Digital Commons Network^™

Affect And Value In Critical Examinations Of The Production And ‘Prosumption’ Of Big Data, Daniel G. Cockayne

Geography Faculty Publications

In this paper I explore the relationship between the production and the value of Big Data. In particular I examine the concept of social media ‘prosumption’—which has predominantly been theorized from a Marxist, political economic perspective—to consider what other forms of value Big Data have, imbricated with their often speculative economic value. I take the example of social media firms in their early stages of operation to suggest that, since these firms do not necessarily generate revenue, data collected through user contributions do not always realize economic value, at least in a Marxist sense, and that, in addition to their …

Maintaining The Japan Connection: The Impact Of Study Abroad On Japanese Language Learners’ Life Trajectories And Ongoing Interaction With Japanese Speakers, Rikki Campbell

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

This article explores the post-study abroad life trajectories of learners of Japanese. Drawing upon data collected from eight interviewees, it presents the experiences of study abroad returnees’ ongoing engagement with Japan and Japanese speakers once they were removed from the study abroad environment. In particular, it focuses on the impact of study abroad on ongoing studies and career trajectory, and examines ongoing interaction with Japanese speakers throughout these key life stages. Through the lens of possible selves theory (Markus & Nurius, 1986), this study also examines how the informants’ ongoing engagement with the target language is reflected in …

Spartan Daily, September 8, 2016, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2016

Volume 147, Issue 5

The Technological Factors Of Reddit: Communication And Identity On Relational Networks, Jennifer Kienzle

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The relational network reddit is one of the most popular and visited websites on a global and national (United States) level. Communication on reddit lends itself to intergroup communication in that reddit users engage with audiences from ingroup, outgroup, and mixed audience compositions. Reddit’s voting system allows for negative and positive feedback to enhance or impede on one’s message. I examine how these technological factors influence a number of communicative and identity processes: (a) identity salience, (b), identity gaps, (c) group and interpersonal evaluation, and (d) accommodative language. Drawn out of intergroup contact literature and theories about group processes and …

When A Friend Online Is More Than A Friend In Life: Intimate Relationship Prediction In Microblogs, Yunshi Lan, Mengqi Zhang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging services such as Twitter and Sina Weibo have been an important, if not indespensible, platform for people around the world to connect to one another. The rich content and user interactions on these platforms reveal insightful information about each user that are valuable for various real-life applications. In particular, user offline relationships, especially those intimate ones such as family members and couples, offer distinctive value for many business and social settings. In this study, we focus on using Sina Weibo to discover intimate offline relationships among users. The problem is uniquely interesting and challenging due to the difficulty in …

Microblogging Content Propagation Modeling Using Topic-Specific Behavioral Factors, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a microblogging user adopts some content propagated to her, we can attribute that to three behavioral factors, namely, topic virality, user virality, and user susceptibility. Topic virality measures the degree to which a topic attracts propagations by users. User virality and susceptibility refer to the ability of a user to propagate content to other users, and the propensity of a user adopting content propagated to her, respectively. In this paper, we study the problem of mining these behavioral factors specific to topics from microblogging content propagation data. We first construct a three dimensional tensor for representing the propagation instances. …

Use What You Choose: Applying Computational Methods To Genre Studies In Technical Communication, Brian N. Larson, William Hart-Davidon, Kenneth C. Walker, Douglas M. Walls, Ryan Omizo

Faculty Scholarship

This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the summer of 2015 during which a group of thirteen researchers came together to explore the use of machine-learning algorithms in technical communication. To do this we analyzed Amazon.com consumer electronic product customer reviews to reevaluate a central concept in North American Genre Theory: stable genre structures arise from recurring social actions. We discovered evidence of genre hybridity in the signals of instructional genres embedded into customer reviews. Our paper discusses the creation of a prototype web application, "Use What You Choose" (UWYC), which sorts the …

Beyond The Wall In Dheisheh Camp: From Local To Transnational Image-Making, Philip Hopper

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

Murals and graffiti on the Israeli separation barrier near Bethlehem have been well documented by journalists and discussed in academic journals. Though the image and texts on the barrier may be “transnational” they are of little consequence to the local population. Murals and graffiti within the nearby Dheisheh Palestinian Refugee Camp consolidate local public opinion, generally about the occupation and dismemberment of the West Bank and specifically about individual martyrs or shaheed. The performative nature of these images goes beyond the act of painting them. Children from the Camp pose with these images, identifying with the abstraction of justice and …

Imaginative Acts Of Resistance: Dramatic Storytelling In An Elementary School Classroom, Shannon K. Mcmanimon

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

This critical ethnographic project draws upon literature on imagination, critical literacy, and theatre to explore a sixth-grade class’s participation in a critical literacy and creative drama program. Through examples from the storytelling practices of the Neighborhood Bridges program, I outline how students and teachers (including a teaching artist) imagined, co-created, and revised storylines in their classroom; this collaboration provides an alternative to the common narrative of the constrained urban public school classroom. The resulting imaginative acts of resistance: 1) encourage and empower urban elementary students to enact relevant, collaborative community in their classrooms; 2) engage meaningful—not just functional—literacies; 3) ask …

Online Only Classes And Critical Dialogue: Toward A Faustian Bargain Ideal For Virtual Education, C. Kyle Rudick

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

As distance learning and Online Only Classes (OOCs) become more prevalent in higher education, it becomes increasingly urgent that critical-democratic educators continue to work toward a better understanding of liberatory praxis through technology. The goals of this essay are to explain why critical dialogue cannot be realized in OOCs, describe how blended brick-and-mortar/virtual classes may be advantageous for a critical agenda, and help orient future scholarship concerning critical pedagogy and technology toward a “Faustian bargain” ideal argued by Neil Postman. In order to reach these goals, I outline two types of educators that I believe have the most at stake …

Spartan Daily, August 30, 2016, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2016

Volume 147, Issue 2

Blurred Boundaries: Interpreters As Researchers In Cross-Cultural Settings, Jennifer S. Hensley

Journal of Interpretation

This is a study of ambiguities and tensions that occur within the role of the bilingual/bicultural researcher in an ethnographic study. This manuscript presents an analysis of three instances from two interviews in a study on the acculturation of deaf students in deaf kindergarten classrooms in Japan and the US. This is an auto-ethnographic analysis of conflicts found in fluctuating between multiple roles: research assistant, interpreter, cultural mediator, and sociolinguistic consultant. In these examples my bicultural knowledge allowed me to identify “hidden” meanings overlooked by other members of the research team. However, my interpreter role at times made it awkward …

From Sensory Perception To Lexical-Semantic Processing: An Erp Study In Non-Verbal Children With Autism, Chiara Cantiani, Naseem A. Choudhury, Yan H. Yu, Valerie L. Shafer, Richard G. Schwartz, April A. Benasich

Publications and Research

This study examines electrocortical activity associated with visual and auditory sensory perception and lexical-semantic processing in nonverbal (NV) or minimally-verbal (MV) children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Currently, there is no agreement on whether these children comprehend incoming linguistic information and whether their perception is comparable to that of typically developing children. Event-related potentials (ERPs) of 10 NV/MV children with ASD and 10 neurotypical children were recorded during a picture-word matching paradigm. Atypical ERP responses were evident at all levels of processing in children with ASD. Basic perceptual processing was delayed in both visual and auditory domains but overall was …

The Book Of Feral Flora By Amanda Ackerman & Skeena By Sarah De Leeuw, Emily Mcgiffin

The Goose

Review of Amanda Ackerman's The Book of Feral Flora. Review of Sarah de Leeuw's Skeena.

Good Vibrations: Charting The Dominant And Emergent Discursive Regimes Of Sex Toys, George Rossolatos

The Qualitative Report

Sex toys promote a new consumptive ethos whose significance may be adequately outlined by attending to the institutional implications of this product category’s consumption. By drawing on Foucault’s theory of sexuality and the technologies of the self that materialize with the aid of discursive formations about sexuality, as well as on relevant sociological and ethnographic insights, I undertake a qualitative content analysis on a corpus of 100 sex toys’ product reviews from popular magazines and web sites in order to identify how the discourse about sex toys is articulated in terms of three dominant categories of sexual scripts (Simon & …

Innovative Approaches Of Historical Newspapers: Data Mining, Data Visualization, Semantic Enrichment, Jean-­Philippe Moreux, Caroline Kageneck

IFLA 2016 News Media Satellite Session

In this age of Big Data this paper describes how digital libraries can apply at large scale innovative approaches to better valorize and bring better experiences of old newspapers.

