LnuOpen (Linnaeus University)
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Commodification and breast-cancer-ization: Multimodal interaction analysis of advertising campaigns in Pakistani apparel fashion discourses
Get PDFThe present paper explores the gender identity production and interaction of brands with their consumers on social media platforms. The paper examines lower-level, higher-level and frozen mediated action employed in the promotional videos through the framework of multimodal inter(action) analysis (henceforth MIA) (Norris, 2019, 2020, 2021). For this research paper, I have selected five fashion campaigns on the theme of breast cancer awareness from three different apparel brands in Pakistan. The purpose of the paper is to examine the exploitation of linguistic and semiotic resources for gender identity production, and discourse reception by the audiences. The paper examines the video discourse using MIA and for the audience reception by Hall’s theory of audience reception that segments the viewers' positioning into three hypothetical categories: dominant, negotiating, and oppositional. The analysis of the video data shows that apparel brands have been employing covert and overt semiotic resources and strategies to spread awareness on this health concern. However, there are several anomalies and inconsistencies in the information presented for breast self-examination and some brands have been pushing gender ideologies through these health-related campaigns. The audience reception reveals that majorly the audiences are dominant and oppositional, however there are a few who have shown their negotiating the brand’s portrayal of gender ideologies. Finally, linguistic and semiotic analysis allows the researchers to unearth the hidden agenda of the brands
Aging Queer and Transmediated Exclusion in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain
Get PDFCompared with Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain" (1997), Ang Lee's film adaptation (2005) adds to the iconic signs of becoming older. The sophistication of Jack and Ennis is represented through manifold medial forms, such as moving images showing aging appearances, auditory dialogues narrating the coexisting insistence and rejection of queerness, and emotional music as an indexical reference to the condition of mellowness but not fully aged (e.g., "A Love That Will Never Grow Old"). The target media product, by way of expansion, highlights the queer experience of exclusion, and colors this experience with a sovereign joy which flourishes amid conflicts, and reaches the apex after the other (Jack) passes away. As their older selves are entangled with the heteronormative world, an incremental exclusion gives rise to a liberatory sense. The analysis pursues the adaptation's transformation of the concept of exclusion via a spatiotemporal mode. Specifically, it explores the ways aging complicates the queer subjects' commitment to monogamous relationships, and the decision to remain closeted. It follows that the loss caused by being marginalized at earlier ages is somewhat redeemed by the wisdom unconsciously formed, but realized at a later phase of life.
Importantly, the exclusionary force regulating the social identity of "queer" and "aging" bears some relevance to the phenomenon of "disconnect" in our contemporary digital society. The users are queering themselves, whatever their sexual preferences, precisely through getting suspicious of superficial networking in virtual space, while recoiling from actual touch in life. The preferred act of receding into invisibility would shed light on the transmediated exclusion as an outcome of not being excluded, but thrusting exclusion upon oneself
“Dear Africa/You have many narratives” Emerging forms of e-literature beyond the South African Novel
Get PDFOver the past several decades, there has been increasing interest in South African literature. While prominent South African literary novels have rightly been celebrated by international critics and readers in recent years, such texts are rarely considered in tandem with the innovative digital works that are also being produced in the region. These digital works have evolved in response to immense shifts in literary production and publication, resulting in exciting new forms of literature that speak directly to the #FeesMustFall and the #RhodesMustFall generation of young black South Africans. This movement, which I term afrodigitalism, is characterised by intermedial works, with text, images, videos, and audio works often melding together in online spaces. Works are frequently dynamic and creatively ambitious. These Afrodigitalists are at once poets and photographers, playwrights and vloggers, digital practitioners, and life writers. Although such works are often published in English for a Pan-African readership, they remain distinctly African, exploring creative forms that speak to traditional literary forms like oral storytelling.
My research will inform several case studies focused on three writers. These writers include Koleka Putuma, the poet, performer, theatre practitioner, blogger, essayist, and founder of Manyano Media. Xabiso Vili, poet, new media artist, performer, and digital strategist, and Lidudumalingani, writer, photographer, filmmaker, City Editor, and recipient of the Caine Prize for African literature.
The aim of this research is to establish a more robust understanding of the diversity within contemporary South African literary production and how such literature is deeply interwoven with digital culture and technology
The Lyon 16ci – A visually searchable database as instrument of knowledge for book illustrations printed in Lyon between 1480 and 1600
Get PDFThe Lyon16ci is an online database of illustrations printed in Lyon in the 16th century. It presents a collection of 10000 digitized illustrated pages along with several early modern woodblocks; it can be searched using an image as a search query as well as using text keyword for searching metadata assigned to the illustrations. Such visual and text search capability allows research scholars to track and investigate the production, use, circulation and copying of woodblocks, iconographic subjects, artistic styles within 16th-century printed illustrated editions. As this database combines visual and metadata search using VISE imagematching software, it becomes an intermedial instrument of knowledge which revisit the possibilities of searching through the book. The modalities of working with this digital tool for printed illustrations relate to the more theoretical questions of intermediality in digital art historical research: the digital object is embedded in a world of its own, in a system of relations to different entities which allow the user to see the relationships among similar or identical items (tracing the so-called trajectory of the image). How do we categorize and implement these visual capabilities? How do we develop the granularity of both visual and metadata search? Ultimately, which possibilities open up when working digitally with a complex artistic object such as the illustrated printed page, in terms of collecting, digitizing, indexing and sharing
Att skifta perspektiv genom konsten
Get PDFNedan beskrivs två angelägna forskningsteman som knyter an till planerad forskning. Det ena handlar om att utveckla nya - och vidareutveckla existerande metoder för konstförmedling, genom ett planerat samarbete. Det andra handlar om att utforska frågan om hur konkreta exempel från nutida konst kan bearbeta svåra gemensamma händelser
Unraveling speech-to-text transcription processes in children with and without reading and writing difficulties
Get PDFChildren facing reading and writing difficulties encounter obstacles in achieving fluent transcription due to spelling difficulties (Beers et al., 2017). This lack of fluency can impede their formulation processes and negatively impact the final text (Sumner et al., 2013). To address this, speech-to-text (STT) technology has been proposed as a potential solution, bypassing the spelling process. However, there exists a risk that other factors may hinder the production process instead.
In our study, we investigated transcription and error correction processes in 28 Swedish 10–13-year-olds, both with and without reading and writing difficulties, using STT for writing. We examined the influence of individual abilities—working memory, spelling, decoding, and general STT skill—on various text production processes: burst length (words dictated in one go), burst accuracy, and overall production rate (text length/time on task). We used linear mixed-effects regression analysis to investigate whether the independent variables predicted text production processes.
Our findings revealed that production rate was influenced by working-memory capacity, burst length, and burst accuracy. Interestingly, burst accuracy was solely predicted by general STT skill, not by any other individual ability. We also identified two effective transcription strategies: dictating more than one word at a time and combining STT with keyboard use.
The results underscore that producing text using STT is a cognitively intricate process, placing substantial demands on working memory. Moreover, STT skill (the combined effect of technical capabilities of the tool and the participant’s output) plays a pivotal role in achieving fluent transcription without unnecessary interruptions. Pedagogical implications will be discussed
The perspectives of students with DLD on what facilitates learning
Get PDFThe aim of this study is to further understandings of what support young people diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) find helpful in educational settings. The study is grounded in a multidimensional understanding of disabilities where biological, psychological, and social dimensions of living with a disability are included (Anastasiou & Kauffman, 2013).
While it has repeatedly been shown that students with DLD have an increased risk for educational problems (Ziegenfusz et al., 2022), little is known about what these students find helpful for learning. The perspectives of students with DLD are important for the development of adequate support for this group (Lyons et al., 2022).
In the study, reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) is used to analyse semi‐structured interviews with 14 students (13–16 years) diagnosed with DLD. Preliminary results indicate that help to understand expectations and requirements for educational tasks and activities can be important for students with DLD. Students with DLD may also find help to manage time and effort spent on educational activities important. Moreover, a responsive approach where teachers monitor students’ activities and behaviour and offer support when needed can also help students with DLD to better manage educational tasks. In addition, adjusted linguistic demands in educational activities may also facilitate learning for students with DLD. The initial analysis indicates that exploring students’ perspectives on support can contribute to better understandings of how negative effects of DLD in educational settings can be reduced
Success factors and pitfalls for language and communication focused Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programs for teachers
Get PDFAim(s): The presentation will offer an overview of success factors and pitfalls identified when conducting a series of CPDs in elementary schools by our research groups. The CPDs all aim at improving use of evidence-based language learning activities and interactions in the classroom.
