University at Albany, State University of New York
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Everyone’s a Critic: Processes of Legitimation in the Video Essay Genre on YouTube
Get PDFThe rise of video essays as a popular genre on YouTube is a notable development in the media criticism and intellectual work in online spaces. Theorization on criticism as intellectual work and the performance of expertise and credibility is well developed within sociology (Alexander 2004; Jacobs & Townsley 2017) but esearch on YouTube specifically is quite limited within the social sciences. Most existing research on the video essay genre comes from media studies and communications scholarship (McWhirter 2022; Smarandache 2021; Sylvia & Moody 2022). This study seeks to understand how creators working in the video essay genre, and more specifically, those making works of media criticism, achieve a sense of authority and legitimacy as outsiders to traditional intellectual fields. This project is a content analysis with video essays themselves being the objects of analysis. Analysis found four main factors that mediate performances and the construction of credibility on YouTube: Technical proficiency, intellectual hierarchy, audience relations, and identity. These processes overlap with each other and are shaped by material factors like the particular YouTube’s structure of payment and monetization as well as more cultural factors like the conventions of the criticism genre. The creation of expertise and credibility on YouTube is a multifaceted process. As creators who exist outside traditional institutions of knowledge and criticism, video essayists must manage their position as non-traditional intellectuals alongside other obstacles inherent to working on YouTube
Stakeholders’ Participation in PCAOB Audit Standard Setting
Get PDFLobbying is an integral part of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s standard-setting process. Although the PCAOB has been drafting auditing standards for over 20 years, there is still much to learn about how stakeholder behavior in submitting comment letters to the PCAOB varies by interest group, comment period (concept release, proposal, and reproposal), the stakeholder’s position on the proposal, arguments used, and emotional strategies. This paper examines PCAOB Docket 034, which proposed audit report reforms, including the auditor’s disclosure of critical audit matters (CAMs). There was strong stakeholder participation and conflicting opinions when this standard was under discussion. To analyze lobbying behavior, I conducted a content analysis of 489 comment letters addressing the proposed rules by the PCAOB. Findings show that stakeholders use various emotional strategies to influence regulators, with accounting professionals consistently expressing more negative sentiment than the other major stakeholders. Financial statement preparers (i.e., public companies) adopt a more positive tone than accounting professionals when opposing positions, and they use intense language, employing dual strategies of sentiment and intensity across comment periods. Accounting professionals focus on sentiment strategy, sometimes aligning their viewpoints more closely with financial statement users (i.e., investors) than with their audit clients, the preparers. With respect to CAMs, stakeholder participation led the PCAOB to significantly revise its initial proposal. Additionally, I find that machine learning approaches identify lobbying positions more accurately than dictionary-based classification, suggesting that machine learning is the most efficient and reliable methodology for analyzing the textual evidence of comment letters’ stance
How Can Educators Motivate Young People to Participate in Civic Life?
Get PDFIntroduction:
In a democratic society, why do some people engage in civic and political action while others sit on the sidelines? What — if anything — can educators do to support informed civic participation among a wider segment of the population, even at a time of political cynicism?
These are challenging and vital issues, as we see during each election cycle and the periods in between, and I’ve tried to address them from various angles.
As a middle school social studies teacher in the early 2000s, I aimed to motivate young people to be civically engaged — sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. My efforts to lead discussions of current events, highlight the connections between the past and the present, and structure opportunities for students to contact local officials worked well for some, but I knew that I was missing something
Does Art Pluralism Lead To Eliminativism?
