2,646 research outputs found

    Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

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    In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10

    DARIAH and the Benelux

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    Language Management in a Japanese Multinational Company: A Data-Driven Approach

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    Globalization poses a challenge for businesses with linguistically diverse staff, prompting the choice of English as the default corporate language. In Japan, research on the use of English in business contexts from both corporate and employees' perspectives is very limited, let alone studies adopting a data-driven approach. This study focuses on Rakuten, a Japanese multinational corporation (MNC), with the aim of illustrating the key challenges the company faces when it adopts English as its official language. The research is interdisciplinary and is positioned at the intersection of business communication, computational sociolinguistics, and language management. The first article, "Content analysis of language-sensitive recruitment influenced by corporate language policy using topic modeling", explores the match (or mismatch) between language-sensitive recruitment (English, Japanese, or bilingual) and corporate language policy. The second article, "It is all about TOEIC: discovering topics and trends m employee perceptions of corporate language policy", examines the barriers m multinational companies that have adopted a foreign language and analyzes employees' attitudes. The third and final article, "Analyzing cultural expatriates' attitude toward 'Englishnization' using dynamic topic modeling", investigates changes in employee' perceptions of Japanese work practices and values over time. The results of my study have implications for the implementation of language-sensitive recruitment in a multilingual corporate context. Furthermore, the thesis also highlights the evolutionary nature of corporate language policy topics by exploring and categorizing large amounts of text. Overall, the results presented in the three articles expand the understanding of the challenges associated with the use of English in a Japanese busines

    Disrupting Digital Monolingualism: A report on multilingualism in digital theory and practice

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    This report is about the Disrupting Digital Monolingualism virtual workshop in June 2020. The DDM workshop sought to draw together a wide range of stakeholders active in confronting the current language bias in most of the digital platforms, tools, algorithms, methods, and datasets which we use in our study or practice, and to reverse the powerful impact this bias has on geocultural knowledge dynamics in the wider world. The workshop aimed to describe the state of the art across different academic disciplines and professional fields, and foster collaboration across diverse perspectives around four points of focus: Linguistic and geocultural diversity in digital knowledge infrastructures; Working with multilingual methods and data; Transcultural and translingual approaches to digital study; and Artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP in language worlds. Event website https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/event/disrupting-digital-monolingualism/ This report forms part of a series of reports produced by the Digital Mediations strand of the Language Acts & Worldmaking project, in this case in collaboration with the translingual strand of the Cross-Language Dynamics project (based at the Institute of Modern Languages Research), both funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Councilā€™s Open World Research Initiative. Digital Mediations explores interactions and tensions between digital culture, multilingualism and language fields including the Modern Languages

    Sociolinguistic Variationist Analysis of Word-Emotion Lexicon in Cook Islands English Online News

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    This paper describes how journalists, in the Cook Islands, use sentiment lexicon when reporting online news. To do so, we employ Sentiment Analysis (SA) in combination with sociolinguistic variationist theory and logistic regression analysis. SA relies on the Word-Emotion Association Lexicon source (Mohammad & Turney 2013), which comprises 10,170 lexical items. The bulk of research carried out on sentiment analysis only distinguishes between positive vs. negative emotions. By contrast, we provide a fine-grained coding by exploring how eight specific core emotions (i.e. ANGER, ANTICIPATION, FEAR, DISGUST, JOY, SADNESS, SURPRISE, and TRUST) are socially stratified in formal contexts. We built a small-scale corpus from web-based newspapers to find out (i) whether social factors (age and sex) condition the use of sentiment lexicon and (ii) to evaluate the socially acknowledged generalisations according to which females tend to use sentiment lexicon more than males. The data was quantitatively examined through mixed-effects Rbrul logistic regression analysis. The independent variables include: word class (i.e. nous, adjectives, verbs), sex, age, and word-frequency. Specifically, the latter is a variable involved in language processing and is commonly studied in psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics (Mickiewicz 2019). To account for word-frequency we use the SUBTLEX-US corpus (Brysbaert & New 2009). Our findings suggest that sentiment lexicon is conditioned by age, with young and old speakers favouring the use of sentiment lexicon. Sex, word class, and word-frequency do not have a significant influence on sentiment lexicon in our data.

    Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages

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    Title: Negotiating ludic normativity in Facebook meme pages Author: Ondřej ProchĆ”zka Affiliation: Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences This thesis explores the capacity of Internet memes to inflect social realities in the communities organized around them on social media, particularly Facebook. Memes are not mere playful ā€˜jokesā€™ or ā€˜parodiesā€™ spreading virally on the Internet in countless variations, they are also powerful tools for political investment aimed to sway public attention and opinions. Memes have been increasingly documented as a vital component in the unprecedented spread and ā€˜normalizationā€™ of hateful sentiments and ideologies characterized by ā€˜fake newsā€™ and ā€˜post-truthā€™ politics appealing to emotions rather than ā€˜factsā€™ in the digital mainstream. Based on authorā€™s more than five-year observation of communities around Countryball memes, this work argues that much of the socio-cultural and communicative dynamics involving memes can be understood in terms of ludic play. The object of the study ā€“ Countryballs memes ā€“ are simple meme-comics featuring ball-shaped creatures in colors denoting nation-states while satirically reinventing international ā€˜dramaā€™ through the prism of socio-cultural and linguistic stereotypes. Having become a household name among memes, Countryballs offer communicative resources to playfully engage not only with wider socio-political issues, but also to with the linguistic, semiotic and ideological boundaries of our communicative norms shaped by the affordances of social media. The present work demonstrates how play can be used as a useful concept for understanding not only how matters of public attention are packed, framed and transmitted in the digital culture via (Countryball) memes, but more importantly how such matters are in fact interpreted by those who engage with them. More specifically, it shows how play enables alternative modes of expression and meaning making with different normative patterns and preferences which stand outside ā€˜standardā€™, ā€˜rationalā€™ or ā€˜civilā€™ expectations. And it is precisely ludic play that fosters different types of communication and sociality which are often done ā€˜just for funā€™, however serious or offensive their effects may be. To identify these effects and their implications in the contemporary digital age, the thesis employs a discourse-analytical methodology informed by current advances in digital ethnography and sociolinguistics. It focuses on negotiations among participants in memetic communities about what counts as ā€˜appropriateā€™, ā€˜acceptableā€™ or ā€˜correctā€™ in their socio-communicative behavior. Together in four case studies, the present work provides a comprehensive account of how participants articulate, police, break and re-construct ludic normativity in connection with recent socio-political issues and digital culture at large. This includes the role of memes in the newly emerging forms of communication, in the rise of populism and nationalism, algorithmic manipulation and exploitation, curating digital content and more. The concept of play is continually revisited throughout the discussion against the developments in the scholarship on Internet memes and their ludic genealogy. In doing so, the thesis also revisits some of the traditional concepts such as the notion of ā€˜communityā€™ and ā€˜communicative competenceā€™ to arrive at more precise accounts of the concrete processes of globalization and digitalization in our societies and their effects

    Explaining the distribution of implicit means of misrepresentation:A case study on Italian immigration discourse

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    This study analyzes Fillmore's frames in a large corpus of Italian news headlines concerning migrations, dating from 2013 to 2021 and taken from newspapers of diverse ideological stances. Our goal is to assess whether, how, and why migrants' representation varies over time and across ideological stances. Our approach combines corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis with cognitive linguistics. We present a new methodology that exploits SOCIOFILLMORE, a tool integrating a novel Natural Language Processing model for automatic frame annotation into a web-based user interface for exploring frame-annotated corpora. In our corpus, the frequency distribution of frames varies over time according to detectable contextual factors. Across political stances, instead, the most frequent frames remain more constant: both right-winged and left-winged news providers contribute to reifying migrants into non-agentive entities. Further, in religious (Christian) press migrants are given a more humanizing depiction, but they still often appear in non-agentive roles. The distributions of frames can be explained by the fact that the latter act as indirect, routinized, and implicit means of (mis)representation. We suggest that framing entails inferential operations that take place unconsciously and can therefore escape the cognitive screening not only of those who receive discourse, but also of those who (re)produce it.</p

    The dynamics of contacts and multilingual practices in the Chinese community in Britain. Revisiting social network analysis

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    This article revisits the application of Social Network Analysis to the study of language maintenance and language shift in the Chinese community in Britain. An approach that focuses more on individual variations, including variable behaviours by the same speaker in different contexts, is proposed. The approach is illustrated with new data from Chinese-speaking families in London. The role of the social media in language maintenance and language shift, and in promoting multilingual practices is explored

