Latent and explicit mnemonic communities on social media:studying digital memory formation through hashtag co-occurrence analysis

This article explores the nature and dynamics of mnemonic communities within the context of social media platforms and proposes to identify mnemonic communities using hashtag co-occurrence analysis. The article distinguishes between 'explicit' and 'latent' mnemonic communities, arguing that while some digital mnemonic communities may exhibit characteristics of offline communities, others exist latently as discursive spaces or semiospheres without direct awareness. On platforms like Instagram, hashtags function as semiotic markers, but also as user-chosen indexes to the content. As hashtags link the social and semantic aspects of community formation, hashtag co-occurrence analysis offers a robust framework for understanding and mapping these communities. This method allows to detect and analyse patterns of hashtag use that suggest the presence of networked community structures that may not be apparent or conscious to the social media users themselves. Additionally, a metric is introduced for determining the degree of 'latentness' of communities that quantifies the cohesion within communities compared to their external connections. The article demonstrates this approach by applying hashtag co-occurrence analysis to a dataset of Instagram posts tagged with #Juneteenth, a popular hashtag used to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. It identifies 87 mnemonic communities that reflect the diversity and complexity of how platforms facilitate memory-sharing practices and the role of semiotic markers in forming (latent) mnemonic networks.</p

Latent and explicit mnemonic communities on social media:studying digital memory formation through hashtag co-occurrence analysis

This article explores the nature and dynamics of mnemonic communities within the context of social media platforms and proposes to identify mnemonic communities using hashtag co-occurrence analysis. The article distinguishes between 'explicit' and 'latent' mnemonic communities, arguing that while some digital mnemonic communities may exhibit characteristics of offline communities, others exist latently as discursive spaces or semiospheres without direct awareness. On platforms like Instagram, hashtags function as semiotic markers, but also as user-chosen indexes to the content. As hashtags link the social and semantic aspects of community formation, hashtag co-occurrence analysis offers a robust framework for understanding and mapping these communities. This method allows to detect and analyse patterns of hashtag use that suggest the presence of networked community structures that may not be apparent or conscious to the social media users themselves. Additionally, a metric is introduced for determining the degree of 'latentness' of communities that quantifies the cohesion within communities compared to their external connections. The article demonstrates this approach by applying hashtag co-occurrence analysis to a dataset of Instagram posts tagged with #Juneteenth, a popular hashtag used to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. It identifies 87 mnemonic communities that reflect the diversity and complexity of how platforms facilitate memory-sharing practices and the role of semiotic markers in forming (latent) mnemonic networks.</p

Immunomodulation by diet : individual differences in sensitivity in layer hens

Enhancing relevant immunity of production animals to achieve more robust animals is receiving more and more attention. Several epidemics have hit production animals recently and with devastating consequences, but enhancing diseases resistance increasingly provides new opportunities. Furthermore, welfare and health of production animals is becoming a more and more consumer driven topic. Several routes are being used to approach the possibility of enhancing immunity such as selective breeding, enriched and altered housing conditions, vaccination programs, diet supplementation with immune stimulating components, and other management procedures. Disease susceptibility has been shown to be related to stress reactivity, which in turn is related to differences in HPA axis reactivity. Interestingly, independent of selection criteria used, the extremes of various selection procedures result in a recurrent dichotomy in HPA axis reactivity, either being hyperresponsive or hyporesponsive to stress. Animals with a hyperresponsive HPA axis show greater environmental sensitivity, while the hyporeactive animals are more intrinsically regulated. Often, research on immunomodulation is performed with compromised animals and/or exaggerated supplementation of dietary components in one generation of animals, but epigenetics by definition seems to be the mechanism for mothers to prepare their offspring for the environment they will be born into. Enhancing immunity through normal diet in uncompromised animals is rarely investigated, let alone over generations. In this thesis the aim was to induce immunomodulation through diet in selection lines of chicken that have previously been selected on their antibody response to sheep red blood cells over two generations of chicken. First, potential HPA axis differences were examined in these selection lines to establish their environmental sensitivity, whereafter immunomodulation through normal diet was investigated in humoral and cellular parameters of immunity. As humoral immunocompentence was not easily modulated, an immune trigger was used to detect potential differences in humoral reactivity. The selection lines showed differential sensitivity to immunomodulation by diet in both generations, suggesting that adaptation to environmental factors may be a line-specific (genetically based) process, with differential neuroendocrine regulation. Most interestingly, the second generation showed effects of the diets in all the selection lines, albeit in different manners. It is concluded that normal diet can cause immunomodulation, mainly in animals with hyper HPA axis reactivity, and that introducing such practices may be more beneficial when mothers are treated, as all offspring showed immunomodulation, irrespective of selection line. While genetic background and/or epigenetic processes on neuroendocrine and immune regulation of the individual form the framework wherein individual immunomodulation by diet can take place, environmental conditions determine if the modulation is beneficial or not. <br/

Smiling in Auschwitz:Instagram Selfies and Historical Representation at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

The subject of the chapter is a project carried out on 17 January 2017 by the Israeli artist Shahak Shapira, entitled “Yolocaust”. As part of this project, the artist collected and shared photos – self-portraits (selfies) taken by people visiting the sites commemorating the Holocaust: the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. The photos published on social media are presented by the author as a testimony of inappropriate attitudes, a reflection of the ignorance and narcissistic attitude of the young generation towards the historical reality of the Holocaust. The author takes the interpretation that the way of constructing meaning in social media – where anyone can produce historical knowledge not only through written text, but a range of other means, such as spoken language, static and moving images, music, non-verbal sounds and gestures – leads to a postponement of the notion of “truth” and “semantic clarity”, becoming a threat to historical consciousness. Consequently, he puts forward the thesis that the photos in question do not, however, prove the individual attitude of their authors to historical events such as the Holocaust, but constitute an element of shaping cultural memory as a “ludic identity”