Participation structure in fictional discourse: Authors, scriptwriters, audiences and characters

This chapter provides an overview of the participation structure in fic- tional discourse by discussing the relevant theoretical participation frameworks. The main focus is on the discourse of film and television, which is discussed in-depth, before the participation structures of literary fiction and drama are also addressed. The discussion highlights the participant roles each of the models describes for authors/producers, characters, and particularly for recipients/read- ers, which are given most focus in pragmatic research. One of the key differences between different frameworks has been the conceptualization of recipients/readers as either ratified participants or unratified overhearers. The chapter explains the terms as they are used by Goffman (1976, 1979) as well as the different positions that the respective theoretical approaches adopt

Subtitles and cinematic meaning-making: Interlingual subtitles as textual agents

This theoretical paper adopts the point of view of the audience of subtitled films and outlines a theory of subtitles as communicative agents within the participation structures of film reception. Based on examples from three Swiss fiction films - Heidi (2015), Heimatland (2015) and Der Goalie bin ig (2014) - the following communicative effects are found and illustrated: uniformity, authorisation, foregrounding, aestheticisation, foreignisation. These effects are conceptualised in terms of Constitutive Communication theory and textual agency (Cooren. 2004. Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings. Organization 11(3). 373-393. doi:10.1177/1350508404041998), which describe that by communicating with audiences, subtitles animate into being other participants in film discourse and contribute to what viewers take away in terms of characters, stories, the cultural aspects they represent and the source culture(s) from which the text is perceived to communicate

"This is not the place to bother people about BTS": Pseudo-synchronicity and interaction in timed comments by Hallyu fans on the video streaming platform Viki

The community of users on Viki.com, a video streaming platform distributing Asian television to an international audience, use the site to engage with streams of television dramas. Rather than just being passive consumers, viewers interact in a range of different ways, among them the use of Timed Comments (TC). TCs are comments viewers post while viewing dramas. Subsequent viewers can read these comments when streaming the same episode. Users can read and respond to comments by previous viewers as if they were written at the time of watching (similar to Danmaku). Building on our previous work on Viki-TCs, we have framed the community mainly as a harmonious collective engaging with artefacts from a different cultural and linguistic context. In this study, we focus on the creation of pseudo-synchronicity by looking at interactivity between TC writers and in particular on those TCs that construct conflict. Our corpus consists of 320,000 multilingual, but predominantly English comments. We make use of an exhaustively annotated sample of 8,930 comments to extract and formalize patterns of implicit and explicit interaction and locate them in the larger corpus using corpus linguistic methods. Special attention is given to conflictual interaction in connection with plot spoilers, judgments on co-viewers' analytic and experiential skills and inappropriate language usage, negative comments on actor appearance, commenters using the space for fan interaction outside of the drama-scope and the technical use of the platform. These conflictual interactions often function as negotiations of the platform norms, socialize viewers into how the space works and can thus also be linked to community building. Our study contributes to understanding better how online fan community norms are built and behavior is sanctioned or (implicitly) condoned through interaction. In this way we contribute both to the study of interaction in a context that works online and asynchronously and to the study of online fan communities

Translating the other: Communal TV watching of Korean TV drama

Our research is situated in the field of the pragmatics of fiction (Locher and Jucker 2017; Messerli 2017), and explores a website that makes Asian drama series and movies accessible to an international audience by means of fan generated subtitles in over 150 languages ( www.viki.com ; Dwyer 2012, 2017). The streaming site offers a social network and participatory element in that it provides viewers with different possibilities of participation. Next to producing subtitles in teams, members can comment on episodes and actors, rate shows, produce their own videos, write to each other, etc. This paper explores the possibility of viewers commenting on the episode while it is being watched as a dynamic form of active reception. These comments are time-aligned with the video, which acts as the pivot of the interaction. Viewers can read other fans' comments, and can contribute their own comments and thus their own voice to this additional communal layer of drama series reception. Despite the fact that viewers typically view episodes and read/write comments asynchronously, a simultaneous viewing experience among an international community is created. We present a case study of the viewing of the first episode of two series and show how the commentators negotiate a number of issues, which include expectations about genre, character development, intertextuality and culture. We demonstrate that engaging with the video through written comments, engaging with each other in these comments and participating cross-linguistically are highly interactive, pragmatic achievements between different modes of communication of which the video itself is the starting point. Crucially, the timed comments also contribute to translating and making sense of the cultural 'other' as rendered in the videos. This is particularly the case in the comments on culture triggered by the video but also transpires in dialogues between the members

