LOCO: The 88-million-word language of conspiracy corpus

The spread of online conspiracy theories represents a serious threat to society. To understand the content of conspiracies, here we present the language of conspiracy (LOCO) corpus. LOCO is an 88-million-token corpus composed of topic-matched conspiracy (N = 23,937) and mainstream (N = 72,806) documents harvested from 150 websites. Mimicking internet user behavior, documents were identified using Google by crossing a set of seed phrases with a set of websites. LOCO is hierarchically structured, meaning that each document is cross-nested within websites (N = 150) and topics (N = 600, on three different resolutions). A rich set of linguistic features (N = 287) and metadata includes upload date, measures of social media engagement, measures of website popularity, size, and traffic, as well as political bias and factual reporting annotations. We explored LOCO’s features from different perspectives showing that documents track important societal events through time (e.g., Princess Diana’s death, Sandy Hook school shooting, coronavirus outbreaks), while patterns of lexical features (e.g., deception, power, dominance) overlap with those extracted from online social media communities dedicated to conspiracy theories. By computing within-subcorpus cosine similarity, we derived a subset of the most representative conspiracy documents (N = 4,227), which, compared to other conspiracy documents, display prototypical and exaggerated conspiratorial language and are more frequently shared on Facebook. We also show that conspiracy website users navigate to websites via more direct means than mainstream users, suggesting confirmation bias. LOCO and related datasets are freely available at https://osf.io/snpcg/.

The cognitive prerequisites for language: insights from iterated learning

Human languages are transmitted by iterated learning: we learn the language of our community by observing language use in communicative interaction, and then in turn we produce linguistic behaviours which become the basis for learning in others. Computational and experimental models of iterated learning show that linguistic structure (including compositional structure, which underpins the open-ended expressivity of human language) evolves on a cultural timescale as a result of this iterated learning process. I consider the implications of this work for our understanding of the cognitive capacities required to support linguistic structure, highlighting the importance of the capacities to acquire compositionally-structured meaning-signal mappings from data, and to reason about the minds of others during learning and use.

Null models for understanding fairy shrimp habitats

The Chilean fairy shrimp species are represented by the Branchinecta genus, which are poorly described, and mainly occur in shallow ephemeral pools in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and the Southern Chilean Patagonian plains. The aim of the present study was to perform an initial ecological characterization of Branchinecta habitats and its associated communities in the Chilean Southern Patagonian plains (45-53°S) using null models (co-occurrence, niche sharing and size overlap). The results of the co-occurrence analysis revealed that the species’ associations are structured, meaning that at different kinds of Branchinecta habitats, the associated species are different. I did not find niche sharing, which means interspecific competition is absent. Finally the size overlap analysis revealed structured patterns, which are probably due to environmental homogeneity or colonization extinction processes. The habitats studied are shallow ephemeral pools, with extreme environmental conditions, where continuous local colonization and extinction processes probably occur, which would explain the marked Branchinecta species endemism.

Predicate Focus

This chapter discusses a grammatically defined sub-class of focus: that on verbal predicates and on functional elements in the extended verbal projection. The phenomena falling under the label ofpredicate focusare introduced, and it is shown that predicate focus is interpretable on a par with argument or term focus on DPs and PPs. A unified structured-meaning approach that treats focus as the psychological predicate of the clause allows for singling out DP-terms and transitive verbs as categories in need of explicit marking when focused. A cross-linguistic overview of the grammatical strategies for marking predicate focus is provided, focusing on asymmetries in the realization of predicate as opposed to in terms of obligatory marking, grammatical strategy, and complexity. The information-structural and grammatical factors behind such focus asymmetries are discussed with some tentative universals concerning the explicit marking of information-structural categories on verbal predicates.

Mediatization at the margins: Cosmopolitanism, network capital and spatial transformation in rural Sweden

The significance of mediatization in countryside settings is an under-researched topic in media studies. In this paper, based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in two rural areas in Sweden, we study how mediatization integrates the prospects of cosmopolitan social change. The current phase of the mediatization process, which imposes a more dynamic register of networked communication, nourishes a new type of cosmopolitan identity in the countryside. As shown in the study, this development is constituted by complex configurations of different forms of mobility and connectivity. We argue that these spatial processes are socially structured, meaning that certain social groups are better equipped, through the appropriation of network capital, for turning cosmopolitan dispositions into a transformative resource, a ‘cosmopolitan politics of place’. Such alterations of the social structure may successively destabilize the relationship between ‘the urban’ and ‘the rural’.