Thematic Representations Research Articles

The ‘Sown Men’ and the Sons of Oedipus: Representations of Land, Earth and City in Euripides’ Phoinissai

The article discusses thematic representations of the city of Thebes in the two central myths of Phoinissai: that of autochthony and the family of Oedipus. The author examines the aberrant nature of autochthonic reproduction specifically in relation to the femaleness of the earth and the effect of this on the present generation, also taking into account the complex ‘gendering’ of the last of the autochthons, Menoikeus, who dies for the city. Discussion of the city’s role in the Oedipus myth includes the complex relationship of Oedipus’ two sons with their native city and associated difficulties of identity and belonging which are linked with the family history of violence between males and with a problematic connection with the native- or fatherland.

Qatar as Full Island Overnight: Psychological and Social Consequences of Blockade as Reflected in the Social Media

The GCC crisis in which Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain have closed land, sea and air borders going into and from Qatar imposed a host of psychosocial stressors on both Qatari and non-Qatari citizens. This ongoing crisis is contributing to psychological and social problems at both the individual and community levels. Furthermore, pressures are placed on psychological, social, and mental health resources available in Qatar. Therefore, the current economic and political situation calls for a need to assess the resultant psychosocial effects at different levels (individuals, families, and communities) and types (emotional, psychological, and social). One method to empirically identify such psychosocial changes emergent from the crisis is to test individuals' reactions in social media, such as Twitter. Methodology: A total of 1238 tweets were collected over a period of 90 days using https://birdiq.net, 10 thematic representations were codified from 780 tweets. All tweets posted since the blockade started in Ju...

Representations of the Chinese Communist Party’s political ideologies in President Xi Jinping’s discourse

This article analyzes how president Xi Jinping’s political discourse legitimizes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as China’s ruling Party through representations of political ideologies. It probes two dimensions of the representations: thematic representations concerning the topics and topical patterns in Xi’s discourse, and evaluative representations concerning the attitudes and emotions associated with these topics. This study adapts Fairclough’s three-dimensional approaches to Chinese political discourse analysis: description regarding the linguistic features of the discourse, interpretation and explanation of the discourse by considering China’s social, especially political and cultural, particularities. Through the analysis, this article reveals the discursive practice through which the CCP utilizes a range of political ideologies to legitimize its politics. It is hoped that this study can shed light on adapting critical discourse analysis (CDA) to Chinese political discourse analysis in the context of China’s particular culture and politics.

Exploring learning content and knowledge transfer in baccalaureate nursing students using a hybrid mental health practice experience

BackgroundLittle research has been completed exploring knowledge development and transfer from and between simulated and clinical practice settings in nurse education. ObjectivesThis study sought to explore the content learned, and the knowledge transferred, in a hybrid mental health clinical course consisting of simulated and clinical setting experiences. DesignA qualitative, interpretive descriptive study design. SettingsClinical practice consisted of six 10-hour shifts in a clinical setting combined with six two-hour simulations. Participants12 baccalaureate nursing students enrolled in a compressed time frame program at a large, urban, Canadian university participated. MethodsDocument analysis and a focus group were used to draw thematic representations of content and knowledge transfer between clinical environments (i.e., simulated and clinical settings) using the constant comparative data analysis technique. ResultsFour major themes arose: (a) professional nursing behaviors; (b) understanding of the mental health nursing role; (c) confidence gained in interview skills; and, (d) unexpected learning. ConclusionsNurse educators should further explore the intermingling of simulation and clinical practice in terms of knowledge development and transfer with the goal of preparing students to function within the mental health nursing specialty.

