The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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A Data-Driven Study
No full textAmong the multiple effects of Brexit, changes in migration and mobility across Europe were expected. Several studies have analysed these aspects, mostly from the point of view of perceptions, motivations, economic effects, scenarios, and changes in migration from Central and Eastern European countries. In this study we propose an analysis of migration and cross-border mobility using an integrated data-driven approach. We investigate official statistics from Eurostat, together with non-traditional data, to give a more complete view of the changes after Brexit, at EU and regional level. Specifically, we employ scientific publication and Crunchbase data to study highly-skilled migration, Twitter and Air Passenger data to investigate monthly trends. While main trends are preserved across datasets, with a general decrease in migration towards the UK immediately after the referendum approval, we are able to also observe more fine grained trends specific to some data or regions. Furthermore, we relate the changes in mobility observed from Air Passenger data with attention to Brexit from Google Trends data.Open access funding provided by Università di Pisa within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.H2020 Societal Challengeshttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010676H2020 Research Infrastructureshttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010666Università di Pis
What a Jerk!
No full textI argue that “general pejoratives” such as “jerk” or “bastard” differ crucially from items such as “that damn N”. While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as “jerk”, there are three kinds of content that ought to be distinguished: truth‐conditional contents, evaluative presuppositions, and expressive contents that are either at‐issue (in the case of expressive predicates) or non‐at‐issue (in the case of epithets).Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 10.13039/50110000165
Investigating Rhoticity in Scottish Standard English with Sociolinguistic Interviews and Corpus Data
No full textThis paper approaches variable rhoticity in Scottish Standard English (SSE) from a methodological, data‐oriented perspective. The main focus is on how to integrate within a single sociolinguistic framework data that have been elicited under different conditions (sociolinguistic interviews vs. corpus data) and may therefore be incompatible when we take a relatively simplistic approach to stylistic variation. The article first models variation in such an unbalanced ‘patchwork’ dataset in a holistic, unified analysis and then proceeds to deconstruct the results by taking a closer look at the behaviour of the two main components of the data. While previously reported trends in the development of coda‐/r/ in SSE accents are confirmed, it is also shown that, depending on the precise nature of registers (or genres), productions may be considerably more diverse and may go beyond a simple projection of middle‐class identities. The integration of different styles in a single interpretive framework is challenging and far from straightforward.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/50110000165
A Systematic and Reflexive Review
No full textIn West Africa, migration is, in various forms, an integral part of people’s everyday lives. Though most migration takes place within the region, the academic focus is laid on intercontinental migration. Today, a growing body of literature takes intra-regional mobility and migration in West Africa into account. However, a systematic review of publications, which provides an overview of focal points and conjunctures of subject areas, has not yet been conducted. By analysing publications that focus on migration within West Africa, this study seeks to fill this gap. Simultaneously, we apply a critical lens drawn from reflexive migration studies, which allows us to shed light on postcolonial structures and international hegemonies reflected in the research on migration in West Africa. Data was collected on March 3, 2022, using Scopus. Included were 656 articles in English, French and German language listed in the database. The analysis shows that while research mainly concentrates on single countries (Ghana and Nigeria), the thematic focus is predominantly on economic (work) and social issues (social relations and family), with a recent increase on environmental topics (climate change). We further identified a disproportionate focus on the outcomes rather than drivers of migration with an emphasis on urban areas, which acknowledges previous findings on an ‘urban trap’ in research. By applying the concept of translocality to data, this study seeks to challenge the rural-urban dichotomy in the field. Additionally, the study addresses a critical gap in migration studies by focusing on underexplored themes like gender and youth migration. While male adult migrants appear as the norm, women and young people are underrepresented. In line with the claim of reflexive migration studies to establish increased (self-)reflection in the field on how knowledge is generated and discussed, we took a closer look at the affiliations of research. Results show a dominant share of affiliations with institutions based in the US and European countries (former colonizers of West African states) and not in West Africa itself. The discussion of these findings provides a fruitful vantage point for drawing attention to the Global North dominance in research. It highlights the importance of a shift towards decolonised knowledge production in order to reduce the hegemonic power imbalances in the field.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Universität Passau (3160
Affective, Cognitive, and Contextual Cues in Reddit Posts on Artificial Intelligence
No full textArtificially intelligent technologies have become a common topic in our everyday discussions where arguments about the subject can take different forms from cognitive reasoning to emotional expressions. Utilizing persuasion theories and research on the appeal of content characteristics as the theoretical approach to examine affective–cognitive language, we investigated social media posts on artificial intelligence (AI). We examined Reddit posts from 2005 to 2018 referring to AI (N = 455,634) using automated content analysis tools. The results revealed that although both the tone positivity and affective–cognitive ratio were dependent on the specific context, the language in AI posts was more analytically than emotionally oriented in general. Other users were more likely to engage with Reddit posts on AI that were high in cognitive and analytic content compared to affective and emotional content. In addition to the practical contribution of public opinion on AI, the results contribute to the theoretical discussions on affective and cognitive language in social media discussions.Open Access funding provided by LUT University (previously Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT)).LUT University (previously Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT)
The Robotic-Surgery Propositional Bank
No full textRobot-assisted minimally invasive surgery is the gold standard for the surgical treatment of many pathological conditions since it guarantees to the patient shorter hospital stay and quicker recovery. Several manuals and academic papers describe how to perform these interventions and thus contain important domain-specific knowledge. This information, if automatically extracted and processed, can be used to extract or summarize surgical practices or develop decision making systems that can help the surgeon or nurses to optimize the patient’s management before, during, and after the surgery by providing theoretical-based suggestions. However, general English natural language understanding algorithms have lower efficacy and coverage issues when applied to domain others than those they are typically trained on, and a domain specific textual annotated corpus is missing. To overcome this problem, we annotated the first robotic-surgery procedural corpus, with PropBank-style semantic labels. Starting from the original PropBank framebank, we enriched it by adding new lemmas, frames and semantic arguments required to cover missing information in general English but needed in procedural surgical language, releasing the Robotic-Surgery Procedural Framebank (RSPF). We then collected from robotic-surgery textbooks as-is sentences for a total of 32,448 tokens, and we annotated them with RSPF labels. We so obtained and publicly released the first annotated corpus of the robotic-surgical domain that can be used to foster further research on language understanding and procedural entities and relations extraction from clinical and surgical scientific literature.European Research Counci
Leben und Nachleben in Tolkiens Rohan
No full textNeben idealen Orten der Unsterblichkeit wie die zunehmend entrückten ‚unsterblichen Lande‘ gibt es im Werk J.R.R. Tolkiens auch Beschreibungen von Bereichen konkreter beziehungsweise diesseitiger Unsterblichkeit. Im Volk von Rohan und insbesondere in seinem König Théoden zeichnet Tolkien das Bild einer Kultur mit konkreten Vorstellungen von Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit, für die er seine profunde Kenntnis der angelsächsischen Kultur heranzieht. Mein Artikel untersucht diese immanenten Unsterblichkeitsvorstellungen und ihre literarische Darstellung unter religionswissenschaftlichem Blickwinkel, ausgehend vom Konzept der ‚objektiven Unsterblichkeit‘ des Philosophen Alfred North Whitehead.In addition to ideal places of immortality such as the increasingly enraptured ‘immortal lands’, there are also descriptions of realms of concrete or worldly immortality in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. With the People of Rohan, and especially King Théoden, Tolkien paints a picture of a culture with concrete ideas of life, death, and immortality, for which he draws on his profound knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture. My article examines these immanent notions of immortality and their literary representation from the perspective of religious studies, starting from the concept of ‘objective immortality’ coined by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead
