Representations of SARS in the UK newspapers

In the Spring of 2003, there was a huge interest in the global news media following the emergence of a new infectious disease: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). This study examines how this novel disease threat was depicted in the UK newspapers, using social representations theory and in particular existing work on social representations of HIV/AIDS and Ebola to analyse the meanings of the epidemic. It investigates the way that SARS was presented as a dangerous threat to the UK public, whilst almost immediately the threat was said to be ‘contained’ using the mechanism of ‘othering’: SARS was said to be unlikely to personally affect the UK reader because the Chinese were so different to ‘us’; so ‘other’. In this sense, the SARS scare, despite the remarkable speed with which it was played out in the modern global news media, resonates with the meanings attributed to other epidemics of infectious diseases throughout history. Yet this study also highlights a number of differences in the social representations of SARS compared with earlier epidemics. In particular, this study examines the phenomena of ‘emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases’ over the past 30 or so years and suggests that these have impacted on the faith once widely held that Western biomedicine could ‘conquer’ infectious disease

Article Segmentation in Digitised Newspapers

Digitisation projects preserve and make available vast quantities of historical text. Among these, newspapers are an invaluable resource for the study of human culture and history. Article segmentation identifies each region in a digitised newspaper page that contains an article. Digital humanities, information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP) applications over digitised archives improve access to text and allow automatic information extraction. The lack of article segmentation impedes these applications. We contribute a thorough review of the existing approaches to article segmentation. Our analysis reveals divergent interpretations of the task, and inconsistent and often ambiguously defined evaluation metrics, making comparisons between systems challenging. We solve these issues by contributing a detailed task definition that examines the nuances and intricacies of article segmentation that are not immediately apparent. We provide practical guidelines on handling borderline cases and devise a new evaluation framework that allows insightful comparison of existing and future approaches. Our review also reveals that the lack of large datasets hinders meaningful evaluation and limits machine learning approaches. We solve these problems by contributing a distant supervision method for generating large datasets for article segmentation. We manually annotate a portion of our dataset and show that our method produces article segmentations over characters nearly as well as costly human annotators. We reimplement the seminal textual approach to article segmentation (Aiello and Pegoretti, 2006) and show that it does not generalise well when evaluated on a large dataset. We contribute a framework for textual article segmentation that divides the task into two distinct phases: block representation and clustering. We propose several techniques for block representation and contribute a novel highly-compressed semantic representation called similarity embeddings. We evaluate and compare different clustering techniques, and innovatively apply label propagation (Zhu and Ghahramani, 2002) to spread headline labels to similar blocks. Our similarity embeddings and label propagation approach substantially outperforms Aiello and Pegoretti but still falls short of human performance. Exploring visual approaches to article segmentation, we reimplement and analyse the state-of-the-art Bansal et al. (2014) approach. We contribute an innovative 2D Markov model approach that captures reading order dependencies and reduces the structured labelling problem to a Markov chain that we decode with Viterbi (1967). Our approach substantially outperforms Bansal et al., achieves accuracy as good as human annotators, and establishes a new state of the art in article segmentation. Our task definition, evaluation framework, and distant supervision dataset will encourage progress in the task of article segmentation. Our state-of-the-art textual and visual approaches will allow sophisticated IR and NLP applications over digitised newspaper archives, supporting research in the digital humanities

Archives Conservation Discussion Group 2011: Digitization and Its Effect on Conservation Treatment Decisions: How Has Wide-Spread Digitizing of Collections Changed Our Approach to Treatment?

In line with this year’s AIC theme: ETHOS, LOGOS, PATHOS: ethical principles and critical thinking in conservation, The Archives Conservation Discussion Group 2011 examined the impact of providing digital collections in museums and libraries, and their conservation implications. Presentations and a subsequent discussion covered topics such as: How conservators are balancing ethical concerns, especially as dictated by the AIC Code of Ethics, with increased demand from digital projects. How conservators are keeping pace with large-scale or fast-paced digitizing projects, while maintaining standards. And the impact of limiting access to original materials by providing digital surrogates and its effect on treatment decisions

The South African media's framing of the introduction of Mandarin into the South African school curriculum

A research project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.This research report examines the way the media framed the introduction of Mandarin to the South African school curriculum, and the relationship between frame sponsors and the frames employed by the media. The dramatic growth of Chinese investment and its related social and political influence in Africa has been greeted by a mixed response. The media has often characterised the relationship in a binary way, as either Chinese imperialism or a developmental relationship. To improve China’s image, the Chinese government has embarked upon a policy of soft power, which extends into influencing educational language policy, to encourage more people to learn Mandarin and understand Chinese culture. To explore the media articulation of the China-South Africa relationship media framing theory was employed. The frame analysis was conducted by analysing the content of 50 articles published in the South African press between March and October 2015. The analysis found three mega-frames: imperialism, globalisation and nationalism. The imperialism and globalisation frames are consistent with other academic and media literature that considers the China-Africa relationship as either colonial or a natural outcome of global market dynamics. The role of frame sponsors and their influence on the framing process was also explored. The majority of frame sponsors were official government, trade union and academic sources, suggesting an elite contestation. Notably absent were Chinese frame sponsors and the views of teachers, parents or learners. Government frame sponsors promoted the globalisation mega-frame while trade union sources promoted the imperialism and nationalism frames. The results suggest that the South African media articulates the China-South Africa relationship using the binary of colonial predator or developmental partner, where a more nuanced reading may prove more fruitful in understanding the dynamics of their relationship.MT201

Topic Retrospection with Storyline-based Summarization on News Reports

The electronics newspaper becomes a main source for online news readers. When facing the numerous stories of a series of events, news readers need some supports in order to review a topic in an efficient way. Besides identifying events and presenting the search results with news titles and keywords the TDT (Topic Detection and Tracking) is used to do, a summarized text to present event evolution is necessary for general news readers to review events under a news topic. This paper proposes a topic retrospection process and implements the SToRe system that identifies various events under a news topic, and composes a summary that news readers can get the sketch of event evolution in the topic. It consists of three main functions: event identification, main storyline construction and storyline-based summarization. The constructed main storyline can remove the irrelevant events and present a main theme. The summarization extracts the representative sentences and takes the main theme as the template to compose summary. The summarization not only provides enough information to comprehend the development of a topic, but also serves as an index to help readers to find more detailed information. A lab experiment is conducted to evaluate the SToRe system in the question-and-answer (Q&A) setting. The experimental results show that the SToRe system enables news readers to effectively and efficiently capture the evolution of a news topic

Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy

Deconstructing the “editorial analogy,” and analogical reasoning more generally, in First Amendment litigation involving powerful tech companies

The journalism of China

89 pages, A list of Chinese newspapers : p. 79-88, Chinese magazines and trade journals : p. 88-89, University of Missouri bulletin ; v. 23, no. 34. Journalism series ; no. 26https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/moore/1095/thumbnail.jp