Familiarity breeds contempt: perceived service and sales complacency in business-to-business relationships

Relationship marketing and its strategic focus on long-term exchanges is an engrained practice in today’s business-to-business (B2B) environment. B2B relationships are important given the reciprocating benefits they offer to offset the resource-intensive investments necessary for relationship initiation and maintenance. However, the reality of the marketplace shows customer defection rates remain a concern, dark side relationship mechanisms emerge as exchanges persist, and suppliers shirk on investing the effort necessary to service their customers. Research is needed to better understand customer defections and the nuanced assessment of perceived supplier complacency in B2B service relationships. To inform this research agenda, the authors assess depth interviews with 56 executive participants across 35 post-mortem customer defection cases. Findings identify thematic representations of perceived supplier complacency within the customer-supplier service provision (i.e. service complacency), as well as during the sales renewal process (i.e. sales complacency).

Grammatical Encoding and Learning in Agrammatic Aphasia: Evidence from Structural Priming.

The present study addressed open questions about the nature of sentence production deficits in agrammatic aphasia. In two structural priming experiments, 13 aphasic and 13 age-matched control speakers repeated visually- and auditorily-presented prime sentences, and then used visually-presented word arrays to produce dative sentences. Experiment 1 examined whether agrammatic speakers form structural and thematic representations during sentence production, whereas Experiment 2 tested the lasting effects of structural priming in lags of two and four sentences. Results of Experiment 1 showed that, like unimpaired speakers, the aphasic speakers evinced intact structural priming effects, suggesting that they are able to generate such representations. Unimpaired speakers also evinced reliable thematic priming effects, whereas agrammatic speakers did so in some experimental conditions, suggesting that access to thematic representations may be intact. Results of Experiment 2 showed structural priming effects of comparable magnitude for aphasic and unimpaired speakers. In addition, both groups showed lasting structural priming effects in both lag conditions, consistent with implicit learning accounts. In both experiments, aphasic speakers with more severe language impairments exhibited larger priming effects, consistent with the "inverse preference" prediction of implicit learning accounts. The findings indicate that agrammatic speakers are sensitive to structural priming across levels of representation and that such effects are lasting, suggesting that structural priming may be beneficial for the treatment of sentence production deficits in agrammatism.

Accept(ing) the other (Metallic[a]) hypermasculine image: Case studies towards an alternative understanding of hypermasculinity in the aesthetics of 1980s heavy metal

Machismo and other thematic representations of masculinity have informed much of the scholarly research into 1980s heavy metal’s aesthetics. Although some studies have provided more substantial insights than others, the discourse has largely been shaped by scholars who criticize 1980s heavy metal because of its (hypermasculine) thematization of sexism and misogyny. However, on closer inspection hypermasculinity manifests itself in 1980s heavy metal’s aesthetics in more ways than simply through sexist and misogynist themes, but these have largely been ignored by the discourse. As a way of bringing 1980s heavy metal’s hypermasculine aesthetic into sharper focus, this article garners a closer look at how hypermasculinity was used as an important idiomatic hallmark. It provides examples of bands, songs and albums with ‘alternative hypermasculine’ aesthetics, and elucidates how other macho themed subtexts were just as important as sexism and misogyny in defining the genre. It also argues for a paradigm shift in how scholars evaluate 1980s heavy metal’s hypermasculine aesthetics in general. This article will be of interest to scholars of critical musicology, cultural studies, decade studies, gender studies, historiography and metal music studies.

Representation of Bakassi Peninsula Conflict in Nigeria and Cameroon Print Media: A Critical Discourse Approach

The media discursive representation of participants and their roles in conflict situations is the focus of this study. The Nigeria-Cameroon clashes over the oil rich Bakassi Peninsula have been reported in newspapers from the two countries. In a bid to demonstrate how social attitudes are expressed in the discourse structure of news reports, the study analyzed news reports from four newspapers in the countries published in the heat of the armed conflicts between 2002 and 2010. The analysis focused on the thematic representations, the representation of actors in the material processes and power hierarchy. Our findings show that newspapers from each of the countries presented perspectives that seemed to favour their positive images before the entire world, each claiming victim status for their key actors. In terms of the different ideologies and values that motivate the news reports, the Nigerian newspapers adopted event-oriented reporting style, thereby appealing to the value of social justice. The news visibly portrayed the abuse of human rights and injustice by Cameroon security forces. On the other hand, Cameroon newspapers, while presenting misfortunes of the country's security forces in the hands of the militant groups from Nigeria, portrayed Cameroon security forces as responsive and capable of handling the conflict. The foregrounding of the virtues of the country's security forces in the news reports in Cameroon newspapers demonstrates that they are motivated by the ideology of patriotism.

