Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:23:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-12-07Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:50:34Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 grotto_v_me_mar.pdf: 854301 bytes, checksum: c83dddeec8d2faba12e2744573006a15 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / O desenvolvimento tecnológico que afeta diretamente a comunicação entre sujeitos e enormemente a interatividade entre eles, e que vem sendo cada vez mais foco de trabalhos de pesquisa em ciências sociais, é o ponto de partida para a proposta deste trabalho de característica multidisciplinar. Aqui, propôs-se buscar nos resultados das interações entre indivíduos de interesses comuns afiliados a redes de relacionamentos as percepções e impressões desse público em particular acerca de um objeto específico, no caso, o produto cultural cinematográfico. Tendo em vista a efemeridade muitas vezes observada no âmbito da internet, a rede de relacionamentos escolhida é aquela que já foi a mais popular entre os brasileiros, o Orkut, e o produto cultural, o filme O Segredo de Brokeback Mountain, que inspirou a criação de comunidade homônima que agrega os indivíduos focados nesse trabalho. Assim, a partir do resgate de informações disponibilizadas à consulta pública em redes de relacionamento na internet, através da avaliação dos conteúdos, alcançou-se a confirmar teorias de cinema que defendem a representação e identificação dos indivíduos em seu produto cultural, levando-os a esse reconhecimento no processo de comunicação com o espectador/receptor / The technological development that directly affects communication between subjects and greatly interactivity between them, and that has been increasingly focus of research in social sciences, is the starting point for the purpose of this feature multidisciplinary work. Here, it is proposed to seek the results of interactions between individuals of common interests affiliated with networks of relationships perceptions and impressions of that particular audience about a particular object, in this case, the cinematic cultural product. Given the transience often observed within the Internet, the network of relationships that has been chosen is the most popular among Brazilians, Orkut, and cultural product, the film Brokeback Mountain, which inspired the creation of community homonym that aggregates individuals focused in this work. Thus, from the redemption of information available to the public consultation on social networks on the Internet, through the evaluation of content reached to confirm theories that defend the film representation and identification of individuals in their cultural product, leading them to this recognition in the process of communication with the viewer/receiver

This thesis presents a qualitative study on the processes of user-generated crowdsourced collaborative translation in Yeeyan, China’s largest online translation community. Collaborative translation is still a relatively emergent area of scholarship and research so far has focused mainly on audiovisual translation practice. Studies which focus on the co-production of written texts mostly provide only a fragmented picture and treat collaborative translation as a linear process. In this thesis, I examine the translation initiated and undertaken by two or more volunteer translators who collaboratively produce a translated text, focusing on how they interact with each other, who they are, why they participate, and what meanings they give to their behaviour. Adopting an ethnographic methodology, I have conducted longitudinal in-depth fieldwork in Yeeyan, using the methods of participant observation and interactive interview. Three types of data are collected: 1) fieldnotes; 2) the material resources archived on the Yeeyan website and the translation manuscripts; and 3) elicited interview data. After my preliminary thematic analysis, I undertake a micro-level discourse analysis, examining the participants’ behaviours, decision-making processes, emerging identity roles and perceptions on competence as they unfolded during the collaboration process. Primarily informed by Wenger’s “communities of practice” theory (CoP theory), the analysis reveals that Yeeyan is first a participatory media platform which provides Chinese readers with access to knowledge and information not available in their mother language, as well as allowing its users to play an active role in the production and circulation of the media content. More profoundly, Yeeyan is an online CoP where a crowd of translators from different professional and disciplinary backgrounds interact with each other regularly for the shared practices they are passionate about and for the shared enterprises they care for. The findings suggest that the process of collaborative translation in Yeeyan is de facto an experience of meaning negotiation. First, competence in a CoP is obtained through mutual recognition from other members as a result of their active and continuous participation. Second, meanings in Yeeyan are not static, but are dynamically negotiated between the participants, depending on the genre of the text being translated, which specialized expertise the translators possess, how competent they are in the Yeeyan community, and what meanings they intend to give to their behaviours individually and collectively. Third, a CoP like Yeeyan is also a complex social learning system which consists of multiple interrelated sub-communities. Yeeyan members’ endeavour to solve translation problems and thereby increase their competence also contributes to forming a shared history of learning. Beyond these findings, this thesis also makes broader methodological and theoretical contributions. It demonstrates how the use of an immersive ethnographic methodology, hitherto seldom applied in the TS field, can provide more holistic insights into translators’ interactions, translation manuscripts and the entire collaboration process. The use of CoP theory offers us a new perspective that explains collaborative translation as a social practice through which – and to which – the participants ascribe meanings in the process of translating and interacting.

