Zugl.: Hamburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2006.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on October 30, 2007) Page v list of figures missing from manuscript. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis analyzes how the news blogs Daily Kos and Power line construct news presented from an ideological viewpoint. Specifically the types of evidence used by the blogs to assert their viewpoints and their intended audiences were analyzed. This thesis utilized theory from Jean Francois Lyotard to explain how images and text were used by the blogs to legitimate their ideological narrative. Edwin Black's theory of second . ' persona was used to analyze the intended audience of the blogs. The ideology of the two blogs was described by the political spectrum developed by Barry Clark. The analysis of the two blogs found that both blogs utilized various sources to legitimize their narratives. The two blogs constructed news stories in stylistically similar manners. News constructed in this manner reinforces ideological viewpoints and manifests itself in a partisan electorate and partisan politicians unwilling to be flexible with their political positions. This inflexibility is not beneficial in a democracy that needs compromise in order to function.

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Based on previous researchers’ criticism of Euro-American bias inherent to universal analogue and digital knowledge organisation systems, this combined qualitative and quantitative postcolonial critical discourse analysis investigates the constructed meanings behind the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) controlled vocabulary hosted by the Word Digital Library’s (WDL) metadata scheme. This is done with a sample of metadata pertaining to their African cultural heritage collection. The study aims to see if the restricted controlled vocabulary exclude and marginalise situated African knowledge thereby conflicting with their ideological imperative of promoting international understanding. The use of postcolonial theory and discourse analysis theory as both the analytical theoretical framework and methodological approach, reveal that Westerncentric terms from colonial discourse dominate but do not constitute the entirety of the discourses represented by the subject headings. Relying on the assumption that the cataloguers select subject headings based on the rule of literary warrant, the reason for this preference imply an unbalanced collection rather than a biased knowledge organisation system. Therefore, the study suggests the creation of positive rhetorical spaces (Olson, 2002) by adding preferred terms that stem from marginalised situated knowledge systems that too are represented by the existing resources. This will allow for several discourses to co-exist achieving thereby a better fit with the culturally inclusionary aims of the WDL not dependent on the limits of their collection. Also acknowledged is metadata’s pragmatic rationale in support of standardisation for enhanced search and discoverability, but questioned is the sustainability of this principle if the goal is to promote equitable understanding and representation to a wide and international user group. Ultimately, recognising the bias within knowledge organisation systems will serve inclusivity more, rather than traditional claims of universality which conceal exclusion.

Based on previous researchers’ criticism of Euro-American bias inherent to universal analogue and digital knowledge organisation systems, this combined qualitative and quantitative postcolonial critical discourse analysis investigates the constructed meanings behind the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) controlled vocabulary hosted by the Word Digital Library’s (WDL) metadata scheme. This is done with a sample of metadata pertaining to their African cultural heritage collection. The study aims to see if the restricted controlled vocabulary exclude and marginalise situated African knowledge thereby conflicting with their ideological imperative of promoting international understanding. The use of postcolonial theory and discourse analysis theory as both the analytical theoretical framework and methodological approach, reveal that Westerncentric terms from colonial discourse dominate but do not constitute the entirety of the discourses represented by the subject headings. Relying on the assumption that the cataloguers select subject headings based on the rule of literary warrant, the reason for this preference imply an unbalanced collection rather than a biased knowledge organisation system. Therefore, the study suggests the creation of positive rhetorical spaces (Olson, 2002) by adding preferred terms that stem from marginalised situated knowledge systems that too are represented by the existing resources. This will allow for several discourses to co-exist achieving thereby a better fit with the culturally inclusionary aims of the WDL not dependent on the limits of their collection. Also acknowledged is metadata’s pragmatic rationale in support of standardisation for enhanced search and discoverability, but questioned is the sustainability of this principle if the goal is to promote equitable understanding and representation to a wide and international user group. Ultimately, recognising the bias within knowledge organisation systems will serve inclusivity more, rather than traditional claims of universality which conceal exclusion.

This thesis demonstrates that participants in Political Blogging Communities increase their deliberative capacity over time, potentially enabling them to participate in democratic societies. The study unifies perspectives on the meaning of blogs in American politics. It presents a unique theoretical framework that incorporates community and social learning literatures. The Internet is thought to potentially enable a revitalization of democracy because of its political and communicative properties. While studies have looked to deliberation in online forums, this study specifically targets Political Blogging Communities. Blogs have been targeted by a diverse range of scholars and methods that raise questions of their role in emphasizing the constitutional ideal of deliberation. Daily Kos and Red State are among the most popular political discussion sites, but are generally under-investigated in the literature. The theoretical framework and results presented here suggest that they are places where democratic capacity increases. A pilot study provided encouraging results. Because Political Blogging Communities talk about public issues, have several aspects of a supportive community, and feature contributions from ordinary people, they foster an adherence to deliberative norms. The sampling frame sought dedicated participants in an effort to approach the question of social learning over time. To address these questions, the deliberative content of 373 diaries from 20 authors at Daily Kos and Red State was hand coded. This Thesis makes two principal contributions: (1) it introduces a new measure that assesses deliberative quality is introduced, and (2) finds that the diversity of deliberative content in political blogs increases over time. / Master of Arts

The increasing popularity of the social web and online communities requires the attention of researchers of conflict resolution. Although there are many ways to resolve conflict offline, the ways in which conflict takes place within a native online context have not been much studied. Are any of the tools and strategies that are used to improve communication offline used successfully online, or are some other strategies taking their place? What communication patterns occur within an online community equipped with comment moderation capabilities? This research is a case study and addressed these questions by performing a qualitative analysis of comment conversations within two diaries that discussed a conflict event known as the Pie Fight within the Daily Kos community in June, 2005. The findings of this research are organized into three sections, which discuss behaviors related to Communication Style, Conflict Minimization or Avoidance, and community members' response to Comment Moderation (Ratings). Novel communication style behaviors which were noted included the use of cut-and-paste "paraphrasing" which was used to escalate conflict rather than resolving it, medium blaming when the writer's own words were quite obviously provocative, and extended leave-taking as a means of maintaining relationships before departing from the community. Conflict minimization or avoidance behaviors included the assumption that removal of discussion about the conflict by deleting an entire diary and comments threads would somehow resolve the disagreements included in them it, the use of benign verbal aggression which seemed to bring some segments of the community together, and the temporary or permanent departure from the community by members who took part in the conflict discussion. Ratings moderation created another point of conflict when negative ratings were threatened, although negative ratings were used mainly to address unproductive language rather than punish differences of opinion. The use of positive ratings to offer silent support or appreciation to members whose reasoned comments received a dismissive response was also observed. These findings could be used in future research about the suitability of online communities as sites of deliberative discussion.

Les systèmes d'information biomédicaux actuels reposent sur l'exploitation de données provenant de sources multiples. Les Systèmes d'Organisation de la Connaissance (SOC) permettent d'expliciter la sémantique de ces données, ce qui facilite leur gestion et leur exploitation. Bénéficiant de l'évolution des technologies du Web sémantique, un nombre toujours croissant de SOCs a été élaboré et publié dans des domaines spécifiques tels que la génomique, la biologie, l'anatomie, les pathologies, etc. Leur utilisation combinée, nécessaire pour couvrir tout le domaine biomédical, repose sur la définition de mises en correspondance entre leurs éléments ou mappings. Les mappings connectent les entités des SOCs liées au même domaine via des relations sémantiques. Ils jouent un rôle majeur pour l'interopérabilité entre systèmes, en permettant aux applications d'interpréter les données annotées avec différents SOCs. Cependant, les SOCs évoluent et de nouvelles versions sont régulièrement publiées de façon à correspondre à des vues du domaine les plus à jour possible. La validité des mappings ayant été préalablement établis peut alors être remis en cause. Des méthodes sont nécessaires pour assurer leur cohérence sémantique au fil du temps. La maintenance manuelle des mappings est une possibilité lorsque le nombre de mappings est restreint. En présence de SOCs volumineux et évoluant très rapidement, des méthodes les plus automatiques possibles sont indispensables. Cette thèse de doctorat propose une approche originale pour adapter les mappings basés sur les changements détectés dans l'évolution de SOCs du domaine biomédical. Notre proposition consiste à comprendre précisément les mappings entre SOCs, à exploiter les types de changements intervenant lorsque les SOCs évoluent, puis à proposer des actions de modification des mappings appropriées. Nos contributions sont multiples : (i) nous avons réalisé un travail expérimental approfondi pour comprendre l'évolution des mappings entre SOCs; nous proposons des méthodes automatiques (ii) pour analyser les mappings affectés par l'évolution de SOCs, et (iii) pour reconnaître l'évolution des concepts impliqués dans les mappings via des patrons de changement; enfin (iv) nous proposons des techniques d'adaptation des mappings à base d'heuristiques. Nous proposons un cadre complet pour l'adaptation des mappings, appelé DyKOSMap, et un prototype logiciel. Nous avons évalué les méthodes proposées et le cadre formel avec des jeux de données réelles contenant plusieurs versions de mappings entre SOCs du domaine biomédical. Les résultats des expérimentations ont démontré l'efficacité des principes sous-jacents à l'approche proposée. La maintenance des mappings, en grande partie automatique, est de bonne qualité. / Modern biomedical information systems require exchanging and retrieving data between them, due to the overwhelming available data generated in this domain. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) offer means to make the semantics of data explicit which, in turn, facilitates their exploitation and management. The evolution of semantic technologies has led to the development and publication of an ever increasing number of large KOSs for specific sub-domains like genomics, biology, anatomy, diseases, etc. The size of the biomedical field demands the combined use of several KOSs, but it is only possible through the definition of mappings. Mappings interconnect entities of domain-related KOSs via semantic relations. They play a key role as references to enable advanced interoperability tasks between systems, allowing software applications to interpret data annotated with different KOSs. However, to remain useful and reflect the most up-to-date knowledge of the domain, the KOSs evolve and new versions are periodically released. This potentially impacts established mappings demanding methods to ensure, as automatic as possible, their semantic consistency over time. Manual maintenance of mappings stands for an alternative only if a restricted number of mappings are available. Otherwise supporting methods are required for very large and highly dynamic KOSs. To address such problem, this PhD thesis proposes an original approach to adapt mappings based on KOS changes detected in KOS evolution. The proposal consists in interpreting the established correspondences to identify the relevant KOS entities, on which the definition relies on, and based on the evolution of these entities to propose actions suited to modify mappings. Through this investigation, (i) we conduct in-depth experiments to understand the evolution of KOS mappings; we propose automatic methods (ii) to analyze mappings affected by KOS evolution, and (iii) to recognize the evolution of involved concepts in mappings via change patterns; finally (iv) we design techniques relying on heuristics explored by novel algorithms to adapt mappings. This research achieved a complete framework for mapping adaptation, named DyKOSMap, and an implementation of a software prototype. We thoroughly evaluated the proposed methods and the framework with real-world datasets containing several releases of mappings between biomedical KOSs. The obtained results from experimental validations demonstrated the overall effectiveness of the underlying principles in the proposed approach to adapt mappings. The scientific contributions of this thesis enable to largely automatically maintain mappings with a reasonable quality, which improves the support for mapping maintenance and consequently ensures a better interoperability over time.