On the first hand, the state-of-the-art OLR (optical layout recognition) technique in one of the largest heritage press digitization projects in Europe (Europeana Newspapers, www.europeana-newspapers.eu, 2012-2015) was used in a data mining experiment. Data analysis was applied to quantitative metadata derived from a 850K pages subset of six XIXth-XXth c. French newspaper titles from the BnF collection. The METS/ALTO XML data was analyzed with data mining and data visualization techniques …

Born Digital Records Of Mexican Indigenous People: A Proposal To Preserve Sound And Audiovisual Documents Of Raramuri ́S Culture, Perla Olivia Rodríguez Reséndiz, Jaime Ríos Ortega, César Augusto Ramírez, Sylvie Marchand

IFLA 2016 News Media Satellite Session

Each day increases the amount of digital born sound and audiovisual documents as collections in libraries, archives and museums. However are unaware how these collections must be preserved for the future. Therefore, the risk of loss is increased. All types of sound and audiovisual recordings in risk if they are not documented and preserved properly, highlights the recordings of the indigenous peoples.

This is serious phenomenon because with the loss of an indigenous language will be lost knowledge, worldview, and the way of understanding the world of a social group. The diversity of the indigenous languages of Mexico as cultural …

Latinotwitter: Discourses Of Latino Civic Engagement In Social Media, Alison N. Novak, Kristine C. Johnson, Manuel Pontes

College of Communication & Creative Arts Departmental Research

Twitter, like other social media platforms, has been identified as a space for cultural groups to debate political ideologies, engage civically, and even form action strategies for social change. Since 2014, the #LatinoTwitter hashtag has been used by Latino users for these purposes. Despite the popularity of the hashtag, few studies have examined it or its users. This study provides the results of a discourse analysis of the 31,000 tweets from 2014–2016 that use the hashtag. The findings indicate Twitter has become a popular platform for Latinos to debate political issues, find parity between ethnic communities, and even promote Latino-centered …

Profiling Social Media Users With Selective Self-Disclosure Behavior, Wei Gong

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Social media has become a popular platform for millions of users to share activities and thoughts. Many applications are now tapping on social media to disseminate information (e.g., news), to promote products (e.g., advertisements), to manage customer relationship (e.g., customer feedback), and to source for investment (e.g., crowdfunding). Many of these applications require user profile knowledge to select the target social media users or to personalize messages to users. Social media user profiling is a task of constructing user profiles such as demographical labels, interests, and opinions, etc., using social media data. Among the social media user profiling research works, …

Analyzing Clinical Depressive Symptoms In Twitter, Amir Hossein Yazdavar, Hussein S. Al-Olimat, Tanvi Banerjee, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

350 million people are suffering from clinical depression worldwide.

Performing, Sensing, Being: Queer Identity In Everyday Life, Justin J. Rudnick

Communication Studies Department Publications

Drawing from performance, affect, and queer theories, I explore how queer identity is storied, performed, and sensed in everyday life. I access performance and sensory ethnographic practices to examine how queer persons “do” their identities on a daily basis. I draw from data collected through ethnographic participation in a queer-friendly district of Columbus, Ohio in addition to in-depth interviews with fourteen self-identified queer persons I met through my fieldwork. My approach privileges observations and reflections of mundane moments of everyday life to position queer identity as a routine, repetitive, habitual, and otherwise performative practice. I question the emphasis on verbal …

Instructor-Student Classroom Interactions: An Experimental Study Of Language, Sex-Differences, And Student Perceptions Of Instructors, Carl Joseph Brown

Dissertations

Higher education instructors must establish meaningful relationships with students in order to be effective. Student ratings of instructor dynamism, approachability, and credibility impact overall evaluations of instructors. Instructor use of strategic language choices, such as slang use in the classroom, impact these student evaluations. Here, the outcome of language choices’ impact on student evaluations is explored. To do so, both instructor and student sex main effects and interactions are tested. Last, specific methods, findings, as well as meaning and application are covered. Overall, instructor use of slang impacts student evaluations.

Superheroes And Social Action: Reproduction, Recurrence, And Recognition In The Superhero Genre, Max M. Renner

Open Access Theses

Rhetorical genre analysis examines genre as social action and is primarily concerned with the experiences of individual users (Miller, 1984). The genres that rhetorical genre scholarship takes up are typically functional genres or genres in which individuals have direct means of utilizing and modifying a genre. This focus on functional genres makes sense in terms of the tradition’s interest in user experience and reciprocity. This project seeks to examine the potential implications rhetorical genre analysis has for vernacular genres which, for the most part, have remained the domain of literary scholarship due to their focus on structural, formal elements.