Technology continues to evolve quickly and is dramatically changing the behaviors of online users. Social networking sites, while offering users interactive online spaces to socialize with their friends and family, are also a breeding ground for various undesirable online behaviors, such as cyberbullying. Cyberbullying on social networking sites (SNS bullying) has emerged as a societal challenge in recent years. The prevalence and adverse consequences of SNS bullying have been extensively reported in the mass media and drawn increasing attention from government agencies, parents, and the academic community. The research on SNS bullying is broad, and little effort has been devoted to consolidating its findings. Furthermore, scant attention has been paid to understanding the role technological factors play in the development of SNS bullying.. Accordingly, this dissertation proposes two main research objectives to advance the scientific understanding of SNS bullying. It seeks to (1) summarize the research status of SNS bullying and (2) examine the role of technological factors in SNS bullying among perpetrators and aggressive bystanders. Three essays are included. In Essay 1, I summarize the current knowledge on SNS bullying through a literature review and analysis. Drawing on the general aggression model, I propose a classification framework to classify the factors affecting SNS bullying. The literature review and analysis outline the patterns of research on SNS bullying and identify future research directions. In Essay 2, I examine the effects of technological factors on SNS bullying perpetration. Drawing on crime opportunity theory and affordance theory, I propose a research model to examine the drivers of SNS bullying perpetration and test how SNS affordances influence the evaluation of SNS environments for perpetration using an online survey. The results suggest that SNS affordances are salient enablers that afford SNS bullying perpetration. In Essay 3, I examine the effects of technological factors on bystanders' aggressive responses to SNS bullying. Drawing on moral disengagement theory, I develop a research model to investigate the effects of beliefs about SNS use and moral disengagement mechanisms on bystanders' aggressive responses to SNS bullying using a focus group discussion and a scenario-based survey. The results suggest that moral disengagement mechanisms are significant social cognitive processes bystanders use to rationalize their aggressive responses toward victims.. This dissertation offers important implications for research and practice. Theoretically, it contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by examining an emerging societal challenge associated with the undesirable use of information technology. It also adds to the growing body of research on SNS bullying by integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines, and demonstrates that technological factors play a substantial role in affecting the development of SNS bullying. Practically, this dissertation offers practitioners a rich and fine-grained understanding of the cause and development of SNS bullying. It also provides valuable information about the effects of the technological factors that lead to SNS bullying perpetration and bystanders' aggressive responses. Overall, this dissertation derives important insights into the prevention and intervention of SNS bullying.

Policy makers write policies that are implemented by actors at various levels of government. This results in policies that are implemented differently than how they were intended due to institutional contexts, pressure from the agency, personal beliefs, and collaboration between bureaucrats. This is especially true of natural resource policies, which are implemented at local scales by actors spread across the landscape. This research explores the effects that pressure from above, beliefs of individual actors, collaboration between actors, network structure, and distance between actors collectively have on policy implementation in federal natural resource agencies. A network modeling approach is employed to simulate the policy implementation process as a network of bureaucrats. Results indicate that network structure has little influence on the policy outcome, but adding distance alters the policy outcomes sensitivity to other parameters. The results illuminate the need to consider distance in policy implementation research. / 10000-01-01

This dissertation addresses statistical issues related to endogenous peer selection in the context of social networks, social interaction models and snowball sampling methods. The first chapter studies the peer effects of friends, studymates, and seatmates on academic performance. We use data on social networks, personality traits, and cognitive ability measures collected through a unique survey conducted in three schools in Hong Kong. We estimate a social interaction model which accounts for endogenous network formation and correlation between multiple networks with a Bayesian approach. Our results show that the cognitive ability of studymates and the conscientiousness of friends positively affect a student's mathematics exam score while the conscientiousness of studymates and the cognitive ability of friends have no effect. The second chapter proposes a novel identification strategy for social interactions in a model with endogenously formed social networks. The network endogeneity arises from the correlation between the links of the network and the unobservables that determine the outcome of interest. We show that the eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix that defines the social network are control variables for network endogeneity without imposing any parametric assumption. We propose an information criterion to select the number of eigenvectors to be included as control variables. We apply the proposed method to the same empirical application as the first chapter and compare the results. The third chapter studies a snowball sampling method for social networks with endogenous peer selection. Snowball sampling is a sampling design which preserves the dependence structure of the network. It sequentially collects the information of vertices linked to the vertices collected in the previous iteration. The snowball samples suffer from a sample selection problem because of the endogenous peer selection. We propose a new estimation method that uses the relationship between samples in different iterations to correct selection. We use the snowball samples collected from Facebook to estimate the proportion of users who support the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong.

