Web-based Texts Research Articles

Russian language in modern web space: dynamic processes and development trends

This article investigates new language trends in Internet communication. The goal was a comprehensive description of new features that appeared at every level of the language system functioning in the web space. Investigation of new systemic web phenomena has both relevance and perspectives, as the focus of literary language development has shifted from literary texts to web-based texts. The research material included Facebook posts and comments. The material was processed with stylistic methods (contextual, stylistic compatibility, interpretation, etc.). The synchronic analysis was accompanied with elements of diachronic commentary. The analysis also considered the normative aspect, yet the emphasis was made on the evolution of contemporary literary language influenced by digitalization and the growth of the Internet. The important factor in language transformation and development is realization of the creative function of the language in the user-generated content of the informal segment of the Internet. The multiple extralinguistic factors influencing Internet communication are described in details, but it is the creative function of the language and the features of new communication in the Internet space that are of primary importance for the development of the literary language in the Russian segment of the Internet. The study uses examples to prove the scientific hypothesis that new language phenomena on the Internet are not random, but on the contrary are systemic, as they are manifested at every language level. This allows drawing conclusions about the inevitability of transformation of the Russian language in the future, as the language will provide the communication of digital society that is already developing new ethic norms. Considering the trend on strengthening the legal frames for actions of state and transnational actors in the network space, the study of the Russian language and its trends in the Internet as one of the powerful means of soft power makes our study relevant for forming legislative mechanisms aimed at preserving Russian national interests in the international communication. The study is perspective, since it makes a significant contribution to preserving cultural and linguistic identity of Russian citizens in front of the growing international competition and uncertainty. In addition, being a linguistic study, this work deals with the issues of processing information with its increased speed and volume.

Critical Reading in a Screen Paradigm

Abstract An important step in teaching critical reading for online civic reasoning is building teachers’ own acceptance of and comfort with screen literacies, understanding them not as alternative to gold-standard book literacies but as normative. To do so, teachers must better understand how web-based texts, and the reading of them, differ from the “classical” critical reading most teachers are used to. This article examines the “quantum” nature of web-based texts—their fundamental instability, their reader constructedness, and their nature as processes rather than objects—and relates these features to hyper-reading and other reading strategies that research shows allow engaged readers to screen-read critically.

Talk Around Digital Texts

Digital, web-based texts as a resource for the classroom present new ways of making meaning as learners draw on a wide range of communicative resources such as gaze and gesture to access and read them. This study employed a multimodal interaction analysis framework to examine an English language class of Japanese university students explaining online video stories face-to-face in a university in Japan. The findings identified a gap in the digital literacy skills the teacher assumed the learners possessed and the actual digital literacy skills required for successful completion of the classroom activity. The findings challenge the assumption that young learners are ‘digital natives', being capable of using technology for the specific purposes required in the class task. Implications for the planning and implementation of digital media for talk in language classroom tasks are discussed.

Legitimization as a rhetorical process in a regulatory agency

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify how the US Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) communicatively engaged in legitimization concerning accreditation.Design/methodology/approachThis study utilized the rhetorical analysis approach outlined by Hoffman and Ford (2010) to explore the accreditation-related texts from an online source created by CHEA, Information About Accreditation.FindingsThe analysis identified three overarching approaches to include: isomorphism to address regulatory legitimacy, organizational identity management to address pragmatic legitimacy, and a dialogic approach to address normative legitimacy. This analysis also developed a new theoretical model for the rhetorical construction of legitimacy, “A Model for the Rhetorical Construction of Legitimacy,” that can be summarized as: organizations foster a type of legitimacy through a legitimizing strategy by demonstrating how the purpose of the legitimizing strategy is achieved by the implementation of the legitimizing strategy.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations include that data were gathered only from online, web-based texts during a period in which the rhetorical situation was ongoing.Practical implicationsThis study expands research concerning the rhetorical approach to issues management in that it examines the way legitimacy is negotiated through the various rhetorical strategies of an organization. Additionally, information is offered about the rhetorical structure of texts when an organization seeks to legitimize certain ideas.Originality/valueThis analysis developed a theoretical model for the rhetorical construction of legitimacy, “A Model for the Rhetorical Construction of Legitimacy,” that demonstrates important relationships between legitimizing strategies and types of legitimacy. Understanding these relationships may allow for a better interpretation of how legitimacy theory is represented within a communicative venture.

