Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review Of Irish Media: A Critical History (John Horgan & Roddy Flynn), Michael Foley

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

Citizen-Activist As Journalist: Network Journalism And Professional Practices In The Coverage Of The Aleppo Offensive, Jenny Hauser

Irish Communication Review

The global news flow of the Syrian conflict has been characterised by citizen journalism since its outset. In the absence of professional journalists on the ground, collaborative newsgathering with citizen activists has posed challenges for newsrooms seeking to align this practice with professional norms and values in journalism. This research investigates the sourcing of news content from the Aleppo offensive in November 2016. Quantitative content analysis and textual analysis of news texts by BBC World Service, France 24 English and Al Jazeera English examines how professional sourcing routines were adapted to a news context dominated by citizen activists and how …

Ttip And Ceta In Irish Newspapers: Expertise And Plurality Of Editorial Bias, Barry Finnegan

Irish Communication Review

This paper analyses Irish newspaper coverage of two international free-trade and investment-protection agreements, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (herein, TTIP) between the EU and the USA whose negotiations are currently in suspension, and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (herein, CETA) currently provisionally applied in law between the EU and Canada. The paper demonstrates that they constitute two good examples of substantive matters of public importance with which to analyse the editorial balance of Irish newspapers. Using agenda-setting and framing theory, the research sets out the importance of the role of media in democratic life, and contextualises newspapers’ editorial …

Activating The Archive And The Postcolony In The Work Of Sven Augustijnen, Ann Curran

Irish Communication Review

The repression of colonial pasts reveal themselves in contemporary discourses and forms of representation – they are not nor can be ever fully deemed ‘past’ says T.J. Demos. Belgian filmmaker Sven Augustijnen excavates the troubling legacy of Belgian colonialism through his documentary films and installations. His investment in archival research and the presentation of media artifacts produces a multi-sensory experience for the viewer which in turn has implications for contemporary documentary practices, archive thinking and critical media literacy. In this article I will consider the relationship between the 2016 exhibition mounted by Augustijnenat Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in …

A Comparison Of The Models And Methods Of Surveillance In East Germany And Northern Ireland And Their Relevance To Modern-Day Securitization Of Society, Cliodhna Pierce

Irish Communication Review

Despite increasing awareness of the rise in societal surveillance as a result of leaks by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and subsequent revelations from Wikileaks, the damage of pervasive surveillance practices on the individual and on communities has yet to be measured. As John Gilliom has argued, ‘until we are able to generate sufficient research to make plausible sense of how differently situated people – welfare mothers, prisoners, students, middle-class professionals – speak of and respond to their various surveillance settings, we will be unable to devise a meaningful account of what surveillance is’ (2006, 126). Before we can examine …

Is Google Self-Aware?, Gerry Heapes

Irish Communication Review

The field of artificial intelligence evolves incrementally with gradual improvement over time and has relied on the Turing Test as a measure of progress. However human standards of intelligence measurement may not be appropriate to current developments. The platform of cloud computing now provides a means of implementing a kind of ubiquitous awareness unknown to humans before now and a means of augmenting human intelligence. The level of awareness held by Google is explored and some recent developments in the uses of AI programmes for social media are covered. The misinterpretation of these developments is explored and a solution proposed. …

Quantum Computational Supremacy: Security And Vulnerability In A New Paradigm, Deborah Brennan

Irish Communication Review

Despite three decades of research, the field of quantum computation has yet to build a quantum computer that can perform a task beyond the capability of any classical computer – an event known as computational supremacy. Yet this multi-billion dollar research industry persists in its efforts to construct such a machine. Based on the counter-intuitive principles of quantum physics, these devices are fundamentally different from the computers we know. It is theorised that large-scale quantum computers will have the ability to perform some remarkably powerful computations, even if the extent of their capabilities remains disputed. One application, however, the factoring …

Data Protection And Privacy For Media And Individuals Under Irish And Eu Law, Sarah Kearney

