1,720,954 research outputs found
LA PRODUZIONE SOCIALE DELLA DISINFORMAZIONE: ATTIVITÀ, IDEOLOGIA E PATRIOTTISMO NELLE TROLL FARMS IRANIANE
Get PDFThe present research explores the production culture and daily operations of Iranian troll farms through the lens of production studies, focusing on the working conditions of paid troll without making judgments. I employed qualitative methods to delve into the inner workings of Iranian troll farms. Between March 2022 to July 2024. I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight disinformation workers at both managerial and staff levels, as well as a Saudi journalist interested in the same topic. At the outset of this research, I approached disinformation work in Iran as a distinct form of digital labor, often viewed as a “black box” that is very difficult to access. However, as my research progressed; I came to realize that Iranian troll farms are very distinctive as they are not as opaque as initially thought. Moreover, working in these environments fosters a sense of pride and patriotism among employees, who see themselves as “digital soldiers” engaged in an information warfare. This research represents the first in-depth study of troll farms in Iran, and it contributes to a deeper understanding of disinformation practices beyond Western-centric analyses; it situates these activities within the broader digital media industry in Iran and offers a detailed examination of the unique features that set Iranian troll farms apart, offering a more comprehensive view of this growing phenomenon.
Keywords: Iranian troll farms, Arab troll farms, computational propaganda, disinformation, production studies, Iran, digital soldiers, information warfare, qualitative researchThe present research explores the production culture and daily operations of Iranian troll farms through the lens of production studies, focusing on the working conditions of paid troll without making judgments. I employed qualitative methods to delve into the inner workings of Iranian troll farms. Between March 2022 to July 2024. I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight disinformation workers at both managerial and staff levels, as well as a Saudi journalist interested in the same topic. At the outset of this research, I approached disinformation work in Iran as a distinct form of digital labor, often viewed as a “black box” that is very difficult to access. However, as my research progressed; I came to realize that Iranian troll farms are very distinctive as they are not as opaque as initially thought. Moreover, working in these environments fosters a sense of pride and patriotism among employees, who see themselves as “digital soldiers” engaged in an information warfare. This research represents the first in-depth study of troll farms in Iran, and it contributes to a deeper understanding of disinformation practices beyond Western-centric analyses; it situates these activities within the broader digital media industry in Iran and offers a detailed examination of the unique features that set Iranian troll farms apart, offering a more comprehensive view of this growing phenomenon.
Keywords: Iranian troll farms, Arab troll farms, computational propaganda, disinformation, production studies, Iran, digital soldiers, information warfare, qualitative researc
“It was very hard for me to keep doing that job”: understanding troll farm’s working in the Arab world
Get PDFThis article investigates the production culture and routines of “troll farms” in three Arab countries—Tunisia, Egypt, and Iraq—from a production studies approach. A production studies approach enables us to focus on the working conditions of paid trolls. We employed qualitative methods to look inside the “black box” of Arab troll farms. From February to April 2020, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight disinformation workers at both managerial and staff levels. We propose to understand disinformation work as a specific type of digital labor, characterized by very intense shifts and emotionally burdensome daily tasks, absence of legal job contracts, and highly surveilled work environments. The article contributes to understand disinformation practices outside and beyond the West; it situates disinformation activities within the broader context of digital media industries; it provides a detailed analysis of the features that distinguish troll farms in the Arab world from those that emerged in other regions of the Global South; and it reconnects the research on disinformation to digital labor studies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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