Humour support and emotive stance in comments on Korean TV Drama

Viewers on viki.com comment on Korean television drama series while watching: They produce timed comments tied to the timecode of the audiovisual stream. Among the functions these comments have in the community, the expression of emotive stance is central. Importantly, this includes humour support encoded in a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic ways. Our study identifies a range of humour support indicators, which allow us to find comments that are responses to humour. Accordingly, our study explores how commenters make use of the affordances of the Viki timed comment feature to linguistically and paralinguistically encode their humorous reaction to fictional events and to previous comments. We do this both quantitatively e based on a multilingual corpus of all 320,118 timed comments that accompany five Korean dramas we randomly selected (80 episodes in total), and qualitatively based on the in-depth analysis of two episodes. What we contribute is a typology and the distribution of humour support indicators used in a novel genre of technology-mediated communication as well as insights into how the viewing community collectively does humour support. Finally, we also present the semi-automatic detection of humour support as a viable strategy to objectively identify humour-relevant scenes in Korean TV drama

Contrastive analysis of English fan and professional subtitles of Korean TV Drama

We compare fan subtitles and subtitles produced by professionals in order to detect what concepts each of them foreground, and how they differ in register and in translation strategy. Differences are systematically explored with the help of corpus-assisted discourse analysis to contrast two sets of English subtitles from 26 Korean dramas and 451 episodes - fan subtitles from Viki and professional subtitles from Netflix. Results reveal that professional translators show more target text orientation, whereas fan translators position themselves and their readers as expert members of their community, aiming for access to the source text. We find no clear difference in register, but professional subtitles are more concise, whereas Viki subtitles are longer and employ, e.g., hedges and disfluency markers

Metaphors we read by: Finding metaphorical conceptualizations of reading in web 2.0 book reviews

While interdisciplinary research on metaphor is abundant (Eggs, 2000; Semino & Demjén, 2017; Veale et al., 2016), it is still scarce in Digital Humanities. At the intersection of literary studies, corpus stylistics, and digital humanities, we present an exploratory quantitative metaphor analysis of a corpus of German language lay book reviews. Using a deliberately simple methodological approach that operates on seed words for conceptual sources and targets we investigate how reading experiences of literary texts are metaphorically presented by reviewers. We explore a corpus of approx. 1.3 mill. book reviews for metaphors used to conceptualize the target domain READING EXPERIENCE. In line with conceptual metaphor theory, metaphors in language are understood as closely linked to human thought processes and experiences (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, pp. 4–6; Shutova, 2017). They are mappings from typically more basic experiential source domains (LIFE) to more abstract target domains (READING EXPERIENCE), indicated by indirectly used lexis (the words come, end, and road in “we've come to the end of our road”, VUAMC, Steen et al., 2010). Starting from findings on literature reviews in English (Stockwell, 2009; Nuttall & Harrison, 2018) and on reviews in German (Köhler, 1999), we analyze metaphor patterns in social reading networks, with a particular focus on the mapping READING EXPERIENCE IS MOTION. The main aim at this stage is to draw up a first typology of mappings

On a Cross-Cultural Memescape: Switzerland through Nation Memes from within and from the Outside