Irish Communication Review

Recent public discussion has seen an increasing emphasis placed on data protection and privacy. An accord must be struck between the individual's right to privacy and an organisation’s right to examine an individual’s personal information for its given commercial, contractual or social media activities. This paper examines the evolution of data protection and regulation in Irish and EU law, Illustrating that data protection applies in relation to the publication of material in the media, even if it may still be set aside in the case of public interest. It concludes that the Irish and European Courts place considerable significance on …

The Self And Other: Portraying Israeli And Palestinian Identities On Twitter, Jason Deegan, John Hogan, Sharon Feeney, Brendan K. O'Rourke

Irish Communication Review

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has lasted over half a century, with both sides enduring military and political turmoil. This paper explores how Twitter is being used as a medium to portray identities in the conflict. We examine the tweets contained in the @IDFspokesperson and @ISMPalestine Twitter accounts between late 2015 and early 2016. Using textual analysis, we gain an insight into how these Twitter accounts, defined by the conflict, are used in portraying the self and the other.

Text Analytics Techniques In The Digital World: A Sentiment Analysis Case Study Of The Coverage Of Climate Change On Us News Networks, Jerome Casey

Irish Communication Review

This paper analyses nearly 600 news segments relating to climate change broadcast on 3 American news networks over a period of 8 years. The paper demonstrates the typical steps involved in a text analytics solution. It shows how the text data was sourced and imported into a software program. The steps carried out in pre-processing the text data are outlined as well as explaining key terms in the text analytics pipeline. A sentiment analysis is applied using a lexicon and further processing is carried out to answer the

original questions posed such as what words drive a particular sentiment category, …

Text Analytics Techniques In The Digital World: Word Embeddings And Bias, Marisa Llorens

Irish Communication Review

The proliferation of textual data in the form of online news articles and social media feeds has had an impact on the text analytics developments in recent years. Some of the challenges of natural language processing, understanding and generation have been successfully resolved and the results are applications such as AI personal assistants and bots. Word embeddings are an example of these successful solutions where unsupervised data-driven algorithms are used to understand concepts and relationships between words. This paper presents a description of word embedding algorithms, and a discussion on how bias in the training data can be captured, reproduced …

Like, Post, Share, Buy: The Commercial Value Of Affective Networking On Social Media, Cáitríona Murphy

Irish Communication Review

The purpose of this article is to unpack the complexities of how economic value is generated in the digital economy, specifically on social media. This article looks at social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, and analyses the labour that is carried out by SNS users.

This is a theoretically oriented project that has aimed to identify and analyse the ways in which SNS users create value and profit for corporations. The article explores the labour processes carried out on social media such as the generation of data, the creation of content and the creation of …

All Aboard? Seniors And Their Media, Adrian Smyth

Irish Communication Review

It is a plain chronological fact that personal digital technologies – such as the mobile phone, computers and the internet and digital television services – have arrived late in the lives of many older people. The ‘problem’ here – if it is to be perceived as such – is that this late arrival may present some older people with a particular set of challenges which may not necessarily apply to other, younger, people; and while it is important to acknowledge older people must never be considered an homogenous cohort when it comes to experiences of ageing, considerations such as late-life …

In An Era Of Fake News, Information Literacy Has A Role To Play In Journalism Education In Ireland, Isabelle Courtney

Irish Communication Review

Framed by the problem of fake news and misinformation, a recent study into journalism education in Ireland focused on the overlaps that exist between two professions: journalism and librarianship. The emerging literature on fake news is overwhelmingly coming from these two disciplines. Historically both have deep roots in truth and fact and employ a specific range of tools for the evaluation of information. Librarians use a framework called information literacy, while journalism educators speak of media literacy, fact-checking and verification of sources. With the many overlaps in media and information literacy, journalists and librarians would appear to be natural partners …

