SPARC 2019 Fake news & home truths : Salford postgraduate annual research conference book of abstracts

Welcome to the Book of Abstracts for the 2019 SPARC conference. This year we not only celebrate the work of our PGRs but also our first ever Doctoral School Best Supervisor awards, which makes this year’s conference extra special. Once again we have received a tremendous contribution from our postgraduate research community; with over 90 presenters, the conference truly showcases a vibrant, innovative and collaborative PGR community at Salford. These abstracts provide a taster of the inspiring, relevant and impactful research in progress, and provide delegates with a reference point for networking and initiating critical debate. Find an abstract that interests you, and say “Hello” to the author. Who knows what might result from your conversation? With such wide-ranging topics being showcased, we encourage you to take up this great opportunity to engage with researchers working in different subject areas from your own. To meet global challenges, high impact research needs interdisciplinary collaboration. This is recognised and rewarded by all major research funders. Engaging with the work of others and forging collaborations across subject areas is an essential skill for the next generation of researchers. Even better, our free ice cream van means that you can have those conversations while enjoying a refreshing ice lolly

Tourist Responses to Tourism Experiences in Saudi Arabia

A decade ago, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) was not perceived to be a popular tourism destination except for religious purposes, the government of KSA has been proactive in recent years building new destinations, changing longstanding policies, focusing on tourism and hospitality education, and renovating its image to attract domestic and international tourists. Tourism contributed to almost 9% of the Kingdom’s GDP in 2018, around 65 billion dollars (WTTC, 2019). The purpose of this paper is to understand the sentiment that tourists have regarding the new tourism campaigns in KSA, to have transparent feedback about the experiences and services mostly adopted by tourists, and to study the feasibility of KSA Vision 2030 regarding the tourism sector. This study will perform an open data analysis by extracting and analyzing data from a well-known online source (Twitter). Results will highlight the utilization of online data tools to measure tourism trends

Environmentalism in China and India: a comparative analysis of people and politics in two coal capitals

This dissertation presents the results of an interdisciplinary environmental study that focuses on the formation of environmental discourse at the grassroots level of society. Case studies on the ‘Coal Capitals’ in Guizhou of China and Jharkhand of India were conducted in order to examine the question: why do people appear to react in different ways when encountering environmental problems, such as those caused by mining? This thesis investigates how the environment – and the participation space for discussing it – has been socio-culturally, historically and politically defined in the two countries. It is one of the few initiatives to have assessed environmental development issues based on comparative literature reviews and empirical fieldwork in coal villages in China and India. It has critically examined the literature related to the two locations studied by encompassing environmental governance, political discourses and historical studies about environmental development, media productions and daily life conversations about the environment. By examining the representations of environmentalism in the Chinese and Indian cases, this study deals with different dynamics of discourse construction in the two societies – including the power of the state, the influences of media and social elites, and the emergence of grassroots movements. The investigation of the interactions between these dynamics enhances our understanding of, on the one hand, the social settings of the two Coal Capitals in the two countries, and, on the other hand, the relationship between nature and the people, especially those with limited social and economic resources. By bringing in the voices of the marginalised social groups, this thesis adds to a growing body of research on the diversity of environmentalism within developing countries. In particular, the analysis helps explain how popular environmentalism and the concept of environmental participation in India and China have become recognised differently, in the discussions created by researchers and media commentators in conjunction with actors with power in the state machinery

Capturing stance dynamics in social media: open challenges and research directions

Social media platforms provide a goldmine for mining public opinion on issues of wide societal interest and impact. Opinion mining is a problem that can be operationalised by capturing and aggregating the stance of individual social media posts as supporting, opposing or being neutral towards the issue at hand. While most prior work in stance detection has investigated datasets that cover short periods of time, interest in investigating longitudinal datasets has recently increased. Evolving dynamics in linguistic and behavioural patterns observed in new data require adapting stance detection systems to deal with the changes. In this survey paper, we investigate the intersection between computational linguistics and the temporal evolution of human communication in digital media. We perform a critical review of emerging research considering dynamics, exploring different semantic and pragmatic factors that impact linguistic data in general, and stance in particular. We further discuss current directions in capturing stance dynamics in social media. We discuss the challenges encountered when dealing with stance dynamics, identify open challenges and discuss future directions in three key dimensions: utterance, context and influence

Refugee or migrant crisis?