Empowering the disempowered through voice-inclusive practice: Children’s views on adult-centric educational provision

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a significant platform to include children’s views on issues that affect their lives, yet, in many contexts, particularly in educational practice, children’s perspectives continue to be irregularly sought and are rarely acted upon. By providing children’s perspectives on what they would like adults to know, this article explores a unique view of childhood and the interactions with family, community, educational experiences and well-being. The children’s insights about their worlds that they feel adults are missing potentiate the development and incorporation of voice-inclusive practice. While the sense that each child makes of their Lebenswelt – the ‘ingredients’ – is idiosyncratic and will be influenced by many factors, including peers, teachers, parents, other adults and the media, it is the nature of this personal understanding that is poorly understood, and consequently ignored by adults. By exploring the commentary of more than 1000 children across five countries – Australia, England, New Zealand, Italy and Sweden – this research reveals an overwhelming collection of what the authors describe as ‘comments that rhyme’ in terms of the identification of expressed sentiment and thematic representations of their perspectives.

A method comparison of photovoice and content analysis: research examining challenges and supports of family caregivers

PurposeThe purpose of this manuscript is to compare methods and thematic representations of the challenges and supports of family caregivers identified with photovoice methodology contrasted with content analysis, a more traditional qualitative approach. MethodsResults from a photovoice study utilizing a participatory action research framework was compared to an analysis of the audio-transcripts from that study utilizing content analysis methodology. ResultsMajor similarities between the results are identified with some notable differences. Content analysis provides a more in-depth and abstract elucidation of the nature of the challenges and supports of the family caregiver. ConclusionsThe comparison provides evidence to support the trustworthiness of photovoice methodology with limitations identified. The enhanced elaboration of theme and categories with content analysis may have some advantages relevant to the utilization of this knowledge by health care professionals.

High-resolution morpho-bathymetry of Pozzuoli Bay, southern Italy

We present the results of a detailed bathymetric survey of Pozzuoli Bay (Gulf of Naples, Italy). This shallow marine area, along with the Campi Flegrei inland, is a highly active volcanic district in the coastal zone of SW Italy. The area has been active since at least 78 ka B.P., and is structurally dominated by a caldera collapse (∼8 km in diameter) associated with the eruption of the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff (NYT), a 30–50 km3 dense rock equivalent (DRE) ignimbrite dated ∼15 ka B.P. The main cartographic product consists of a 1:10,000 scale morpho-bathymetric map of Pozzuoli Bay, derived from 1 m cell-size, colour hill-shaded, digital terrain model of the seafloor. Multibeam bathymetry data reveal the precise extent of Roman underwater archaeological remains located in the N–NW infralittoral zone of the Bay. Morphometric analysis allowed for the development of thematic representations, including slope and aspect maps. A complete data set of active fluid vents seafloor locations were also recorded during the survey and reported in the final map. The multibeam bathymetric survey illustrated in this study provides an unprecedentedly detailed image of the seafloor morphology of Pozzuoli Bay and represents a contribution to the understanding of the dynamic evolution of the Campi Flegrei caldera, a high-risk volcanic area densely populated by almost one million people.