Media Literacy And Disciplinarity: A Case Study, Clare Scully

Irish Communication Review

Recent years have seen a number of changes and developments in Ireland’s third-level education sector. Increasing concerns about student literacy issues have been accompanied by an apparent institutional logic in which generic ‘one size fits all’ modules are privileged on the basis of their expediency in the context of an underfunded, neoliberal educational landscape. While these modules may offer efficiencies at an administrative, teaching and practical level, there is little research that investigates their impacts and effectiveness on students in terms of disciplinary identity and knowledge, grades or quality assurance. As a contribution towards this topic, this exploratory paper discusses …

Editors' Introduction: Critical Media Literacy - Who Needs It?, Harry Browne, Deborah Brennan

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

Ireland Austerity Addiction: Challenges & Opportunities, Brendan O'Rourke, John Hogsn

Conference papers

The current hold of austerity on Irish public policy provokes a comparison with addiction. Postliberalism, the form of austerity Ireland is hooked on, brought the country to its knees. It tied the millstone of bank bailouts around Ireland’s neck, slashed its education and health spending and meant its budgets were closely supervised by the Troika of the Europe Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank from 2010-2013. Unemployment spiked and there was an exodus, particularly of young people, from the country. This was a period of national humiliation as economic sovereignty evaporated in a deal described …

Memories Of Television In Ireland: Separating Media History From Nation State, Edward Brennan

Articles

This article emerges from a broader project that explores the history of television in Ireland using audience life story interviews. It argues that a dominant narrative persists in the history of television in the Republic of Ireland. Based in institutional sources this narrative is ideologically narrow although it tells a story of cultural liberation. A key example of its ideological limitation lies in the way that Irish people’s experience of British television transmissions has been forgotten. The reason for this lies in historical methods rather than conscious bias. Nevertheless, historical methods themselves can promote limited visons of reality that promote …

The Run Of Ourselves: Shame, Guilt And Confession In Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Media, Marcus Free, Clare Scully

Articles

This article examines the emergence of the themes of shame and guilt in Irish print and broadcast media in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse. It considers how the potential search for explanation of the crisis as a manifestation of unregulated banking and development sectors was displaced onto a confessional discursive pattern in which emphasis was placed on rampant borrowing and consumption as reflective of collective narcissism and acquisitive greed. Hence the logic that ‘hubris’ led inevitably to a national fall from grace and the corresponding resurgence of postcolonial shame; and the interplay between cultural nationalist and neoliberal discourses …

Tourists' Photographic Constructions Of Place In Ireland, Sean T. Ruane, Bernadette Quinn, Sheila Flanagan

Books / Book chapters

This chapter explores notions of authenticity in terms of the photographs taken by tourists while on holiday. Some tourists photograph attributes of the host’s culture that they perceive as “authentic”, while ignoring, editing, or erasing aspects that conflict with their “imagined” views. Drawing upon methods of participant-informed photo-ethnography used in a study of US tourists’ holiday photographs of Ireland, tourists will be resituated in this chapter as “editors” in their own photographic reproductions of place. Moreover, by focusing attention to how they confer meaning on destinations and the people who live in them, through the embodied performance of photography, this …

Misogyny Detection And Classification In English Tweets: The Experience Of The Itt Team, John Cardiff, Elena Shushkevich

Conference Papers

The problem of online misogyny and women-based offending has become increasingly widespread, and the automatic detection of such messages is an urgent priority. In this paper, we present an approach based on an ensemble of Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, and Naïve Bayes models for the detection of misogyny in texts extracted from the Twitter platform. Our method has been presented in the framework of the participation in the Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI) Shared Task in the EVALITA 2018 evaluation campaign.

