Research across healthcare and organizational settings demonstrates the importance of social support to increase physical and mental well-being. However, the process of seeking social support is less well-understood than its outcomes. Specifically, research examining how people seek social support in natural settings is scarce. One natural setting increasingly used by people to seek support is the internet. In this online setting, people seek and provide social support verbally via social media platforms and messages. The present project seeks to further examine the nature of social support seeking in these online contexts by examining people’s language. This analysis includes discovering the common language features of social support seeking. By applying a data-driven content analysis approach, this research can examine the underlying themes present when seeking social support and build upon that insight to classify new instances of support seeking. These results would have important practical implications for occupational health. By identifying individuals who are seeking social support, future interventions will be able to take a more targeted approach in lending additional support to those individuals who have the greatest need. Subsequently, this application potentially provides the mental and physical health benefits of social support. Therefore, this research extends our knowledge of both the nature of support seeking and how to develop effective interventions. / M.S. / Research suggests that social support has important effects on our mental and physical health. To this point, though, the process of seeking social support has largely been neglected in research. Specifically, there hasn’t been much research on how social support is sought online. We know that people seek social support online by posting and messaging on social media. The present study seeks to examine the language of online support seeking—this way, we can understand what people tend to say when seeking support. The present study is concerned with the content of support seeking posts; by analyzing this content, we can understand themes that are prevalent in online support seeking. This allows us to better understand support seeking and, hopefully, better identify people in need of support. By identifying those people in need of support, we can ensure that their support needs are met and that they don’t suffer the health consequences related to a lack of social support. Therefore, this research extends our knowledge of social support seeking, both theoretically and practically.

The purpose of this study is to analyze if textbooks used in Swedish for second language learners incorporate translanguaging and inclusion. The textbooks used in this study are aimed at pupils in Swedish middle school (ages 10-12). The material that we have used and analyzed are the textbooks Språkis – svenska för nyfikna C and Entré elevbok A. As a theory we chose to apply translanguaging. Our analytical starting points for this study are text- and multimodal text analysis. The questions, that this study is based upon, are “Do the textbooks express a translanguaging language vision?” and “Do the textbooks include the intended reader?”. Starting with our questions we created indicators to be able to analyze the textbooks. The indicators that we used to expose translanguaging were comparison of language, mother tongue, meta-markers (looks like, reminds of…) and fixed phrases. The indicators that were used to expose inclusion were; prior knowledge that is assumed, if minorities are noticed -in what way?, how the reader is addressed and level of difficulty in the language. The study showed that the level of prior knowledge needed to be able to use the textbooks set the textbooks apart. It also showed that neither one of the textbooks used the mother tongue as a resource for future learning. We could also see how the usage of pictures differed between the textbooks. Both textbooks, somewhat, used the pictures to support the text, but to a different extent. In conclusion the study shows that the textbook Språkis – svenska för nyfikna C, uses translanguaging and inclusion to a greater extent than Entré elevbok A does.

Topic models allow the probabilistic modeling of term frequency occurrences in documents. The fitted model can be used to estimate the similarity between documents as well as between a set of specified keywords using an additional layer of latent variables which are referred to as topics. The R package topicmodels provides basic infrastructure for fitting topic models based on data structures from the text mining package tm. The package includes interfaces to two algorithms for fitting topic models: the variational expectation-maximization algorithm provided by David M. Blei and co-authors and an algorithm using Gibbs sampling by Xuan-Hieu Phan and co-authors.

<p>The intention of this essay is to critically analyze which perspective on gender that is conveyed in schoolbooks on religion in contemporary Sweden. The main question is: what gender perspective is conveyed in schoolbooks on religion? The sub questions are: what does the writer emphasize and what has the writer excluded from the text? Are the historical and discursive aspects of gender presented in the schoolbooks? What remains to be developed regarding the gender perspective in the schoolbooks?Earlier research has shown that men are overrepresented in the schoolbooks and that women and men are shown in stereotypical ways. This study highlights whether two books, written for the A-course in the upper secondary school and printed in 2007 and 2008, have been influenced by the recent requirements on equality in teaching material.The method used is a text analysis built on critical theory and Yvonne Hirdman’s theory of the gender system. The analysis is based on gender theory.The result shows that gender issues mainly are not regarded as important for religion in schoolbooks, when women are visible it is mostly their social role within religions that is represented and explained. The gender system of the religions is excluded from the text. The main conclusion from this study is that the schoolbooks need a more profound gender perspective, where masculinity and femininity are dealt with as human-created concepts.</p>

From a social constructionist understanding of social reality, this research explores how the female entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurship are represented in official discourses. From the view point of post-structuralist feminism, this research takes the position that discourses are linguistic practices that create truth effects. It finds that the texts on the official website, including the policies and the female entrepreneurs¡¦ stories, have the potential to reproduce the stereotype of gender.

