The innovative advancements of information communication technology (ICT) combinedwith a globalized economy have given rise to organizational forms that manipulate timeand distance. Today, competitive advantages are more elusive than tangible as a result ofdynamically complex environments motivating organizations to adjust in structure andfunctional capacity. New emergent forms of organizational structures have resulted inthe virtual organization (VO), which employs a network structure and allowsorganizations the flexibility to perform core processes amongst distributed teams, units,departments, and/or organizations. In essence the virtual organization may be viewed asa strategic response to dynamic environmental forces that have encouragedorganizations to rethink the concept of competitiveness. Virtual organizations havegained popularity throughout the last decade as a more effective way of managing andcommunicating information within and across organizations. Information communicationtechnology (ICT) has aided in the globalizing effect of informationalism. Theinformational flows within a virtual organization have direct bearing on individual andgroup efforts to obtain and employ information essential to organizational objectives.This thesis investigates the information interchange within virtual organizations througha theoretical study, which converges identified relevant subject areas and introduces theMedia Rich Social Information Interchange (MERiSii) model. The empirical study isdesigned to further investigate the validity of theoretical concepts employed in theMERiSii model and to expand its development to facilitate the function of informationinterchange. VGR-IT is an IT infrastructure provider, for hospitals and healthcarefacilities in the Västra Götaland region of Sweden. Interviews conducted with an accountmanager for VGR-IT and an IT strategist for Borås Hospital give insight into thecommunicative tasks of information interchange that must be effective to support the coreprocesses within VGR-IT and the service VGR-IT provides to Borås hospital. The resultsof a comparative analysis between the theoretical and empirical studies support a revisedMERiSii model that may be implicated in future research to further verify itseffectiveness. / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik

O surgimento da Internet provocou uma revolução no que diz respeito a novas formas de interação entre as pessoas, oferecendo experiências de comunicação em tempo real, nos chamados ambientes virtuais. Diante desse cenário, novos gêneros textuais emergem, abrindo caminho para inúmeras possibilidades de análise sob os mais diversos enfoques. Neste trabalho, tomamos por objeto de estudo as conversações digitais, procurando verificar, num primeiro momento, em que medida estas se aproximam ou se distanciam das conversações face a face. Também procuramos, ainda, identificar, descrever e analisar algumas estratégias interacionais inerentes a esse novo gênero, além de observar a manifestação de fenômenos da (des)cortesia verbal entre os interlocutores que utilizam esta forma de comunicação. Buscamos embasamentos na perspectiva da Análise da Conversação e da Sociolinguística Interacional para definir o gênero digital e as estratégias conversacionais do \"texto falado por escrito\" na Internet. O corpus utilizado neste trabalho é formado por conversações digitais advindas do MSN, software de comunicação instantânea da Microsoft Corporation, escolhido devido à sua larga utilização entre pessoas que utilizam a internet para comunicação. Pretendemos, assim, contribuir para o estudo das conversações digitais no âmbito da língua portuguesa, oferecendo uma nova abordagem para o estudo das comunicações mediadas pelo computador. / The emergence of the Internet sparked a revolution regarding to new forms of interaction between people, offering experiences of real-time communication, in the so-called virtual environments. In this scenario, new text genres emerge, opening up new possibilities for analysis from various perspectives. In this work, our study object is the digital conversations, and we try to ascertain, at first, how these conversations are similar, approach or move away from face to face conversations. We seek also to identify, describe and analyze some interactional strategies inherent to this new genre, in addition to observing the manifestation of phenomena of verbal (dis) courtesy between the interlocutors who use this form of communication. Our basements are on the perspective of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics, where we try to define the genre and digital strategies of conversational \"spoken text written\" on the Internet. The corpus used in this work is composed by digital conversations coming from the MSN instant messenger software from Microsoft Corporation, which was chosen because of its wide usage among people who access the Internet for communications. We intend, therefore, to contribute to the study of digital conversations in the Portuguese language scope, offering a new approach to the study of computer-mediated communications.

