Between Silence and Salience. A Multimethod Model to Study Frame Building from a Journalistic Perspective

Research into frame building, which aims to investigate the development of news framing in the journalistic realm, is on the rise. While most frame-building studies focus on the relative contribution of journalists or sources to news frames, this article presents and evaluates an integrated methodological model. The model is based on constructionist premises with the purpose of examining how frames are created as part of the interaction among reporters, editors, and sources. Based on a review of the methodologies used in earlier frame-building studies, we propose an ethnographic four-phase model in which multiple methods are interwoven: newsroom observations, reconstruction interviews, and frame analyses of news products (which illustrate what is made salient) as well as production documents (which also reveal what is silenced). The model is illustrated with two multisited studies in newspaper newsrooms: an interview-based study of the news reports of preselected journalists and an observation-based study for which the news reports to be analyzed were selected based on their salience in newsroom meetings. Through this multimethod model, this paper offers some guidelines for the study of frame building from a journalistic perspective

In search of the pitiful victim: A frame analysis of Dutch, Flemish and British newspapers and NGO-advertisements

Contains fulltext : 191166.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the representation of global poverty in Western media. Both NGOs and journalists are being criticized for their one-sided emphasis on the misery and dependency of people in developing countries. The objective of this paper is to measure the extent of such problematizing representation in newspaper articles and NGO-advertisements. A frame analysis was conducted of 876 articles and 284 advertisements from the Netherlands, Flanders and the United Kingdom. The results challenge some conventional assumptions. Overall, the 'victim frame' and 'pitiful images' do not dominate the discourse of NGOs and newspapers. However, British NGOs are an exception: they portray the poor as 'pitiful victims' twice as often as their counterparts in the Netherlands and Flanders. Furthermore, the findings confirm the conviction that the media predominantly highlight poor countries' dependence on the West.18 p

Fujaba hits the Wall(-e)

With the ever increasing pervasiveness of software in every day's life, it is quite easy to explain children the importance of software development. Especially when using gadgets such as LEGO robots, one can fascinate young pupils. It is much harder though to and fair link to the actual educational and research programs from a particular university without blowing the audience away with details of a particular Java framework. This paper illustrates how one can use Fujaba to involve children from 8 to 18 years old in realistic requirements elicitation workshops. The children implicitly get in touch with the object-oriented paradigm by playing in the real world the communication between objects in a robot's computer. Fujaba's visual object browser provides a convincing means to illustrate that the game adequately represents the robot's internals

An open platform for personal health record apps with platform-level privacy protection

One of the main barriers to the adoption of Personal Health Records (PHR) systems is their closed nature. It has been argued in the literature that this barrier can be overcome by introducing an open market of substitutable PHR apps. The requirements introduced by such an open market on the underlying platform have also been derived. In this paper, we argue that MyPHRMachines, a cloud-based PHR platform recently developed by the authors, satisfies these requirements better than its alternatives. The MyPHRMachines platform leverages Virtual Machines as flexible and secure execution sandboxes for health apps. MyPHRMachines does not prevent pushing hospital- or patient-generated data to one of its instances, nor does it prevent patients from sharing data with their trusted caregivers. External software developers have minimal barriers to contribute innovative apps to the platform, since apps are only required to avoid pushing patient data outside a MyPHRMachines cloud. We demonstrate the potential of MyPHRMachines by presenting two externally contributed apps. Both apps provide functionality going beyond the state-of-the-art in their application domain, while they did not require any specific MyPHRMachines platform extension

The half-life of 221^{221}Fr in Si and Au at 4K and at mK temperatures

The half-life of the $\alpha$ decaying nucleus $^{221}$Fr was determined in different environments, i.e. embedded in Si at 4 K, and embedded in Au at 4 K and about 20 mK. No differences in half-life for these different conditions were observed within 0.1%. Furthermore, we quote a new value for the absolute half-life of $^{221}$Fr of t$_{1/2}$ = 286.1(10) s, which is of comparable precision to the most precise value available in literature