Critical Tourism: Assessing Snow-Based Practice in Finnish Lapland

Touring, traveling, or moving from one place to another for purpose of business, leisure, either locally or internationally, is known as tourism. In many countries, tourism forms an integral part of economic development through job creation, infrastructural investments, and income provision. One of the root causes for global tourism growth has been the industrial revolution in Great Britain around the 19th century. This was characterized by a transition from hand production to use of machinery, including improved steam and water power, emergence of textile industry, new modes of iron production, which all became known as factory system. Entrepreneurship and consumerism served as driving forces for the industrial revolution which then expanded around the world. By the 20th century, the movement of people across regions enhanced following improvements in transportation. However, the revolution also meant an increase demand for workers in factories. Apart from industrial work, leisure accounted for movement of people during breaks from work. Although mass movement may result to income growth, it equally raises pertinent questions of how environments are constructed to suit the needs of people arriving, what kind of threats emerge from such destinations and perhaps what can be done to address such problems? Thus, this paper uses a review of web-based texts and critical tourism approach to seek an understanding of tourism from different perspectives which address the potentials and threats in tourism. Using the case of Finnish Lapland, our observations show that snow is essential to boosting tourism. However, habits towards climate change are a threat to sustaining snow tourism in the region. The paper then proposes economic diversification as a way forward.

Rumours about wildlife pest introductions: European rabbits in Spain.

Rumours associated with wildlife are frequent, although they have received little attention in the scientific literature. Studying rumours is important because of their relevance not only in a broad theoretical sense but also in environmental management. The goal of this study is to explore the complexity of the relationships between humans and wildlife through a thematic analysis of rumours associated with allegedly introduced European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) that cause crop damage in Spain. For this purpose, potential rumours were identified using the Google search engine. Data analysis consisted of reading and re-reading Web-based texts to identify main themes, ideas and topics with the assistance of NVivo 10 software. The analysis identified three main themes: (1) the reviewed websites referred to allegedly introduced rabbits which differed from native rabbits; (2) differences were based on alleged observations of unnatural behaviour, physiology or physical appearance of introduced rabbits; (3) rumours were frequently used in the context of the rabbit management conflict; e.g. farmers accused hunters of releasing harmful rabbits. This study suggests that the analysis of wildlife-release rumours sheds light on the position of parties involved in conflicts associated with the (alleged) introduction of wildlife species. It stresses the importance of rumours in conservation and environmental management, and opens the door to future research.

Dimensions of lodging guest satisfaction among guests with mobility challenges: A mixed-method analysis of web-based texts

Given that many lodging businesses cannot afford to provide satisfactory services to people with mobility challenges, this study recommends a strategic order of service attribute development to maximize customer satisfaction with minimal costs. The crucial lodging service attributes of this population are identified and distinguished by degrees of influence on customer satisfaction based on the analyses of 543 web travel reviews. The results suggests prioritizing the bottom-line delivery of basic and performance factors (i.e. room access and staff attitude capability), whereas optionally offering the delivery of excitement factors or above-and-beyond delivery of performance factors, such as luggage and equipment support and general lodging features. Being the first attempt to integrate quantitative and qualitative web content analysis with Penalty-Reward Contrast Analysis, this study captures the real-life tourist service evaluation criteria with improved accuracy and reliability. It also enables a thorough and efficient exploitation of customer-generated web textual data.

Research on Improved Association Rules Algorithm for Web-Based Chinese Short Texts

The classical Apriori algorithm has many drawbacks. This author proposed an improved association rules algorithm for Web-based Chinese short text, which combines Apriori algorithm with matrix. It proves that this algorithm has higher performance according to the results of case studies and simulation experiments.

Toward Zoopoetics: Rethinking Whitman's "Original Energy"

