Agenda setting and active audiences in online coverage of human trafficking

Online news platforms and social media increasingly influence the public agenda on social issues such as human trafficking. Yet despite the popularity of online news and the availability of sophisticated tools for analyzing digital texts, little is known about the relations between news coverage of human trafficking and audiences’ reactions to and interpretations of such coverage. In this paper, we examine journalists’ and commenters’ topic choices in coverage and discussion of human trafficking in the British newspaper The Guardian from 2009 to 2014. We use latent semantic analysis to identify 11 topics discussed by both journalists and readers, and analyze each topic in terms of the degree to which journalists and readers agree or disagree in their topic preferences. We find that four topics were preferred equally by journalists and commenters, four were preferred by journalists, and three were preferred by commenters. Our findings suggest that theories of ‘agenda setting’ and of the ‘active audience’ are not mutually exclusive, and the scope of explanation of each depends partly on the specific topic or subtopic that is analyzed

Secondary production and energetics of the shrimp Caridina nilotica in Lake Victoria, East Africa: model development and application

Measurements of body mass, carbon content, respiration, growth, and egestion are combined in a model of secondary production by the tropical freshwater shrimp Caridina . The model is developed to permit its direct application to empirical data for abundances and size frequency distributions of field populations. Model calculations combined with population data for offshore Lake Victoria over a period of two years indicate that Caridina consume the equivalent of 2.2% of annual lake primary production. Present net annual secondary production by the shrimp is an order of magnitude greater than the present fishery yield of the lake. Detritus-fed experimental organisms evidently had assimilation efficiencies as low as 10% by model calculation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42892/1/10750_2004_Article_BF00031923.pd

From CAQDAS to Text Mining : the domain ontology as a model of knowledge representation about qualitative research practices

The nature of qualitative research practices is multiparadigmaticity which creates coexistence of different research and analytical approaches. This paper is a methodological reflection on how the process of qualitative data analysis is developing, moving from traditional CAQDAS coding procedures through Content Analysis dictionary-based approach towards the textual data exploration for knowledge discovery in corpora using Natural Language Processing and Text Mining procedures. This change is described on the example of the process of analyzing and discovering the ways through which qualitative research practices are conceptualized and represented in the vivid language of scholarly articles. Taking into account the problem of a "curse of abundance" in the present-day field of qualitative research I try to organize and articulate these practices in a legible system of knowledge representation about contemporary qualitative research field