The Future Of Television May Be A Lot Like Its Past, Edward Brennan

Other

Like that first card from an old friend, or the roof of twinkling lights over the streets, in Ireland The Late Late Toy Show is one of those signs that Christmas is on its way. Kids are let loose on a grown - up show for a night of singing, dancing and, most importantly, toys. This annual special is ‘event television’. It will be discussed in kitchens, offices and school yards for days afterwards. Television events are set up, across different media, weeks in advance. There are ‘making of’ programmes, press pieces, promos, retrospect ives and so on that tell …

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Exploration Of A Crowdfunding Entrepreneurial Pitch., Victoria Doyle, Olivia Freeman, Brendan K. O`Rourke

Conference papers

This paper explores multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) as a methodology to address the research question: How are environmentally conscious entrepreneurial ventures constituted in online investment crowd-funding pitches and the communications that surround them? While discourse may be realised in many different ways (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001 p.5, Bezemer and Jewit, 2010), multimodal discourse analysis focuses on analysing and describing a repertoire of meaning making resources which individuals use in various contexts (visual, gestural, written, actional etc.). Broadband internet and associated technologies mean that these crowdfunding pitches and many other genres tend to be much richer …

The Evolution Of An Enduring Expertise: Understanding Irish Economists In Irish Public Discourse In The Great Recession, Joe Fitzgerald, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This work focuses on the institutional and social contexts of Irish economists’ prominence in public discourse in Ireland during the Great Recession. While examining performative aspects of experts’ legitimacy is important, understanding the wider societal context of how particular professional expertise is recognised is also vital (Collins & Evans 2007). The economics profession generally is characterised by strong hierarchy and dense integration (Fourcade, 2009; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009; Pautz, 2014), we explore such phenomena in the Irish context. The Irish context is of interest more generally as a prominent PIIGS country in the Eurozone crisis, as a small peripheral state …

Desidero Ergo Sum (I Desire Therefore I Am): Towards A Psychoanalytic Reading Of The Advertising Of Perfume, Eugene O'Brien

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

Advertising Gastronomic Identity In An Epicurean World: The Case For Irish Single Pot Whiskey, Brian Murphy

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

Three Ireland, Two Sports, One Country: Contemporary Sports Sponsorship And The Commercialisation Of National Identity, Colm Kearns

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

It's Just One Of Those Gender Role Things: The Woman Does The Shopping, And The Man Fixes The Doors: Irish Advertising Students And Postfeminist Gendered Discourses, Aileen O'Driscoll

Irish Communication Review

In 2010 the European Commission published a report outlining its official position on ‘Breaking gender stereotypes in Media’ thereby explicitly recognising that advertising’s dissemination of images that depict gender stereotyping works to uphold gender inequalities. In addition, the European Coalition against Media Sexism (WECAMS) has engaged with the European Parliament and the European Advertising Standards Alliance in a bid to open up discussion on the possibility for standardising guidelines aimed at tackling and preventing sexism and gender stereotyping in advertising. Furthermore, over a more than forty-year history feminist media research has consistently pointed to problematic gendered imagery in advertising texts …

Language Change And Ideology In Irish Radio Advertising, Joan O'Sullivan

Irish Communication Review

This paper examines language ideological change in the Irish context through a longitudinal analysis of accent choice in a corpus of radio ads from 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007. The analysis is based on Sussex’s (1989) ad components of Action and Comment. The Action component is generally comprised of contextual dialogic interaction and associated with discourses of ‘everyday informal interaction’ while the Comment component, often associated with the slogan of the ad, tends to be monologic and decontextualised and is associated with discourses of ‘power and authority’ (Lee, 1992). The use of standard British English accent features, particularly in …

In Search Of Identity: An Exploration Of The Relationship Between Guinness's Advertising And Ireland's Social And Economic Evolution Between 1959 And 1969, Patricia Medcalf

Irish Communication Review

This paper analyses the first decade of ads published and broadcast by Guinness in Ireland. The period is 1959 to 1969, a time that marked the start of significant change in Irish society. It is argued here that the messages in the adverts chronicle many of these changes. Seismic shifts in government economic policy coincided with the 200^th anniversary of the foundation of the Guinness brewery. The ensuing lift in the economy’s fortunes is mirrored in many ads, as are some of the demographic changes, such as rising marriage rates and falling birth rates, and an expanding middle class. …