Project Testbed: Argument Mapping and Deliberation Analytics

One key goal of the Catalyst project was to design metrics that could capture and represent aspects of the conversation’s structural quality, to assist harvesters and moderators. Many such metrics, alerts and visualizations were developed in the course of the project, but initial user testing has shown that users find it difficult to interpret abstract signals. Following that, we have both introduced new analytics that we felt could be more directly useful, and improved the representation of existing ones. We evaluated their usefulness in a smaller conversation and in experimental settings

A Summary Report Prepared for the Office of the Governor, Boards and Commissions

This research project was undertaken by the author in partial fulfillment of a Master of Judicial Studies degree awarded December 2012 by the University of Nevada Reno and the National Judicial College. Although the project was funded by the author, the preparation of this report was funded by the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Justice Center staff and faculty, especially André Rosay, Ph.D., Justice Center Director, Sharon Chamard, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Justice, and Barbara Armstrong, M.A., Research Associate. Points of view in this publication are those of the author and do not represent the official position or policies of the Justice Center, the University of Alaska Anchorage, the University of Nevada Reno, the National Judicial College, or the State of Alaska, Office of the Governor, Boards and Commissions and its staff.This report presents results of a survey of lay adjudicators in mixed-administrative tribunals in Alaska. Mixed administrative tribunals are appointed boards or commissions in which lay members decide legal issues with the involvement of a professional administrative law judge. This involvement varies in degree and methods, depending on the tribunal’s rules and statutes. The report describes reported participation, role perception, attitudes toward law, recruitment, and satisfaction with experience.List of Tables / The Purpose of this Research / The Participants / Respondents' Understanding of Member Duties / Participation in Decision-Making / Respondent Attitudes toward Law / Recruitment / Member Satisfaction / Maintaining the Strengths of Alaska's Mixed Tribunal

Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understanding of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers

Glitched Rhetorics: Online Deliberation of New Technology

This dissertation examines public deliberation on the social media site reddit regarding two controversial technologies: Alexa and Bitcoin. Such vernacular deliberation of prominent new technologies is widespread online and increasingly significant—with Alexa and Bitcoin generating numerous controversies throughout the 2010s & early 2020s—yet understudied by rhetoric and media scholars. Arguments for and against the technologies consistently emerge, and so I ask: What are the terms, patterns, and logics in the binarized reddit deliberations of emergent technology? There is also an alternative rhetorical practice of those conflicted and ambivalent, yet not absent from the deliberations. I name it glitching, a paleologism used to describe a digital version of a transhistorical and transgressive anti-idealism (i.e., kynicism). My second question is: In what way do redditors glitch the deliberation of emergent technology? Rhetorical-archaeological analysis and digital rhetorical ethnography are the methods I utilize to answer the first and second questions, respectively. Arguments for Alexa employ terms “connect,” “work,” and “convenience,” in patterns emphasizing expertise and rationality, toward a logic of technological progress. “Listening” and “labor” are the terms which appear throughout anti-Alexa posts and comments, in patterns resembling investigative journalism, to advance a logic of economic justice. Pro-Bitcoin arguments employ terms “buy” and “celebration,” in a pattern resembling that of speculative finance, undergirding a logic of prosperity technology. “Privacy” and “scam” are the terms which appear throughout anti-Bitcoin posts and comments, in a pattern of technical expertise which supports logics of technological and financial skepticism. Glitched rhetorics are ambivalent and irreverent interruptions in the binary oscillation of vernacular deliberation about technology which frequently appear in online fora, and closely resemble the kynicism of Diogenes of Sinope. The glitched rhetorics about Alexa and Bitcoin diverge in extremeness, but share embrace of risk and use of sexual vulgarity to challenge customs and interrupt sober deliberations which otherwise lead to the synthesis of managed decline. Glitched rhetorics are not the collective action necessary for systemic change in the matter of society’s relationship to technology, but as a kynical signal not unlike the barking of a dog they persistently reveal that such action is necessary

Museums and science centres as sites for deliberative democracy on climate change

This paper addresses the position of the museum sector in relation to public policy-making about climate change. It is informed by the perspectives of museum and science centre visitors and leaders canvassed as part of the Australian Research Council Linkage project, ‘Hot Science, Global Citizens: the agency of the museum sector in climate change interventions’. We apply complexity theory to evaluate the claim that museums are a site for the enaction of deliberative democracy. In doing so, we reveal a cultural opportunity for cultural institutions to play a more expansive and explicit role in brokering social futures for communities confronted by climate change

Exploring political corporate social responsibility : a case study in Australian mining

This thesis presents a critique of Scherer and Palazzo’s (2011) political corporate social responsibility framework (PCSR). This critique is based on a single exploratory case study of an Australian mining company and its relationships with government and community stakeholders. More specifically, this research investigates the extent to which the PCSR framework proposed by Scherer and Palazzo (2011) is adequate to explain the activities of the company in question, and the dynamics with its key stakeholders. The original contribution to knowledge of this thesis is an extended PCSR framework that accounts for civil society perspectives and stakeholder power relations. The case study selected involved a highly politicised mine extension case for a multi-national company operating in Australia. This case was selected for its theoretical relevance as the company had a long and ongoing history of corporate social responsibility. The case study analysed extensive secondary data including media reports, company policy and NGO documentation to produce a timeline of events. In-depth semi-structured interviews were the primary sources of data; these were triangulated with direct observation of community meetings and government hearings. The data were used to produce a thick description of PCSR in action in an Australian mining context. The themes that emerged from data analysis indicated that PCSR as practised in the case study, departs from the theoretical assumptions of the Scherer and Palazzo (2011) framework. While the framework proved useful in categorising macro-level activity related to PCSR, it was unable to fully account for the roles of actors and the impacts of their activities under PCSR at the local level. The analytical framework also did not account for the impacts of PCSR on power roles of stakeholders, despite being a central feature of the theory underpinning PCSR (Habermas 1996). Results indicated the need for an extension to Scherer and Palazzo’s (2011) framework. As a result, this study makes two key contributions to the PCSR research. First, this study conceptualises a model for the role of power within stakeholder deliberation, and second, it offers an extension to the framework of Scherer and Palazzo (2011) that accounts for civil society perspectives. The study concludes by considering directions for future research

Dispatches from Greece: ‘‘We were sleeping as Individuals and we woke up as Citizens’’

The universalistic understanding of the subject embedded in the Liberal and Marxist traditions together with contrasting accounts of unconstrained agency fail to explain the contingencies of ground responses that call for social change. The paper makes a case for the opening of the understanding of the human subject when placed in the theoretical terrain of radical political philosophy elaborated by thinkers such as C. Castoriadis, M. Hardt & A. Negri, E. Laclau and C. Mouffe. The conceptualisation of the human subject as both a creative and constrained agent rescues it from deterministic excesses and accounts of unlimited power. Within these confines, the purpose of this paper was to explore the project of autonomy as conceptualised by Castoriadis and relate it to a new articulation of human development. Through a case study of the social movement in Skouries, Chalkidiki, the democratic openings realised by the creative human praxis and the re-politicisation of individuals, were explored. The self-organised communities call for a creation of public spaces where deliberation and self-reflection can take place, resulting in a re-thinking of the developmental paradigm applied in the years of Greek austerity. The question that remains open is how the new social relations manifested in the area can foster principles of social and individual autonomy in all spheres of social life. The paper concludes that processes of uniformity tend to eliminate the multiplicity embedded in social ambiguity resulting in forms of social exclusion

Using Text Similarity to Detect Social Interactions not Captured by Formal Reply Mechanisms

In modeling social interaction online, it is important to understand when people are reacting to each other. Many systems have explicit indicators of replies, such as threading in discussion forums or replies and retweets in Twitter. However, it is likely these explicit indicators capture only part of people's reactions to each other, thus, computational social science approaches that use them to infer relationships or influence are likely to miss the mark. This paper explores the problem of detecting non-explicit responses, presenting a new approach that uses tf-idf similarity between a user's own tweets and recent tweets by people they follow. Based on a month's worth of posting data from 449 ego networks in Twitter, this method demonstrates that it is likely that at least 11% of reactions are not captured by the explicit reply and retweet mechanisms. Further, these uncaptured reactions are not evenly distributed between users: some users, who create replies and retweets without using the official interface mechanisms, are much more responsive to followees than they appear. This suggests that detecting non-explicit responses is an important consideration in mitigating biases and building more accurate models when using these markers to study social interaction and information diffusion.Comment: A final version of this work was published in the 2015 IEEE 11th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science