Theoretical framework/area of investigation: Weak language skills increase risk of academic failure, impacting both the individual her/himself, and society. Teachers play an essential role in developing language skills. Teachers’ knowledge and skills in providing a language-fostering environment in the classroom might be increased by CPD programs. However, studies evaluating the effect of CPDs for educators targeting language development at school are scarce, and there can be many pitfalls and difficulties, both when conducting research studies, and when implementing findings into practice.
Methodological design: In our research group, we have conducted several studies evaluating the effect, on both participating teachers and their students, of different language and communication focused CPDs for teachers.
Findings and conclusion: In research and practice, there are several factors to take into consideration when planning CPDs. Building relations with the teachers, and openly discussing their teaching practices from video recordings and observations in the classroom, to enable personalized coaching can contribute to a positive experience of the CPD. Relevant background and expertise is crucial in making the CPD accepted and interesting for the participating teachers.
Changing teaching practices is a time-consuming process, and positive effects on teacher or student outcomes following CPDs are not guaranteed. Aligning the content of a CPD program with the teachers own specific needs and goals may be difficult. Research design must be thoroughly explained to the participants, to reduce the risk of data loss.nQuantitative and qualitative results maynpaint somewhat different pictures showing the need of mixed methods when analyzing these kinds of data. A measurement of intervention Fidelity, i.e., to what extent the participants implement the intervention content as intended by the researchers, can help in evaluating the program’s effectiveness
Is language a barrier for multilingual parental engagement?: An investigation of multilingual parents’ identity construction in educational contexts
Get PDFParental engagement is a multidimensional construct, which is often related to pupils' good school performance. When it comes to super-diverse contexts in non-comprehensive education systems, research shows that, particularly for multilingual families, the involvement of parents in schools plays an indispensable role (Schnell, 2015). However, this can be a challenge for multilingual parents with migrant background due to prevailing structures of power and dominant ideologies in the school space (e.g. Turney & Kao, 2009), which reinforce inequalities in the school system. Considering identity from a poststructuralist perspective (Darvin & Norton, 2015) and an inclusive approach to parental engagement (Goodall, 2018), this ongoing dissertation intends to understand how multilingual parents construct their identities while seeking to engage with their children’s learning in the host society, and how capital and ideology intersect in this process. Case studies with 7 participants were carried out, in which data from diary studies and episodic-narrative interviews with parents were collected, and observations of school-parent meetings were conducted. The data has been analyzed from the lenses of the Critical Discourse Analysis (Reisigl & Wodak, 2017). A glimpse into preliminary results suggest that while language does appear as an important capital for the construction of multilingual parents’ identity in the educational context, monolingual bias and deficit models circulating in the institution seem rather to have a bigger impact in how parents negotiate their possibilities of engagement in their children’s learning than a so-called language barrier
Students' decisions on information organization in writing
Get PDFWriting instruction in school seeks to develop students' language toward a more formal and elaborated language which is necessary for writing expository texts. In a developmental perspective, advanced writers can write with a higher degree of syntactic complexity and correctness (Crossley, 2020) and take a reader's perspective during the writing process (Kellogg, 2008). However, in a school context, there may be large individual differences between students with regard to writing skills and understand of their writing process. To be able to make informed choices about how to structure their texts, students need knowledge of what effect different ways of organizing information into clauses and sentences have on the text.
The aim of our study is to uncover the different decisions students make when they organize information into clauses and sentences in their texts. The following research questions are addressed: 1) What is the relationship between the students' planning and revising behavior in and their own perception of their writing process? 2) What is the relationship between the students' planning and revising behavior and the sentence structure in the final texts?
The conducted study is a pilot study, designed as an experiment with mixed methods with 15 9 grade students in Sweden, as part of a larger project. The students were given a written assignment and produced their texts in a key stroke logging software, registering pauses and revisions during writing. Subsequently, they read their texts aloud, which forced them to take a reader's perspective. Finally, we performed stimulated recall interviews to investigate the students' intentions and degree of awareness regarding sentence organization and boundary markers between clauses and sentences.
The study will have didactic implications for writing instruction in school. Preliminary results show very different profiles among the students, both regarding sentence organization, planning, and revising, and regarding the ability to motivate linguistic choices