Background: Diabetes is a serious condition affecting the UK South Asian (SA) population. Beliefs amongst a number of factors have been reported to impede on self-management behaviours. Social networks (SN) are known to be an important source of support for diabetes management. Yet little is known about how much and what types of diabetes 'work' is undertaken and the impact of SN in shaping beliefs about diabetes. The aim of this study was to explore and gain knowledge about the association between illness beliefs and SN in British SA adults with diabetes. Methods: A mixed methods approach was used. Firstly, a systematic review was conducted to assess the feasibility of using standardised questionnaires to measure diabetes-related beliefs in this target population. Secondly, using a cross-sectional design, a Postal Health Survey (PHS) explored illness beliefs (Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire-BIPQ) and health outcomes (health status, self-efficacy, normalisation and self-care) in a sample of (N=67) recruited using random, purposive and snowball sampling. A Social Network Survey Interview (SNSI) with (N=37) (who completed the PNS), identified SN in each participant's network using concentric circles, and closed- questions on the amount of 'work' done by the network. A topic guide, specific to the aims of the Qualitative Study (QS) was embedded within the SNSI to explore the social, cultural and religious context related to diabetes management. Participants who completed the SNSI also completed the QS. Data was collected during 2010 and 2011. Results: Five studies meeting the review criteria were identified from the systematic review. The results supported the need to measure illness beliefs using standardised questionnaires. Certainsocialnetworkcharacteristics:sizeofthesupportnetwork, number of supportive females, practical and emotional work was related to diabetes- related beliefs. After multivariate analysis, emotional work remained a significant predictor of concern and emotional distress related to diabetes. The qualitative study identified six themes: fatalism, normalising diabetes, social networks, alternative food therapies, and travel back home to the East and religion related to beliefs and management practices. The QS also complemented and extended some of the findings of the cross-sectional study, related to social networks and fatalism beliefs. Conclusion: This study provides a unique contribution to the research on diabetes management in British SA, using a mixed methods approach. It has addressed the gap in knowledge with regards to illness beliefs about diabetes in British SA, as measured by five dimensions of the CS-SRM (Leventhal et al, 1980) and described the importance of the social context, particularly the family in being at the forefront of 'work' related to diabetes management. Future studies need to establish utility of the BIPQ in the UK South Asians to ensure it is appropriateness to the experience of diabetes in SA. Policy guidelines on diabetes may need to move beyond the notion of 'self' to include support and education for the SN, with a recognition of the impact of cultural and religious beliefs on diabetes management.

This dissertation proposes a new framework for understanding how argumentation and rhetorical action unfold in digital space. While studies in the field of rhetorical theory often address new discursive practices in spaces like Twitter and Facebook, they do not always assess the ways that the platforms themselves can influence the forms and conventions of argumentation. Similarly, the field of new media studies has attended to the structural and technical components of digital platforms, but rarely views these details through a rhetorical lens. Thus, this dissertation combines the two disciplines by approaching its thesis from two angles. First, it employs major scholarly and theoretical work from the field of rhetorical studies to determine the ways in which digital rhetorical practices align with or differ from previous ones. Second, it combines new media scholarship with close readings of digital texts, in order to examine how argumentation functions across different media platforms. This interdisciplinary approach provides unique insight into the ways that media platforms and rhetorical practices coevolve. The dissertation’s central term, “emergent arguments,” marks an epistemological shift away from the idea that an argument resides within a single text or narrative. Instead, arguments emerge from sustained and engaged interactions with digital communities, from explorations of hyperlinked trails of information, from patterns of images, words, and datasets. In digital space, knowledge is constructed communally, meaning that argumentation takes place in collaboration with a community. The project follows closely with the work of Aristotle and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, where argumentation is an inherently social act driven by cultural context and shared knowledge. The dissertation builds upon this premise by claiming that digital media make this sociality visible, traceable, and more dynamic than previous communicative platforms. It ultimately argues that in digital space, meaning itself is social, intertextual, and multimodal.

This thesis investigates several problems in social network analysis on misinformation prevention with an emphasis on finding solutions that can scale to massive online networks. In particular, it considers two problem formulations related to the spread of misinformation in a network that cover the elimination of existing misinformation and the prevention of future dissemination of misinformation. Additionally, a comprehensive comparison of several algorithms for the feedback arc set (FAS) problem is presented in order to identify an approach that is both scalable and computes a lightweight solution. The feedback arc set problem is of particular interest since several notable problems in social network analysis, including the elimination of existing misinformation, crucially rely on computing a small FAS as a preliminary. The elimination of existing misinformation is modelled as a graph searching game. The problem can be summarized as constructing a search strategy that will leave the graph clear of any misinformation at the end of the searching process in as few steps as possible. Despite the problem being NP-hard, even on directed acyclic graphs, this thesis presents an efficient approximation algorithm and provides new experimental results that compares the performance of the approximation algorithm to the lower bound on several large online networks. In particular, new scalability goals are achieved through careful algorithmic engineering and a highly optimized pre-processing step. The minimum feedback arc set problem is an NP-hard problem on graphs that seeks a minimum set of arcs which, when removed from the graph, leave it acyclic. A comprehensive comparison of several approximation algorithms for computing a minimum feedback arc set is presented with the goal of comparing the quality of the solutions and the running times. Additionally, careful algorithmic engineering is applied for multiple algorithms in order to improve their scalability. In particular, two approaches that are optimized (one greedy and one randomized) result in simultaneously strong performance for both feedback arc set size and running time. The experiments compare the performance of a wide range of algorithms on a broad selection of large online networks and reveal that the optimized greedy and randomized implementations outperform the other approaches by simultaneously computing a feedback arc set of competitive size and scaling to web-scale graphs with billions of vertices and tens of billions of arcs. Finally, the algorithms considered are extended to the probabilistic case in which arcs are realized with some fixed probability and a detailed experimental comparison is provided. \sloppy Finally, the problem of preventing the spread of misinformation propagating through a social network is considered. In this problem, a ``bad'' campaign starts propagating from a set of seed nodes in the network and the notion of a limiting (or ``good'') campaign is used to counteract the effect of misinformation. The goal is to identify a set of $k$ users that need to be convinced to adopt the limiting campaign so as to minimize the number of people that adopt the ``bad'' campaign at the end of both propagation processes. \emph{RPS} (Reverse Prevention Sampling), an algorithm that provides a scalable solution to the misinformation prevention problem, is presented. The theoretical analysis shows that \emph{RPS} runs in $O((k + l)(n + m)(\frac{1}{1 - \gamma}) \log n / \epsilon^2 )$ expected time and returns a $(1 - 1/e - \epsilon)$-approximate solution with at least $1 - n^{-l}$ probability (where $\gamma$ is a typically small network parameter). The time complexity of \emph{RPS} substantially improves upon the previously best-known algorithms that run in time $\Omega(m n k \cdot POLY(\epsilon^{-1}))$. Additionally, an experimental evaluation of \emph{RPS} on large datasets is presented where it is shown that \emph{RPS} outperforms the state-of-the-art solution by several orders of magnitude in terms of running time. This demonstrates that misinformation prevention can be made practical while still offering strong theoretical guarantees. / Graduate

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-07T19:21:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2015-08-21. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2016-03-07T19:25:22Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000856463_20161126.pdf: 156940 bytes, checksum: 1fd60fb452686d2931fe94a88eba4dcd (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2016-11-28T18:47:37Z: 000856463_20161126.pdf,. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2016-11-28T18:48:21Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000856463.pdf: 1799416 bytes, checksum: e97b4bbe2cb59ef5a2af067af857326f (MD5) / Este trabalho visa apresentar as potencialidades do uso das redes sociais, especificamente o Facebook, como recurso didático-pedagógico nas aulas de Língua Portuguesa para promoção de habilidades da leitura e da escrita por meio do acesso e produção de gêneros textuais/digitais que permeiam esse espaço virtual. Inicialmente, realizou-se uma investigação sobre tecnologias na educação, tomando-se por base teóricos e especialistas no assunto, com o objetivo de promover uma reflexão sobre o uso pedagógico das redes sociais na educação. As atividades foram desenvolvidas com alunos das Séries Finais do Ensino Fundamental, de uma escola estadual no interior do estado de São Paulo, considerando a importância de se adquirir, na sociedade contemporânea, conhecimentos e habilidades para participação em práticas sociais em ambientes digitais. Nesse contexto, a proposta foi verificar o desenvolvimento do letramento digital, considerando-se que são internautas ainda em formação escolar e dominam as tecnologias atuais que estão incorporadas no seu cotidiano. Cabe mencionar que várias pesquisas realizadas no campo da educação apontam para as dificuldades relacionadas à deficiência da leitura, da escrita, que abrangem uma parcela significativa destes alunos. No entanto, acredita-se que nunca se leu e se escreveu tanto como nos dias atuais graças à repercussão dos espaços digitais, é inegável a necessidade da utilização dos meios tecnológicos no ambiente escolar. Assim, por meio do uso de tecnologia na educação, pretende-se contribuir na formação desses jovens enquanto cidadãos, e também na construção de novos conhecimentos e, consequentemente, na ampliação dos horizontes visando à formação de estudantes multiletrados / The objective of this paper is to present the possibilities of using social media, Facebook, to be more specific, as a pedagogical and didactic tool in Portuguese language classes for the 9th grade to develop reading and writing skills by reading and writing different text/digital genres that are found in this media. In order to do so, firstly we researched about Educational technologies by surveying and reflecting about the pedagogical uses of social media. Activities were developed with 9th grade students in a state school inland São Paulo state who are native computer users dealing well with technology, but still in formal education and need to take part in social practices. Several researches in Education point out that there are difficulties towards reading and writing with basic education students. However thanks to digital spaces, students have never read and written so much. So, we cannot deny the need of using technology in schooling. By using it, we intend to help students to become citizens, to build new knowledge and hence, to broad horizons by forming multi literate students

Orientador: Paulo Eduardo Teixeira / Banca: Dora Isabel da Costa / Banca: Célia Aparecida Ferreira Tolentino / Resumo: O desenvolvimento tecnológico que afeta diretamente a comunicação entre sujeitos e enormemente a interatividade entre eles, e que vem sendo cada vez mais foco de trabalhos de pesquisa em ciências sociais, é o ponto de partida para a proposta deste trabalho de característica multidisciplinar. Aqui, propôs-se buscar nos resultados das interações entre indivíduos de interesses comuns afiliados a redes de relacionamentos as percepções e impressões desse público em particular acerca de um objeto específico, no caso, o produto cultural cinematográfico. Tendo em vista a efemeridade muitas vezes observada no âmbito da internet, a rede de relacionamentos escolhida é aquela que já foi a mais popular entre os brasileiros, o Orkut, e o produto cultural, o filme O Segredo de Brokeback Mountain, que inspirou a criação de comunidade homônima que agrega os indivíduos focados nesse trabalho. Assim, a partir do resgate de informações disponibilizadas à consulta pública em redes de relacionamento na internet, através da avaliação dos conteúdos, alcançou-se a confirmar teorias de cinema que defendem a representação e identificação dos indivíduos em seu produto cultural, levando-os a esse reconhecimento no processo de comunicação com o espectador/receptor / Abstract: The technological development that directly affects communication between subjects and greatly interactivity between them, and that has been increasingly focus of research in social sciences, is the starting point for the purpose of this feature multidisciplinary work. Here, it is proposed to seek the results of interactions between individuals of common interests affiliated with networks of relationships perceptions and impressions of that particular audience about a particular object, in this case, the cinematic cultural product. Given the transience often observed within the Internet, the network of relationships that has been chosen is the most popular among Brazilians, Orkut, and cultural product, the film Brokeback Mountain, which inspired the creation of community homonym that aggregates individuals focused in this work. Thus, from the redemption of information available to the public consultation on social networks on the Internet, through the evaluation of content reached to confirm theories that defend the film representation and identification of individuals in their cultural product, leading them to this recognition in the process of communication with the viewer/receiver / Mestre