Democratic Replay: Enhancing TV Election Debates with Interactive Visualisations

This paper presents an online platform for enhancing televised election debates with interactive visualisations. Election debates are one of the highlights of election campaigns worldwide. They are also often criticised as appearing scripted, rehearsed, detached from much of the electorate, and at times too complex. Democratic Replay enhances videos of election debates with a collection of interactive tools aimed at providing a replay experience centred around citizens' needs. We present the system requirements, design and implementation, and report on an evaluation based on the ITV Leaders' Debate from the 2015 UK General Election campaign

Scientific literacy through co-inquiry based on non-formal and informal learning

This paper presents a collaborative research on scientific citizenship developed by the Open University UK (OU) through the weSPOT project for inquiry based learning and the Universidade do Estado da Bahia (UNEB) responsible for coordinating the Telecentros.BR training programme for Digital Inclusion in Brazil. The European weSPOT project (2013-2015) is a working environment with social, personal and open technologies for inquiry based learning (IBL). The Telecentros.BR training programme (2013-2014) is a non-credit online course supported by the Brazil Government, whose participants are more than 2000 young educators in diverse areas with low access to digital technology. The role of these young educators is to promote better use of ICT and support the Telecentro.BR’s projects created by the communities for their development in various dimensions. The objective of this research is to create a framework for applying collaborative inquiry to scaffold citizen’s scientific skills through digital technologies. This framework, drawn on qualitative and quantitative study, synthesizes key abilities related to multiple literacies to foster scientific skills in the digital age of open education, open science and open citizenship

Implicit dialogical premises, explanation as argument: a corpus-based reconstruction

This paper focuses on an explanation in a newspaper article: why new European Union citizens will come to the UK from Eastern Europe (e.g., because of available jobs). Using a corpus-based method of analysis, I show how regular target readers have been positioned to generate premises in dialogue with the explanation propositions, and thus into an understanding of the explanation as an argument, one which contains a biased conclusion not apparent in the text. Employing this method, and in particular ‘corpus comparative statistical keywords’, I show how two issues can be freshly looked at: implicit premise recovery; the argument/explanation distinction

Arguments for exception in US security discourse

In his influential State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben proposes that, even in apparently liberal western democracies, the state will routinely use the contingency of national emergency to suspend civil liberties and justify expansion of military and police powers. We investigated rhetorical strategies deployed in the web pages of US security agencies, created or reformed in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, to determine whether they present argumentation conforming to Agamben’s model. To expose rhetorical content, we examined strategies operating at two levels within our corpus. Argument schemes and underlying warrants were identified through close examination of systematically selected core documents. Semantic fields establishing themes of threat and danger were also explored, using automatic corpus tools to expose patterns of lexical selection established across the whole corpus. The study recovered evidence of rhetoric broadly consistent with the logic predicted by State of Exception theory, but also presented nuanced findings whose interpretation required careful re-appraisal of core ideas within Agamben’s work