Modification(MOD) is a term generally applied to personal computer games, especially first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer, and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not standalone software and require the user to have the original release in order to run. We use Creativity Theory as the study framework, and divide it into four parts- Domain-Relevant Skills, Creativity-Relevant Processes, Task Motivation, and Social Environment to analyze. We collect the MOD creators¡¦ thoughts and reflections as text. From this thesis we can learn: 1. What computer games are popular that game players would like to create the modifications with it in Taiwan and China ? 2. What kinds of themes that MOD creators would like to use? 3. What are the MOD creators¡¦ internal and external motivations? 4. How the social environment influences the MOD creators? Finally, We will discuss the effect of social environment on domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes and task motivation. Modifications can help original computer games to continue life and even improve the richness of the game content. It would become the trend that game company supports the game editor in the future. The cost of game development could be reduced by creating with MOD creators and test with MOD players.

Mental imagery as a form of human cognition is still not well understood, particularly in the area of spatiality. This thesis attempts to find the relationship between the mental images of places created while reading a story (ekphrastic) and the mental images created while viewing a cinematic adaptation of that story. Using Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope, and Panofsky’s theory of iconography, associations can be made between places in text and film that inform the themes that readers/spectators identify and evaluate. Netlytic, an online text analysis tool, permits the analysis of online message board fan opinions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings according to themes of visualization and of place. Analysis of findings suggests that mental images created from the text and from the filmic adaptation are both passively and actively integrated in order to increase comprehension of spatial elements in Tolkien’s epic.

The overall ambition of this thesis is to investigate the approaches taken to environmental and sustainability education in outdoor education and ecocriticism in a Swedish and in an international context, to investigate environmental meaning making and to conduce to the development of analytical methods for empirical investigations of environmental meaning making. Four objectives are formulated.   The first objective of the thesis is to analyse constitutive discursive rules and traits regarding environmental and sustainability education and environmental meaning making in outdoor education in a Swedish context and in ecocriticism. This is achieved through discourse analyses of central textbooks in outdoor education and of research and textbooks in ecocriticism. The second objective is to investigate how different situated circumstances such as, text, place, mobility, social situations and previous experiences interplay in environmental meaning making. This is achieved through analyses of classroom communication, through analysis of nature writing and through an analysis of painted landscapes. The third objective is to compare and critically discuss the constitutive discursive rules and traits within the two investigated educational practices ­– out door education and ecocriticism ­– in the light of the results from the investigations of environmental meaning making carried out. The fourth objective is to develop analytical methods based on John Dewey and Louise Rosenblatt’s theories of transaction and meaning making for conducting empirical investigations of environmental meaning making in which different interplaying situational circumstances are taken into account. The results of the thesis show that taking a transactional starting point to investigate environmental meaning making adds further understanding of the situational circumstances influencing environmental meaning making in specific situations which sheds new light to the identified approaches to environmental and sustainability education in outdoor education and ecocriticism. These results suggest that a transactional approach to environmental and sustainability education can help to clarify taken for granted assumptions regarding the nature of situational circumstances such as text, place and mobility in environmental meaning making.

The amount of information available on the web is growing constantly. As a result, theproblem of retrieving any desired information is getting more difficult by the day. Toalleviate this problem, several techniques are currently being used, both for locatingpages of interest and for extracting meaningful information from the retrieved pages.Information extraction (IE) is one such technology that is used for summarizingunrestricted natural language text into a structured set of facts. IE is already being appliedwithin several domains such as news transcripts, insurance information, and weatherreports. Various approaches to IE have been taken and a number of significant resultshave been reported.In this thesis, we describe the application of IE techniques to the domain of universityweb pages. This domain is broader than previously evaluated domains and has a varietyof idiosyncratic problems to address. We present an analysis of the domain of universityweb pages and the consequences of having them input to IE systems. We then presentUniversityIE, a system that can search a web site, extract relevant pages, and processthem for information such as admission requirements or general information. TheUniversityIE system, developed as part of this research, contributes three IE methods anda web-crawling heuristic that worked relatively well and predictably over a test set ofuniversity web sites.We designed UniversityIE as a generic framework for plugging in and executing IEmethods over pages acquired from the web. We also integrated in the system a genericweb crawler (built at the University of Kentucky) and ported to Java and integrated anexternal word lexicon (WordNet) and a syntax parser (Link Grammar Parser).

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Curriculum and Instruction / F. Todd Goodson / American education is increasingly driven by standards and high-stakes tests. This creates a dynamic in which curricular content addressed in the standards will be subjected to high-stakes tests while that not addressed in the standards risks being ignored. Such a dynamic threatens poetry—a subject whose strength resides in its ambiguity instead of one correct answer. The literature review establishes poetry as an important area of study for K-12 students and explores how the Standards Movement has affected poetry instruction in other English-speaking countries. This research used context-sensitive textual analysis to examine the treatment of poetry in American English language arts standards from 1971 to 2010 as demonstrated in the following three documents: (1) Representative Performance Objectives for High School English written by the Tri-University Project in 1971, (2) Standards for the English Language Arts written by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association in 1996, and (3) the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts written in 2010. Context-sensitive textual analysis (Huckin, 1992) presumes that the contexts in which texts are written and read impact their meanings. The study describes those impacts, their implications, and suggestions for continued study.