1,721,000 research outputs found
Shopping as ‘best practice’ – analysing Walmart’s sustainability policies
No full textNowadays, companies increasingly rely on green-economy oriented campaigns, in order to engage the growing number of ethic, environment-friendly consumers. Indeed, expressions evoking environmental friendliness are becoming ever trendier. Walmart, the American multinational corporation and the largest retailer in the world, is a relevant case in point, since its explicit, advertised goals are perfectly in line with the contemporary ‘green-oriented scenario’. Interestingly enough, Walmart’s advertising campaigns seem to echo the Sustainable Development Goals, as declared through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations Summit on 25 September 2015.
Against this background, our study examined the Walmart’s videos (retrieved from YouTube) on ‘sustainability’ with their variety of communicative strategies, where ‘responsible’ Walmart positive attitudes to fundamental issues are advertised. Walmart made a major commitment announcing goals to create zero waste, use only renewable energy and responsible sourcing, sell products that sustain people and the environment. In gist, the company’s commitments are to expand the business while at the same time improving communities.
Our integrative approach to the analysis of aspects of contemporary Walmart corporate communication relies on a broad (Positive) Discourse Analysis (DA) perspective. The focus is on both the values of social esteem/capacity as classified in the Appraisal Framework, and the specificity of language of advertising with its lines of appeal. Furthermore, insights from ecolinguistics and multimodal DA resources were taken into account.
This study highlighted how the fluid YouTube medium, fully exploiting the grammar of visuality, allows Walmart sustainability campaign to achieve an all-pervasive effect and make its goals ‘visible’ and presenting shopping at Walmart as a best practice.
In terms of PDA, Walmart advertising foregrounds positive production and distribution models to imitate, through an intentional exploitation of multimodal representational resources, so as to construe a persuasive vision of a better world. From an ecolinguistic perspective, the study clarified how Walmart’s communication tends to align the virtual customers by getting them onside with the widely shared sustainability values, especially by representing its actions as an inspiring ongoing story of progress. Issues of credibility were also discussed
State of Florida vs. George Zimmermann: the media focus on the interaction of racial and legal issues
No full textThe trial of the Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman (July, 2013) for the fatal shooting of the unarmed Trayvon Martin, closely followed in the U.S, became one of the most racially-charged, and apparently most politically motivated, prosecutions in recent U.S. history (Adjei, Gill 2013, Bhandaru 2013). Amidst the growing media frenzy and active participation of the public, a whirlwind of controversy and political debate surrounded the reports of this murder. The national media soon seized on the shooting, initially covered by the Florida media alone, and race was reported as central to the tragedy –Trayvon Martin being described as a 17-year-old “black male” and George Zimmerman as a 29-year-old “white Hispanic”. Police quickly released Zimmerman, since his behaviour was legally acceptable according to Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law (a self-defense law). Only after nearly 450,000 people signed an online NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) petition, a process against Zimmerman for second-degree murder was started which ended up with his acquittal, grounded on the “stand your ground” law. Key issues at stake in this story are racial profiling, due process and the failure of self-defence laws in many states to keep up with the U.S. violent realities.
Taking place in Florida’s controversial criminal-justice system, this trial had a disruptive impact on societal values and belief systems, which also found expression in the sensationalized reports of the media. News media are often able to favour particular value positions (affectual and judgmental), while employing a relatively impersonal style in which evaluations and other potentially contentious meanings are largely confined to material attributed to quoted sources (White 2005, 2012). By exploring the (print) media coverage of this story from a discourse analytical perspective, where legal and sociological debates are involved (Babacan et al. 2009), the present study thus aims at providing a socio-critical interpretation of how the media discourse/s contributed to inflame racial passions, and to generate new and potentially disruptive social dynamics.
At the same time, this study attempts to highlight how changes in society mean that legislation is no longer able to cope with a nation where, by 2020, the word ‘minorities’ will lose its present significance. Qualitative samples from the US press media (The New York Times and Orlando Sentinel) will be analyzed and the legal and socio-cultural implications discussed.