Happiness, stress, a bit of vulgarity, and lots of discursive conversation: A pilot study examining nursing students' tweets about nursing education posted to Twitter

The use of social media platforms like Twitter within/for nursing education has become more common in recent years. Regardless, it is unclear how nursing students use technology like Twitter during the course of their nursing education. The aim of this paper was to explore how nursing students describe elements of their nursing education via the social media platform, Twitter. Tweets about nursing courses, classes, and clinical were collected in October 2011 and analyzed for themes. Overall, 498 tweets were collected over a collective six day period, and 189 tweets were codified into five thematic representations. Nursing students were found to discuss a variety of elements related to their nursing education, including events and situations they perceived to be positive or exciting. Stress and annoyance messaging was also noted as a salient theme expressed by nursing students when describing their education. Vulgarity and derogative messaging targeting elements of nursing education (including courses, students, and faculty) were found in a subset of tweets. The majority of the tweets collected in this study contained random discursive conversations regarding nursing education, including information seeking requests and declarative statements about temporal events. The findings of this study point to a need for educators to explore aspects surrounding eProfessionalism within nursing education. Similarly, this paper also highlights the growing requirement for nursing educators to learn more about how social media is being used by nursing students within/for their education, in order to better develop learning and networking opportunities for students. Without this, nursing education may miss a significant opportunity to help shape students' professional use of social media technology like Twitter.

Web 2.0 and Neogeography. Opportunities for teaching geography

This paper is focused on the use of the geographical contents in Web 2.0 applications for didactics and particularly as a valuable source for many of the operations traditionally carried out when working with geographical data and issues in a GIS environment. The paper represents an introductory examination of to date well known topics concerning geographical data and software but with the focus of using them for teaching geographical issues and introducing them for the use of (online) Geographic Information tools. In particular it will be pointed out how geographical questions can be raised and tackled by means of data and features spread over the web and containing geographical data. There is also an analysis of how they can be elaborated cartographically. The paper opens with a short introduction to the geographical “revolutions” that took place in the late XX and early XXI centuries in the digital age, with the advent of GIS and the so-called neogeography. A brief review on how GIS and geospatial technologies in general can be effectively used to disseminate geographical issues follows. The attention is then focused on an exercise, that can be proposed to geography students, or that is, the analysis of the Italian 2013 general election. The exercise foresees the use of geocoded tweets from Twitter, the popular social media, and some of the hashtags used in the pre-election periods (#elezioni2013) to observe their concentrations. The exercise also implies working with a free web GIS service such as GeoCommons, which together with other families of similar online software, make it possible to produce maps showing some thematic representations of the results obtained as well as analyzing the data with more than basic visualization functions.

The Perfect Storm: Stress, Anxiety, and Burnout in the Secondary School Music Classroom

This study investigates teacher stress, anxiety, and burnout through my experience teaching music in a suburban Toronto secondary school between 2002 and 2008. Primary data sources include a rich collection of journal entries I have written over a six-year period, which were retrospectively analyzed in this study. Hence, this study is principally rooted in reflective practice. In addition, this study is informed through autobiographical and phenomenological lenses. These other two lenses have allowed me to incorporate secondary source data (anecdotal notes, emails, text messages, and video footage) that were repurposed for this study. Findings have exposed two principal thematic representations from the data, namely; (a) those that directly or indirectly addressed extracurricular performances, and (b) fear of failure. Reexperiencing my experience has been exceedingly therapeutic and cathartic for me, providing insight and transparency into the demanding nature of music pedagogy at the secondary school level. In addition, findings have helped me to refine and develop my current and future pedagogy as a teacher educator.

Transfer learning for image information mining applications

The recent explosion of data from various Earth observation (EO) systems requires new ways to rapidly harness the information and synthesise it for decision-making. Currently, several image information mining (IIM) systems have some form of supervised statistical learning models that relate the image content to the various semantic classes. However, this kind of approach is constrained by the paucity of training information in several EO domains due to limited ground truth. Although semi-supervised learning methods alleviate this problem to a certain extent by using unlabelled data from various spatial databases, these methods require that the training data and future unseen data should conform to the same statistical distribution and feature space. To overcome this problem, a more recent approach, known as transfer learning, is focused on using small amounts of labelled information from closely related or similar learning task and somehow adapts that information in developing new semantic models. Transfer learning can be applied in several processes of supervised and unsupervised learning. In this article, we propose transfer learning methods for IIM and discuss various techniques and their implications for content-based retrieval in the EO domain. Specifically, we explore three domains; the first two illustrate the heterogeneity in land cover and coastal zone thematic representations, and the third is on rapid disaster response during coastal events. This study demonstrates the usefulness of knowledge transfer between closely related tasks in the EO data synthesis. The adopted methodology for knowledge transfer is based on harnessing prior knowledge from similar concepts to learn new ones and uses a modified weighted least squares support vector machine.

