Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Terrorism In The Middle East: Implications On Egyptian Travel And Tourism, Tamer Z.F Mohamed, Tamer S. Elseyoufi

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This paper attempts to shed the light on challenging issues affecting travel and tourism industry especially in the Middle East such as political, socio-economic and security instability. Due to its geopolitical and historical importance, the paper focuses on the situation in Egypt as a descriptive case study. The methodology relies on historical review and impact assessment to understand the roots and extended branches of instability in the Middle East that led to the Arab Spring, by focusing on the Egyptian case in the last half century. The assessment explains the negative effect of Western and Egyptian policy on extending the …

Spatial Changes Of Pilgrimage Centers In Pilgrimage Studies – Review And Contribution To Future Research, Justyna Liro, Izabela Sołjan, Elżbieta Bilska-Wodecka

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Pilgrimages and pilgrimage centres are a subject of research often undertaken from the perspective of geographic sciences. Geographical research on pilgrimage movement and sanctuaries is important due to its focus on the spatial aspect. This article analyses the current state of research on pilgrimage centres. The main trends of the current studies include: the phenomenon of pilgrimage in terms of religion, society, culture and tourism; as well as its impact, including on the development of the settlement and; studies of pilgrimage centres, in particular their impact on space in various spatial and temporal scales, as well as; the conclusions drawn …

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.

Women's Words About Pilgrims To Santiago De Compostela, 1890 - 1920, Maryjane Dunn

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Many scholarly articles claim that the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was moribund at the turn of the last century based on statistical surveys of the Cathedral and Hospital Real registers, but these numbers only represent a fraction of the persons who devoutly visited Santiago Cathedral. In reality, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pilgrimage as described by five turn-of-the-nineteenth-century female authors.- Emilia Pardo Bazán, Katherine Lee Bates, Georgiana Goddard King, Annette Meakin, and Catherine Gasquoine Hartley - is itself in a liminal state, between the traditional pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela and the newer tourist-pilgrim. The writings by …

Political Pilgrimage During China’S Cultural Revolution: The Case Of Dazhai, Ian S. Mcintosh

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

During China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) political pilgrimage was a tool for promoting the communist ideal of collectivism. This paper explores the creation in the 1960s by Chairman Mao Zedong of one of the foremost sites of political pilgrimage, the small agricultural commune of Dazhai in north-central China. I argue that in the days of militant atheism, all the factors usually associated with the creation of a religious pilgrimage site were present and utilized to great effect by the communists to create a ‘super symbol’ of China’s desired future. These factors included a miracle, charismatic leadership, altruism, poignant sites of historical …

The Economic Impact Of Pilgrimage: An Economic Impact Analysis Of Pilgrimage Expenditures In Galicia, Elisabeth J.E Graave, Jeroen Klijs, Wim Heijman

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

In this article, we calculate the economic impact of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the NUTS 2 region Galicia (Spain) in 2010. This economic impact is relevant to policymakers and other stakeholders dealing with religious tourism in Galicia. The analysis is based on the Input-Output model. Location Quotient formulas are used to derive the regional Input-Output table from the national Input-Output table of Spain. Both the Simple Location Quotient formula and Flegg’s Location Quotient formula are applied. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is carried out. We found that pilgrimage expenditures in 2010 created between €59.750 million and €99.575 million in …

Systems (Holistic) Approach To Religious Tourism, Tadeja Jere Jakulin, Alan Clarke

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Systems Approach has been accepted within natural sciences since Ludwig von Bertalanffy published his manifesto of general system theory (Bertalanffy, 1952) and Norbert Wiener his on Cybernetics (Wiener, 1948). The intention of general systems theory and cybernetics is the ‘ontology’ of action, which is shown by feedback information. Its goal is to find a method to predict the consequence of a decision-making action. Industrial engineering recognised it, when Forrester published the work Industrial Dynamics (Forrester, 1961) and social sciences rediscovered it with Senge’s work on the learning organisation - The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990). Systems Approach is a methodology for …