Digital collections are ubiquitous. However, not all digital collections are the same. While most digital collections have limited forms of change - primarily creation and deletion of additional resources - there exists a class of digital collections that undergo additional kinds of change. These collections are made up of resources that are distributed across the Internet and brought together into the collection via hyperlinking. This means the underlying collection members are not controlled by the curator of the collection. Resources can be expected to change as time goes on. To further complicate matters these collections can be hard to maintain when they are large, highly dynamic, or lacking active curation. Part of the difficulty in maintaining these collections is determining if a changed page is still a valid member of the collection. While others have tried to address this problem by measuring change and defining a maximum allowed threshold of change, these methods treat all change as a potential problems and treat web content as a static document despite its intrinsically dynamic nature. Instead, I approach the problem of determining significance of change on the web by embracing it as a normal part of a web document's lifecycle, Instead of using thresholds to identify abnormal changes, I determine the difference between what a maintainer expects a page to do and what it actually does. These models are created using a variety of feature extractors to find pertinent information in a page, a Kalman filter to model the history of a page and predict a next version and finally classification of results into either expected or unexpected change. I evaluate the different options for extractors and analyzers to determine the best options from my suite of possibilities. This work is informed by a series of studies on both web pages and potential collection maintainers, observations of the NSDL Pathways, and a ground-truth set of blog changes tagged by a human judgment of the kind of change. The results of this work showed a statistically significant improvement over a range of traditional threshold techniques when applied to the collection of tagged blog changes.

The purpose of this thesisis to examine the female body ideal of the Swedish fitness blogs and how it is reproduced. To answer the research question five of the most read female fitness blogs were chosen for a critical discourse analysis. The results show that pictures is an important communication event. The ideal is reproduced by representing bodies with desirable attributes in environments and poses that communicates positive feelings. There is a dialectic relation between picture and text in each published post. To get the text and picture accentuate the ideologies of the fitness blogs, often with strong words that reminiscent infatuation and euphoria. The intertextual chain in the blogs frames training, fitness and the ideal female body as a healthy, happy and successful subject position.

Research in the field of gaming and the gaming culture shows that the culture is characterized by sexism and hypermasculinity, however a majority of this research is conducted in an Anglo-Saxon context. Therefore the aim of this study was to elucidate the Swedish gaming discourse in relation to gender, gendered norms and stereotypes. We also sought to examine the relationship between the editorial content and the blog comments. The study was based on a critical discourse analysis with a gender perspective, applied to five Swedish gaming blogs. By implementing power theory and encoding/decoding theory, we have concluded that there is a discursive struggle, where one part of the gaming culture is characterized by male dominance, while the other part of the discourse is showing signs of resistance to this hypermasculinity. We found that there is a gap between how gender is portrayed among the blog comments in relationship to the editorial content.

La presente investigación indaga los sentidos construidos por jóvenes que producen blogs PRO ANA en castellano, en torno a la delgadez como un estilo de vida a seguir. Desde los estudios de comunicación/cultura, y a partir de una perspectiva y un análisis socioculturales, se realiza un recorrido por diferentes blogs en donde se encuentran modos de comunicarse: ayunos, credos, la determinación de mandamientos y la firma de contratos, entre otras estrategias analizadas para sostener el estilo de vida. Así mismo, se problematiza a partir de le exploración a quién/es están explícitamente dirigidas estas plataformas identitarias. Enmarcados en las condiciones sociales e históricas del mundo que transitan, los jóvenes son foco de discursos que estigmatizan sus prácticas cotidianas. Sus decisiones son puestas en cuestión cuando desean alcanzar la delgadez a través de restringir su alimentación y, a su vez, darlo a conocer en el espacio virtual. La intención de este estudio no fue la de formular una definición, sino comprender procesos de significación y producción de sentido desde una dimensión cultural que dé cuenta de la vida social de jóvenes ubicados material y simbólicamente en el espacio social actual. En la investigación se realiza, además, un posicionamiento conceptual sobre la juventud, el consumo y la relación que se establece entre jóvenes, consumo y cuerpos delgados, así como un recorrido por las investigaciones que han servido de insumo para la problematización de la tesis. Es necesario considerar como marca epocal el debilitamiento de los viejos rituales que establecían el pasaje a la adultez. Las condiciones sociales, políticas y económicas han ubicado al joven más alejado de las prácticas que daban cuenta del cambio de su condición de joven a adulto, rituales que se vieron modificados por el debilitamiento de las estructuras tradicionales y una economía de mercado que avasalló con los mecanismos de ingreso establecidos durante décadas, instaurando nuevos parámetros para pensar la juventud. A estas particularidades, para pensar a los jóvenes de hoy se suma la construcción que realizan los medios masivos de comunicación, que encuadran, estigmatizan y etiquetan una juventud apática, descomprometida y desinteresada. Jóvenes a los que sólo les interesa lo estético, teniendo en cartel una programación que focaliza en el cuerpo (en un determinado tipo de cuerpo, que gusta más cuanto más se le notan los huesos y los músculos) de manera constante la relación con el éxito. En esta investigación nos preguntamos por los sentidos construidos por jóvenes que producen blogs PRO ANA en castellano, en torno a la delgadez como un estilo de vida a seguir. La producción de blogs, de creación propia y sin necesidad de ser autorizados o registrados, constituye una expresión destacada en las construcciones de sentido como formas de relación entre los jóvenes que transitan este tipo de conductas alimenticias y que expresan como estilo de vida a seguir el trabajo por obtener un cuerpo delgado.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-115). / v, 115 leaves, bound 29 cm