Power (Empowerment) through the Body, Self, and Black Male Identity in Contemporary Theatrical Modern Dance

Postmodern articulations in contemporary theatrical modern dance have produced new black male expressions–straight and gay–that disrupt rigid and reductive representations of identity and masculinity and also open up pluralistic and libratory possibilities through the black male dancing body. I use this context to examine power (and empowerment) in the work of choreographers Bill T. Jones, Ronald K. Brown, Reggie Wilson, Nicholas Leichter, Helanius Wilkins, and Kyle Abraham, who approach the particularity of black male identity from postmodern perspectives. My idea of power, here, is inspired by Ralph Ellison's nameless black protagonist in Invisible Man whose search for self-understanding and identity stands as both a literal and allegorical struggle for the power over one's “visibility” and agency as a black man. Through identifying key philosophical, stylistic, and thematic representations across the choreographers, I explore how power negotiates and is negotiated around issues of self, sexuality, and identity in the black male dancing body.

A Tripartite Perspective of Social Capital and Its Access by High School Dropouts

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to document and analyze students’ experiences with dropping out of high school, using a social capital framework. Examining the stories of high school dropouts provided valuable information related to the root causes of dropout behaviors. The context of this study was a high school in an urban school division in a Southeastern state. The participants were 5 high school dropouts who spoke English as a primary language and who were a part of the general education population at the school. Triangulation of data sources included field notes, interviews with the participants, and archival documents. Three-iteration code mapping was used for data analysis and was included in an audit trail of all the study procedures. Other points and thematic representations considered were: (a) results of this study presented as narrative descriptions of the dropout histories of each participant, (b) themes resulting from the analysis across all of the narratives as discussed within the social capital framework, (c) suggestions for the development of programs to increase social capital in the family, school, and community, as included in the Conclusion section.

Proposition 83, Framing and Public Attitudes toward Sex Offenders: An Application of Heuristic Models of Social Judgment

This ongoing study seeks to accomplish two objectives: 1) evaluate framing of thematic representations in newspaper articles about sex offenders, sex offense cases, and sex offender policy; and 2) measure the role of media exemplars and heuristics on individuals’ attitudes and social judgment. In 2006, California voters passed a sweeping measure known as Proposition 83, or “Jessica’s Law,” which increased dramatically the state’s punitive response to persons convicted of sex crimes and registered as sex offenders. In a preliminary content analysis of a representative sample of articles from the Sacramento Bee during the 2006 election year, articles tended to portray sex offenders as predatory and non-human, focusing primarily on the most extreme cases and prolific offenders, without regard for the vast heterogeneity of individuals and offenses subsumed by the term “sex offender.” This manner of newspaper framing also over-emphasized child molestation in comparison to rape and other categories of sex offenses. Moreover, even where newspaper articles sought to convince readers to vote against the measure using centrally persuasive techniques, sensational language and non-representative exemplars were highly correlated with arguments that Proposition 83 would not achieve greater public safety. The implications of these preliminary findings offer an opportunity to experimentally test the role of the availability and representativeness heuristics on social judgment for persons exposed to sensational and unrepresentative media framing. The relationship between these phenomena and concerns for social justice according to feminist critical theory are also discussed.

