117,787 research outputs found

    Visualizing teens and technology: A social semiotic analysis of stock photography and news media imagery

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    Previous research on verbal representations shows how the news media consistently depicts young people’s uses of digital media in a narrow, negative light. In this article, we present an innovative methodology for demonstrating how young people and their digital practices are visually depicted. We focus on stock photography produced by the commercial image banks which source the news media with much of its imagery. Following an indicative analysis of news media images, we present a social semiotic analysis (grounded also in a descriptive content analysis) of a dataset of 600 stock photos top-sliced from three major image banks. By pinpointing dominant representational, compositional and interpersonal meanings, we show how image banks and, in turn, the news media produce a rather pessimistic metadiscursive framing of ‘teens and technology’. These influential visualizations are often reductionistic – consistently centering technologies over relationships; they are also problematic in, for example, their inexplicably gendered and classist assumptions

    Desocializing Social Media: The Visual and Media Ideologies of Stock Photography

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    Commercial image banks powerfully shape the cultural meanings of social media, especially when circulated as “fact” in the news media. To this end, we report a social semiotic analysis that documents the representational, compositional, and interpersonal framing of social media in a corpus of 600 stock photographs top-sliced from three global image banks. This core analysis is complemented with reference to (a) keywords used to categorize photos in image banks, and (b) two indicative samples of photos reproduced in international English-language news reports. We find that a visual “regime of truth” is produced in stock photography (and then circulated by the news media) that is gendered, affectively flattened, and “corporatized.” Social media are also depicted in ways that are disembedded and largely asocial or desocialized . We interpret these findings in terms of visual and media ideologies, and vis-à-vis scholarly perspectives on “connectivity” and “sociality” in digital communication/culture

    Global patterns of cropland use intensity

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    This study presents a global scale analysis of cropping intensity, crop duration and fallow land extent computed by using the global dataset on monthly irrigated and rainfed crop areas MIRCA2000. MIRCA2000 was mainly derived from census data and crop calendars from literature. Global cropland extent was 16 million km2 around the year 2000 of which 4.4 million km2 (28%) was fallow, resulting in an average cropping intensity of 0.82 for total cropland extent and of 1.13 when excluding fallow land. The lowest cropping intensities related to total cropland extent were found for Southern Africa (0.45), Central America (0.49) and Middle Africa (0.54), while highest cropping intensities were computed for Eastern Asia (1.04) and Southern Asia (1.0). In remote or arid regions where shifting cultivation is practiced, fallow periods last 3–10 years or even longer. In contrast, crops are harvested two or more times per year in highly populated, often irrigated tropical or subtropical lowlands where multi-cropping systems are common. This indicates that intensification of agricultural land use is a strategy that may be able to significantly improve global food security. There exist large uncertainties regarding extent of cropland, harvested crop area and therefore cropping intensity at larger scales. Satellite imagery and remote sensing techniques provide opportunities for decreasing these uncertainties and to improve the MIRCA2000 inventory

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

    Square Dancing with the Stars to Enhance Dynamic Hirschman Linkages?

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    In this Presidential Address, the author takes the reader on a reconnaissance of his life and time as a regional scientist. He points out scenery he found scintillating along the way, hoping that some may pick up the banner and chew on a few of the ideas for a while. He suggests a revisit to Albert O. Hirschman’s notion of key sectors and more empirical analysis related to Marcus Berliant’s and Masahisa Fujita’s notion of knowledge creation and transfer.Presidential Address, San Antonio, Texas, March 29, 2014 (53rd Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We 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

    Letter from unknown writer to Jesse L. Boyce

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    Letter to Jesse L. Boyce from unknown author (possibly Jack) about the investigation into the powder magazine located in the Grand Canyon. Some personal news is included in the letter such as the writer's marriage to the daughter of C.A. Taylor, former Supervisor of Cochise County

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We 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

    Identification of pollen types of beekeeping interest by non-targeted mass spectrometry

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    Background The identification of pollen is important in the field of beekeeping for the determination of the botanical origin of bee products and investigations of bee diet. Until now, it has been performed by melissopalynology, the microscopic examination of pollen grains. However, this technique has some limitations, such as the necessity of experienced analysts and identification restricted to the family level for some pollen types. Although many techniques have been proposed as alternatives or complements to melissopalynology and omics techniques have been explored to gather information on the botanical origin of honey, no study has yet been conducted on a large set of pollen types. Results The study dataset consisted of 34 different pollen types of pellets collected by honeybees in Switzerland and analyzed in multiple biological replications, leading to 150 observations. The pollen samples were analyzed after tryptic digestion using a non-targeted mass spectrometry-based method. Liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC–MS) was employed to identify pollen, and melissopalynology was used as a reference method for the identification. We built an OPLS-DA prediction model for the 34 pollen types. The model clearly identified new samples in their membership group (Acer sp., n = 10) and a new pollen type at the species-specific level for Quercus sp. Less predictable results were achieved for Composita H and pollen collected directly from the plant. Conclusion The use of a non-targeted mass spectrometry-based method and chemometrics resulted in a promising tool for pollen identification as a replacement/supplement method to traditional melissopalynology

    Sarah L. Blum Author Visit - Warrior Nurse: PTSD and Healing

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    Hear Sarah L. Blum, author of Women Under Fire: Abuse in the Military, discuss her newest book, Warrior Nurse: PTSD and Healing followed by a Q&A and book signing. Sarah L. Blum is a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as an operating room nurse during the intense fighting of 1967. In recognition of her service, she was awarded the Army Commendation Medal. Sponsored by CWU Veterans Center and CWU Libraries.https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/libraryevents/1252/thumbnail.jp
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