The egress pathway of herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1) is a complicated process mediated by co-ordinated activity of several virus glycoproteins. The virions are first assembled and enveloped at trans-Golgi-network (TGN) or endosome membranes and then travel through a guided pathway that is directed towards the cell adherent points for secretion. Once secreted the vast majority of virions remain associated with the extracellular membrane of cells and very few free virions are released into the culture medium (< 1%). The mechanisms that mediate both the targeted secretion of newly assembled virions at cell contact points and post-secretion attachment of virions with the extracellular surface of cells are poorly understood, and were the topics of this research. In this thesis, an HSV-1 passage mutant of increased virion secretion phenotype had been studied. Genome sequencing of the mutant virus identified mutations in three viral envelope proteins. Study of recombinant viruses that were constructed based on those three mutations revealed that a single amino acid change in glycoprotein I (gI) of glycine to arginine at residue 39 is responsible for the increased release of virus. The result suggests the principal effect of this mutation is to modify the secretory pathway used by virions during their release from infected cells. Data also suggests a role of gC in the attachment of virions to the extracellular surface of cells after egress. In the context of HSV-1 envelopment and egress glycoprotein E (gE), which forms a heterodimeric complex with gI (gE/gI), is known to be important. The gE/gI complex has been shown to interact with many tegument proteins and have a redundant role in secondary envelopment. The gE/gI complex has been also proposed to colocalise with various cellular components and sort the nascent virions to cell contact points. However, there is little understanding of the cellular proteins that gE/gI interact with, or the mechanisms that mediate targeted secretion of virions. This research has identified a novel interactome of gE/gI by mass-spectrometric analysis utilising stable isotope labelling with amino acids in cell culture (SILAC) medium. Among the cellular interactome obtained, Nipsnap1 was validated by co-precipitation assays from both infected and transfected cells, and furthermore using cell free systems, suggesting gE and Nipsnap1 directly interact. Nipsnap1 and its homologue Nipsnap2 have been proposed to contribute in vesicle transport and membrane fusion in cells. Using CRISPR-Cas9 technology these proteins were knocked out in a keratinocyte cell line (HaCaT) to investigate their role in HSV-1 egress. However, little or no effect on HSV-1 egress could be observed upon loss of either or both of these proteins suggesting the biological significance of gE-Nipsnap1 interaction may not be directly linked to any egress function of gE/gI. Two further interesting 'hits' from the gE/gI interactome were interferon-induced transmembrane protein type-2 (IFITM2), a virus restriction factor, and Myoferlin that has a putative role in endocytic vesicle recycling. This study could validate gE-Myoferlin interaction and co-localisation in infected or transfected cells however, functional significance of this interaction remains to be determined. Overall, the research of this thesis has provided a better understanding of the role of the gE/gI complex in HSV-1 egress and investigated the role of some interesting cellular proteins in the context of virion egress.