Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis explores the developmental pathway of thematic coherence among one Saudi female student in a foundational second language (L2) writing composition course, contributing to the field of L2 academic writing by offering a rich description of writing development. Despite a rapid increase in enrollment in the past 10 years, students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) remain an understudied L2 learner population. In addition, although a number of studies have explored coherence among L2 learners of English, such research focuses either on the linguistic features utilized by learners to ensure cohesion or on the contrast between L2 learners’ cohesive devices and that of professional standards. To date, no studies offer insight into learners’ developmental trajectory toward greater competency in producing coherent academic paragraphs. The present study proposes an alternative approach by analyzing academic paragraphs in light of the definition of thematic coherence as a general-to-particular structure of ideas, i.e., a flow of information to form a superordinate-subordinate structure in which subordinate ideas support the abstract, overarching assertion. Further, the study uses the methodology of a microgenetic analysis to facilitate the tracing of the history of mediation and micro-changes in the focal learner’s written production over time as it relates to the proposed definition of thematic coherence. Each of the written drafts of paragraphs produced by the focal student is analyzed in sequence. An analysis of qualitative data is presented to contextualize and describe the focal learner’s experience in the instructional context and how this is interconnected to the development of her written paragraphs. The results showed an increase in the student’s ability to produce academic paragraphs with a general-to-particular structure, particularly during mediation that was rich with metalinguistic terminology that also created opportunities to collaboratively construct meanings of such terms. A main contribution to L2 academic writing this study offers is a rich description of a student’s developing skills in producing academic paragraphs. An implication is that to nurture academic writing skills, such as thematic coherence among students from KSA, instruction must be attentive to the developmental stages this student population progresses through.

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This study presents eighteen topics and their distribution over the corpus of 891 abstracts, within the scope of IS research on Covid-19. With the goal of describing the IS-fields contribution to society in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. The topics were created by collecting 844 abstracts from 63 IS journals and 160 IS related abstracts from non-IS journals, all from the Web of Science Core Collection database. The abstracts were then fitted with the topic model BERTopic; that provided the eighteen topics which then were manually labeled. Flaws to this study is that it utilizes a relatively small corpus for topic modeling, and that the topic model BERTopic lacks the ability to assign documents to multiple topics. The result has similarities to a previous literature review but lacks the distinguished topic of government response and IS field agendas. However, this study’s resulting topics can give a more general perspective over a considerably larger body of research papers, and help identify further research directions.

This master thesis in human geography explores how neighborhoods are represented and perceived on the popular social media platform Instagram. By analyzing user-generated content, both visually and textually, this study aims to uncover the predominant themes, characteristics, and subjective perspectives associated with neighborhood representation on Instagram. Through a systematic analysis of the content shared by Instagram users, the research identifies recurring themes, visual motifs, and distinguishing features that emerge when portraying and expressing experiences of different neighborhoods using topic modelling and sentiment analysis in Orange. The study specifically focuses on Umeå, allowing for a deeper understanding of how Instagram users perceive and portray the various neighborhoods within the city. The findings of this research hold potential implications for urban planning practices, as they shed light on the factors influencing neighborhood representation on Instagram and their relevance to decision-making processes related to urban development, community engagement, and social well-being. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into the interplay between social media and neighborhood representation.

Bibliometric research is an important tool for examining the scientific output of various fields of study. By conducting such research, it is possible to see how the influences of different people, ideologies and discoveries have affected the scientific discourse. One way of doing this is through topic modelling, which consists of organizing the words that are used within a set of text data into different topics. To the knowledge of the author, no topic modelling study of Swedish philosophy had previously been conducted. For this reason, this study aimed to partially fill the gap by exploring the publications of one specific Swedish philosophical journal. Using Python, a topic model with 14 topics was created from the journal Filosofisk tidskrift. The change of these topics between the years 1980 and 2020 was examined. Specific attention was given to possible differences between analytic and Continental philosophy. To validate the results, an interview was also held with Fredrik Stjernberg, professor in theoretical philosophy. The results displayed a varied popularity and change for each topic. Too little Continental philosophy was discovered for a proper comparison, leading to the conclusion that Continental philosophy is not very influential in Swedish philosophical discourse. Future research should be conducted on peer-reviewed articles and be backed up by greater professional philosophical aid.