    Kompiliranje korpusa u digitalnim humanističkim znanostima u jezicima s ograničenim resursima: o praksi kompiliranja tematskih korpusa iz digitalnih medija za srpski, hrvatski i slovenski

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    The digital era has unlocked unprecedented possibilities of compiling corpora of social discourse, which has brought corpus linguistic methods into closer interaction with other methods of discourse analysis and the humanities. Even when not using any specific techniques of corpus linguistics, drawing on some sort of corpus is increasingly resorted to for empiricallyā€“grounded socialā€“scientific analysis (sometimes dubbed ā€˜corpusā€“assisted discourse analysisā€™ or ā€˜corpusā€“based critical discourse analysisā€™, cf. Hardtā€“Mautner 1995; Baker 2016). In the postā€“Yugoslav space, recent corpus developments have brought tableā€“turning advantages in many areas of discourse research, along with an ongoing proliferation of corpora and tools. Still, for linguists and discourse analysts who embark on collecting specialized corpora for their own research purposes, many questions persist ā€“ partly due to the fastā€“changing background of these issues, but also due to the fact that there is still a gap in the corpus method, and in guidelines for corpus compilation, when applied beyond the anglophone contexts. In this paper we aim to discuss some possible solutions to these difficulties, by presenting one stepā€“byā€“step account of a corpus building procedure specifically for Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian, through an example of compiling a thematic corpus from digital media sources (news articles and reader comments). Following an overview of corpus types, uses and advantages in social sciences and digital humanities, we present the corpus compilation possibilities in the South Slavic language contexts, including data scraping options, permissions and ethical issues, the factors that facilitate or complicate automated collection, and corpus annotation and processing possibilities. The study shows expanding possibilities for work with the given languages, but also some persistently grey areas where researchers need to make decisions based on research expectations. Overall, the paper aims to recapitulate our own corpus compilation experience in the wider context of Southā€“Slavic corpus linguistics and corpus linguistic approaches in the humanities more generallyDigitalno doba otvorilo je nove mogućnosti za sastavljanje korpusa druÅ”tvenog diskursa, Å”to je korpusnolingvističke metode približilo drugim metodama analize diskursa te humanističkim znanostima. Čak i kada se ne koriste nikakve specifične tehnike korpusne lingvistike, danas je za empirijski utemeljenu druÅ”tvenoā€“znanstvenu analizu sve učestalije koriÅ”tenje neke vrste korpusa (ā€˜korpusnoā€“asistirana analiza diskursaā€™ ili ā€˜kritička korpusna analizaā€™, Hardtā€“Mautner 1995; Baker 2016). U postjugoslavenskom prostoru, nedavni razvoj korpusne lingvistike donio je prednosti u mnogim područjima istraživanja. Ipak, za lingviste i analitičare diskursa koji se upuÅ”taju u prikupljanje specijaliziranih korpusa za vlastite istraživačke svrhe, i dalje ostaju otvorena mnoga pitanja ā€“ djelomično zbog pozadine korpusne lingvistike koja se brzo mijenja, ali i zbog činjenice da joÅ” uvijek postoji rascjep u poznavanju korpusnih metoda, kao i metodologije sastavljanja korpusa izvan anglofonskog konteksta. Ovim radom pokuÅ”avamo smanjiti spomenuti rascjep predstavljajući jedan postupni prikaz postupka izgradnje korpusa za hrvatski, srpski i slovenski, kroz primjer sastavljanja tematskog korpusa iz digitalnih medija (novinski članci i komentari čitatelja). Nakon pregleda tipova korpusa, koriÅ”tenja i prednosti u druÅ”tvenim znanostima i digitalnim humanističkim znanostima, predstavljamo mogućnosti sastavljanja korpusa u južnoslavenskim jezičnim kontekstima, uključujući opcije preuzimanja podataka s mreže, dozvola i etičkih pitanja, čimbenika koji olakÅ”avaju ili otežavaju automatizirano prikupljanje i označavanje korpusa i mogućnosti obrade. Studija otkriva sve veće mogućnosti za rad s danim jezicima, ali i neka uporno siva područja u kojima istraživači trebaju donositi odluke na temelju istraživačkih očekivanja. Općenito, rad ima za cilj rekapitulirati vlastito iskustvo sastavljanja korpusa u Å”irem kontekstu južnoslavenske korpusne lingvistike i korpusnih lingvističkih pristupa u humanističkim znanostima općenito
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