ABSTRACT
As with many other male-dominated sports, for over a century of its history, Australian Rules Football organizations resisted and undermined women's participation in the game. The first league for women footballers commenced in Victoria in 1981. Since then, the growth in women's participation has been substantial, and in 2017, a professional women's Australian Football League (AFLW) commenced. The next phase of the participation of women in football is approaching, and heralds an opportunity for women to (re)gain power within the sport. In October 2019, thirty percent of women players rejected the proposed Collective Bargaining Agreement from the Australian Football League (AFL), with the underlying sentiment of wanting a stronger voice in the vision for the future of their game. This paper examines how changing participation rates in community football can transform the narrative of women's football from one of subsidized welfare to women players being necessary for the survival of football.
ABSTRACT
I present a posthumanist approach to literary interpretation using stylistic analysis. It is posthumanist since i) digital cameras/audio-video resources and editing applications prompt multimodal readings of literary works unlikely from human intuition alone;ii) anthropocentrism in literary texts is defamiliarised. I highlight how stylistic analysis can be used productively for developing multimodal creativity in posthumanist reading by motivating audio-video edits and effects. I model using Anne Brontë's poem ‘Home' (1846). When read only with intuition, ‘Home' communicates young Brontë's yearning for her family home. In contrast, this article has a non-intuitive digital multimodal realisation of this poem where a young Californian stuck in London because of pandemic (Covid-19) travel restrictions yearns for her home state in the aftermath of wildfires linked to anthropogenic climate change. This posthumanist transformative reading, flagging the negative repercussions of humans for their planetary home, defamiliarises the poem's anthropocentric normality. Importantly, I show how stylistic analysis of ‘Home' motivates creative use of audio-visual edits and effects in the posthumanist multimodal reading. The article makes contrast with standard interpretive practice in stylistics (‘humanist stylistics'). It also reflects on the value of posthumanist stylistics for extending students' creative thinking in an educational context. © The Author(s) 2023.
ABSTRACT
Eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 challenged individuals and nations—in ways that seemed to resonate with the themes addressed by Albert Camus in his 1947 book The Plague—to consider the importance that should be attached to conscionable acts and to those who conscientiously object. Coincidentally, this book has evolved against that background. This book concludes with some reflections on the relevance of conscientious objection in a pandemic context, a consideration of the broader representativeness of the issues arising and some tentative conclusions regarding the functioning of such objections in the Covid-19 experience and the resulting implications for democratic society. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Misinformation constitutes one of the main challenges to counter the infodemic: misleading news, even if not blatantly false, can cause harm especially in crisis scenarios such as the pandemic. Due to the fast proliferation of information across digital media, human fact-checkers struggle to keep up with fake news, while automatic fact-checkers are not able to identify the grey area of misinformation. We, thus, propose to reverse engineer the manipulation of information offering citizens the means to become their own fact-checkers through digital literacy and critical thinking. Through a corpus analysis of fact-checked news about COVID-19, we identify 10 fallacies–arguments which seem valid but are not–that systematically trigger misinformation and offer a systematic procedure to identify them. Next to fallacies, we examine the types of sources associated to (mis-/dis-)information in our dataset as well as the type of claims making up the headlines. The statistical patterns surfaced from these three levels of analysis reveal a misinformation ecosystem where no source type is exempt from flawed arguments with frequent evading the burden of proof and cherry picking behaviors, even when descriptive claims are at stake. In such a scenario, exercising the audience’s critical skills through fallacy and semantic analysis is necessary to guarantee fake news immunity. © 2022 by authors;licensee OJCMT by Bastas, CY.
ABSTRACT
As with many other male-dominated sports, for over a century of its history, Australian Rules Football organizations resisted and undermined women's participation in the game. The first league for women footballers commenced in Victoria in 1981. Since then, the growth in women's participation has been substantial, and in 2017, a professional women's Australian Football League (AFLW) commenced. The next phase of the participation of women in football is approaching, and heralds an opportunity for women to (re)gain power within the sport. In October 2019, thirty percent of women players rejected the proposed Collective Bargaining Agreement from the Australian Football League (AFL), with the underlying sentiment of wanting a stronger voice in the vision for the future of their game. This paper examines how changing participation rates in community football can transform the narrative of women's football from one of subsidized welfare to women players being necessary for the survival of football.
ABSTRACT
Multimodal analysis traditionally involves conceptualising abstract frameworks for language, images, and other resources and their intersemiotic relations (e.g. text and image relations) and then demonstrating these frameworks with some examples. This scenario has changed with the recent move towards multimodal approaches to big data analytics which will involve empirically testing and validating multimodal theory and frameworks through the analysis of large data sets. However, large training sets of analysed texts are required to develop computational models based on multimodal theory. Therefore, an alternative approach which involves integrating multimodal frameworks with existing computational models for big data, cloud computing, natural language processing, image processing, video processing, and contextual metadata is proposed. The integration of these disparate fields has the potential to dramatically improve computational tools and techniques, thus placing multimodality at the forefront of research aimed at mapping and understanding multimodal communication. As a step forward in this direction, we explore how existing computational tools and approaches can be integrated into a multimodal analysis platform (MAP) with facilities for searching, storing and analysing text, images and videos in online media, together with dashboards for visualising the results. Preliminary analyses and classifications of text and images about COVID-19 and George Floyd in five online newspapers and Twitter postings show how media patterns can be studied using existing computational tools. The study highlights (a) the benefits and current limitations of big data approach to multimodal discourse analysis and (b) the need to incorporate knowledge about language, images, metadata, and other resources as semiotic systems (rather simply sets of symbols and pixels) to improve computational techniques for big data analytics. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd