolution of the current society in the light of a pervasive technology like digital technology. Digital technology is intertwined with almost all the life sectors. Since the dawn of digital technology, the number of application and solutions based on such technology had a surprising rate of growth. Nowadays there is no field of human knowledge that doesn’t take advantage or is based on digital: communication, education, government, health, energy, mobility, etc.. We are increasing leaving the analog, face to face, paper-based world to enter the intangible digital mediated one. At the same time, society already faced several relevant cyber infrastructure malfunctions and attacks due to hackers, some targeting Governmental or Law Enforcement agencies and Institutions, some targeting critical infrastructures, others targeting big companies. Nowadays we are surrounded by “critical infrastructures” managed by cyber components that, in case of attacks, may create minor or mayor impacts on our daily life. The actual trend is to transfer to the digital domain as much as possible any “traditional” process and document, so in a glimpse government procedures and citizens documents and data will flow in the format of bit streams, sometimes, under the pressure of critical events this process wasn’t designed to ensure security. Consequently, the more we become digitalised, the more we are vulnerable to hackers and hybrid threats. Of course, the overall scenario includes many other aspects and “shades”. In the “analogue” world we had different pipelines and “channels” to perform, thanks to different tools and means, our activities, in the cyber world the whole activity depends on a single “pillar”: cyber technology. The pervasiveness of cyber technology, the internet and the quick deployment of emerging number crunching applications is emphasizing energy consumption, at the same time the rapid pace of innovation in the field of consumers’ devices produces significant amount of waste to be recycled or disposed. As a consequence, can cyber technology be considered green and resilient