O surgimento da Internet provocou uma revolução no que diz respeito a novas formas de interação entre as pessoas, oferecendo experiências de comunicação em tempo real, nos chamados ambientes virtuais. Diante desse cenário, novos gêneros textuais emergem, abrindo caminho para inúmeras possibilidades de análise sob os mais diversos enfoques. Neste trabalho, tomamos por objeto de estudo as conversações digitais, procurando verificar, num primeiro momento, em que medida estas se aproximam ou se distanciam das conversações face a face. Também procuramos, ainda, identificar, descrever e analisar algumas estratégias interacionais inerentes a esse novo gênero, além de observar a manifestação de fenômenos da (des)cortesia verbal entre os interlocutores que utilizam esta forma de comunicação. Buscamos embasamentos na perspectiva da Análise da Conversação e da Sociolinguística Interacional para definir o gênero digital e as estratégias conversacionais do \"texto falado por escrito\" na Internet. O corpus utilizado neste trabalho é formado por conversações digitais advindas do MSN, software de comunicação instantânea da Microsoft Corporation, escolhido devido à sua larga utilização entre pessoas que utilizam a internet para comunicação. Pretendemos, assim, contribuir para o estudo das conversações digitais no âmbito da língua portuguesa, oferecendo uma nova abordagem para o estudo das comunicações mediadas pelo computador. / The emergence of the Internet sparked a revolution regarding to new forms of interaction between people, offering experiences of real-time communication, in the so-called virtual environments. In this scenario, new text genres emerge, opening up new possibilities for analysis from various perspectives. In this work, our study object is the digital conversations, and we try to ascertain, at first, how these conversations are similar, approach or move away from face to face conversations. We seek also to identify, describe and analyze some interactional strategies inherent to this new genre, in addition to observing the manifestation of phenomena of verbal (dis) courtesy between the interlocutors who use this form of communication. Our basements are on the perspective of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics, where we try to define the genre and digital strategies of conversational \"spoken text written\" on the Internet. The corpus used in this work is composed by digital conversations coming from the MSN instant messenger software from Microsoft Corporation, which was chosen because of its wide usage among people who access the Internet for communications. We intend, therefore, to contribute to the study of digital conversations in the Portuguese language scope, offering a new approach to the study of computer-mediated communications.

Previous research has established that punctuation can be used to communicate nuances of meaning in online writing (McAndrew & De Jonge, 2011). Punctuation, considered a computer mediated communication (CMC) cue, expresses tone and emotion and disambiguates an author's intention (Vandergriff, 2013). Quotation marks as CMC cues can serve pragmatic functions and have been understudied. Some of these functions have been generally described (Predelli, 2003). However, no corpus study has specifically focused on the pragmatic uses of quotations in online text. Consumer reviews, a genre of online text, can directly impact business profits and influence customers' purchasing decisions (Floyd, Freling, Alhoqail, Cho & Freling, 2014). Businesses are investing in sentiment analysis to gauge their target market's opinions (Salehan & Kim, 2016). Sentiment analysis is the computerized appraisal of a text to determine whether its author is expressing a positive or negative opinion (Novak, Smailovic, Sluban & Mozetic, 2015). Sentiment analysis programs are still limited and could be improved in accuracy. Most programs rely on lexicons of words given a pre-determined polarity value (positive or negative) out of context (Novak et al., 2015). However, context is crucial to communication, and sentiment analysis programs could incorporate a better variety of contextual linguistic features to improve their accuracy. Quotations used for pragmatic communication is such a feature. This study discovered seven pragmatic quotation uses in a 2014 Yelp review corpus: Collective Knowledge, Non-standard, Grammatical, Non-literal, Narrative, Idiolect, and Emphasis. An ANOVA and Tukey HSD test were performed, and the results were significant. Pragmatic category accounted for 15% of the variance in review star rating. The Collective Knowledge category and the Narrative and Non-literal categories were significantly different from each other. The Collective Knowledge category showed a correlation with positive sentiment, while the Narrative and Non-literal categories displayed a correlation with negative sentiment. These three categories are likely present in several types of online text, making them valuable for further sentiment analysis research. If these pragmatic patterns could be detected automatically, they could be used in sentiment algorithms to give a more accurate picture of author opinion.

