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Arguing it Out : Discussion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium
\"The social and cultural history of Byzantium seems at first sight unsuited to the kind of thick description at which Natalie Zemon Davis excels. Yet recent scholarship that aims to locate Byzantine culture and society within new global and transnational approaches to history demands a more nuanced understanding. In these lectures she will explore the question of what kind of thick description can be provided. She will focus on the long twelfth century, a time of intense creativity as well as of rising tensions, and one for which literary approaches are currently a lively area in current scholarship. She will argue for their integration within a broader approach to Byzantine social and cultural history focusing on discourse, and drawing on the many kinds of dialogue texts (secular and religious) that were a key feature of Byzantine textual production\"--From publisher's website.
Book
Marketing insights from text analysis
Language is an integral part of marketing. Consumers share word of mouth, salespeople pitch services, and advertisements try to persuade. Further, small differences in wording can have a big impact. But while it is clear that language is both frequent and important, how can we extract insight from this new form of data? This paper provides an introduction to the main approaches to automated textual analysis and how researchers can use them to extract marketing insight. We provide a brief summary of dictionaries, topic modeling, and embeddings, some examples of how each approach can be used, and some advantages and limitations inherent to each method. Further, we outline how these approaches can be used both in empirical analysis of field data as well as experiments. Finally, an appendix provides links to relevant tools and readings to help interested readers learn more. By introducing more researchers to these valuable and accessible tools, we hope to encourage their adoption in a wide variety of areas of research.
Journal Article
Psychological Well-Being of Left-Behind Children in China: Text Mining of the Social Media Website Zhihu
China’s migrant population has significantly contributed to its economic growth; however, the impact on the well-being of left-behind children (LBC) has become a serious public health problem. Text mining is an effective tool for identifying people’s mental state, and is therefore beneficial in exploring the psychological mindset of LBC. Traditional data collection methods, which use questionnaires and standardized scales, are limited by their sample sizes. In this study, we created a computational application to quantitively collect personal narrative texts posted by LBC on Zhihu, which is a Chinese question-and-answer online community website; 1475 personal narrative texts posted by LBC were gathered. We used four types of words, i.e., first-person singular pronouns, negative words, past tense verbs, and death-related words, all of which have been associated with depression and suicidal ideations in the Chinese Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (CLIWC) dictionary. We conducted vocabulary statistics on the personal narrative texts of LBC, and bilateral t-tests, with a control group, to analyze the psychological well-being of LBC. The results showed that the proportion of words related to depression and suicidal ideations in the texts of LBC was significantly higher than in the control group. The differences, with respect to the four word types (i.e., first-person singular pronouns, negative words, past tense verbs, and death-related words), were 5.37, 2.99, 2.65, and 2.00 times, respectively, suggesting that LBC are at a higher risk of depression and suicide than their counterparts. By sorting the texts of LBC, this research also found that child neglect is a main contributing factor to psychological difficulties of LBC. Furthermore, mental health problems and the risk of suicide in vulnerable groups, such as LBC, is a global public health issue, as well as an important research topic in the era of digital public health. Through a linguistic analysis, the results of this study confirmed that the experiences of left-behind children negatively impact their mental health. The present findings suggest that it is vital for the public and nonprofit sectors to establish online suicide prevention and intervention systems to improve the well-being of LBC through digital technology.
Journal Article
Covid-19 Insights and Linguistic Methods
The emergence of COVID-19 affects the world population in many ways, resulting in its own specialised discourse. In addition to providing a source of data for analysis, this discourse has also led to a rethinking of multifarious research methods. This section presents a series of articles by scholars from different parts of the world with macro- and micro-linguistic perspectives, ranging from corpus-based analysis to content analysis studies. At the macro level, these scholars explored ways through which government bodies communicate with the public. Official announcements, parliamentary proceedings and COVID-19-related corpora are examined and a comparative textual analysis between the Malaysian and British governments is provided. At the micro level, the scholars analysed selected corpora with lexical, semantic, and discourse foci and personal posts of short narratives and photos to encapsulate meanings from human life and experience. The main takeaway from these studies is the application of a wide range of methods for different focus and perspectives that may be customised to the researcher’s unique context.
Journal Article
Applying Semiotics & Systematic Visual-Textual Analysis to Racialized Transnational Carer Employees’ Arts-Based Data
Due to increased migration and global aging, transnational caregiving plays an increasingly significant role in supporting work-family integration in Canadian society. Yet, there is limited research exploring racialized transnational carer employees’ (R TCEs’) experiences in Canada. TCEs are immigrants working in paid employment in Canada and providing unpaid care to family and/or friends across nations. This unpaid care can include emotional, physical and/or financial support. The data for this article were drawn from a larger study that examined R TCEs’ experience using arts-based and qualitative inquiry. Seventeen participants (male = 10, female = 7, other = 0) provided an art piece (e.g. poem, artifact, photograph, and drawing) as well as a written or verbal description of their piece’s meaning. This paper applies a semiotic framework and “Systematic Visual-Textual Analysis” to triangulate our analysis of participant art pieces and the meaning they gave to these creative products. Our analysis illustrates the multi-dimensional experience of transnational carer employees in Canada, through the common and overlapping symbolism of transition, care, love, and motivation. The research provides a cross-cultural, nuanced, and wholistic perspective on transnational care by R TCEs in Canada, while taking a novel analytical approach that allows for the systemic application of semiotics to arts-based analysis. Our findings have the potential to inform the implementation and content of caregiving supports in Canadian workplaces, post-secondary institutions, and medical care, as well as the application of semiotics and systematic visual-textual analysis in social science.