I see them [moose, cat, chickadee, prairie-dog...] and myself the same old law.-Leaves of Grass (1855)The underlying AssuMpTion deeply engrained within culture that uses alphabetic systems is that letters do not relate to the material earth. They are immaterial, existing the mind, and they are therefore disembodied. The theorist Brian Rotman exposes this assumption well his 2008 Becoming Beside Ourselves. Letters, for him, are in way Moreover, they have no relation to that of the body, and even the sounds we speak-the minimal hearable fragments-are absent any trace of the apparatus of the body producing them.1 Rotman's project explores how digital technologies, ubiquitously avail- able to people, change this bias. Increasingly, we look at the materiality of images, graphs, web-based texts, and words rather than through them, to echo Richard Lanham's phraseology.2 Rotman, though-and here is my departure point-overlooks the fact that letters can be iconic. They can gesture written form, and when the letters compel someone to utter sound, those minimal hearable fragments are not devoid of but rather replete with traces of the sense-making apparatus of the body producing them. This is why Song of the Rolling Earth Walt Whitman can say in the best poems re-appears the body-and not just the human body.3At first glance, alphabetic systems do not seem to resonate with, to use David Abram's phrase, the world: the life [that] swells within and unfolds around us. Abram seeks a new way of speaking . . . that enacts our with the earth rather than blinding us to it. . . . style of speech that opens our sense to the sensuous all its multiform strangeness. An even greater challenge is for written language to emphasize our interbeing with the animate world. For Abram, ideogrammatic systems more readily exhibit the animate, sensuous earth than alphabetic systems, for they often borrow their shapes . . . from elements the surrounding landscape.4 However, Spell of the Sensuous, Abram reminds us that the origin of alphabetic systems also involves pictographic inheritance. The Hebrew word for what became the English M is the same Hebrew word for Water-and we still see the ripple effect along the top of the lowercase m. Likewise, the Hebrew word for what became the English Q is the same Hebrew word for Monkey, and the Hebrew word for what became A is the same Hebrew word for Ox.5 Turning the A upside-down exposes the ox's two horns, and I cannot help but see the tail swinging to and fro Q -especially italicized Garamond.The fact that A's and Q's once explicitly mimed oxen and monkeys points towards several questions. Do nonhuman animals still shape the form of writings within alphabetic systems? If so, where ? Are they isolated cases? -widespread?The dynamic where nonhuman animals shape the form of human writing pervades poetry and poetics the long twentieth century, be- ginning prominently with the century's forerunner, Walt Whitman. I contend that many poets, including Whitman, discovered innovative breakthroughs form through paying attention to the gestures and vocalizations of nonhuman animals. To substantiate these claims would take more space than this essay, but what follows is gesture towards that direction.In this essay I focus primarily on subset within Abram's world: just the animals. That is to say, I am more interested the A and the Q than the m. Zoopoetics-a theory I introduce-recognizes that nonhuman animals (zoion) are makers (poiesis), and they have agency that making.6 The etymology also suggests that when poet undergoes the making process of poiesis harmony with the gestures and vocalizations of nonhuman animals, multispecies event occurs. It is co-making. A joint venture. The two-fold foci of zoopoetics- that nonhuman animals are makers and that this making has shaped the form of human poems-illuminates how animals animate even the non-iconic alphabetic systems of language, and therefore bring the sensuous world to the surface of the written page. …

Author’s Native Language Identification from Web-Based Texts

Author’s Native Language Identification from Web-Based Texts

Discourse and the governance of diversity in England's official tourism texts

Through a focus on selected ‘texts’, this paper critiques the discursive representation of ethno-cultural diversity by Official Tourism Organisations (OTOs) in England. Embracing a social constructionist philosophy and using the method of critical discourse analysis (CDA), three text ‘types’ identified as promotional texts (brochure and web-based texts), operational texts (texts produced as part of the operational practice of the organisations) and interview texts (transcriptions of interviews with representatives of OTOs) were analysed. Utilising a threedimensional approach to written language as text, as discourse practice and as social practice, the research sought to probe representations of ethno-cultural diversity by OTOs in England in order to inform understanding of the constructed inter-textual nature of such discursive practices and their embeddedness in broader trajectories of institutional governance in and through tourism. The interpretative findings derived from this approach to ‘text’ suggest that discourses of denial, equality, otherness and silence are routinely deployed by OTOs vis-à-vis ethnic minority populations in England. It is argued that such projective practices reflect deeper patterns of political and institutional exclusion of ‘minority’ cultures and identities. This raises questions relating to the ways in which OTOs may conceivably foreground, appropriate, institutionalise or deny ethno-cultural diversity when projecting aspects of heritage and identity in and through tourism.

Image–language interaction in online reading environments: challenges for students’ reading comprehension

This paper presents the qualitative results of a study of students’ reading of multimodal texts in an interactive, online environment. The study forms part of a larger project which addressed image–language interaction as an important dimension of language pedagogy and assessment for students growing up in a multimedia digital age. Thirty-two Year 6 students representing a sample of high, medium and low performers on an Australian state-wide school literacy test were surveyed about their internet usage and interviewed using a structured protocol while working online through a selection of materials from an educational website. Findings from the earlier stages of the project indicated that different types of image-text relations vary in the degree of difficulty they pose for students’ reading comprehension. This phase of the project extended the analysis of image-text relations to online, interactive texts. Student performance on online reading tasks and interview data are used to illustrate some of the complexities students encounter when reading online, and how this may vary with factors such as their day-to-day literacy experiences and levels of engagement. The results have implications for literacy pedagogy and assessing the reading of web-based texts.

