Digital Commons Network^™

Impact Of Text Messaging On Communication, Heidi Hemmer

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

This study used two focus groups to learn about college students and their use of text messages. All of the students were from the Arts and Humanities College at Minnesota State University. One focus group contained five females and other focus group contained five males. The main focus of this study was to find if text messages displaced face-to-face communication. The results of this study suggest text messages do have a displacing effect on face-to-face communication. But text messaging is not the only technology that has the displacement effect. This study also suggests males and females view text messages differently. …

Social Movements, Media, And Democratization In Georgia, Maia Mikashavidze

Theses and Dissertations

A purpose of the study was to analyze the construction of reality around the Georgian media democratization movement in 2010-12. The qualitative analysis of movement statements (n=17) and in-depth interviews with movement activists (n=12) found that the movement relied on mobilizing master frames linked to the concept of democracy: free speech, access to information, fair elections, transparency, plurality, and devised an innovative frame, it concerns you. The movement pursued two goals with its framing efforts: improvements in the media environment and mobilization of citizen participation.

The quantitative analysis of news stories about the movement (n=552) by six pro-opposition, pro-government, and …

Opinion Mining Of Sociopolitical Comments From Social Media, Swapna Gottipati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Opinions are central to almost all human activities by influencing greatly the decision making process. In this thesis, we present the problems of mining issues, extracting entities and suggestive opinions towards the entities, detecting thoughtful comments, and extracting stances and ideological expressions from online comments in the sociopolitical domain. This study is essential for opinion mining applications that are beneficial for policy makers, government sectors and social organizations. Much work has been done to try to uncover consumer sentiments from online comments to help businesses improve their products and services. However, sociopolitical opinion mining poses new challenges due to complex …

Multiple Account Identity Deception Detection In Social Media Using Nonverbal Behavior, Michail Tsikerdekis, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

Identity deception has become an increasingly important issue in the social media environment. The case of

blocked users initiating new accounts, often called sockpuppetry, is widely known and past efforts, which have attempted to detect such users, have been primarily based on verbal behavior (e.g., using profile data or lexic al features in text). Although these methods yield a high detection accuracy rate, they are computationally inefficient for the social media environment, which often involves databases with large volumes of data. To date, little attention has been paid to detecting online decep- tion using nonverbal behavior. We present a detection …

A Melting Pot Of Voices: Public Discourse And The Latino Immigrant Experience In The United States, Elizabeth Katherine Vammen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the discourses surrounding the immigrant experience in the United States to reconcile first-hand accounts of Latino immigrant experiences with the discourse prevailing in broader domains such as immigration law, public forums, non-fiction essays, and the news media. In order to break down barriers that prevent productive discussions, this analysis identifies stifling language guised under what Antonio Gramsci defines common sense rather than good sense. At the same time this study aims to deconstruct stifling language, it uses first-hand accounts from Latino immigrants to provide insight as to where the American public is not listening. By analyzing common …

Making Fenians: The Transnational Constitutive Rhetoric Of Revolutionary Irish Nationalism, 1858-1876, Timothy Richard Dougherty

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation traces the constitutive rhetorical strategies of revolutionary Irish nationalists operating transnationally from 1858-1876. Collectively known as the Fenians, they consisted of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the United Kingdom and the Fenian Brotherhood in North America. Conceptually grounded in the main schools of Burkean constitutive rhetoric, it examines public and private letters, speeches, Constitutions, Convention Proceedings, published propaganda, and newspaper arguments of the Fenian counterpublic. It argues two main points. First, the separate national constraints imposed by England and the United States necessitated discursive and non-discursive rhetorical responses in each locale that made it near impossible to sustain …

The Effect Of Sensor Errors In Situated Human-Computer Dialogue, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

Errors in perception are a problem for computer systems that use sensors to perceive the environment. If a computer system is engaged in dialogue with a human user, these problems in perception lead to problems in the dialogue. We present two experiments, one in which participants interact through dialogue with a robot with perfect perception to fulfil a simple task, and a second one in which the robot is affected by sensor errors and compare the resulting dialogues to determine whether the sensor problems have an impact on dialogue success.

