The chequered career of a cryptic concept

Copyright @ 2006 The Autho

An Analysis of Media Perceptions Regarding African Americans in Gettsyburg Throughout 1963

On Monday, September 28, 1863, the Compiler, Gettysburg Pennsylvania’s Democratic newspaper, published an article taken from the Sussex Messenger about a black man forcing himself onto a white woman. The girl, daughter of Mr. Daniel Messick, was going from her father’s house which was just outside of the town limits to a neighbor’s home when she was suddenly assaulted by a black man. The man jumped out from behind thick brush and grabbed the girl. A struggle ensued and the assailant ripped off the girl’s clothing and put his hand over her mouth in order to keep her from calling for help. Despite the man’s best attempts to silence his victim’s cries, nearby neighbors heard the muffled screams and rushed to the girl’s aid. They arrived just in time to prevent the man from raping the girl. The girl was released from her assailant and the local constabulary took the man into custody. The Adams Sentinel, the Compiler’s Republican counterpart, did not run the story. Although this incident did not take place in Gettysburg, the instance effectively reflects attitudes and perceptions held by two of the area’s largest and most prosperous newspapers: the Adams Sentinel and the Compiler

The Grub-Street Journal and the Changing Culture of Information in the Early 1730s

Between 1730 and 1733, the Grub-Street Journal was one of the most renowned and controversial weekly news-sheets produced and sold in London. This article traces the attempts made by the editors of the Journal to make sense of, and manipulate, the changing fashions related to the organization and consumption of information. The Grub-Street Journal linked critiques of new forms of information organization, such as printed volumes with prefaces and indexes, with wider societal changes taking place. This can be seen in the Journal’s shifting relationships with its audiences and competing journals. As the weekly news-sheet became increasingly outmoded, the editors of the Journal could no longer successfully manipulate its position within the London coffee-house network, launching more direct attacks on the publication trade. The Journal offers a fascinating insight into the changing culture of information in the 1730s and highlights the way in which images connected to information are used to explore cultural change, throughout recorded history

Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories ("fake news"), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online sur-vey, we find:(i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with14 percent of Americans calling social media their "most important" source;(ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared8 million times;(iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and(iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks

Satirical game design : the case of the boardgame construction BOOM!

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3402942.3403008To recognize satire, the audience must be aware of the context and the satirical intent of the work in question. Academic research on the possibilities and effects of satire in games is minimal, if compared with other rhetorical uses of playful interaction. This paper contributes to our understanding of satire in games by discussing and annotating design decisions that were meant to be taken satirically. More specifically, the focus of this paper is Construction BOOM!, a tile-laying boardgame designed by the some of the authors of the paper (Gualeni and Schellekens) themselves with the overt intention of satirizing the current situation of real-estate development in Malta. Part of our contribution consists in leveraging the notion of the ‘implied designer’ as articulated by Van de Mosselaer and Gualeni to show how game elements participate in the player's inferring a satiric implied designer for the game. The paper highlights the opportunities available for designers to implement satire into the various elements of a game and opens the door to further research into exploring how much these elements influence the perception of satire by players.peer-reviewe

Experiments on Satire Detection for Norwegian News Articles

Masteroppgave i informasjonsvitenskapINFO390MASV-INF