Towards a New Architecture of Cosmic Experience

The article unfolds an account of several overlapping fields of inquiry contributing to the early modern experience of the cosmos. Traversing scale, scope, and media, from the first recorded meteorite fall to scholastic debates over the materiality of heaven and the practice of architecture as cosmic analogue, I argue in favour of bringing together a broad range of interdisciplinary source material in order to explore the spatiality of the cosmos and how it was encountered and reproduced as a place or cosmic space or non-place on earth. The accompanying examples gesture towards an open-ended model defined not solely by the built environment as much as by the ephemeral and rhetorical structures framing the cosmos for human consumption.

Rhetorical Analysis of Introduction Sections from Humanities and Sciences Research Theses Authored by Pakistani Scholars

This research aims to investigate the rhetorical structures of the introduction sections of Pakistani research theses at postgraduate level. The corpus of study contains 32 “Introduction” sections of Pakistani research theses from two faculties: Humanities and Sciences. The faculty of Sciences include theses from disciplines of Zoology, Chemistry, Botany and Biochemistry, whereas the faculty of Humanities include theses of Mass Communication, English, Gender Studies and Computer Studies. Both qualitative and quantitative methods including textual analysis and frequency percentages have been used for data analysis. The online software Compleat Lexical Tutor(Cobb.2015) was employed to extract the sentence units of the data. A hand tagged move analysis was conducted by following Swales’ Model (2004) as a reference framework. All the instances of moves and steps were calculated to explore the rhetorical variation across two faculties. Findings of the study disclosed that Pakistani authors follow their own pattern of Move 1 (Establishing the research territory) along with the variation in frequency of its constituent steps across two faculties. The demarcation between two faculties has revealed that, in the field of sciences, there is a stronger use of topic generalization than in humanities. Moreover, the inter-textual links to prior research in the field of sciences are provided more frequently than in the field of humanities. However, scholars from the faculty of Humanities represent their stance by claiming relevance of the field.

Ripensare la ricerca italiana in linguistica educativa

This is not a research essay, it is a survey of the characteristics of present-day research essays in Italian educational linguistics. Many weak points are pointed out, most of which concern ‘borders’, such as the fuzzy epistemological borders between educational linguistics and other scientific areas; the frequent overlapping of different research typologies, which require different methodologies and have different rhetorical structures; confusion as far as implied readers are concerned. The consequence is that sometimes edulinguistic research allows amateurish trips outside educational linguistics, and allows for non educational linguists to take amateurish trips (and sometimes jobs) in the field of educational linguistics. A tentative list of parameters that can be used by referees, editors and evaluators is provided, in order to define the quality of studies before they are accepted in journals and conferences.

Jeremiah’s Deathscapes

This chapter explores the rhetorical structures of the book of Jeremiah with regard to its message of violent destruction—a topic that the chapter defines under the heading of “deathscape.” This term is defined as having two sub-strands: embodiment and spatiality. Jeremiah contains much material relating to the experiences of the central prophetic figure, which provides a solid textual resource for examining how the human person is impacted by the task of proclaiming terror and loss. The Confessions especially display a persona traumatized by this task. At the same time, land is rendered desolate, alongside the human inhabitants. Spatiality provides a tool for reading urban destruction via the lens of a withered landscape. Reading Jeremiah as a single work employs the methodological lens of rhetorical criticism, examining the way in which violent imagery expresses the link between historical events and literary depictions of the impact of warfare. Seeking for the cause of great suffering, Jeremiah locates it in the action of divine justice, a manner of providing order for chaos that renders the deity monstrous since it is the divine sphere that contextualizes unbearable human pain. Evaluation of Jeremiah’s urban imaginary aligns not only with material events but also with responses from differing audiences and parallel subject areas, such as gender, disability, and colonialism. Ultimately, the chapter suggests, further reflection on the inanimate agency of urban environments in creating textual poetics of deathscape will be useful.