Generating Supplementary Travel Guides From Social Media, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang, Lifu Huang, Minghui Qiu, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we study how to summarize travel-related information in forum threads to generate supplementary travel guides. Such summaries presumably can provide additional and more up-to-date information to tourists. Existing multi-document summarization methods have limitations for this task because (1) they do not generate structured summaries but travel guides usually follow a certain template, and (2) they do not put emphasis on named entities but travel guides often recommend points of interest to travelers. To overcome these limitations, we propose to use a latent variable model to align forum threads with the section structure of well-written travel guides. The …

Executive Control In Hispanic Children: Considering Linguistic And Sociocultural Factors, Miriam M. Martinez

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Executive control represents a collection of high-order cognitive processes that are associated with important child outcomes, including academic achievement and social competencies. Despite the burgeoning interest in examining the development of executive control, less is known about the development of these skills among ethnic minority children. Hispanic children are currently the largest ethnic minority group in the United States and their diverse sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds provide an excellent context to study the influence of linguistic and sociocultural factors on the development of child executive control. The purpose of the three complementary studies reported in this dissertation is to contribute …

Between Two Worlds: Stories Of The Second-Generation Black Caribbean Immigrant, Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot

Trotter Review

People have an endless fascination with character information since it helps us to predict the behavior of those we interact with (King, Rumbaugh, and Savage-Rumbaugh 1999). Stories or narratives serve as an extension of this fascination. They help us make better decisions even without supplying immediate information. When we each talk about the past, our stories not only disclose currently relevant social particulars, but also provide tools for reasoning about action—our own and others’. In many instances, the stories we tell offer explanations of an outcome that resulted when we acted upon something—or serve as indirect memories of a place …

Having The Last Word, But Losing The Culture Wars: Mainstream Press Coverage Of A Canceled Evangelical Benediction., Rick Clifton Moore

Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines how mainstream news media reported the withdrawal of a popular pastor from the 2013 Obama inaugural ceremony. Louie Giglio was originally chosen for a role in the event but relinquished his position when focus was placed on a sermon he once delivered about homosexuality. Analysis of framing and sourcing of the stories raises serious questions about the role media played in reporting about this skirmish, which is clearly part of the larger culture wars.

Is Maternal Touch Used Referentially?, Rana Abu-Zhaya

Open Access Theses

Early social interactions are highly multimodal and include a wealth of cues (e.g., speech, facial expressions, motion, gestures and touch). Infant-directed speech (IDS) by itself may aid in language development. Touch by itself has been also shown to play an important role in dyadic interactions affecting both the infant and the caregiver. However, little is known about the impact of the combination of these two modes of communication on infant language development. In this thesis, I hypothesize that caregiver touch is provided in synchrony with speech, providing the language-learning infant with cues that may not only help her to find …

On Predicting Religion Labels In Microblogging Networks, Minh Thap Nguyen, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Religious belief plays an important role in how people behave, influencing how they form preferences, interpret events around them, and develop relationships with others. Traditionally, the religion labels of user population are obtained by conducting a large scale census study. Such an approach is both high cost and time consuming. In this paper, we study the problem of predicting users' religion labels using their microblogging data. We formulate religion label prediction as a classification task, and identify content, structure and aggregate features considering their self and social variants for representing a user. We introduce the notion of representative user to …

The Importance Of Community Resilience: Developing The American Red Cross International Services Department In The New Hampshire Region, Sarah Romac

Capstone Collection

Disaster management and humanitarian aid organizations have had to reevaluate how communities and individuals can better adapt and prepare for future disaster events. One concept organizations are incorporating into their overall framework is strengthening community resilience. Increasing a community’s resilience level increases its ability to cope with the changes that affect it. Creating awareness of the vulnerabilities in an area, addressing these vulnerabilities with preparedness training, disaster risk reduction (DRR), and sustainable changes made over the long-term can develop a community’s adaptive capacity to be more resilient.