This study examines identity presentations on the online social networking site, Facebook.com. The two-phase research design includes a period of participant observation of a sample of 346 college students and recent graduates followed by an interview period with a sample subset of 48 interviewees. The study analyzes key performance components on the site using a symbolic interaction perspective, to determine common characteristics of Facebook profiles, importance of performance components, and categories of identity performance. Identity performance components are broken into two general categories, static and dynamic. Dynamic components, those that are updated frequently and drive much of the activity online, are far more important in terms of identity performance. Dynamic components on Facebook found to be important in this study are status updates, use of bumper stickers and pieces of flair, giving gifts, and photos. Analysis of these components supports the symbolic interaction literature in general and the works of George H. Mead specifically. The Facebook news feed allows Facebookers to continually observe identity performances of others as well as to give and receive feedback on performances. This continual flow of information allows for the development of a generalized other, used as the basis for anticipating reactions from others to potential activity. Based on these anticipations, in an effort to reduce misinterpretations, Facebookers develop exaggerated performances that serve to distinguish in-groups from out-groups.

This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective understanding, type of punctuation (i.e., ?, !, and combinations thereof) was a weaker indicator of some affective content, and repetition was not found to be significant. The study argues that certain string types, possibly defined by punctuation type and not count, have large indexical fields of pragmatic meaning available to them, which are bounded by context. In light of these observations, the study also proposes distinctions/categories of punctuation strings and their associated pragmatic meanings.

This dissertation examines the discourse produced by beginning learners of Spanish using social media. Specifically, it looks at the use and development of interactional resources during two video-mediated conversations. Through a combination of Conversation Analysis tools and quantitative data analysis, the use of turn-taking strategies, repair trajectories, and alignment moves was examined to discover how beginning language learners manage videoconferencing exchanges and develop their interactional capabilities in this new interactional setting. The goal of this investigation was twofold: 1) to describe and explain how students construct, manage and maintain conversations via videoconferencing, and 2) to gain a better understanding of the links between technology-based social media and language learning. The results of this study indicate that instructional videoconferencing conversations display their own clearly delimited and idiosyncratic organization of interactional features. In terms of turn-taking, the results of the analyses demonstrate that beginning learners are fully capable of participating competently in speaker selection to manage a conversation with a peer of similar proficiency level. In the area of repair, the analyses show that, during instructional videoconferencing exchanges, beginning learners orient to both the communication of personal meaning and the accuracy of their discourse. They enact this orientation through the use of self-initiated self-repair. Finally, with regard to the use of alignment moves, the analyses reveal that, in tune with their nascent linguistic and interactional abilities, beginning learners use primarily acknowledgement moves.

