1,720,956 research outputs found
Place, Identity, and Hybridity Matters : An Ethnographic-Computational Study of Critical Information Ecosystems in Remote Communities in Michigan's Upper Peninsula
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Information and Media - Doctor of Philosophy, 2025Rural communities face unique information challenges, yet current theories largely ignore the contextual elements essential for understanding how place-based information systems operate. Existing scholarship often treats rural areas as monolithic, overlooking diverse experiences and depicting rural information environments as merely reactionary systems responding to local news loss and technological disconnect. This contributes to deficit framings that overlook the reality: rural information systems are diverse, vibrant, and long-established networks that communities have intentionally developed over generations.To better understand this diversity, I employ Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT), which identifies storytelling networks facilitating information flow. However, CIT fails to account for place-based identity processes that systematically determine access to these networks. This dissertation argues that place, identity, and hybridity are crucial for understanding sophisticated rural information ecosystems in ways current scholarship overlooks. To address the gap in CIT\u2014how identity creates gatekeeping and uneven access to storytelling networks\u2014I develop Informational Belonging, a framework extending Abdelal et al.'s (2006) operationalization of identity to place-based contexts. This framework centers on four dimensions of place-based identity assessment: constitutive norms (who we are because of where we are), social purposes (what we do to care for our own), relational comparisons (where you fit in our social map), and cognitive models (how you understand how things work here).Using convergent mixed methods, this dissertation explores how information ecosystems and identity assessment interact through systematic community processes. Computational analysis of 253,392 Facebook posts from 2,463 organizations across Michigan's Upper Peninsula reveals that remote areas operate through systematically different information ecologies rather than simple underservice. Statistical analysis demonstrates that organizational composition varies significantly across remoteness levels (\u3c72(48) = 837.41, p < .001), with remote communities served by distinct hybrid ecosystems where non-news actors fulfill specific community functions that traditional media cannot address. Historical analysis spanning 1867-2023 suggests that non-news actor prominence emerges from long-established adaptive patterns rather than recent crisis responses. However, attempts to identify critical information content using an ensemble classification model that combines RoBERTa and CardiffNLP transformers encountered challenges with place-specific cultural references that are integral to identity dimensions (Macro F1 = 0.348, Cohen's \u3ba = 0.296). These findings highlight the limitations of algorithmic approaches in understanding and identifying critical information within local information networks.These computational boundaries necessitated ethnographic investigation to understand how identity assessment determines network access. Fieldwork conducted over 24 months in "Huronia," a pseudonymized remote community, demonstrates that accessing information networks requires demonstrating competence across all four identity dimensions through sustained community engagement. Communities evaluate participants through complex graduated assessments extending beyond simple insider-outsider categories to include nested place identities and cultural competence markers. During crises, a "values override" mechanism enables social purposes centered on community care to temporarily supersede normal boundary maintenance, allowing communities to activate collective assistance while preserving the identity assessment systems that make such assistance meaningful.This research extends Communication Infrastructure Theory by providing a process-oriented framework explaining how communities systematically determine storytelling network inclusion rather than treating access patterns as random or demographic. The findings demonstrate that place operates as an active force shaping information needs and competence requirements, identity functions as community assessment infrastructure determining graduated network access, and hybridity represents sophisticated adaptive systems refined over generations rather than makeshift crisis responses. Understanding these convergent processes offers insights crucial for supporting rural information equity through recognition of existing community assets rather than deficit-based interventions that may inadvertently undermine the sophisticated place-based systems communities develop to ensure collective care.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
EXPLORING THE UNCERTAIN ROLE OF ACCURACY GOALS IN THE SELECTION AND PROCESSING OF INFORMATION : ACCOUNTING FOR THE ABILITY IN THE THEORY OF MOTIVATED REASONING
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Communication - Doctor of Philosophy, 2024Drawing from the theory of motivated reasoning, accuracy goals have been considered as a potential remedy for promoting democratic citizenship. Existing literature suggests that accuracy goals may foster balanced information-seeking behavior and objective processing of political information. However, previous work has yielded mixed results. In light of this uncertain role of accuracy goals, this study suggests that several indicators of abilities \u2013 news literacy and cognitive sophistication \u2013 are prerequisites for accuracy goals to promote unbiased and even-handed reasoning of information. For this, I conducted two online experiments. Results from Study 1 show that news literacy and cognitive sophistication did not enable accuracy-driven individuals to choose information from credible sources or counter-attitudinal information. Findings from Study 2 reveal that even when individuals were cognitively sophisticated, accuracy goals did not lead to favorable evaluations of information supported by strong evidence or pro-attitudinal information. I discuss the implications of the results for the role of accuracy goals.Description based on online resource. Title from PDF t.p. (Michigan State University Fedora Repository, viewed ).Includes bibliographical references
Examining Public Diplomacy Message Strategies During Times of Crisis Communication : An Analysis of Recent Major Turkey-Russia Crises
No full textPublic diplomacy is a way of communicating a country's foreign policies to other countries with the main purpose of building favorable relationships. It is a vital instrument for international relations, used to construct relationships between nations and create positive images of a country in another. It also serves to address matters of conflict, build trust, and provide a platform for dialogue. In times of crisis, public diplomacy can help to bridge the gap between countries and create a more constructive atmosphere for negotiations. However, the role of public diplomacy in international crises has not been thoroughly studied in terms of the analysis of message strategies during challenging and critical times. Additionally, there is a lack of understanding of the effectiveness of public diplomacy as a crisis communication tool in the context of social, economic, environmental, political, and health crises. This dissertation seeks to address this need by examining the message strategies employed by a nation-state when confronted with a critical international political crisis. This dissertation argues that public diplomacy can be used as a feasible approach in crisis communication when analyzing international crises, such as in the case of Turkey\u2013Russia; the case of the shootdown of a Russian warplane in 2015 and the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara in 2016. Building from these case studies, the overarching questions of this dissertation are: First, do the public diplomacy functions (message strategies); advocacy / influence, communication / informational, relational, promotional, warfare, and political; used by governments differ when confronting a crisis? And second, do the public diplomacy functions used by the government differ when used in a digital platform and on a government official website during a crisis? Lastly, how did the traditional media frame and interpret both crises? To analyze the questions, three different data sets were used (official press releases from both Turkey and Russia, Twitter posts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the presidential accounts of both countries, and the highest circulation newspapers in the US \u2013 The New York Times, The Washington Post and in the UK-The Guardian, The Times) in the two crises mentioned above. Thematic analysis in qualitative research was used to examine the information included in all the date sets. Based on the results of the analysis, a new theme -apology- was identified and this is the contribution of this study. Additionally, the results indicated that traditional diplomacy between the leaders and behind-the-scenes diplomacy were influential in mitigating the crises. To conclude, this study supports the idea that public diplomacy is a viable approach in crisis communication to help nations mitigate crises.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Information and Media - Doctor of Philosophy, 2023Includes bibliographical reference
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
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