Journal Article
Locally Based Architectural Construction Strategies in Rural China: Textual Analysis of Architects’ Design Thinking
The distinctive constraints and opportunities present in rural China underscore the importance of exploring sustainable architectural construction models in such areas. Architects engaged in rural projects have contributed design thinking that incorporates construction operations in response to local elements, resulting in significant benefits for the sustainability of rural construction. This study investigates these design approaches as locally based architectural construction strategies and seeks to identify their latent wisdom as a reference for future practices through the textual analysis of 63 articles showcasing outstanding architectural design in rural China. By organizing related design thinking with respect to three key elements, extracting these elements, and analyzing their correlations from the textual descriptions, 14 types of locally based architectural construction strategies are identified. Via analysis and discussions of these types, this research identifies the paramount concerns in Chinese rural architectural practices as revolving around fundamental issues of technology, livability, and aesthetics. These fundamental issues emphasize different kinds of sustainability—the pursuit of sustainability in local-based rural construction activity through diverse technological explorations, environmental sustainability through special building envelope designs, and cultural sustainability through the establishment of new local rural aesthetics with material and other visible expressions.
Journal Article
Same-Sex Parenting in Italy: An Affective and Developmental Psychocultural Analysis
IntroductionThe study focuses on the issue of same-sex parenting in Italy, one of the few Western countries where it is not legally permitted. The aim of the research is to collect the experience of parents who have had a child abroad through reproduction and/or gestation procedures not ratified and recognized by the national legal system.MethodsThe research involved 32 same-sex parents, specifically 22 mothers (Mage = 41.3; SD = 6.5) and 10 fathers (Mage = 43.8; SD = 7.4) of at least one child. Data were collected in the first part of 2022, using a narrative interview designed to collect parents’ representation of same-sex parenting in Italy. The interviews were analyzed using Emotional Textual Analysis, a text mining methodology for tracing the emotional dimensions of text.ResultsThe factorial analysis generated four thematic clusters (1—loneliness; 2—denied rights; 3—starting a family; and 4—future of LGBTQ+ liberation process) and two factors (1—minority stress; 2—conservatorism).ConclusionsThe results highlight a strong cultural backwardness in Italy on LGBTQ+ parental rights. Participants experience the desire and the practice of being parents within a cultural framework that, in the absence of legislative norms that protect these forms of generativity, emphasizes their sense of difference and isolation.Policy ImplicationsFuture policies should be concerned with the need for cultural and legislative advances, supported by progressive movements and associations, as well as the development of psychological-clinical settings capable of supporting an emotional position in the parents based on trust about the context and the future.
Journal Article
Audiovisual fiction and tourism promotion: The impact of film and television on the image of tourist destinations and contributions from textual analysis
The first studies of film and television as inducers of tourism appeared in the 1990s. In light of the role these media play in tourist decisions, studies of the capacity of audiovisual fiction to project a unique image of tourist attractions and destinations or to influence audience perceptions of them are particularly important. However, ever since research of this kind began, it has suffered from significant theoretical and methodological shortcomings associated mainly with the lack of an interdisciplinary approach. Most of the research has been in the field of tourism and marketing studies, with only a limited number of contributions from film and television studies. The objective of this article is to offer a critical review of studies exploring the relationship between audiovisual fiction and tourist destination image. The aim is to identify their conceptual shortcomings and to point out possible solutions with reference to audiovisual textual theory and analysis. The article begins with the identification of the main areas studied in this research: the effect on the attributes of tourist destinations and on their overall image, stereotypes, and the capacity of audiovisual fiction to vest the locations where their stories are set with different connotations. This is followed by an analysis of studies that exhibit more of an interdisciplinary approach by combining audiovisual studies and tourism studies. The article then addresses the debate over the types of audiovisual productions that researchers argue have the greatest tourism-inducing capacity. Finally, the conclusions point out possible future lines of research based more on explanation than on description, recommending the systematic incorporation of textual analysis into research on film-induced tourism, and particularly on its impact on tourist destination image.
Journal Article
Cross-interdisciplinary insights into adaptive governance and resilience
The Adaptive Water Governance project is an interdisciplinary collaborative synthesis project aimed at identifying the features of adaptive governance in complex social-ecological institutional systems to manage for water-basin resilience. We conducted a systematic qualitative meta-analysis of the project’s first set of published interdisciplinary studies, six North American basin resilience assessments. We sought to develop new knowledge that transcends each study, concerning two categories of variables: (1) the drivers of change in complex water-basin systems that affect systemic resilience; and (2) the features of adaptive governance. We have identified the pervasive themes, concepts, and variables of the systemic-change drivers and adaptive-governance features from these six interdisciplinary texts using qualitative methods of inductive textual analysis and synthesis. We produced synthesis frameworks for understanding the patterns that emerged from the basin assessment texts, as well as comprehensive lists of the variables that these studies uniformly or nearly uniformly addressed. These study results are cross-interdisciplinary in the sense that they identify patterns and knowledge that transcend several diverse interdisciplinary studies. These relevant and potentially generalizable insights form a foundation for future research on the dynamics of complex social-ecological institutional systems and how they could be governed adaptively.
Journal Article
“The Sin Eaters” by Sherman Alexie: A Dystopian Island in a Mostly Auspicious Archipelago
The belated publication of Sherman Alexie’s story “The Sin Eaters” as part of the collection The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) is worthy of the interest of biographic-textual scholars for its singularity. Not only did the author delay its appearance due to the very sinister tone of the story, but he decided to include it at the very heart of a collection, which is very different both stylistically and thematically. Paradoxically, however, the dystopian vision of the United States in the late 1950s offered by “The Sin Eaters” is an effective “counterweight” to the rest of the materials compiled in the collection. Assisted by the ideas of experts in the field of dystopian fiction, the article analyzes the story as an adequate counterpart and complement to the other, more promising, pictures offered in the volume.
Journal Article