Compared with first language (L1) writing, writing in a second or foreign language (L2) is considered to be more challenging and difficult. The challenges and difficulties may result from both the cognitive and the affective aspects of writing. To mitigate the difficulties of L2 writing and help students master L2 writing, teachers could consider using the pedagogical strategies which can help enhance students' cognition in writing or students' writing performance, and also can help reduce students' fear of L2 writing. One of the pedagogical strategies is online collaborative writing supported by CMC. Collaborative learning helps enhance students' cognitive outcomes, such as academic achievement and cognitive development, as well as produce less anxiety in learning. CMC facilitates collaboration, and also provides more chances for interaction which could result in more thoughts. The more thoughts would facilitate to compose. Therefore, it is assumed that online collaborative writing is more effective than traditional collaborative writing in terms of writing performance and writing anxiety. The present study is a quasi-experimental study. Participants were 101 first-year college students from two intact classes of a private university in Taiwan. One class was randomly assigned as the control class. Participants were engaged in traditional collaborative writing. The other was the experimental class. Students wrote collaboratively via blogs. Before the treatment, both classes were asked to completed a background survey, a pre-test L2 writing anxiety questionnaire, and a pre-test individual writing task. The treatment lasted for ten weeks during which each collaborative group in both classes completed five collaborative writing tasks. After the treatment, a collaborative writing questionnaire, a post-test L2 writing anxiety questionnaire, and a post-test individual writing task were administered to all participants. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted to the students who made the largest, medium, and lowest gains in both classes. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to analyze the data. In terms of the quantitative results, there were no significant difference in collaborative writing performance and the quantity of individual writing between classes. The experimental class only significantly performed better than the control class in the quality of individual writing. Concerning the writing anxiety measured, the control class was significantly lower than the experimental class. Regarding students' perceptions, the results of the questionnaire showed that the control class made much more positive responses than the experimental class. As for the qualitative results, students' interviews revealed (1) the function of collaborative writing, (2) the features of the media, (3) the difficulty they encounter during collaborative writing, (4) the positive and negative factors influencing their motivation to write, and (5) their suggestions for teachers. The qualitative results support the quantitative results. Overall, this dissertation study found that, based on statistic results, traditional collaborative writing seems to be more effective than blog-supported collaborative writing in decreasing the writing anxiety of the EFL college students with weaker English ability and little writing experience. In addition, according to students' perceptions and interview results, traditional collaborative writing also appears to be more acceptable in this context. Although the statistic results suggest that the effect of blog-supported collaborative writing on writing performance and writing anxiety seems to be limited and little probably due to the use of blogs as individual and synchronous tools, its effectiveness can not be completely denied because students' perceptions and interviews suggest its positive influence and outcome. L2 teachers are suggested to provide more training sessions, employ the collaborative writing activity as an out-of-class assignment, and carefully monitor the process of collaborative writing if they do use blogs in L2 writing instruction.

Abstract This project is concerned with visual representation of human gross anatomy*. The subject is complex because it derives from an intersection of artistic and scientific disciplines and is an active field of research. The overall aim of the project is to open up new ways of interpretation when engaging with complex visual representations of anatomy. The project involves a consideration of the methods and models in which the communication of visually complex information is achieved by using a combination of artistic and scientific representation. It explores methods and techniques used in the creation of visualisations that are intended to convey scientific knowledge. Literature and visual reviews were undertaken and these examined research material which informed the project's exploration. These reviews included texts that studied the historical development of anatomic representation and also contemporary visual material. Elements of cognition and perception and their relationship to visual communication were reviewed and considered in relation to the project's practical work. Wider socio-cultural contexts that affect pictorial style in anatomic representation were also reviewed and some relevant contexts are discussed within the exegesis. Practical exploration included developing models of anatomy that combined elements from artistic and scientific approaches. For example, in some explorative work, the fine detail of traditional anatomic representation formed one section of a model and this was allied with another section that used a more scientific approach to isolate key structures by illumination. The exegesis concludes with a summary of the project, conclusions arising from the research and an indication of potential areas for further study. * For conciseness, all further references within the exegesis to anatomy and anatomic representation refer to human gross anatomy unless otherwise stated.