For my practicum, I was given the opportunity to be the International Services …

The Social Construction And Broaden-Build Effects Of Appreciation, Recognition, And Reward At Work As Portrayed In Four Contemporary Films, Andrew Gavin Leach

Communication ETDs

Many employees feel underappreciated, unrecognized, and undervalued in todays corporate, white collar environment (Herman& Dasborough, 2008; Ariani, D. W. 2013). Global economic crises, rising housing prices and high unemployment have all contributed to the prevailing thought that it an employee should just be happy with having a job. However, many organizations have found that evoking positive emotion in the workplace is a win-win situation for them and their employees (Lutgen-Sandvik, Riforgiate & Fletcher, 2009). In order to investigate what is enacted to produce positivity in the workplace, this project applied content analysis to four commercial film dated 2004 to 2013. …

Refusing A Spoiled Identity: How The Swinger Community Represents On The Web, Barbara Kreston

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines whether and how Websites provide a way for the unique community of swingers, also called Lifestylers, to represent a new (and revise an old) deviant identity without risk to their social and employment standing. Unlike many marginalized social groups who publically rally, swingers have had to take advantage of virtual space to safely appeal to their audiences. The time period studied includes the history of the swingers "spoiled" identity via academy articles, newspaper headlines, and moral turpitude clauses from the 1950s to the current use of the Web to showcase swingers and their clubs. The study used …

Exploring Organizational Culture And Intercultural Communication Practices In A Teaching Hospital, Jaclyn R. Devine

Communication ETDs

As the population in the United States becomes more diverse, communities are increasingly experiencing disparities in health care quality that follow racial and ethnic lines. It has been documented that improving health care providers' intercultural communication is one way to help reduce these health disparities. This study investigated the intercultural communication practices of employees at a large teaching hospital in the Southwest that is actively working to reduce health disparities in its community. Recognizing the influence of organizational culture on communication in a workplace, this study looked not only at communication practices, but also at organizational culture and at diversity …

Mediated Narratives On Citizenship, Immigration, And National Identity: The Construction Of Dreamer Identities In Public Discourse Surrounding President Obama's 2012 Deferred Deportation Announcement, Marisa Garcia Rodriguez

Communication ETDs

In the present study, I explore mediated constructions of citizenship, immigrant identities, and national identity in the coverage of the debates that surrounded President Obama's 2012 deferred deportation announcement. My goals in this study are to understand (1) how citizenship is constructed in mediated discourse in response to President Obama's announcement; (2) how immigrant identities, specifically young undocumented immigrants (DREAMers), are constructed in mediated discourse; (3) how national identity is constructed through these mediated discourses; and, (4) how the representation of DREAMer identities reproduces or challenges dominant public discourses on citizenship, immigrant identity, and national identity. Using social constructionism and …

The Process Of Diagnosis Delivery Of Autism Spectrum Disorders, Natasha A. Barnett

Communication ETDs

The process of diagnosis delivery of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is a topic area that has not been given ample attention by academic researchers. Some researchers have focused on delivering bad news (i.e.Buckman, 1992; Gordon, 2008; & Myers, 1983). Yet, no communication researcher has utilized communication theory and/or method to focus on diagnosis delivery of ASD. This study expands this area of focus in academic research using a communication perspective that provides an understanding of the process of diagnosis delivery of ASD at the Center for Developmental Disabilities'(CDD) Early Childhood Evaluation Program (ECEP)--New Mexico's number one center for providing a …

Identity Performance And Space In The Albuquerque Poetry Slam Scene, Edward Hakim Bellamy

Communication ETDs

Public spaces where culture is co-constructed and performed by a community of people are rich sites for research on identity formation. This thesis explores the poetry slam as a space where poets and audiences co-construct and perform individual and group identities. From a social constructionist approach to identity formation and through the theories and methods of performance studies, the research design combines participant observation, interviews, and focus groups to elucidate the values and performative acts that define the distinct identity of the local slam community in Albuquerque, NM. The analysis of data identifies five major themes (authenticity, affecting change, building …

Walk Feminine, Talk Feminine: A Critical Textual Analysis Of Femininities, Performances, And Representations, Reslie Cortes

Communication ETDs

In this study I examine the multiple ways in which femininity is performed and how those performances intersect with race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality in the anime Bleach and Samurai Champloo. I also interrogate the implications of these performances in relation to hegemonic discourses of Japanese femininity in the U.S. as submissive, deferent, incompetent, and domestic. As I explain in this document many performances of femininity reinforce this Orientalist ideology, however there are also performances that can alter viewers perception of femininity and offer performances of gender identity that do not conform to hegemonic norms. By doing so, anime can shape …