The present work investigates a selection of print media reports on the killing of Trayvon and related events, in order to highlight how crucial the management of a variety of perspectives can be to effective journalistic communication. The media coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman’s trial can be more deeply understood if situated within the discursive practices used by journalists and other professionals to shape events according to socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events (Goodwin 1994). A famous and much investigated precedent is the 1992 trial of four white Los Angeles policemen charged with beating Mr. Rodney King, an African-American motorist who had been stopped for speeding. A videotape of the beating (made without the knowledge of the officers by a local witness from his balcony) became a politically charged theatre for contested vision (Goodwin 1994). The footage (showing five officers striking King repeatedly, while other officers stood by) was aired around the world, and raised public concern about police (mis-)conduct towards minorities. This line of events is still painfully open and productive –the recent killing of Michael Brown (August 9, 2014) in Ferguson (Mo) being a notable example. There are similarities between the 2013 Zimmermann trial and the 1992 Los Angeles policemen trial in so much as both show how the human ability to see/gauge a momentous event does not simply rely on a transparent cognitive process, but is rather a socially situated activity accomplished through structured practices. Furthermore, from different visual perspectives, other and even contrasting scenarios can easily be shaped in such and similar cases – even more so in the contemporary web-wired, multimedia, g/local arena, which allows events and related information to resonate in real time beyond socio-geographic constraints. One relevant example is the letter of Trayvon Martin’s mother to the Brown family: ‘‘If They Refuse to Hear Us, We Will Make Them Feel Us” (Time Magazine, 18 August 2014), which immediately created a virtually visible, empathic bond between the two events.
The present analysis moves along two related lines of analysis, encompassing both Affect-provoked Judgment (Martin and White 2005; White 2012 a), and Attribution (White 2012 a, b). The major focus is on the interplay of directly-quoted or indirectly-reported speech that journalistic writers use to attribute viewpoints and versions of events to a variety of external sources. Thus, viewed from the Appraisal Framework perspective (White 2012 a), attribution is concerned with the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers include, and adopt a stance towards, what they represent as the words, observations, beliefs and viewpoints of other speakers/writers. This is an area which has been widely covered in the literature under such headings as [...] “direct and indirect speech”, “intertextuality” and, following Bakhtin, “heteroglossia”. [...] At its most basic, this attribution or intertextual positioning is brought into play when a writer/speaker chooses to quote or reference the words or thoughts of another.
Including and attributing a proposition implies that the writer finds it relevant to the ongoing communicative event, as will be clarified in the methodology section
Food, Family and Females: (Southern) Italy in U.S. Advertising
No full textAt the cross-over of Italian and North American lingua-cultural frameworks the complex issue of national identities plays a pivotal role, which is variously represented and advertised in media communication.
A country is not only represented through its geography and landscapes, arts, products and artefacts, but also through the verbal output and receptivity of its speech community that shares metaphors, images, icons (Hymes 1980), and through the recurring topics (and even commonplaces or truisms) that frequently occur in discursive interactions. Such mis/representation contributes to shape what Anderson defined Imagined Communities (1983). Imagined communities and national identities are not a clear-cut and a once-and-for-all affair: they mainly consist in a dynamic interplay of symbols, clichés and conventional, anachronistic behavioural models, which are easily communicated through media, and commercials. It is by now a shared notion that when exposed to overused representations on a regular basis, viewers absorb biased contents a-critically. In this perspective, Gerbner (1993, 2002) among others illustrated how media are responsible for shaping or ‘cultivating’ viewers’ conceptions of social reality. By acting as a pervasive sixth sense, visual media often construct and broadcast unbalanced portrayals, which are predictably filtered through and mediated by the viewers’ race, socioeconomic status, area of residence, and racial predisposition.
Such stereotypical representations are an effective way of simplifying and diffusing complex notions by representing marked clichéd traits, and may even increase emotional identification, contributing to the creation of cultural boundaries between Us and Others, i.e. insiders and outsiders of one’s specific national community. In our case, Americans of Italian heritage are frequently represented through anachronistic behavioural models, such as the ethnocentric sense of family, fixation on food, and mafia.
Regardless of a multifaceted, ever-developing reality, these cultural etiquettes are perpetuated, often construing derogatory meanings that can alter audience attitudes towards minorities, such as American women of Italian heritage who are frequently represented through anachronistic behavioural models, especially in TV commercials. Indeed, the real societal groups can be very different from the frozen image of the ‘advertised’ communities. In 1980s-1990s US TV commercials, Italian American women were depicted either as caring mothers and good-cooks, or overweight grandmothers wearing housecoats or aprons – often with a funny or ironic effect. The typically Italian deli-food fixation is displayed in the setting of welcoming kitchens, and the sense of family appears to be ethnocentric/clannish. In late 1990s-2010 US TV commercials the evolution and foregrounding of ‘updated’ stereotypes is recognizable, though always revolving around food (facilitated) preparation and consumption as the pivot of family life.