The research contained in this thesis involves three interdisciplinary dimensions: Distance Language Education (DLE) as the context of the research, videoconferencing as the technology, and the provision of oral and visual interaction in DLE as the core research problem. Though DLE is increasingly gaining importance at the start of 21st century, the inadequate provision of real-time oral-visual interaction still remains a major deficiency. To be more precise, DLE is still producing language learners who cannot speak the target language. I have outlined the urgency in solving this problem (Wang, 2004a), and it is precisely this urgency that grounds this research. This thesis therefore aims to answer the following central research question: in what ways is oral-visual interaction via videoconferencing able to facilitate L2 acquisition at a distance? In the course of answering the central research question, the following subsidiary questions are closely investigated: 1. What are the needs of distance learners in terms of L2 acquisition? 2. What are the benefits and limitations of videoconferencing-supported oral and visual interaction in the process of L2 acquisition? 3. What are the implications and potential of such interaction for L2 acquisition in distance mode? This thesis is set against a background of research on the importance of interaction in second language (L2) acquisition and the capabilities of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Interaction has been regarded as an integral part of communicative language learning, which promotes L2 acquisition (see Gass, 2003; Hall, 1995; Kitade, 2000; Lantolf, 1994; Mitchell & Myles, 1998; Ohta, 1995; Swain & Lapkin,1995). However, the preliminary study in this research established that, in the context of DLE, this interactive dimension has been inadequately provided, and that distance language learners do need an improved platform for L2 acquisition, especially in terms of acquiring speaking skills. The distance factor in distance language education calls for the employment of technology as a medium to provide an interactive platform for oral and visual interaction. Thus, the empirical dimension of this research, involving the participation of both on-campus and distance language learners, witnesses a two-stage evaluation of a particular Internet-based desktop videoconferencing tool, NetMeeting. In this evaluation, NetMeeting was used to conduct videoconferencing sessions, in which the teacher and participants could see and hear each other during the completion of meaning-based tasks. A great deal of original data was collected from the qualitative evaluation in regard to the benefits and limitations of videoconferencing-supported oral and visual interaction in the process of L2 acquisition in distance mode. This evaluation is approached from two aspects: the technological capabilities and pedagogical values of videoconferencing. Recommendations on the use of videoconferencing and videoconferencing task designs are proposed on the basis of the research findings. These recommendations are highly significant for practitioners in this field. Following Murray (1999), a combination of data collection methods was employed in an attempt to effectively explore the scope and depth of the participants' learning experience through videoconferencing. These methods include pre- and post-trial written surveys, in-depth post-session and post-trial interviews, videotaped videoconferencing sessions and the researcher's personal observation. Qualitative data analysis methods were adopted. Particularly important is the use of Varonis and Gass's (1985) model for analysing the negotiation routines during meaning-based task completion. The contributions of this research are manifold. Theoretically, the research updates key definitions in DLE and CMC in keeping with recent developments in each respective field. In so doing, this thesis puts forward a theory of an emerging fourth generation DLE with synchronous oral-visual interaction as its defining feature (Wang & Sun, 2001), and also proposes a new taxonomy in CMC (Wang, 2004). Both theories categorize more precisely the different roles played by different technologies and their implications for different learner goals. Empirically, this research first develops criteria for selecting appropriate videoconferencing tools (Wang & Sun, 2001) and criteria for evaluating the appropriateness of videoconferencing tasks. These two sets of criteria were then applied in the two-stage evaluation of NetMeeting, yielding useful data (Wang, 2004a; Wang, 2004b). This research also contributes to our understanding of videoconferencing task design and performance principles. The significant findings from this research confirm that Internet-based desktop videoconferencing is capable of supporting oral-visual interaction in DLE and leads to significant improvements in L2 acquisition. Most importantly, this study informs future research into the nature of oral-visual interaction enabled by videoconferencing by demonstrating how and in what ways such interaction facilitates L2 acquisition. The rapid development of computer technology makes publishing the contributions of this study an ongoing part of this research, in order to maintain the originality of this study. Some of the findings have been published in top-ranking international journals (see Wang and Sun, 2001; Wang, 2004a; Wang, 2004b). This study addresses a real and urgent need in distance language learning - the provision of oral-visual interaction. Findings from this research shed light on many issues untreated in the literature and in the practices of DLE. They also point to possible future trends in the globalisation of education because the effects of the pedagogical distance between the learner and education provider may be neutralized, or at least, minimized, through the use of CMC.