Mining the internet for linguistic and social data: An analysis of ‘carbon compounds’ in Web feeds

The potential of the Web for applied linguistic research is being increasingly recognized. As the internet is a particularly valuable source of data on recent changes in meaning, Mautner (2005b) made a plea for more discourse analysts to work with Web-based texts in order to study important social developments. Taking up this suggestion, this article introduces an approach based on the analysis of recent updates to Web-based sources. A special purpose corpus, compiled from Web feeds containing so-called lexical ‘carbon compounds’, such as, for example, carbon credit, carbon diet, carbon sinner, is studied with corpus linguistic tools to explore the online dimension of the interpretative struggle around the issue of climate change mitigation. The analysis reveals semantic associations surrounding the compounds and highlights connotational differences that signal both support and criticism of the climate mitigation initiatives proposed by policy makers and environmentalists.

Stories to tell? Narrative tools in museum education texts

Background: In the 1950s and 1960s, many children experienced museums as dull and boring. Nowadays, museums seem to be much more conscious of their educational role and the need to make their exhibits attractive and interesting. Making use of narratives is one way of achieving this. Some scholars claim that narrative is central to meaning making in a learning context. This article illustrates the extent to which narratives are used in a museum learning context, the kinds of narratives used and their purpose. Purpose: The overall aim was to investigate the versatility of narratives in a learning and meaning-making context in a museum setting. The three-pronged research question is: to what extent is narrative used in the education texts produced by three selected museums and made available on their Internet websites, what kinds of narratives are used and what is their purpose? Method: Data was gathered in January and February 2006, following an extensive Internet search of Swedish museums and their downloadable education texts. Three museums were selected – Skansen, the Swedish Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Science and Technology – each publishing a comprehensive up-to-date selection of education texts on their websites. A total of 134 digital texts specifically produced for students and teachers in connection with museum visits were studied and analysed. Each text was downloaded, sorted, labelled, saved and categorised electronically. The texts catered for different ages: infant and primary school (7–10 years), middle school (10–13 years) and secondary school (13–16 years). Analysis: A preliminary analysis strategy was developed on the basis of texts from the first museum chosen. Detailed adjustments to the analysis framework were made prior to a full analysis of the texts. Every downloaded text was read and re-read and documented according to the kind of narratives contained and their supposed purpose. Results: An analysis of the web-based education texts indicated that not only did the museums make use of narratives to different extents, but that different kinds of narratives were used for different purposes. Depending on the kind of narrative used, the results showed that the main purposes were to communicate by: (1) describing, constructing or reconstructing information; (2) interpreting what has happened, is happening now or might happen in the future; (3) constructing reality and making sense or meaning of it; (4) stimulating the imagination and encouraging creativity; (5) rendering teaching and learning more entertaining, imaginative and effective; and (6) acting as a resource to aid interaction, negotiation and communication. It was also apparent that the chosen museums used narrative to differing degrees depending on their respective traditions and circumstances. Conclusion: The study highlighted how the narratives used in the three museums' web-based education texts make a significant contribution to meaning making by stimulating imagination, encouraging reflection, drawing on existing experience and knowledge and sharpening visitors' curiosity. This is mainly achieved through the narratives' powers of description and analysis, and their ability to challenge existing attitudes and involve the visitor in historical and contemporary events and situations.

Autonomous activism and the global justice movement

In constructing new ways of engaging with society and new visions of how society might be, social activists need to negotiate numerous social, political, philosophical and personal contradictions and tensions. Utilizing data from a discourse analysis conducted on web-based texts, this article focuses on three such tensions experienced by autonomous activists: autonomy versus collective, operationalization versus institutionalization and evasion of versus subjection to mainstream authorities. We examine how autonomous activists negotiate these tensions and argue that the way in which they ‘live with the tensions’ can be theorized using Lash and Urry’s concept of ‘aesthetic reflexivity’. This particular form of reflexivity augments cognitive and emotional reflexivity within autonomous activism, and provides further insight into how autonomous activists succeed in reconstituting their practice in ways that reaffirm their principles.

<em>Representative Poetry On-line</em>: Updating a Historical English Teaching Anthology

Representative Poetry On-line is the first World Wide Web edition of the U. of Toronto English Department's undergraduate textbook, Representative Poetry, originally compiled in 1912. This article describes the editorial history of the anthology, the contents of the present edition, and the features offered by the MLA CD-ROM version of the edition with its TACT interface. Many pivotal questions surrounding literary databases are addressed: the editiorial history of such a long-standing textbook gives insights into the evolution of the literary canon; the new edition brings to the forefront issues of copyright and of the role of poetry on the WWW; and the TACT interface offers a new way to read and understand texts. Representative Poetry On-line is presently the largest non-profit database of poetry on the WWW and part of the growing universe of web-based literary texts.