Playing with words and pictures : intersemiosis in a new genre of news reportage

The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper! It goes without saying that now, more than ever, newspapers, in their print form, are fighting for their very survival. It is also widely acknowledged that one of the greatest assets a newspaper has is its bond with its readers, and if newspapers are to stand up to the challenges of the 21st Century they need to nurture this bond or perish. One newspaper that does appear to have found an innovative way to build community among its readers is the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. At this newspaper, certain news stories are packaged in a way that foregrounds a play on words and pictures. This forms an evaluative stance on the news event being depicted and creates an opportunity for the newspaper to bond with its readers over this wit. The photographs used in these stories are also noted for their quality: their striking clarity and composition creating a certain aesthetic appeal. I have termed this news story genre the image-nuclear news story. Between June 2004 and August 2008, all image-nuclear news stories were actively collected from The Sydney Morning Herald. This produced a total of 1317 stories. A smaller corpus of 1000 stories was logged and analysed in a relational database. Building on social semiotic theories of language and images, this research project investigated the intersemiotic play established through the multiplication of meaning at the interface between words and images in the image-nuclear news story. The analysis also included investigation of the kinds of photographs that are commonly used in image-nuclear news stories both in terms of their news values and compositional/aesthetic qualities. Finally, the project examined the potential effects of this play and use of image for bonding and community building between newspapers and their readers, as well as between readers and the news events. The findings of this research suggest that the inclusion of stories such as image-nuclear news stories in the news story repertoire at The Sydney Morning Herald can be viewed as encouraging a readership that can pride itself in the knowledge that this newspaper caters to their extensive understanding of the world and to their wit. In turn, this means that this newspaper can establish a very powerful readership profile that can be easily packaged and sold to advertisers. This may also be viewed as an attempt by the newspaper to set itself apart from other news providers, maintaining readership loyalties through this special relationship with its readers, and thus prolonging the longevity of the newspaper amid the ever growing and sometimes fierce competition from other media platforms

Playing with words and pictures : intersemiosis in a new genre of news reportage

The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper! It goes without saying that now, more than ever, newspapers, in their print form, are fighting for their very survival. It is also widely acknowledged that one of the greatest assets a newspaper has is its bond with its readers, and if newspapers are to stand up to the challenges of the 21st Century they need to nurture this bond or perish. One newspaper that does appear to have found an innovative way to build community among its readers is the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. At this newspaper, certain news stories are packaged in a way that foregrounds a play on words and pictures. This forms an evaluative stance on the news event being depicted and creates an opportunity for the newspaper to bond with its readers over this wit. The photographs used in these stories are also noted for their quality: their striking clarity and composition creating a certain aesthetic appeal. I have termed this news story genre the image-nuclear news story. Between June 2004 and August 2008, all image-nuclear news stories were actively collected from The Sydney Morning Herald. This produced a total of 1317 stories. A smaller corpus of 1000 stories was logged and analysed in a relational database. Building on social semiotic theories of language and images, this research project investigated the intersemiotic play established through the multiplication of meaning at the interface between words and images in the image-nuclear news story. The analysis also included investigation of the kinds of photographs that are commonly used in image-nuclear news stories both in terms of their news values and compositional/aesthetic qualities. Finally, the project examined the potential effects of this play and use of image for bonding and community building between newspapers and their readers, as well as between readers and the news events. The findings of this research suggest that the inclusion of stories such as image-nuclear news stories in the news story repertoire at The Sydney Morning Herald can be viewed as encouraging a readership that can pride itself in the knowledge that this newspaper caters to their extensive understanding of the world and to their wit. In turn, this means that this newspaper can establish a very powerful readership profile that can be easily packaged and sold to advertisers. This may also be viewed as an attempt by the newspaper to set itself apart from other news providers, maintaining readership loyalties through this special relationship with its readers, and thus prolonging the longevity of the newspaper amid the ever growing and sometimes fierce competition from other media platforms