Sentiment analysis in electronic negotiations

The thesis analyzes the applicability of methods of Sentiment Analysis and Predictive Analytics on textual communication in electronic negotiation transcripts. In particular, the thesis focuses on examining whether an automatic classifier can predict the outcome of ongoing, asynchronous electronic negotiations with sufficient accuracy. When combined with influencing factors leading to the specific classification decision, such a classification model could be incorporated into a Negotiation Support System in order to proactively intervene in ongoing negotiations it judges as likely to fail and then to give advice to the negotiators to prevent negotiation failure. To achieve this goal, an existing data set of electronic negotiations was used in a first study to create a Sentiment Lexicon, which tracks verbal indicators for utterances of positive and, respectively, negative polarity. This lexicon was subsequently combined with a simplified, feature-based representation of electronic negotiation transcripts which was then used as training data for various machine learning classifiers in order to let them determine the outcome of the negotiations based on the transcripts in a second study. Here, complete negotiation transcripts were classified as well as partial transcrips in order to assess classification quality in ongoing negotiations. The third study of the thesis sought to refine the classification model with respect to sentence-based granularity. To this end, human coders were classifying negotiation sentences regarding their subjectivity and polarity. The results of this content analysis approach were then used to train sentence-level subjectivity and polarity classifiers. The fourth and final study analyzed different aggregation methods for these sentence-level classification results in order to support the classifiers on negotiation granularity. Different aggregation and classification models were discussed, applied to the negotiation data and subsequently evaluated. The results of the studies show that it is possible to a certain degree to use a sentiment-based representation of negotiation data to automatically determine negotiation outcomes. In combination with the sentence-based classification models, negotiation classification quality increased further. However, this improvement was only found to be significant for complete negotiation transcripts. If only partial transcripts are used specifically to simulate an ongoing negotiation scenario the models tend to behave more erratic and classifcation quality depletes. This result yields the assumption that polarized utterances (positive as well as negative) only carry unequivocal information (with respect to the outcome) towards the end of the negotiation. During the negotiation, the influence of these utterances becomes more ambiguous, hence decreasing classification accuracy on models using a representation based on sentiments. Regarding the original goal of the thesis, which is to provide a basic means to support ongoing negotiations, this means that supporting mechanisms employed by a Negotiation Support System should focus on moderation techniques and resolving of potentially conflicting situations. Approaches that could be used to employ further conflict diagnosis in interaction with the negotiators are given in the final chapter of the thesis, as well as a discussion of potential recommendations and advice the system could give and lastly, approaches to visualize the classification data to the negotiators.Im Rahmen der Arbeit wurde die Anwendbarkeit von Methoden der Sentiment Analysis und Predictive Analytics auf textuelle Kommunikation in elektronischen Verhandlungen untersucht. Insbesondere sollte ermittelt werden, ob ein automatisiertes Klassifikationsverfahren in laufenden, asynchron geführten elektronischen Verhandlungen mit hinreichender Genauigkeit den Verhandlungsausgang vorhersagen kann. Eine solche Klassifikation, kombiniert mit den Einflussfaktoren, die zu der entsprechenden Klassifikation geführt haben, könnte dann im Rahmen eines Verhandlungsunterstützungssystems genutzt werden, um proaktiv in die Verhandlung einzugreifen um ggf. einen erfolglosen Ausgang der Verhandlung zu verhindern. Basierend auf einem existierenden Datensatz elektronischer Verhandlungen wurde hierzu in einer ersten Studie ein sogenanntes Sentiment-Lexikon erstellt, welches Indikatoren für positive bzw. negative Äußerungen sammelt. Dieses Lexikon sowie eine vereinfachte, Feature-basierte Repräsentation der Verhandlungsdaten diente in einer zweiten Studie als Grundlage, um maschinelle Lernverfahren zu trainieren, die das Resultat der Verhandlung basierend auf den textuellen Daten ermitteln sollten. Die Verfahren wurden sowohl auf vollständigen als auch auf partiellen Verhandlungstranskripten angewendet, um die Klassifikationsqualität in laufenden Verhandlungen bestimmen zu können. Im Rahmen einer dritten Studie wurde eine Verfeinerung des Lernverfahrens auf der Granularität einzelner Sätze durchgeführt. Hierzu wurden Sätze aus Verhandlungen von menschlichen Codern hinsichtlich Subjektivität vs. Objektivität und Polarität (positiv vs. negativ) bewertet. Die Resultate dieser Inhaltsanalyse dienten als Input für maschinelle Lernverfahren, die automatisiert Sätze bezüglich der beiden genannten Dimensionen klassifizieren. In einer finalen Integrationsstudie wurden die Ergebnisse der Klassifikationsverfahren auf Satz-Ebene aggregiert und verwendet um die Klassifikation auf Verhandlungsebene zu unterstützen. Hierbei wurden verschiedene Alternativen zur Aggregation durchgeführt und bewertet. Die Resultate der einzelnen Studien zeigen, dass es mit Abstrichen möglich ist, mit einer Sentiment-basierten Repräsentation von Verhandlungsdaten das Ergebnis einer Verhandlung vorherzusagen. Insbesondere wenn die Klassifikationsmodelle mit feingranularen Informationen angereichert werden, steigt die Qualität der Vorhersage für einzelne Modelle weiter signifikant an. Dies trifft jedoch nur auf Transkripte vollständiger Verhandlungen zu werden nur partielle Transkripte verwendet im Sinne einer möglichst frühzeitigen Vorhersage des Resultats verhalten sich die Modelle erratischer und die Genauigkeit degeneriert. Die mit diesem Resultat verbundene Annahme ist, dass polarisierte Äußerungen (positiv wie negativ) in erster Linie gegen Ende der Verhandlung eindeutige Informationen liefern insbesondere Sentiments in der Mitte der Transkripte scheinen der Klassifikationsqualität eher abträglich. Für konkrete proaktive Unterstützungsmaßnahmen, die ein Verhandlungsunterstützungssystem zu diesem Zeitpunkt ergreifen kann bedeutet dies in erster Linie, dass diese Maßnahmen im Falle dass die Verhandlung zu scheitern droht auf eine Moderation und Auflösung eventueller Konfliktsituationen abzielen sollten. Hierzu werden im Rahmen des Ausblicks in der Thesis ausführlich denkbare Ansätze zur weiteren Konfliktdiagnose in Interaktion mit den Nutzern, Ansätze für Empfehlungen und Ratschlägen, die das System geben kann, sowie Visualisierungsansätze diskutiert

Natural asset management and market-based conservation in Indigenous contexts

This research consists of two parts. The first part provides an extended critique of market-based conservation as exemplary of neo-liberal ideology. Natural asset management, an example of market-based conservation, is described as a form of "progressive neo-liberalism," a political formation that consists of a neo-liberal economic practice and a progressive politics of recognition. Market-based conservation is shown to conflict with Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous life practices, posing a potential challenge to the capacity of Indigenous and Settler communities to imagine non-capitalist futures and to realize what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls "Indigenous resurgence." The second part of the thesis addresses the challenges faced by the Municipal Natural Asset Initiative in engaging with Indigenous Knowledge in their future work and puts forth multiple recommendations for doing so respectfully, effectively, and ethically

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

Towards Interoperable Research Infrastructures for Environmental and Earth Sciences

This open access book summarises the latest developments on data management in the EU H2020 ENVRIplus project, which brought together more than 20 environmental and Earth science research infrastructures into a single community. It provides readers with a systematic overview of the common challenges faced by research infrastructures and how a ‘reference model guided’ engineering approach can be used to achieve greater interoperability among such infrastructures in the environmental and earth sciences. The 20 contributions in this book are structured in 5 parts on the design, development, deployment, operation and use of research infrastructures. Part one provides an overview of the state of the art of research infrastructure and relevant e-Infrastructure technologies, part two discusses the reference model guided engineering approach, the third part presents the software and tools developed for common data management challenges, the fourth part demonstrates the software via several use cases, and the last part discusses the sustainability and future directions

