Facebook\u27s Alternative Facts

In this short essay, I argue that Facebook’s adoption of the alternative-facts frame potentially contributes to the divisiveness that has made social media misinformation a powerful digital tool. Facebook’s choice to present information as “facts” and “alternative facts” endorses a binary system in which all information can be divided between moral or tribal categories—“bad” versus “good” speech, as Sandberg put it in her testimony to Congress. As we will see, Facebook’s related-articles strategy adopts this binary construction, offering a both-sides News Feed that encourages users to view information as cleaving along natural moral or political divisions

Unknown agents in translated political discourse

This article investigates the role of translation and interpreting in political discourse. It illustrates discursive events in the domain of politics and the resulting discourse types, such as jointly produced texts, press conferences and speeches. It shows that methods of Critical Discourse Analysis can be used effectively to reveal translation and interpreting strategies as well as transformations that occur in recontextualisation processes across languages, cultures, and discourse domains, in particular recontextualisation in mass media. It argues that the complexity of translational activities in the field of politics has not yet seen sufficient attention within Translation Studies. The article concludes by outlining a research programme for investigating political discourse in translation

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.Comment: 49 page

Media, Politics and the Portrayal of Climate-Gate by CNN and Fox News

Mere days before the Copenhagen Climate Summit, the main server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was illegally hacked and over 3,000 documents were downloaded and released onto climate change blogs with excerpts of emails exchanged between climate change scientists that discussed manipulation of data, faulty observation techniques, and their frustration over their inability to provide solid proof that global warming was occurring. The release of these emails set off a firestorm of debate and the incident was quickly coined ―Climate-gate. This study examines the ensuing media coverage by CNN and Fox News and seeks to understand the narrative of the event that was provided to the American public. An analysis of the coverage of Climate-gate by two major American news media organizations offers new and interesting insight into the nature of the partisan-based divide that characterizes public opinion regarding the issues of global warming and climate change in the United States

Doctor-patient communication in head-and-neck cancer follow-up consultations:The role of the Distress Thermometer and Problem List

Cancer survivors often suffer from psycho-social problems as a consequence of side effects of treatment and fear of recurrence of the disease. Although there is wide consensus that this kind of distress has a negative effect on health and healing, the discussion of emotional problems does not routinely occur in follow-up cancer consultations. This thesis investigates the interaction between doctors and patients in a corpus of scheduled head-and-neck cancer follow-up consultations in a cancer centre in The Netherlands, with a focus on the effects of the introduction of the Distress Thermometer and Problem List (DT+PL) as a tool to further the discussion of psychosocial distress. The multi-method design of the study, including insights from ethnography of communication and discourse analysis (more specifically conversation analysis and linguistic pragmatics), combines interviews with doctors and patients reflecting on the follow-up head-and-neck cancer consultation with a qualitative analysis of video-recorded consultations and descriptive quantitative data on discursive patterns that surfaced in the interactions. This broad design made it possible to trace not just what issues are discussed in the consultation and how frequently they are discussed, but also how the participants co-construct the interaction, what contextual parameters influence this, how the DT+PL affects all this, and how doctors and patients view the follow-up consultation and the DT+PL

Embodiment in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Discourse: Healing, Silence and the Miracle Cure

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a thousand-year old medical practice originated in China, has stepped into the western world with globalization for years. TCM has entered the West with its foreign, distant and “unscientific” concepts despite the fact that medicine globalization is still a contested concept. My thesis aims to understand the embodied concepts of TCM through practitioner-patient interaction as culturally specific constructs. Among many TCM medical and philosophical concepts, I specifically focus on the healing, the silence and the miracle cure and how they are embodied and co-constructed by the practitioner and the patient during acupuncture, herb prescription and tuina massage treatment sessions. Using a discourse analytic approach informed by ethnographic field notes and interviews conducted in 2014 Kunming China, my thesis looks at data of video recordings of acupuncture, pulse reading and tuina massage sessions, through which I define the embodiments of TCM discourse are feelings as healing, interacting silences and the “miracle-minded” (Zhan, 2009) cure. The current thesis will provide groundwork for future inter/cross-cultural TCM practitioner-patient interaction comparison for the purpose of developing culturally competent alternative healthcare materials. It also provides the interactional and cultural insights to further research how to handle the interculturality of TCM in the West for the purpose of the betterment of the holistic treatment in the United States. Also, through studying the embodiment of TCM concepts in interaction, it provides us interactional and cultural insights to further our understandings of the interculturality with TCM labeled as the holistic treatment around the world

A practical guide to conversation research: how to study what people say to each other

Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have allowed researchers to more directly and precisely examine conversations in natural contexts and at a larger scale than ever before, and these advances open new paths to understand humanity and the social world. Existing reviews of text analysis and conversation research have focused on text generated by a single author (e.g., product reviews, news articles, and public speeches) and thus leave open questions about the unique challenges presented by interactive conversation data (i.e., dialogue). In this article, we suggest approaches to overcome common challenges in the workflow of conversation science, including recording and transcribing conversations, structuring data (to merge turn-level and speaker-level data sets), extracting and aggregating linguistic features, estimating effects, and sharing data. This practical guide is meant to shed light on current best practices and empower more researchers to study conversations more directly—to expand the community of conversation scholars and contribute to a greater cumulative scientific understanding of the social world