'What about the wolves?’: The use of scripture in YouTube arguments

Reading and interpreting the Bible is an important practice in Evangelical Christian communities, both online and offline. Members of these communities employ biblical exegesis not only in convincing others about the validity of their beliefs, but also influencing the development of the social context in which they interact. Thus, reading and interpretation of the Bible serves both a theological purpose, allowing users to provide textual evidence for beliefs, and a practical social purpose, allowing users to map their own and others’ actions onto biblical texts, either to condone or to condemn them. For users who hold the same belief about the importance of the Bible in making moral judgements, the biblical text can be a particularly useful tool to position oneself and one's actions. In this article, I employ concepts from positioning theory, to analyse how Evangelical Christian YouTube users read across the books of the Bible by treating similar uses of metaphorical language as interchangeable, and using them to position particular users and to make moral judgements about their actions. The analysis shows that reading and exegesis of scripture can be used in dynamic online environments to map characters and storylines from diverse biblical passages onto a particular online argument, providing a common resource for users from different backgrounds and contexts. Findings show that reading and interpretation of scriptures provide a powerful means of claiming authority for Evangelical Christians in the community, and are used to position oneself and one's actions, influencing the subsequent discourse and emerging social context

Slacktivists or Activists?: Identity Work in the Virtual Disability March

Protests are important social forms of activism, but can be inaccessible to people with disabilities. Online activism, like the 2017 Disability March, has provided alternative venues for involvement in accessible protesting and social movements. In this study, we use identity theory as a lens to understand why and how disabled activists engaged in an online movement, and its impact on their self-concepts. We interviewed 18 disabled activists about their experiences with online protesting during the Disability March. Respondents' identities (as both disabled individuals and as activists) led them to organize or join the March, evolved alongside the group's actions, and were reprioritized or strained as a result of their involvement. Our findings describe the values and limitations of this activism to our respondents, highlight the tensions they perceived about their activist identities, and present opportunities to support further accessibility and identity changes by integrating technology into their activist experiences

Mapping AI Arguments in Journalism Studies

This study investigates and suggests typologies for examining Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the domains of journalism and mass communication research. We aim to elucidate the seven distinct subfields of AI, which encompass machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, expert systems, planning, scheduling, optimization, robotics, and computer vision, through the provision of concrete examples and practical applications. The primary objective is to devise a structured framework that can help AI researchers in the field of journalism. By comprehending the operational principles of each subfield, scholars can enhance their ability to focus on a specific facet when analyzing a particular research topic

Network Structure and User Roles of a Crowdsourcing Community – The Context of Social Innovations for a Development Project

The principles of crowdsourcing are increasingly applied in social contexts like development projects. In this study we explore a crowdsourcing community, which aims to enhance conditions in low income communities. We investigate the network structures of the community and detect behavioral pattern and user roles based on participation behavior for this specific context. Overall, the observed community shows a high level of collaboration and reciprocal dialogue. On the individual level we located four different user roles distinct in their interaction and contribution behavior. So called “collaborators” are considered as unique user role in an online community within a social context. We contribute to the theory of crowdsourcing by illustrating that context and purpose of crowdsourcing initiatives may influence the behavioral pattern of users. Further we add insights to the junctures between crowdsourcing and social innovation in the context of open development

Understanding Social Reasoning in Language Models with Language Models

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, understanding their ability to comprehend human mental states becomes critical for ensuring effective interactions. However, despite the recent attempts to assess the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the degree to which these models can align with human ToM remains a nuanced topic of exploration. This is primarily due to two distinct challenges: (1) the presence of inconsistent results from previous evaluations, and (2) concerns surrounding the validity of existing evaluation methodologies. To address these challenges, we present a novel framework for procedurally generating evaluations with LLMs by populating causal templates. Using our framework, we create a new social reasoning benchmark (BigToM) for LLMs which consists of 25 controls and 5,000 model-written evaluations. We find that human participants rate the quality of our benchmark higher than previous crowd-sourced evaluations and comparable to expert-written evaluations. Using BigToM, we evaluate the social reasoning capabilities of a variety of LLMs and compare model performances with human performance. Our results suggest that GPT4 has ToM capabilities that mirror human inference patterns, though less reliable, while other LLMs struggle

Inspiring disruptive change: A novel approach to modelling the value creation process

This methodology paper puts forth a novel process with which to portray the value network and enterprise asset creation. Real cases which involved field research by the authors are used to present and better illustrate certain concepts. Organizations involve intense human interaction and require novel ways which make evident variations in performance, a central aspect of management today and in the near future. Our contribution is in combining the use of the narrative / storylines, game design patterns, value network analysis and the dynamic capabilities paradigm to reduce the complexity of the strategy debate. Our modelling tool is also pictorial and so simple to grasp. The primary value of graphical notations lies in their communication and understanding possibilities (Fowler, 2004). The importance of the dynamic capabilities paradigm (Teece et al., 1997) is emphasized in which ICT plays a central and strategic role (Pavlou, 2004) in the creation of value and consequently enterprise assets. Geertz (2000) brought attention to the fact that research is performed in order to clarify or usefully revise our own or someone else’s ideas and we see this clarification and revision as being necessary given a heightened need to motivate and inspire people to carry out actions of disruptive change (Denning, 2004)

Trends in qualitative research in language teaching since 2000

This paper reviews developments in qualitative research in language teaching since the year 2000, focusing on its contributions to the field and identifying issues that emerge. Its aims are to identify those areas in language teaching where qualitative research has the greatest potential and indicate what needs to be done to further improve the quality of its contribution. The paper begins by highlighting current trends and debates in the general area of qualitative research and offering a working definition of the term. At its core is an overview of developments in the new millennium based on the analysis of papers published in 15 journals related to the field of language teaching and a more detailed description, drawn from a range of sources, of exemplary contributions during that period. Issues of quality are also considered, using illustrative cases to point to aspects of published research that deserve closer attention in future work, and key publications on qualitative research practice are reviewed

Mobile Historical

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) seeks NEH Level II Start-Up support for work leading toward the release of Mobile Historical, an open-source (and, optionally, hosted) software application (app) that allows cultural institutions, K-16 teachers, and university-based humanists to publish humanities information to mobile devices. The proposed project builds and extends (dramatically so) an existing mobile app development project aimed at curating the city, Cleveland Historical. We seek funding to scale up, revise, and extend our previous work toward the creation of the open-source tool Mobile Historical. Thus, the principal activities of this proposal are focused on creating a new vehicle for interpretive humanities publishing in mobile environments via innovative technologies and guidance on how to curate humanities content, including especially developing approaches to state-of-the-art interactive humanistic learning for broad public audiences and users