The Linguistic Landscape of Tahrir Square Protest Signs and Egyptian National Identity

This is a study of the languages that occurred naturally in Tahrir Square at the heart of Cairo during the revolution in 2011. This paper proposes a vivid perspective to the Linguistic Landscape (LL) research by investigating the Egyptian revolution protest signs and the semiotic aspects of communication of over one hundred photographs. This paper is situated within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodological approaches and the grounded theory approach which have implications for investigating protest signs. The main objective of this study is to show how the LL of Tahrir Square protest signs can offer some insights into Egyptian national identity. The unit of analysis was protest sign in search for a dominant pattern that represents the Egyptian national identity. After analyzing the protest signs and the photographs, two main dominant patterns found in these signs which are unique features of Egyptian national identity. These patterns were sarcasm and faith

Sentiment analysis and classification of Indian farmers’ protest using twitter data

Protests are an integral part of democracy and an important source for citizens to convey their demands and/or dissatisfaction to the government. As citizens become more aware of their rights, there has been an increasing number of protests all over the world for various reasons. With the advancement of technology, there has also been an exponential rise in the use of social media to exchange information and ideas. In this research, we gathered data from the microblogging website Twitter concerning farmers’ protest to understand the sentiments that the public shared on an international level. We used models to categorize and analyze the sentiments based on a collection of around 20,000 tweets on the protest. We conducted our analysis using Bag of Words and TF-IDF and discovered that Bag of Words performed better than TF-IDF. In addition, we also used Naive Bayes, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and Support Vector Machines and also discovered that Random Forest had the highest classification accuracy

Workplace literacy practices of clerks in the South African Police Services (SAPS)

This thesis examines the patterning of literacy practices of clerks in the South African Police Services (SAPS) and how power relations are perpetuated through institutional structures and associated divisions of workplace tasks, within a workplace like SAPS. An ethnographic-style case study approach was used to examine the literacy practices of three clerks at three different SAPS sites. The data collected included participant observations, interviews, analysis of texts and photographs of documents. The data was then analysed using thematic analysis and discourse analysis. The qualitative data analysis indicated fragmentation of literacy tasks into “bits and pieces” reflecting the “old” capitalism of the traditional workplace. The fragmentation of the clerks’ literacy tasks also resonated with the decontextualized, skillsbased approach of literacy and language curricula and pedagogies that still dominate formal education and literacy learning. Furthermore, it would appear as if the literacy tasks were used as mechanisms to regiment workers since the paper trail served as a means of accountability for compliancy. The problem was compounded by the disjuncture between what is prescribed by SAPS language policy and what was happening in practice, namely, that English is the only “working language” used by SAPS in all official documents despite its claim to facilitate “functional multilingualism” (in Government Gazette, 8 March 2016). Thus, the study concludes that SAPS work-based literacy practices, like the literacy and language practices of the schooling system, are not conducive to producing students and workers who could apply critical and holistic thinking to make sense of disparate literacy tasks. Hence, the patterning of the literacy practices within the workplace serves to perpetuate institutionalized power in a context where needs for compliancy and accountability are high. The study points to the importance of the development of a language and literacy curriculum in the training of members of SAPS that is a hybridization of principles of the skills based and social practices approaches, especially where critical literacy skills still have to be honed. It argues that enabling workers to fulfil tasks with a more holistic understanding of the nature of their work could improve their efficiency, effectiveness and work satisfaction. Clarity, and I daresay, the political will, around the implementation of the prescribed “additive multilingualism” would go a long way to challenging the hegemony of English in powerful institutions of the state

Giving Voice to Language: Basque Language Activism and the Politics of Education in France, 1969-1994

Over the past several decades there has been a wellspring of political debate in Europe regarding the rights of linguistic minorities in education. Perhaps nowhere has this transnational debate sparked more controversy than in France where the notion of linguistic rights has been negatively construed by many political authorities as antithetical to the republican model of universal public education. Despite such enmity a host of ethnolinguistic activists in France have been laboring for decades to transform education from a site of exclusion into a vehicle of empowerment. In this dissertation I explore the mobilization dynamics that characterized a minority language schooling initiative within the French Basque Country from 1969 to 1994. Drawing on qualitative case study data, I pay particular attention to the struggles, strategies and successes of Basque language activists affiliated with a community-based schooling association known as 'Seaska'. Building on social movement theory, I argue that Seaska gradually accrued the support of reluctant policy-makers by mobilizing an influential repertoire of discursive, organizational and performative strategies. Throughout my discussion I show how these strategic practices allowed Seaska to cope with an enduring tide of political opposition, seize upon several windows of political opportunity and gain increasing levels of recognition within the political arena. By way of conclusion I consider future avenues for conducting comparative research on minority language activism in educational settings beyond the French Basque context

Interpreting as Ideologically-Structured Action: Collective Identity between Activist Interpreters and Protesters

In this paper, I explore the work of the American Sign Language-English interpreters who volunteered in the 1988 Deaf President Now protest (DPN). Drawing from the construct of ideologically-structured action (Dalton 1994; Zald 2000), I frame the interpreters’ decisionmaking throughout the protest, showing how their beliefs about and relationships with deaf people shaped their actions. Further, I argue that the activist interpreters exhibited a collective identity (Polletta and Jasper 2001) with the deaf protesters, despite not being deaf themselves. I also discuss the integral role of interpreters to the protesters’ mission of challenging the existing power structure. To develop my argument, I analyze interview data collected from 27 DPN stakeholders to explore how and why the interpreters volunteered their time to push the protest forward. The data reveal strong personal and community relationships that motivated interpreters to volunteer their services. Through my analysis of interview data, I offer an exploration of the work of signed language interpreters in a specific localised setting, providing new insight into how ideology and community ties may guide the actions of interpreters in times of conflict and activism in deaf community settings

Location Reference Recognition from Texts: A Survey and Comparison

A vast amount of location information exists in unstructured texts, such as social media posts, news stories, scientific articles, web pages, travel blogs, and historical archives. Geoparsing refers to recognizing location references from texts and identifying their geospatial representations. While geoparsing can benefit many domains, a summary of its specific applications is still missing. Further, there is a lack of a comprehensive review and comparison of existing approaches for location reference recognition, which is the first and core step of geoparsing. To fill these research gaps, this review first summarizes seven typical application domains of geoparsing: geographic information retrieval, disaster management, disease surveillance, traffic management, spatial humanities, tourism management, and crime management. We then review existing approaches for location reference recognition by categorizing these approaches into four groups based on their underlying functional principle: rule-based, gazetteer matching–based, statistical learning-–based, and hybrid approaches. Next, we thoroughly evaluate the correctness and computational efficiency of the 27 most widely used approaches for location reference recognition based on 26 public datasets with different types of texts (e.g., social media posts and news stories) containing 39,736 location references worldwide. Results from this thorough evaluation can help inform future methodological developments and can help guide the selection of proper approaches based on application needs

A DATA DRIVEN APPROACH TO IDENTIFY JOURNALISTIC 5WS FROM TEXT DOCUMENTS

Textual understanding is the process of automatically extracting accurate high-quality information from text. The amount of textual data available from different sources such as news, blogs and social media is growing exponentially. These data encode significant latent information which if extracted accurately can be valuable in a variety of applications such as medical report analyses, news understanding and societal studies. Natural language processing techniques are often employed to develop customized algorithms to extract such latent information from text. Journalistic 5Ws refer to the basic information in news articles that describes an event and include where, when, who, what and why. Extracting them accurately may facilitate better understanding of many social processes including social unrest, human rights violations, propaganda spread, and population migration. Furthermore, the 5Ws information can be combined with socio-economic and demographic data to analyze state and trajectory of these processes. In this thesis, a data driven pipeline has been developed to extract the 5Ws from text using syntactic and semantic cues in the text. First, a classifier is developed to identify articles specifically related to social unrest. The classifier has been trained with a dataset of over 80K news articles. We then use NLP algorithms to generate a set of candidates for the 5Ws. Then, a series of algorithms to extract the 5Ws are developed. These algorithms based on heuristics leverage specific words and parts-of-speech customized for individual Ws to compute their scores. The heuristics are based on the syntactic structure of the document as well as syntactic and semantic representations of individual words and sentences. These scores are then combined and ranked to obtain the best answers to Journalistic 5Ws. The classification accuracy of the algorithms is validated using a manually annotated dataset of news articles

Spaces of Multilingualism

This innovative collection explores critical issues in understanding multilingualism as a defining dimension of identity creation and negotiation in contemporary social life. Reinforcing interdisciplinary conversations on these themes, each chapter is co-authored by two different researchers, often those who have not written together before. The combined effect is a volume showcasing unique and dynamic perspectives on such topics as rethinking of language policy, testing of language rights, language pedagogy, meaning-making, and activism in the linguistic landscape. The book explores multilingualism through the lenses of spaces and policies as embodied in Elizabeth Lanza’s body of work in the field, with a focus on the latest research on linguistic landscapes in diverse settings. Taken together, the book offers a window into better understanding issues around processes of change in and of languages and societies. This ground breaking volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics

Same Same but Different? Gender Politics and (Trans-)National Value Contestation in Europe on Twitter

The progress achieved in women's rights and gender equality has become the target of a backlash driven by "anti-gender" activists and right-wing populists across EU member states. To a large extent, this conflict takes place in the digital and social media spheres, illustrating the new mediatized logic of value contestation. Therefore, we ask to what extent are the debates about gender equality on Twitter similar in three European countries, and how do users engage in these debates? We examine these questions by collecting Twitter data around the 2021 International Women's Day in Germany, Italy, and Poland. First, we show that the debate remains nationally segmented and is predominantly supportive of gender equality. While citizens engage with the gender equality value online, they do so in a prevailingly acclamatory fashion. In contrast, political and societal actors show higher levels of engagement with the value and receive more interactions on Twitter. Our study highlights the relevance of national contexts to the analysis of (transnational) social media debates and the limited political engagement of citizens on Twitter across Europe. We also critically discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a cross-country social media comparison