In recent years, increasing attention has been dedicated to the hazardous and volatile situation in the Middle East, a crisis which has pushed many to flee their countries and seek refuge in neighboring countries or in Europe. In describing or discussing these tragic events, labels such as “European migrant crisis” and “European refugee crisis” started being widely used by the media, politicians, and the online world alike. The use of such labels has the potential to dictate the ways in which displaced people are received and perceived. With this study, we investigate label use in social media (specifically YouTube), the emergent patterns of labeling that can cause further disaffection and tension or elicit sympathy, and the sentiments associated with the different labels. Our findings suggest that migration issues are being framed not only through labels characterizing the crisis but also by their describing the individuals themselves. Using topic modeling and sentiment analysis jointly, our study offers valuable insights into the direction of public sentiment and the nature of discussions surrounding this significant societal crisis, as well as the nature of online opinion sharing. We conclude by proposing a four-dimensional model of label interpretation in relation to sentiment—that accounts for perceived agency, economic cost, permanence, and threat, and identifies threat and agency to be most impactful. This perspective reveals important influential aspects of labels and frames that may shape online public opinion and alter attitudes toward those directly affected by the crisis

Engaging Civil Society in the Nagorno Karabakh Conflict: What Role for the EU and its Neighbourhood Policy?

The conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, opposing Armenia and Azerbaijan, is the longest conflict in the OSCE area and a fundamental security threat to the South Caucasus and surrounding regions, preventing full and inclusive economic development and constraining regional relations. This chapter takes the ENP as a conflict transformation tool and looks at how the EU has used this initiative to reach civil society organisations (CSOs) and improve their performance as peace-builders in this protracted conflict. Building on the theoretical framework presented by Tocci (2008), the chapter assesses EU involvement in the civil society domain, mapping the types of organisations privileged by the EU and the potential impact of their activities on the conflict. It puts forward relevant arguments regarding the suitability of the EU’s goals and instruments to the dynamics on the ground and concludes with a categorisation of the EU’s approach according to three hypotheses: The Liberal Peace, the Leftist Critique and the Realist hypothesis. It is argues that work with civil society is a crucial part of the EU’s approach, despite the difficulties of making such engagement a central part of its peace-building and conflict transformation activities.

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Perspective Scaling and Trait Detection on Social Media Data

abstract: This research start utilizing an efficient sparse inverse covariance matrix (precision matrix) estimation technique to identify a set of highly correlated discriminative perspectives between radical and counter-radical groups. A ranking system has been developed that utilizes ranked perspectives to map Islamic organizations on a set of socio-cultural, political and behavioral scales based on their web site corpus. Simultaneously, a gold standard ranking of these organizations was created through domain experts and compute expert-to-expert agreements and present experimental results comparing the performance of the QUIC based scaling system to another baseline method for organizations. The QUIC based algorithm not only outperforms the baseline methods, but it is also the only system that consistently performs at area expert-level accuracies for all scales. Also, a multi-scale ideological model has been developed and it investigates the correlates of Islamic extremism in Indonesia, Nigeria and UK. This analysis demonstrate that violence does not correlate strongly with broad Muslim theological or sectarian orientations; it shows that religious diversity intolerance is the only consistent and statistically significant ideological correlate of Islamic extremism in these countries, alongside desire for political change in UK and Indonesia, and social change in Nigeria. Next, dynamic issues and communities tracking system based on NMF(Non-negative Matrix Factorization) co-clustering algorithm has been built to better understand the dynamics of virtual communities. The system used between Iran and Saudi Arabia to build and apply a multi-party agent-based model that can demonstrate the role of wedges and spoilers in a complex environment where coalitions are dynamic. Lastly, a visual intelligence platform for tracking the diffusion of online social movements has been developed called LookingGlass to track the geographical footprint, shifting positions and flows of individuals, topics and perspectives between groups. The algorithm utilize large amounts of text collected from a wide variety of organizations’ media outlets to discover their hotly debated topics, and their discriminative perspectives voiced by opposing camps organized into multiple scales. Discriminating perspectives is utilized to classify and map individual Tweeter’s message content to social movements based on the perspectives expressed in their tweets.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201