scholarly journals Online self-expression and experimentation as ‘reflectivism’: Using text analytics to examine the participatory forum Hello Sunday Morning

Author(s):  
Nicholas Carah ◽  
Carla Meurk ◽  
Daniel Angus

Hello Sunday Morning is an online health promotion organisation that began in 2009. Hello Sunday Morning asks participants to stop consuming alcohol for a period of time, set a goal and document their progress on a personal blog. Hello Sunday Morning is a unique health intervention for three interrelated reasons: (1) it was generated outside a clinical setting, (2) it uses new media technologies to create structured forms of participation in an iterative and open-ended way and (3) participants generate a written record of their progress along with demographic, behavioural and engagement data. This article presents a text analysis of the blog posts of Hello Sunday Morning participants using the software program Leximancer. Analysis of blogs illustrates how participants’ expressions change over time. In the first month, participants tended to set goals, describe their current drinking practices in individual and cultural terms, express hopes and anxieties and report on early efforts to change. After month 1, participants continued to report on efforts to change and associated challenges and reflect on their place as individuals in a drinking culture. In addition to this, participants evaluated their efforts to change and presented their ‘findings’ and ‘theorised’ them to provide advice for others. We contextualise this text analysis with respect to Hello Sunday Morning’s development of more structured forms of online participation. We offer a critical appraisal of the value of text analytics in the development of online health interventions.

Author(s):  
Michelle Gorea

According to dominant theorizations of contemporary society, many people’s daily practices now occur within, and reproduce, a social world where media are the fundamental reference and resource for the development of the self (Couldry and Hepp 2017:15). Although previous research has revealed the mutual shaping of technologies, interaction, and identity in the broader contexts of economic and social change related to ‘millennials’, we know little about the precise ways in which these practices occur and how the self is being differently constructed over time. Using a multi-method qualitative approach, this work in progress paper explores three key questions: 1) What happens when visuality becomes a part of youth’s everyday practices of interaction? 2) What roles are images playing in routine interaction among youth? 3) How and in what ways does the maintenance of a visually ‘mediated presence’ in social media shape youths’ views of the self? This paper elaborates on findings within three categories that illustrate youth’s visual practices and how they are differently understood over time: (1) images of the self in the moment; (2) images of the self over time; and (3) images of the self under surveillance. The preliminary findings of this research suggest that although youth’s technological practices may not all be new, there are significant aspects of visuality that alters some of the key factors shaping young people’s use and understandings of new media technologies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Downer ◽  
Chrissie Wells ◽  
Charlotte Crichton

Automated analysis of open-ended text survey data is an appealing prospect. It eliminates human error and human variability and can be used to create models that are easier to update over time than a manual approach to coding generally yields. Today, text analytics is a huge business and is among the most popular innovations within the current research landscape. However, within the research industry, there has been little change in usage in recent years, and awareness of the options available appears to be limited. We wished to look more closely at the true strengths of different approaches, the main barriers to their adoption, and how these might be overcome. Using text responses from a short survey about work and play in two markets, we contrasted two tools in analyzing the output: Q’s text analysis component and Google Cloud Natural Language. We chose these tools as they can each be easily applied to survey data but are based on different analytic principles. We found some surprising differences between the output of the two tools and between the text analysis metrics and scalar data. We conclude by discussing some of the key contemporary themes in text analytics and the likely future role of this method within market research and insight.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyke Stommel ◽  
Fleur Van der Houwen

In this article, we examine problem presentations in e-mail and chat counseling. Previous studies of online counseling have found that the medium (e.g., chat, email) impacts the unfolding interaction. However, the implications for counseling are unclear. We focus on problem presentations and use conversation analysis to compare 15 chat and 22 e-mail interactions from the same counseling program. We find that in e-mail counseling, counselors open up the interactional space to discuss various issues, whereas in chat, counselors restrict problem presentations and give the client less space to elaborate. We also find that in e-mail counseling, clients use narratives to present their problem and orient to its seriousness and legitimacy, while in chat counseling, they construct problem presentations using a symptom or a diagnosis. Furthermore, in email counseling, clients close their problem presentations stating completeness, while in chat counseling, counselors treat clients’ problem presentations as incomplete. Our findings shed light on how the medium has implications for counseling.


Author(s):  
Christo Sims

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. This book documents the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. It is the account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. The book shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes. It traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. It offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. The book offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.


Author(s):  
Matylda Szewczyk

The article presents a reflection on the experience of prenatal ultrasound and on the nature of cultural beings, it creates. It exploits chosen ethnographic and cultural descriptions of prenatal ultrasounds in different cultures, as well as documentary and artistic reflections on medical imagery and new media technologies. It discusses different ways of defining the role of ultrasound in prenatal care and the cultural contexts build around it. Although the prenatal ultrasounds often function in the space of enormous tensions (although they are also supposed to give pleasure), it seems they will accompany us further in the future. It is worthwhile to find some new ways of describing them and to invent new cultural practices to deal with them.


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