Get PDFArt pluralism is the view that there is no single, correct account of what art is. Instead, art is understood through a plurality of art concepts and with considerations that are different for particular arts. Although avowed pluralists have retained the word “art” in their discussions, it is natural to ask whether the considerations that motivate pluralism should lead us to abandon art talk altogether; that is, should pluralism lead to eliminativism? This paper addresses arguments both for and against this move. We ultimately argue that pluralism allows one to retain the word “art”, if one wants it, but only in a loose, conversational sense. The upshot of pluralism is that talk of art in general cannot be asked to do theoretical and philosophical work
Is Chunking Multimodal?: Music Reading Expertise Effects on Eye Movements During a Cross-modal Visual Search Paradigm
Get PDFExperts show performance advantages during visual search due to their extensive experience with domain-specific stimuli. Experts form memory representations for meaningful visual patterns, called chunks, that group together multiple chess features. Prior work suggests that the ability for experts to precisely encode a search template facilitates visual search performance (e.g. Hout & Goldinger, 2015). In music, expert musicians might also form chunks (see e.g., Maturi & Sheridan, 2020), although it is unclear what constitutes a chunk in music. The current study addressed the possibility that chunks are multimodal by introducing a new auditory-visual cross-modal version of the visual search paradigm introduced by Maturi and Sheridan (2020), while monitoring eye movements, comparing experts and non-musicians. Results support the idea that chunks are possibly multimodal in music: compared to non-musicians, experts had higher accuracy which was magnified in the cross-modal condition, indicating experts\u27 performance advantages. In addition, compared to non-musicians, experts had longer dwell times in the target region for the cross-modal condition only, suggesting that experts fixate in more relevant regions and are successfully integrating auditory information into visual information, and that process takes time
A Corona Theorem for Multipliers on the Dirichlet Space
Get PDFAn analogue to Wolff\u27s ideal problem for the multiplier algebra of the Dirichlet space, the main theorem provides sufficient conditions to classify membership of an arbitrary function in an infinitely generated ideal of the multiplier algebra
Let Your Head Hang Down: A Narrative Examination of Cultic & Conspiratorial Romance
Get PDFA response to recent cultural trends of radicalization, extremism, and violence in American society, this dissertation, a novel rendered in ephemeral fragments of oral histories, interrogates the romanticist postures that compel a community of musical artists, the so-called “Folk Revival Revival,” toward infamy and tragedy. Where more traditional sociological approaches to cultic formations stress the importance of centralized charismatic authority, and more traditional psychological approaches rely upon a conspiratorial Cold War ethos of cognitive bias and coercive control (i.e. “brainwashing”), this project meets such assumptions with incredulity, asserting instead that cultic and conspiratorial entrancement awakens first from within, and may be best understood as a misguided narrative expression of romantic genius, where the transcendent subjectivity of the individual transgresses against established standards of empirical truth as defined by the modern space, and is legitimized more by the discursive style of its rebellion than the aggregation of alternative systems of knowledge or social order
Panel: K12 Educators Integrating AI to Enhance Education
No full textAI is having huge effects on education at all levels and K–12 educators have the opportunity to make a major impact in the lives of their students through understanding and using AI. This impact can be achieved through integrating AI with teaching strategies and through teaching AI knowledge and content to their students. We have proposed a project to the National Science Foundation to work directly with middle and high school teachers over a three-year period, engaging them in research as well as demonstrating how AI can support and enhance their teaching
Compassion Cartography: Mapping the Psychological Landscape of Altruistic Equity and Effectiveness
Get PDFPsychologists and philosophers have often championed deliberative reasoning over empathy as a better approach to overcoming parochial biases and guiding altruistic equity and effectiveness. Advocates of the effective altruism (EA) philosophy even advise philanthropists to downregulate empathic responses to maximize the impact of their donations. However, recent research reveals that extraordinary altruists (XAs), such as those who donate organs to strangers, are driven primarily by empathy. This dissertation explores whether empathy necessarily impedes altruistic equity (impartial regard for others’ welfare) and effectiveness (prioritizing impact), revealing a more nuanced reality that challenges this perspective. Across two phases of research involving three subject groups (NTotal = 360; NEA = 119, NXA = 65, Ncontrol = 174), I investigate the cognitive, affective, moral, and attitudinal underpinnings of equitable and effective altruistic behavior among self-identifying effective altruists (EAs), extraordinary altruists (XAs), and ordinary adults (controls). The findings suggest that empathy is elevated among XAs, while reasoning is elevated among EAs. However, both capacities predict the prioritization of equity and effectiveness across populations, at times only showing their maximal prosocial benefits when both are high. Furthermore, expansive moral concern, utilitarian beliefs in impartial beneficence, compassionate love, identification with all of humanity, and intriguingly, group loyalty, also play critical roles. Bringing EAs and XAs into the lab for the first time in a single, unified investigation, the current insights suggest ongoing debates over the altruistic utility of reasoning versus empathy may be based on a false dichotomy. Instead, the data suggest that there is no single recipe for exceptional altruism, and that both reasoning and empathy are critical ingredients that work best together