Discovering the New Place of Learning

The book explores the potential of learning outside the traditional classroom when students gain real-world experiences in a variety of contexts and public spaces such as built, natural and virtual landscapes, museums, heritage sites, science centres and community venues. The authors of the book promote and put the flexible and ‘plastic’ concept of a place of learning into action by including physical geographical location, digital, virtual and textual spaces into the analysis. The book illuminates the importance of innovative educational strategies in connecting formal, non-formal and informal education – experiential learning in museums, heritage places and communities, inquiry-based pedagogy, digital storytelling, environmental online games, narrative geographies, and the use of geospatial technologies

Feasibility of using citations as document summaries

The purpose of this research is to establish whether it is feasible to use citations as document summaries. People are good at creating and selecting summaries and are generally the standard for evaluating computer generated summaries. Citations can be characterized as concept symbols or short summaries of the document they are citing. Similarity metrics have been used in retrieval and text summarization to determine how alike two documents are. Similarity metrics have never been compared to what human subjects think are similar between two documents. If similarity metrics reflect human judgment, then we can mechanize the selection of citations that act as short summaries of the document they are citing. The research approach was to gather rater data comparing document abstracts to citations about the same document and then to statistically compare those results to several document metrics; frequency count, similarity metric, citation location and type of citation. There were two groups of raters, subject experts and non-experts. Both groups of raters were asked to evaluate seven parameters between abstract and citations: purpose, subject matter, methods, conclusions, findings, implications, readability, andunderstandability. The rater was to identify how strongly the citation represented the content of the abstract, on a five point likert scale. Document metrics were collected for frequency count, cosine, and similarity metric between abstracts and associated citations. In addition, data was collected on the location of the citations and the type of citation. Location was identified and dummy coded for introduction, method, discussion, review of the literature and conclusion. Citations were categorized and dummy coded for whether they refuted, noted, supported, reviewed, or applied information about the cited document. The results show there is a relationship between some similarity metrics and human judgment of similarity.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 200

Modelling the structure of a multimodal artefact

This dissertation studied the structure of multimodal artefacts, or how language, image and other semiotic modes combine and interact in documents. This places the study within the emerging field of multimodal research, which uses linguistic methods to study the interaction of multiple semiotic modes. Despite the growing amount of multimodal research, the structure of multimodal artefacts has not received the attention it warrants. Previous studies have been either very detailed or exceedingly abstract, leaving a significant gap between data and theory, which this dissertation attempted to bridge. To do so, the dissertation adopted a data-driven approach to multimodal analysis, addressing the structure of multimodal artefacts, the factors that shape the artefact structure, and the role of structure in the recognition and interpretation of the artefacts. The data consisted of tourist brochures produced by the city of Helsinki between 1967 and 2008, which allowed a longitudinal perspective to their multimodal structure. A total of 58 double-pages were annotated for their content, visual appearance, layout and rhetorical organisation, and compiled into an XML-based multimodal corpus. To study the corpus, the dissertation developed visualisation methods that combined information from multiple analytical layers of the corpus to represent the multimodal structures in the data. The study revealed the functional motivation behind the structure of the tourist brochures, identifying patterns in their hierarchical and rhetorical organisation, which were used to fulfil specific communicative tasks. The configuration of these patterns, in turn, signalled how the brochure was to be interpreted. The results also showed that after the year 1985, which marked the introduction of desktop publishing software, the organising principles of the tourist brochures have shifted towards a more fragmented and non-linear structure.Väitöskirja osoittaa, että kielitieteen menetelmiä voidaan soveltaa menestyksekkäästi myös visuaalisen viestinnän tutkimukseen. Vaikka kieltä ja kuvaa yhdistelevät tekstit ovat jo pitkään olleet osa arkipäiväistä elämää, kielen ja kuvan vuorovaikutuksesta tiedetään edelleen melko vähän, joka asettaa haasteen esimerkiksi keskustelulle medialukutaidon vaatimuksista. Kielitiede auttaa vastaamaan haasteeseen, sillä tieteenalalla on pitkä perinne viestinnän rakenteiden järjestelmällisessä tutkimuksessa. Tärkeintä on löytää sopiva teoria: tekstin rakennetta kuvaavat teoriat soveltuvat paremmin visuaalisen viestinnän tutkimukseen kuin esimerkiksi kieliopin teoria. Väitöskirjatutkimus avaa näin uusia mahdollisuuksia visuaalisen viestinnän empiiriseen tutkimukseen, jonka tuottamaa tietoa voidaan soveltaa tulevaisuudessa esimerkiksi opetusmateriaalien ja julkisen viestinnän kehittämisessä. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu Helsingin kaupungin vuosina 1967-2008 julkaisemista englanninkielisistä matkailuesitteistä. Laajasta aineistosta valittiin yhteensä 58 aukeamaa, jotka analysoitiin sisältöä, ulkoasua, sommittelua sekä sisällön välisiä suhteita kuvaavan mallin avulla. Analyysin pohjalta luotiin tietokoneen avulla useita kielen ja kuvan vuorovaikutusta sekä esitteen rakennetta kuvaavia malleja, sekä kehitettiin uusia työkaluja tutkittujen rakenteiden visualisoimiseksi. Havaintojen perusteella matkailuesitteiden rakenne muuttuu 1980-luvulla pirstaleiseksi, samaan aikaan kun tietokoneet otetaan käyttöön graafisessa suunnittelussa. Siinä missä vanhat esitteet käyttävät ilmaisuun valtaosin kirjoitettua kieltä, uudet pilkkovat sisällön pieniin yksiköihin, jotka yhdistelevät kieltä ja kuvaa. Muutos havaittiin kehitettyjen mallien avulla, sillä sitä on vaikea todentaa silmämääräisesti. Havainto on merkittävä, koska visuaalisen viestinnän kasvava merkitys liitetään usein visuaalisen sisällön määrään, ei sen yhteistoimintaan ja vuorovaikutukseen kielen kanssa. Visuaalisen sisällön määrä pysyy kuitenkin ennallaan tutkitulla aikavälillä - keskimäärin 50 % esitteiden pinta-alasta on valokuvia, kuvitusta ja muita graafisia elementtejä - vaikka sisällön esittämiseen käytetyt rakenteet muuttuvat samaan aikaan perusteellisesti

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discreet entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of “thinking through things” literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal

Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in an eighteenth-century Swiss canton: the case of Dr Laurent Garcin

Symposium: S048 - Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in the long eighteenth centuryThis paper takes as a case study the experience of the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, Laurent Garcin (1683-1752), with Chinese medical and pharmacological knowledge. A Neuchâtel bourgeois of Huguenot origin, who studied in Leiden with Hermann Boerhaave, Garcin spent nine years (1720-1729) in South and Southeast Asia as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Upon his return to Neuchâtel in 1739 he became primus inter pares in the small local community of physician-botanists, introducing them to the artificial sexual system of classification. He practiced medicine, incorporating treatments acquired during his travels. taught botany, collected rare plants for major botanical gardens, and contributed to the Journal Helvetique on a range of topics; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, where two of his papers were read in translation and published in the Philosophical Transactions; one of these concerned the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), leading Linnaeus to name the genus Garcinia after Garcin. He was likewise consulted as an expert on the East Indies, exotic flora, and medicines, and contributed to important publications on these topics. During his time with the Dutch East India Company Garcin encountered Chinese medical practitioners whose work he evaluated favourably as being on a par with that of the Brahmin physicians, whom he particularly esteemed. Yet Garcin never went to China, basing his entire experience of Chinese medical practice on what he witnessed in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (the ‘East Indies’). This case demonstrates that there were myriad routes to Europeans developing an understanding of Chinese natural knowledge; the Chinese diaspora also afforded a valuable opportunity for comparisons of its knowledge and practice with other non-European bodies of medical and natural (e.g. pharmacological) knowledge.postprin