Dissecting the image of Elsa towards semiotic reading of the Philippine classic film ‘Himala’

Himala (Miracle) is one of the Philippine classic films produced in 1982 by the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines. Aside from several local and international awards given to the film, it was also chosen as the Best Asia-Pacific Film of All Time in 2008 by the CNN and the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. The film narrates the story of Elsa, who induced the people of Cupang to believe that she had witnessed the apparition of the Virgin Mary in the hill during the eclipse. She also made the people believe that she can heal those who have diseases, that have resulted to many hopefuls flocking on her house. But who is Elsa? This paper focused on dissecting the character of Elsa to present new interpretations of the film. Through Roland Barthes’ Semiotic Theory, the study determined different images of Elsa such as Elsa is a god-like figure; Elsa is a curse, where the tough luck of Cupang came from; and Elsa is a religious prostitute that sells her so-called miracle for those who are hopeless. Using semiotics, it can be said that the film shows not only the socio-cultural, economic, and political issues in the country, but the dismantling of patriarchal society. The reading made to the character of Elsa shows the reconstruction of feminist culture in the film, which proves that women are more powerful than men

Ang mito ng bayanihan of \u27d pipol: Isang semiotikang pagbasa ng Juan for all, all for Juan ng Eat Bulaga!

Ginamit sa pag-aaral na ito ang mga imahe sa segment ng Eat Bulaga na Juan for All, All for Juan mula sa 52 na Sabadong episode sa taong 2013: ang title card, tindahan, kwento ng mga nanalo, pagkain, si Bossing at sina Jose, Wally at Paolo, bayanihan line at plastik na bote. Ang mga imaheng napili na ginawang tuntungan ng mananaliksik sa pagsusuri ay hinati sa dalawang bahagi: ang estratehiya ng Eat Bulaga bilang tagapagbigay-biyaya sa bayan (Juan for All) at ang Barangay bilang bayan na tumutulong sa adhikain ng Eat Bulaga (All for Juan). Sa huli, sa pamamagitan ng teoryang Semiotika ni Roland Barthes, sinuri ang bawat imaheng kinuha sa palabas upang masipat ang konsepto ng bayanihan of „d pipol na itinataguyod ng palabas. Ipinakita sa pagsusuri na ang paglalapat ng bayanihan sa Juan for All, All for Juan ay nagsilbing estratehiya ng palabas upang maikubli ang mga kontradiksyong maikakabit dito – ang walang patid na komersyalismo at kapitalismo ng mga naghaharing-uri sa bansa

State of communicating children protection in Taguig City, Philippines: Basis for a sustainable development plan

This study is an attempt to describe the state of communicating children\u27s protection in Taguig City, Philippines. To achieve this goal, the researchers conducted series of interviews with 10 bonafide residents, who have at least one child or grandchild, and five officers of Violence Against Women and Children (VAWC) from five identified most populated barangays in Taguig City in terms of the population size of children. These barangays are Lower Bicutan, Central Signal Village, New Lower Bicutan, Western Bicutan, and Upper Bicutan. The gathered data reveals that there are various activities on children\u27s protection, ways on how these are disseminated, and challenges in coordinating with the communities. For instance, some of the themes that emerged in the analysis are curfew for minors, community-based education on children’s protection, patrolling, utilization of print media, social media consumption, poor quality and lack of materials, and lack of effort from the authority. Themes generated from the gathered data can also help identify issues related to child protection that the local government of Taguig City must address. Through the inputs of this study, a development plan can be proposed to sustain the needs of the community in general as far as children protection is concerned. © 2020 RJ4All

#Walangpasok on Twitter: Natural language processing as a method for analyzing tweets on class suspensions in the Philippines

In this study, we aim to prove that natural language processing (NLP) can be used as a method for analyzing qualitative data like tweets. To validate this, we examine various topics emerging from tweets about class suspensions in the Philippines using #walangpasok (no classes). By utilizing three NLP techniques, we presented various topics. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), the study identified the following: (1) information dissemination and public announcements from government offices, and (2) sentiments of students. Through Word2Vec, we generated (1) monitoring and dissemination of alerts and warnings, (2) local government accountability, and (3) sentiments of Twitter users. An intrinsic evaluation was conducted for word2vec model using cosine similarity. The word-groups have an average cosine similarity of 0.997811. Lastly, the topics that emerged using K-means are (1) weather advisory, (2) class suspension announcements, (3) role of local government, and (4) users\u27 sentiments and outlook towards a situation. The number of clusters generated by the k-means clustering algorithm was decided based on the silhouette score of 0.0153423865462. It turns out that the study provided the same results using NLP techniques. We also performed open coding to analyze the data manually and to ensure that the obtained results using the techniques are accurate. Thus, the use of NLP as a method of qualitative data analysis can be considered reliable and may be recommended to use in other qualitative research, particularly in the field of social sciences. © 2020 IEEE