The Philological-Pragmatic Approach : A Study of Language Choice and Code-Switching in Early Modern English School Performances

In this study I set out to account for certain central aspects of language choice and code-switching. My purpose is twofold: to explain why people use multiple languages within a single discourse or choose to use a particular language in a particular setting, and to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of combining philosophical and empirical research. Towards these ends, I develop a philological-pragmatic approach and apply it to a collection of multilingual texts. The material consists of the Orationes manuscript (Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral Archives Lit. MS E41), containing speeches and plays in English, Latin, and Greek performed by students at the King’s School, Canterbury, in 1665–1684. I conduct a philosophical and methodological analysis of the philological-pragmatic approach, construct a framework on the basis of that analysis, and apply it in the empirical analyses to understand and explain actions. The philosophical and methodological analyses indicate that a basis for the philological-pragmatic approach can be constructed by reinterpreting philology and pragmatics from the perspective of action analysis and theory of action: philology as the study of concrete action-tokens (interpretation), pragmatics as the study of abstract action-types (explication and classification). The empirical analyses indicate that multilingual language use is an important and characteristic strategy in the Orationes texts. Three explanatory entities were central in accounting for multilingual language use: consequences of actions, causal antecedents, and further actions/forms. Consequences were classified into five basic categories: face-related, textual, argumentative, stylistic, and capacitative. These taxonomies sufficiently accounted for the patterns of language use observed in the dataset. The study constitutes the first book-length investigation of the Orationes texts. In addition to advancing our understanding of the roots of multilingual language use in the Early Modern English period, the patterns identified have several parallels both in different periods and in different cultures. Detecting such patterns has the potential to contribute to an integrated account of the phenomenon. Finally, the study offers other researchers a model for combining philology and pragmatics.Käsittelen väitöskirjassani kielen valintaa ja koodinvaihtoa. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on yhtäältä selittää, miksi yhden diskurssin sisällä käytetään useita kieliä tai tietyissä tilanteissa valitaan tietty kieli, ja toisaalta tuoda esiin hyötyjä, joita saadaan yhdistämällä filosofinen ja empiirinen tutkimus. Kehitän tutkimuksessani ns. filologis-pragmaattisen lähestymistavan ja sovellan sitä monikielisen tekstikokoelman analyysiin. Aineistoni koostuu Orationes-käsikirjoituksesta (Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral Archives Lit. MS E41), joka sisältää Canterburyn King’s Schoolin oppilaiden vuosina 1665–1684 esittämiä puheita ja näytelmiä. Teksteissä käytettävät kielet ovat englanti, latina ja kreikka. Laadin filosofisen ja menetelmäopillisen kuvauksen filologis-pragmaattisesta lähestymistavasta, kehitän analyysin pohjalta viitekehyksen ja sovellan tätä viitekehystä tutkimuksen empiirisessä osassa tekojen ymmärtämiseen ja selittämiseen. Filosofisten ja menetelmäopillisten analyysien perusteella filologis-pragmaattinen lähestymistapa voidaan rakentaa määrittelemällä filologia ja pragmatiikka tekojen tutkimisen näkökulmasta: filologia tutkii konkreettisia tekoesiintymiä (menetelmänä tulkinta), pragmatiikka abstrakteja tekotyyppejä (menetelminä eksplikaatio ja luokittelu). Empiirisen analyysin perusteella monikielinen kielenkäyttö on keskeinen osa Orationes-tekstejä. Selityksissä viittasin erityisesti tekojen seurauksiin, kausaalisiin tekijöihin sekä muihin tekoihin/rakenteisiin. Luokittelin tekojen seuraukset edelleen kasvoihin liittyviin, tekstuaalisiin, argumentatiivisiin, stilistisiin ja mahdollistaviin. Näiden taksonomioiden avulla pystyin selittämään tutkittavat ilmiöt aineistossani. Väitöstutkimukseni on ensimmäinen laaja tutkimus Orationes-teksteistä. Tutkimuksen tulokset auttavat ymmärtämään monikielisen kielenkäytön juuria 1600-luvun Britanniassa. Vertaamalla tuloksia aiempiin tutkimuksiin löydetään yhtymäkohtia eri aikakausilta ja eri kulttuureista. Näitä yhtymäkohtia tarkastelemalla saavutetaan entistä kattavampi käsitys monikielisen kielenkäytön luonteesta. Tutkimukseni tarjoaa myös yleisen mallin filologian ja pragmatiikan yhdistämiseen