Designs of concept maps and their impacts on readers' performance in memory and reasoning while reading

From the perspective of the Fuzzy Trace Theory, this study investigated the impacts of concept maps with two strategic orientations (comprehensive and thematic representations) on readers' performance of cognitive operations (such as perception, verbatim memory, gist reasoning and syntheses) while the readers were reading two history articles that argue from different perspectives about a historical incident that had a profound impact on Taiwan. The results show that the design and focus of the concept maps may influence the formation of mental representations, and that this may be facilitative or constraining in regard to the readers' memory formation and reasoning about the reading materials. Based on these findings, the meaning of constraining effects of concept maps is discussed, and an instructional method involving the progressive elaboration of concept map systems is recommended.

<i>Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron</i> (review)

LIBERTY AND POETIC LICENCE: NEW ESSAYS ON BYRON. Edited by Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe and Charles E. Robinson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 244. ISBN 0 85323 589 7. £65.00. Collections of essays that begin life as conference papers are a risky business: publish too quickly or indiscriminately and the articles can be shallow or unnecessary; publish too slowly or selectively and they can seem dated or abstruse. Fortunately Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe and Charles Robinson have managed to hit the ideal medium in their collection based on the 2001 International Byron Conference; it is filled with pieces that are fresh, thought-provoking and able to stand on their own merits. 'Byron', as Beatty writes in his sensitive introduction, 'is the poet of liberty'. Yet, as the editor goes on to remind readers, both 'liberty' and 'licence' admit many meanings, and it is with these multivalent definitions that the collection concerns itself. In seventeen essays, Liberty and Poetic Licence examines works from all stages of Byron's career and the editors have designed the collection so that it proceeds chronologically. As a result, readers see the many ways Byron interpreted the concepts of liberty and licence throughout his career and the ways in which his valuations and modes of thought about these concepts altered as he matured. The contributors have chosen, for the most part, to deal with liberty rather than licence and what they offer is, also for the most part, very fine indeed. In the suggestive piece that begins the book, Peter Cochran considers Byron's self-censorship in his first four published collections, suggesting that 'pressures, both social and emotional' made Byron censor his own works, a censorship that perhaps lasted until he left England in 1816. Tom Mole next writes incisively about the politics of visibility in The Bride of Abydos, using Judith Butler to consider the complex matrix of real and subversive freedom in the poem's visualisations: Mole's past writings have proven him an illuminating and sensitive scholar, and this article reconfirms those conclusions. In the third essay, Michael O'Neill, writing on Byron's repeated ability to achieve freedom by immersing himself in destructive elements or experiences in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV, argues for a Byron who relishes complexity and mutability, who finds in hubris a reason to celebrate human determination. Offering richly dense close readings, O'Neill's essay addresses the paradox of sorrow and delight that informs all of Byron's works, throwing new light on its source. In the pair of essays that follow, Peter Graham and Katharine Kernberger discuss Manfred. Graham's fascinating piece uses Isaiah Berlin's political philosophy to consider the ways in which the text contemplates 'freedom from' and 'freedom to', reaching the compelling conclusion that Manfred's freedom, freedom to, situates him as the ultimate free soul, master of his own fate. Kernberger, for her part, examines the play's paradox of death, asserting that the annihilation Manfred seeks is belied by Manfred's persistent representations of an afterlife. Kernberger's essay is less fruitful than Graham's, no doubt because of length constraints: at only twelve pages, it does not have much room for extended analysis. As the collection moves on to the less studied works of Byron's middle period, Gabriele Poole uncovers the rich interweaving of textual and thematic representations of liberty in Mazeppa, while Alan Rawes considers the paradox of both Faliero's and Byron's relationship with aristocratic values in Marino Faliero, a paradox he suggests Byron may have begun to resolve through religion. Rawes's vision of a Byron who is edging into faith is intriguing but, again because of space constraints, leaves the reader wanting more. Andrew Stauffer offers a truly original reading of the influence of the hugely popular eighteenthth-century story of Inkle and Yarico on Byron's later works: the links he elucidates between that story and The Blues, Don Juan and The Island break real new ground. …