Lifetime Lexical Variation In Social Media, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ying Ding, Heyan Huang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the rapid growth of online social media attracts a large number of Internet users, the large volume of content generated by these users also provides us with an opportunity to study the lexical variation of people of different ages. In this paper, we present a latent variable model that jointly models the lexical content of tweets and Twitter users’ ages. Our model inherently assumes that a topic has not only a word distribution but also an age distribution. We propose a Gibbs-EM algorithm to perform inference on our model. Empirical evaluation shows that our model can learn meaningful age-specific …

Assisting Coordination During Crisis: A Domain Ontology Based Approach To Infer Resource Needs From Tweets, Shreyansh Bhatt, Hemant Purohit, Andrew J. Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John Flach

Kno.e.sis Publications

Ubiquitous social media during crises provides citizen reports on the situation, needs and supplies. Previous research extracts resource needs directly from the text (e.g. "Power cut to Coney Island and Brighton beach" indicates a power need). This approach assumes that citizens derive and write about specific needs from their observations, properly specified for the emergency response system, an assumption that is not consistent with general conversational behavior. In our study, Twitter messages (tweets) from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 clearly indicate power blackouts, but not their probable implications (e.g. loss of power to hospital life support systems). We use a domain …

Humanesis By David Cecchetto, Max Ritts

The Goose

Review of Humanesis by David Cecchetto.

Stories In A New Skin: Approaches To Inuit Literature By Keavy Martin, Allison K. Athens

The Goose

Review of Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature by Keavy Martin.

Immigrants, Roma And Sinti Unveil The “National” In Italian Identity, Francesco Melfi

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

This essay picks up a few threads in the ongoing debate on national identity in Italy. Immigration and the intertwining of cultures locally have stretched the contours of the nation state to a breaking point. As a result, the social self has become a sharply contested terrain between those who want to install a symbolic electronic fence around an imagined fatherland and those who want a more inclusive nation at home in a global world. After discussing the views of Amin Maalouf (2000), Alessandro Dal Lago (2009), Abdelmalek Sayad (1999) and Patrick Manning (2005) on national identity and migration in …

More Than A Tribesman: The New African Diasporan Identity, Stephen M. Magu

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Current global levels of immigration stand at about 300 million persons; of these, IFAD estimates that 30 million Africans are in the Diaspora. The contributions of diasporic Africans to their communities and to the cultural experiences of the United States are multimodal. To their domiciles, they contribute economically, empowering their families to become more active and less dependent on the state, while transmitting ideas about democracy and better government. At the same time, they contribute to their adopted homelands through social and cultural activities, cultural festivals and other indicators of cultural connectedness to their motherlands. The African diaspora of necessity …

The Body As Politic: Education And The Performance Art Of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Dana Cole

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Art has been used as a tool in many fields as a method to tap into different ways of knowing and learning. It promotes creativity and individual expression by encouraging innovation and by opening up possibilities to different ways of expressing and experiencing. My work looks at the performance art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña as a form of public pedagogy using a/r/tography, an arts-based methodology, to illuminate way art it can be used to enhance the learning experience. This article examine the in-between spaces created in Gómez-Peña’s work as epistemological borderzones underscoring how borders come together in heterogeneity, contradiction, and flux …

Attitudes Toward Using Social Networking Sites In Educational Settings With Underperforming Latino Youth: A Mixed Methods Study, Keith Howard, Margaret Sauceda Curwen, Nicol R. Howard, Anaida Colon-Muñiz

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The researchers examined the online social networking attitudes of underperforming Latino high school students in an alternative education program that uses technology as the prime venue for learning. A sequential explanatory mixed methods study was used to cross-check multiple sources of data explaining students’ levels of comfort with utilizing a social networking site platform as a supplemental communication tool in connection with their schoolwork. Students were found to be significantly less comfortable using social networking sites than other online communication tools in connection with their schoolwork, and females were significantly more uncomfortable than males using such sites in school.

Toward A Biocommunicable Cartography Of Health Decision-Making In The Amazon Basin Of Ecuador, James Cartwright

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper comprises a critical, ethnographic study of health communication in a rural community of Amazonian Ecuador. By synthesizing approaches from anthropology, discourse studies, and public health, the study explores how conversations influence health decisions, how communities understand health systems, and how macrostructural discourse changes the political economy of healthcare in Ecuador. My work draws on the recent theoretical development of ‘biocommunicability’ in anthropology as well as earlier sociological research on knowledge construction. Most importantly, this paper offers a critique of current interventions by NGOs in the region.