Today�s globalized network communication initiates new interactive formats, transforming not only the dissemination, but - increasingly - the production of news. The �one-way� flow of news from a news outlet to the audience has been replaced by a network structure. Following Castells� concept of the �network� (1996) as the central model of information structures, I perpetuate this paradigmatic shift and suggest that networks also transform the professional journalism sphere in many world regions. A revised sphere of journalism is taking shape in which an increasingly global flow of news is evolving and a multiple platform structure of journalism is taking shape in which boundaries between traditional media outlets of print, radio, and television and between national and �foreign� journalism are blurring. Furthermore, I argue that a globalized journalistic network sphere is emerging which involves �traditional� journalistic outlets and bloggers, media activists, so-called citizen journalists, or user-generated content providers alike. These new journalistic spheres of connectivity establish new (and continuous) links between journalists, their sources as well as their audiences. This fundamental change creates new professional levels of connectivity on one hand and on the other, has severe strategic and organizational implications for the management of print, broadcast and online news outlets. Within this new �network� sphere of journalistic practice, the roles of journalistic outlets change. This work suggests a framework that helps to understand journalistic organization today, with innovative work structures based on digital technologies transforming the character and in effect substituting the model of �top-down� journalism models by a model that is far more complicated. I argue that within an evolving global news sphere, information flows are multidirectional. Decentralization and non-linearity become the key parameters defining news flows at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The character of this network in the journalism sphere is transnational, crossmedia, and cross professions. Based on results of thirteen qualitative interviews with media practitioners in Germany, the US and the UK, I argue that a new geography of journalism is taking shape in which journalistic outlets are being transformed into nodes. These nodes are arranged in a dense net of information gathers, producers and disseminators and the interactive connections among them constitute what I want to call network journalism.

This study analyses the code-switching variety Taglish (Tagalog-English) in personal weblogs written by Filipino bloggers.The main research questions are set forth in chapter one: why do writers of weblogs code-switch in contexts where there is no specific addressee and hence no turn taking, and why is 'this' particular language chosen at 'this' juncture in the weblog narrative?Chapter two gives an overview of relevant code-switching theory and research, and focuses especially on the sociolinguistic dimensions. In particular, the markedness model of Myers-Scotton is reviewed with respect to the notion of code-switching itself as an unmarked choice. This sets the stage for introducing Taglish as a normal and unmarked phenomenon for many Filipinos.Chapter three presents the socio-political and linguistic background in the Philippines. This give a backdrop for a focus on the evolution and status of Taglish.The problems associated with the presentation of self in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) are examined in Chapter four and then the unique characteristics of weblogs are explored with respect to their purpose and genre.Chapter five looks at the design and methodology employed and emphasises the qualitative nature of the research and the sampling method as purposive. The main corpus of 25 extracts were analysed using frameworks which bring important perspectives to bear on the use of code-switching in the construction and negotiation of identity. These frameworks are: the referee design dimension of Bell's audience design model with its emphasis on initiative style shifts to project different identities; discursive psychology which highlights the use of language to position self and others; and narrative psychology with its stress on people's use of narrative to seek coherence of self and life-experience. These frameworks are combined with Bakhtinian notions of polyphony, dialogism and heteroglossia.Chapter six gives the detailed results of the analysis of seven weblogs which typify the findings of the corpus. Code-switching on these weblogs highlights the creative end of language use. However, it is a creativity tempered by the realities of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. The heteroglossic nature of the code-switching, in seemingly monological texts, is implicated in how the bloggers negotiate and construct social identities by positioning themselves and others in the ongoing narrative flow. In that the code-switching is extremely plentiful in this non-oral environment, it poses a serious challenge to the attempts by some conversational analysts (e.g., Li, 2005) to claim that code-switching can only really be explicated in terms of the systematics of an interaction taking place. The research seeks to stay within the spirit of CA by suggesting that even in a seemingly monologic form, interaction may be reconceived as heteroglossia covertly present in all language and overtly manifest in switching. Thus switching is not merely a product of how speakers attend to the orderly production of conversation, but also a product of how they attend to the inherent heteroglossic nature of language and exploit their linguistic repertoire maximally to make their communication as effective as possible, and to construct and negotiate multiple identities.

Thesis (D.W.S.)--Institute for Worship Studies, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-210).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2009. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed Oct. 30, 2009). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 185 p. : col. ill. Includes bibliographical references.