Traditionally, when social scientists wanted to analyze large amounts of documents, they have resorted to using manual coding techniques. This process can be made easier by using machine learning approaches. One such approach, called topic modelling, can find which words commonly occur together and in doing so provide the researcher with semantically coherent topics. This thesis utilizes topic modelling to investigate Nordic Psychology, a psychology journal published in the Nordic languages. Articles published between 1949 and 2005 are examined to map out how discourse has changed during the second half of the 20:th century. Psychology textbooks and researchers active in the late sixties frequently refer to something called the cognitive revolution taking place. Accounts of this revolution paint a picture of something resembling a paradigm shift. This thesis therefore sets out to look for signs of the cognitive revolution being a paradigm shift. The topic model used in this thesis does however not find the traces of a paradigm shift within the dataset, suggesting that if a paradigm shift did take place, it was not reflected in the Nordic Psychology journal.

This study aims to investigate topic choices of humour as well as how humour is conjointly constructed in podcasts, with particular focus on the similarities and differences between men and women in both same- and mixed-gender groups. Six podcasts were chosen to be investigated through two different methods: 1. instances of humour were categorised based on the topic of the humour and 2. conversation analysis (CA) was used to analyse the contributions of the different groups of participants with a focus on the pragmatic force and the discursive effect of the contributions. The pragmatic force of the contributions could be supportive or contestive and the discursive effect could be maximally collaborative or minimally collaborative. This study found that the similarities were greater than the differences between same- and mixed-gender groups, regarding both topic choices and how the humour was constructed; however, there were some differences between the groups regarding both aspects. Men tended to make more self-deprecating jokes while women made more jokes about Personal Anecdotes; furthermore, contestive and minimally collaborative humour was more common in groups involving men. This study indicates that podcasts can be an important area of research for future studies regarding humour and gender.

Use of spatial data has become an important aspect of data analysis. Use of location information can provide useful insight into the dataset. Advancement of sensor technologies and improved data connectivity have made it possible to the generation of large amounts of passively generated user location data. Apart from passively generated data from users, explicit effort has been made by commercial vendors to curate large amounts of location related data such as residential histories from a variety of sources such as credit records, litigation data, driving license records etc. Such spatial data, when linked with other datasets can provide useful insights. In this dissertation, we show that spatial information of data enables us to derive useful insights in domains of text analysis and epidemiology. We investigated primarily two types of data having spatial information - text data with location information and disease related data having residential address information. We show that in the case of text data, spatial information helps us find spatially informative topics. In the case of epidemiological data, we show residential information can be used to identify high risk spatial regions. There are instances where a primary analysis is not sufficient to establish a statistically robust conclusion. For instance, in domains such as epidemiology, where a finding is not considered to be relevant unless some statistical significance is established. We proposed techniques for significant tests which can be applied to text analysis, topic modelling, and disease mapping tasks in order to establish significance of the findings. / Computer and Information Science

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This study discusses teaching Malagasy as a second language. Malagasy is the native language spoken on the island of Madagascar. Traditionally, Malagasy has been taught as a language that is similar to English in the way that it uses active and passive voice constructions. However, most native-English students struggle to produce native-like utterances using non-active voice constructions in Malagasy. Recent studies have suggested that Malagasy more closely relates to Germanic V2 languages than it does to English (Pearson 2005, Hyams et al. 2006). This might explain why students taught Malagasy as an English-like language struggle. This study compares the relative effectiveness of teaching Malgasy as a V2 language with topicalized triggers, as opposed to traditional approaches, where the trigger is seen as an English-like subject. The study is based on data gathered from two groups of beginning Malagasy students at the LDS Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah. One group was taught according to traditional methods. The other was taught the topic/voicing theory set forth by Pearson (2005). There was a general trend of improvement from the traditionally taught group to the group taught topicalization.