This …

Data Mining Twitter For Cancer, Diabetes, And Asthma Insights, Kimberly Chulis

Open Access Dissertations

Twitter may be a data resource to support healthcare research. Literature is still limited related to the potential of Twitter data as it relates to healthcare. The purpose of this study was to contrast the processes by which a large collection of unstructured disease-related tweets could be converted into structured data to be further analyzed. This was done with the objective of gaining insights into the content and behavioral patterns associated with disease-specific communications on Twitter. Twelve months of Twitter data related to cancer, diabetes, and asthma were collected to form a baseline dataset containing over 34 million tweets. As …

The Politics Of Town Hall Meetings: Analyzing Constituent Relations-In-Interaction, Robert J. Green

Open Access Dissertations

The politics of town meetings proposes that town hall meetings are institutions of representative democracy that present an opportunity for constituents to hold their elected representatives accountable in a public setting. Constituent relations-in-interaction glosses a complex set of interactional practices and procedures through which ensembles of participants bring town hall meetings, as structures of social interaction, into being. This study uses conversation analysis, the study of talk-in-interaction, to show that the politics of town hall meetings orients to three types of accountability: Interactional accountability, political accountability, and public accountability. The articulation of these accountability types provides a sense of overall-structural …

Emerging Genres, Dangerous Classifications: The Kairos Of Digital Composing Policy, Ellery Sills

Open Access Dissertations

Emerging Genres, Dangerous Classifications: The Kairos of Digital Composing Policy argues that writing policy infrastructure plays a significant (if often invisible) role in affording emerging digital genres in rhetoric and composition. Within the last few decades, the accelerating transformations and instabilities of emerging genres have posed a challenge for contemporary writing programs, which demonstrate a persistent wariness over incorporating digital composing into their mission. In response to this challenge, national educational associations have issued a growing number of policy statements meant to encourage a broader understanding of composing in the classroom. Curiously, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to …

Educational Technology And Innovation Capacity In Arkansas Public Schools, Allie Nicole Taylor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We all have high hopes for our educational system. As they stress the need for 21st century learning, governments recognize the importance of innovation and creativity in schools and invest resources to develop learning environments that foster these qualities. This thesis adapts Crosling, Nair, and Vaithilingam’s (2015) model to provide a framework for studying factors that contribute to a creative learning ecosystem (intellectual capital development, 21st century literacies, climate for innovation, and integrity of the system), the quality of the educational system, and the system’s innovation capacity. A survey of 126 Arkansas high school teachers, indicates that two variables, student’s …

Preferred Leadership Communication Styles Across Cultures, Joy J. Cherfan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reports the results of a two-part study investigating preferred leadership communication styles across multiple cultural clusters. Utilizing a survey, part one identified the three most preferred leader communication styles (i.e., dominant, dramatic, contentious, attentive, animated, open, friendly, relaxed, impression leaving) in six cultural clusters. Using focus group data, the second part provides insight into subordinates’ perceptions of how these communication styles are enacted by leaders in each cluster. Guidelines on how to better communicate are offered to expatriates in hopes of helping them more successfully complete overseas tasks. Such guidelines are needed due to the high percentage of …

Psychometric Testing Of The Presence Of Nursing Scale: Measurability Of Patient Perceptions Of Nursing Presence Capability Of Nurses In An Academic Medical Center, Rebecca L. Turpin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Nursing presence occurs when nurses expend themselves on the behalf of a unique patient. This phenomenon requires further research to develop instruments. The Presence of Nursing Scale (PONS) measures the patient’s perspective (Kostovich, 2012). Psychometric testing of PONS-Revised using exploratory factor analysis is warranted to further develop a reliable and valid measure of nursing presence. Contextual workplace variables need exploration in inpatient settings for correlation with nursing presence.

Method(s): A convenience sample of 122 adult inpatients from ten acute-care nursing units in a Southeastern Magnet hospital were surveyed to conduct the first psychometric testing of this revised instrument using …

Social Learning Remixed: Peer-Based Learning And Social Status In An Online Community Of Practice, Christopher Erin Mikkelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

People have engaged in peer-to-peer learning within communities of practice (CoPs) for centuries. Thanks to web 2.0 technology, people in the 21st century can now learn together and enact Social status even if they have never met face-to-face. Online communities of practice have since formed around a wide variety of activities, one of which is remixing. Remixing is defined as combining or editing existing materials to produce something new, but leaving each part recognizable as a separate entity. Remixing has recently been recognized as form of digital literacy because users must understand each component to make a good remix. Much …