This paper offers a cross-cultural contrastive study of what we term ‘nation memes’. These are humorous internet memes which refer to a particular country/nation. Our analysis of cultural scripts in memes related to Switzerland is based on a tripartite corpus of digital items shared by Polish, Swiss and international communities. By adopting a grounded-theory approach, we examine the prevalent scripts that represent the Swiss and Switzerland from each of the three perspectives. The results of our qualitative study indicate that Swiss memes are based on experiential knowledge of life in Switzerland, as well as a few stereotypes adopted by the Swiss about their own nation. The Polish subcorpus addresses Switzerland from an outsider perspective by invoking well-known cultural scripts, similar to those on international websites, on which Polish users sometimes scavenge. However, the Polish memescape uses scripts about Switzerland to address problems and scripts specific to Poland. Importantly, nation memes do not necessarily involve humorous disparagement, i.e. they do not always take Switzerland/the Swiss to be the target at which to poke fun when building humorous superiority. Moreover, by referring to their own national vices, the Swiss and Poles sometimes use cultural scripts as the basis for self-deprecating humour

Impact of deep learning image reconstructions (DLIR) on coronary artery calcium quantification

BACKGROUND Deep learning image reconstructions (DLIR) have been recently introduced as an alternative to filtered back projection (FBP) and iterative reconstruction (IR) algorithms for computed tomography (CT) image reconstruction. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of DLIR on image quality and quantification of coronary artery calcium (CAC) in comparison to FBP. METHODS One hundred patients were consecutively enrolled. Image quality-associated variables (noise, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR)) as well as CAC-derived parameters (Agatston score, mass, and volume) were calculated from images reconstructed by using FBP and three different strengths of DLIR (low (DLIR_L), medium (DLIR_M), and high (DLIR_H)). Patients were stratified into 4 risk categories according to the Coronary Artery Calcium - Data and Reporting System (CAC-DRS) classification: 0 Agatston score (very low risk), 1-99 Agatston score (mildly increased risk), Agatston 100-299 (moderately increased risk), and ≥ 300 Agatston score (moderately-to-severely increased risk). RESULTS In comparison to standard FBP, increasing strength of DLIR was associated with a significant and progressive decrease of image noise (p < 0.001) alongside a significant and progressive increase of both SNR and CNR (p < 0.001). The use of incremental levels of DLIR was associated with a significant decrease of Agatston CAC score and CAC volume (p < 0.001), while mass score remained unchanged when compared to FBP (p = 0.232). The underestimation of Agatston CAC led to a CAC-DRS misclassification rate of 8%. CONCLUSION DLIR systematically underestimates Agatston CAC score. Therefore, DLIR should be used cautiously for cardiovascular risk assessment. KEY POINTS • In coronary artery calcium imaging, the implementation of deep learning image reconstructions improves image quality, by decreasing the level of image noise. • Deep learning image reconstructions systematically underestimate Agatston coronary artery calcium score. • Deep learning image reconstructions should be used cautiously in clinical routine to measure Agatston coronary artery calcium score for cardiovascular risk assessment

Basal conditions at Engabreen, Norway, inferred from surface measurements and inverse modelling

Engabreen is an outlet glacier of the Svartisen Ice Cap located in Northern Norway. It is a unique glacier due to the Svartisen Subglacial Laboratory which allows direct access to the glacier bed. In this study, we combine both sub- and supraglacial observations with ice-flow modelling in order to investigate conditions at the bed of Engabreen both spatially and temporally. We use the full-Stokes model Elmer/Ice and satellite-based surface-velocity maps from 2010 and 2014 to infer patterns of basal friction. Direct measurements of basal sliding and deformation of lower layers of the ice are used to adjust the ice viscosity and provide essential input to the setup of our model and influence the interpretation of the results. We find a clear seasonal cycle in the subglacial conditions at the higher elevation region of the study area and discuss this in relation to the subglacial hydrological system. Our results also reveal an area with an overdeepening where basal friction is significantly lower than elsewhere on the glacier all year round. We attribute this to either water pooling at the base, or saturated sediments and increased strain heating at this location which softens the ice further