1,720,959 research outputs found
The interactional context of humor in stand-up comedy
No full textFour shows, performed by African American stand-up comedians in Los Angeles in front of Black audiences and White audiences, were examined. The different sections of the events and the components of the joke sequences are analyzed, looking for aspects that facilitate joke acceptability and finding that audience-referred jokes are resorted to differently in Black rooms and White rooms, and punch lines can be followed by accounts even though the audience affiliated to them. In addition to these practices, other resources show an intention to relate with the audience, such as questions that involve the audience in the show and jokes that gravitate to parties in the event. Finally, the evidence shows that the whole event unfolds as an informal, naturally developing encounter between audience and comedian, thanks to a colloquial register, fillers allowing transition across joke sequences, and “pags” that expand previous punch lines positively received by the audience. It is argued that through these resources the interactional context of a joke is constantly oriented to and shaped to be an informal environment where jokes on sensitive topics, such as sex and race, can be accepted more easil
Ironia e ristrutturazione del participant framework: il caso degli ambienti virtuali
No full textEight couples of participants navigate in a collaborative virtual environment with the task of finding out some objects and a member of the research team assisting them. Episodes have been identified (20), in which a participant goes through some difficulty and refers to it ironically. The present work aims at studying what is the aftermath of irony on the social situation in which the participant is involved. The theoretical framework of conversation analysis has been adopted, according to which irony can be defined as a double contextualization of events. The analysis of the episodes suggests that irony allows participants to take on a double identity, so that their own face can be saved without threatening the interlocutors’ or neglecting the difficulty. It also shows that ‘non serious’ answers to a difficulty in the virtual reality do not amount to a break in the involvement in the virtual task, but rather the adoption of strategies typical of real social situations
A Game a Day Keeps the Doctor Away: A short review of Computer Games in Mental Healthcare
No full textComputer games are currently a focal topic in different research areas. One of the emerging contexts for their use is represented by healthcare. Thanks to their potentialities, they have been successfully exploited in this domain to foster motivation and to enhance cognitive processes. This paper proposes a review of existing research on computer games, exploited for prevention, support, training, rehabilitation, and particularly stressing the relationship between cognitive processes and gaming
Conversational Practices and Presence: How the Communication Structure Exploits the Affordances of the Medium
No full textCommunication practices are strictly interdependent on
the resources afforded by the medium, and on the combination of functionalities offered. In this contribution we frame this great variation of resources in terms of presence affordances, since they anchor the communication practices to the specificities of a certain environment. A corpus of mediated conversations recorded in different settings and collected within the PASION project will be examined to this purpose. It will be shown how the structure of the actions sequence, starting from turns and actions constituting it, varies across environments and how nature of the medium is reflected in these variations. On the one hand, this shows that similarities and differences across communication environments can be captured by using the presence concept. On the other hand, this shows how communication practices encapsulate presence cues, and offers a concrete example of they way in which they can be qualitatively investigated
Augmenting Presence: A Study with Activity Feedback
No full textThe study aims at investigating the effects of feedback
intervention on group presence, and to measure these effects
with both behavioral and self-reported data. Participants
played 4 sessions of an online treasure hunting in one of three
different conditions: in the first two conditions they received a
visual feedback about their activity in the prior game session
(‘centrality’ or ‘reciprocity’), while in the third condition no
feedback about prior activity was provided. Results highlighted
stable behavioral modifications in the two feedback conditions,
in terms of the general number of messages exchanged, even
though participants did not declare different levels of social
presence and group awareness in the post-study questionnaire,
and believed that the feedback had a low effectiveness
Unveiling the Structure: Effects of Social Feedback on Communication Activity in Online Multiplayer Videogames.
Full text linkeedback intervention in computer-mediated situations can be interpreted as a way to augment communication. According to this idea, this study investigates the effect of providing a group with a Social Network Analysis-based feedback on communication in an on-line game where players talk to each other via textual chat. Three different situations across two different sessions were compared: an Informed Group with a correct feedback, a not-Informed Group with no feedback and a mis-Informed group with an incorrect feedback. Results show that giving correct information increases the related dimensions of communication, while the absence of feedback and the incorrect feedback were not accompanied by any significant modification
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
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