Papua and the public: News framing of the 2019 Asrama Papua conflict

The 2019 Asrama Papua conflict in Surabaya initiated many discourses on racial discrimination and police brutality towards Papuan students in Indonesia. The question arises as to how the public perceive news framing and its effects on public opinion. This question will be answered by examining reports in the newspapers Kompas (published in Jakarta) and Jubi (Jayapura, Papua) which display quite different thematic and rhetorical structures. As secondary research, this article aims to assess the public opinion on the framing of the incident based on Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality. Through qualitative focus group discussion, this study examines people’s perceptions of news media framing and its effect on the shaping of public opinion towards an ethnic minority group. The results show that media framing reinforces a certain idea of public opinion towards minority groups through various factors such as Perspective of Reporting and Depth of Reporting, both of which differ in Kompas and Jubi as a result of differences in their audiences. Differences were also found in such factors as the thematic structure between lens of sympathy and lens of antagonism. Ultimately, this research suggests that the public possess an awareness of news framing, thus giving them the capability to construct their own critical viewpoints towards media and the incident.

Another Look at the Rhetorical Moves and Linguistic Realizations in International and Indonesian Journal Articles: A Case of Tourism Research

Although a significant number of studies have been conducted to explore the rhetorical structures of research article abstracts, there is a paucity of research specifically comparing the move patterns, and linguistic features of tourism research article abstracts published in international and national journals. Such a comparison is quintessential to address a notion that journal indexation may factor into the quality of textual organization in abstract writing. Employing Hyland’s (2000) analytical framework, the paper analyzed 120 tourism research article abstracts from international journals indexed by Scopus and Indonesian journals indexed by Sinta. Findings revealed more similarities than differences across the two corpora. All of Hyland’s five moves were generally found in the abstracts, with M2 (Purpose), M3 (Method), and M4 (Product) as the most occurring moves in both data sets. An exception was found in M1 (Introduction) and M5 (Conclusion), where M1 was favored and M5 was excluded in Sinta-indexed abstracts, yet the reverse was true of Scopus-indexed counterparts. In terms of the linguistic features, present tense and active voice were evidently dominant across both data groups, with a notable exception in Method move, where past tense and passive voice were more favorable. These findings appear to suggest that journal indexation does not profoundly influence abstract writing. Recommendations and implications for academic writing for publication purposes are also discussed.

Academic Writing in the Baltic States

In the project Bwrite (Academic Writing in the Baltic States: Rhetorical Structures through Cultures and Languages), we aim to address the lack of an empirically grounded holistic understanding of non-Anglophone writing traditions by mapping the academic writing traditions in the national languages of the Baltic States: Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. We aim to achieve this by using machine learning and other computational methods (both quantitative and qualitative) for capturing writing tradition features at scale. By identifying and studying those features, we will not only create a body of knowledge on writing tradition(s) of the Baltic States, but the project will also provide a methodological basis for studying writing traditions elsewhere.

Technology storylines: A narrative analysis of the rural education research

This piece offers a systematic review of rural (P-12) education technology literature. Drawing upon a social change frame (Ogburn, 1922), current rural education technology research within the subfield is collected, examined, and synthesized. Findings explicate that methodological diversity is a strength; however, some populations (e.g., middle school teachers) have thicker coverage than others (e.g., high school students). Additionally, many studies lean on rhetorical structures about what could and should be happening in rural schools, rarely delving into the how’s and whys associated with actual technology use in rural contexts. The piece concludes with a call for scholarship which assists in shifting power structures to support rural schools in their efforts to work with technology for the betterment of rural students and communities in place.

Online Suicide Identification in the Framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)

Background: Suicide is a serious social problem. Substantial efforts have been made to prevent suicide for many decades. The internet has become an important arena for suicide prevention and intervention. However, to the best of our knowledge, only one study has analyzed suicidal comments online from the perspective of rhetorical structure with incomplete rhetorical relations. We aimed to examine the rhetorical differences between Chinese social media users who died by suicide and those without suicidal ideation. Methods: The posts of 15 users who died by suicide and 15 not suffering from suicide ideation were annotated by five postgraduates with expertise in analyzing suicidal posts based on rhetorical structure theory (RST). Group differences were compared via a chi-square test. Results: Results showed that users who died by suicide posted significantly more posts and used more rhetorical relations. Moreover, the two groups displayed significant differences in 17 out of 23 rhetorical relations. Limitations: Because this study is largely exploratory and tentative, caution should be taken in generalizing our findings. Conclusions: Our results expand the methods of RST to the online suicidal identification field. There are implications for population-based suicide prevention by combining rhetorical structures with context analysis.