Drawing on selected TV commercials, we investigated from an evaluative semantic (Hunston &Thompson 2000; Martin & White 2005; Bednarek & Martin 2010; Fleitz 2010) and multimodal discourse analysis perspective (van Leeuwen 2008, 2013; Kress-van Leeuwen 2001, 2006) the (mis-)representation of Italian American women in US advertising in a diachronic perspective.
Our analysis highlighted how nation-based stereotypes are re-mediated through inter/intra-textual references in a process of re-semiotization that appears to be a successful social practice and a fundamental component of marketing strategies.
Is there any scope, however, for boundary-crossing, meaningful, informative memes in the contemporary US commercial semiosphere? Are genuine Italian artifacts and products actually advertised? Are authentic cultural values, practices, skills and traditions transmitted? Apparently not. Racisms and gender bias in their variety of forms and instantiations have a long history in advertising, inescapably leading to pervasive stereotyping, that is still being written. Not only Italian Americans, but also (or mainly) African Americans, or Asian Americans etc. are frequently framed into unflattering frozen portrayals by national or local brands and agencies to meet the audience expectations – a privilege of Italian Americans being the Mafia connection, not to mention the ‘Guidos’ and ‘Guidettes’ (Cavaliere 2012). However, with the world of social media acting as ‘taste-police’ and giving immediate feedback, many such campaigns quickly garner criticism for being (overtly) racist and get shut down. In this fluid scenario, we could even speak of a lively cross-media communication (or feedback) and reciprocal influence, which, in the long run, could change the dynamics of advertising. But, for the time being, ‘upgraded’ stereotypes are continuously shaped to meet and reinforce the perceptual expectations of the audience, according to the characteristics of the advertised goods. Such ongoing re-contextualization of the ‘Italian’ social/ethnic group in the US commercial semiosphere is mainly carried out through the advertising practices of quoting, paraphrasing, genre-mixing and hybridization, equivocation, ambiguity and shift in expectations – often leading to final effects of surprise. We can say that advertisers have re-voiced/ mimicked fictional old-worlds thanks to the potential of semiosis for mobility across boundaries and practices. Thus, local meanings and fossilized metaphors are continuously created, which can produce comic, grotesque and even paradoxical effects, and a persuasive, if inaccurate, meta-fictional setting is shaped, where the womanly stereotype is reinforced by the ethnic stereotype, thus creating an updated and more alluring commodification of the ‘Italian caring mamma’ and Womanly Homemaker
Arte Libera – Disegni di piccoli autori alle prime Arti
No full textNegli anni di attività del Laboratorio di Neuropsicologia dell'Età Evolutiva, diretto dal prof. Massimiliano Conson, i bambini hanno prodotto molti disegni. Disegni liberi, creati al momento, espressione di pensieri, interessi, preferenze e stati emotivi differenti. Tutte insieme, queste piccole opere sono in grado di produrre un effetto potente che colpisce visivamente ed emotivamente l’osservatore. Si è deciso di condividere questa esperienza nella mostra ARTE LIBERA, inaugurata l’11.7.2019, presso la Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Psicologia. Attraverso l’allestimento artistico, diretto dalla pittrice Carla Viparelli e coordinato dalla prof. Lucia Abbamonte, si è cercato di ampliare e di rappresentare l’interattività e l’osmosi del Laboratorio di Neuropsicologia con la comunità di appartenenza. D’interesse collettivo ci è sembrata l’occasione di condividere gli itinerari semantici dei disegni dei ragazzi con il loro territorio e con la comunità accademica, incoraggiando, nell’ottica della terza missione, un atteggiamento collaborativo nella fruizione degli spazi e delle risorse del nostro Ateneo
ESP Across Cultures
No full textLucia Abbamonte
Barbara Cappuzzo
Paola Leotta
Fabiola Notari
Monica Randaccio
Museum AD: interpretative or un-interpretative audio description?
Annalisa Sandrelli
Alice Spence
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
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