Alternating gaze in multi-party storytelling

We present a single case study on gaze alternation’ in three-party storytelling. The study makes use of the XML method, a ‘combinatorial approach’ (Haugh & Musgrave 2019) involving multimodal CA transcription converted into the XML syntax. We approach gaze alternation via (i) the addressee-status hypothesis, (ii) the texturing hypothesis, and (iii) the acceleration hypothesis. Hypothesis (i) proposes that the storyteller alternatingly looks at the recipients not only when their addressee status is symmetrical but also when their addressee status is asymmetrical. Hypothesis (ii) predicts that gaze alternation ‘textures’ the telling by occurring when the storytelling progresses from one segment to another. Hypothesis (iii) states that gaze alternation accelerates toward Climax and decelerates in Post-completion sequences. The analyses support the hypotheses. They suggest that alternating gaze works against the danger of exclusion caused by the dyadic structure of conversation. It further partakes in story organization as it occurs at points of transition from one story section to another section. Finally, accelerated gaze alternation constitutes an indexical process drawing the recipients’ attention to the immediate relevance of stance display (Stivers 2008). We conclude that the three hypotheses warrant further investigation to determine their generalizability across speakers and speech situations

‘I just found your blog’. The pragmatics of initiating comments on blog posts

In computer-mediated communication, the medium of blogs is typically viewed as consisting of posts composed by blog authors and comments which may be left by their readers. This study explores the relationship between these constituent parts of blogs and investigates the pragmatic ties that are established between blog posts and comments. The focus is on the preface position in comments, that is the very first position at the onset of a comment, to discover how they are generally introduced and which specific linguistic constructions are used to initiate them. The aim is to uncover how speaker changes – from blog author to commenter – are signalled linguistically, in addition to the blog specific metadata provided by the interface (e.g. the username or time stamp), and which pragmatic means are used to develop interpersonal relationships between users. Results show that the preface position of blog comments is fertile ground for the occurrence of expressive speech acts with commenters often initiating their comments by thanking or complimenting blog authors, which opens up further opportunity for the study of speech acts in large corpora

Conversation Analysis and the XML method

In this paper we introduce the XML method, a trio of technologies that can benefit conversation-analytic research. Specifically, we make a case for converting the center piece of CA research, the Jeffersonian transcript, into the format of the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML essentially turns documents into hierarchically ordered networks of nodes. As a network, an XML document can be exhaustively searched and any node or node set it contains can be extracted. We argue that the main benefit of formatting CA transcriptions in XML lies in the quantifiability that the format facilitates: CA-as-XML can provide precise "numbers and statistics" (Robinson 2007:65) thus helping to efficiently quantify observations and statistically substantiate claims about the 'generalizability' of observed practices of social action. We also introduce XPath and XQuery, two related query languages designed to exploit the XML format. Further, we describe XTranscript, a free online tool developed to convert completed CA transcripts to XML. Central to our approach is that the methodology be accessible to linguistics of varying levels of technical experience. Therefore, we also describe how this, and common concerns relating to the treatment of spoken data, have shaped our work in this area thus far

Quantitative Assessment of Robotic Swarm Coverage

This paper studies a generally applicable, sensitive, and intuitive error metric for the assessment of robotic swarm density controller performance. Inspired by vortex blob numerical methods, it overcomes the shortcomings of a common strategy based on discretization, and unifies other continuous notions of coverage. We present two benchmarks against which to compare the error metric value of a given swarm configuration: non-trivial bounds on the error metric, and the probability density function of the error metric when robot positions are sampled at random from the target swarm distribution. We give rigorous results that this probability density function of the error metric obeys a central limit theorem, allowing for more efficient numerical approximation. For both of these benchmarks, we present supporting theory, computation methodology, examples, and MATLAB implementation code.Comment: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO), Porto, Portugal, 29--31 July 2018. 11 pages, 4 figure

The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice

The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview and a qualitative analysis of such syntactic characteristics as length and structure of sentences and noun phrases. The analysis is viewed in the broader context of genre characteristics of court forms, their role within legal proceedings, and their function for eliciting narratives from court users. The findings show that while the elicitation strategies are not always coherently aligned with the guidance sections, the guidance itself condenses legal and procedural information into overly complex and verbose syntactic constructions. Comprehensibility barriers are thus created through breaks in information flow, ambiguous syntactic constructions, missing information and misalignment between questions and guidance. Such comprehension challenges have a negative impact on the potential of court users to effectively engage with legal proceedings

"Sorry to hear you're going through a difficult time": Investigating online discussions of consumer debt

As recent years have witnessed increasing pressure on personal finances, compounded by the current cost of living crisis, online forums have become an important resource for people dealing with financial precarity. In this article, we offer a corpus linguistic analysis of data from MoneySavingExpert.com, the UK's largest online money management advice forum, studying 207 threads and 41.4 million words of text posted from 2005 to 2021. Through measures of word frequency and word association, we uncover similarities and differences in language use on the debt-free wannabe (DFW) and mortgage-free wannabe (MFW) forums. Our findings show that the DFW forum focuses on interactive exchanges involving requests for help and offers of advice, while the MFW forum is characterised by goal setting and community building. We thus contribute new insights into the discursive construction of debt in digital media and provide further understanding of the role online forums play in supporting vulnerable people

BAME: A report on the use of the term and responses to it - Terminology Review for the BBC and Creative Industries

The use of the term BAME, an acronym used to refer to people from ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ backgrounds, has become widespread in the UK in recent years. From government reports, advocacy groups and journalistic reportage, BAME has become a catch-all moniker, interchangeably used as both a noun and adjective to signify, or “represent”, a heterogeneous band of people who do not identify as White when describing their identities, cultures, and experiences. Despite this wide spread usage,the term has garnered significant criticism from the very people it seeks to describe. With some people viewing it as an annoying “necessary evil”, to others seeing it as an insult that should never be used. A major concern, apparent in recent public responses to BAME, is that it homogenises culturally distinct social groups. Our aim in this report is to address the current, existing tensions around the use of BAME and ethnicity-related terminology in the creative industries as part of our broader work, research-based and vocational, to action change in the sector. The report makes a critical intervention in current debates, and hopes to drive forward a more thoughtful approach to how language about, and for, diverse communities is used in the future

TRAC:COVID Case study 2: misinformation, authority, and trust

This case study reports on a study of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Twitter and focuses on the scale and variety of iterations of vaccination hesitancy, misinformation and conspiracy theories in ~84 million tweets sampled between 1st January 2020 and 30th April 2021. Findings suggest that COVID-19-specific anti-vaccination (i.e. anti-vax) discourse is underpinned by political (dis)trust, fears of corruption, concerns over safety, and exists within a wider conspiracy theory network. 1. Despite the presence of vaccine misinformation, the majority of tweets about vaccines in relation to COVID-19 either do not contain – or are critical of – vaccine misinformation. 2. COVID-19 vaccine misinformation exists within a wider web of misinformation and conspiracy theories in which attempts are made to undermine confidence and trust in vaccines, health professionals, and policy-makers. 3. Anti-vax tweets often reference multiple anti-vax ideas as well as conspiracy theories not specifically linked to vaccines. 4. Thus, vaccine misinformation can be communicated in numerous ways and alongside other forms of misinformation, making both the identification of an archetypal anti-vax stance and the disaggregation of concerns that inform anti-vax stances difficult, if not impossible. 5. Moreover, given relationships within and between anti-vax ideas and broader conspiracy theories, anti-vax content could be regarded as a vector for the spread of numerous forms of misinformation. 6. These relationships – investigated in this case study through hashtag co-occurrences – provide valuable insights into the ‘discursive landscape’ of vaccine misinformation and the forms of misinformation and conspiracy theories to which COVID-19 misinformation is related. 7. However, due to the various forms and configurations through which misinformation may be realised and communicated, there is no silver bullet to prevent or detect vaccine misinformation. 8. Some misinformation contains language directly related to known conspiracy theories (e.g. nwo), but other forms are exceptionally novel, subtle, evolving, and, indeed, designed to circumvent automated moderation systems put in place by social media sites. 9. The ongoing role of expert human analysts in interpreting these linguistic behaviours is therefore crucial. 10. More broadly, the outcomes of this case study suggest a need to investigate the social and political conditions that result in social alienation and distrust, which informs anti-vaccination and conspiratorial beliefs. More comprehensive understanding of distrust facilitates understanding of how and why misinformation has been so pervasive and enduring throughout the pandemic