Khulekani Face Moyo , Absolom Mutavati, Richard Muranda
The study looked at the quest for career success among music artists and music producers who were groomed in the Midlands Province. The study explored the motivation behind the selected music artists and music producers’ departure from Gweru to ply their trade in the Zimbabwe capital city Harare. Purposively selected artists and music producers from the Midlands Province were included in this study. We employed a qualitative research method with semi-structured interviews to solicit data from participants. A total of six participants, two music producers and four music artists tutored in the Midlands Province and relocated to Harare were sampled purposively. The resource dependence and social capital theories were used to guide analysis of data. The study reveals that in Harare there are more opportunities and chances for music artists and music producers’ growth and development. Participants submitted that in the Midlands Province, there is a lack of financial support, exposure, resource hubs and a vibrant arts society. Harare proffers an enabling ecosystem to music artists and music producers who work hard. The national televisions, radio stations and print media in Harare provide a positive environment to those in Harare, much to the disadvantage of the Midlands Province. The strong networks in both social media and mainstream media mostly benefit Harare dwellers. We thus recommend the establishment of more physical and digital networks across the Midlands Province to promote music artists, foster interaction, collaboration, enhance career success and visibility for the arts community beyond provincial and national boundaries.
Viswanathan Mohan, Dorairaj Prabhakaran, Sonal Singh
et al.
Introduction Air pollution presents a major public health threat to India, affecting more than three quarters of the country’s population. In the current project, GEOHealth Health Effects of Selected Environmental Exposomes Across the Life CourSe–India, we aim to study the effect of environmental exposomes—fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3) and extremes of temperature—on multiple health outcomes using a modified life course approach. The associated training grant aims to build capacity in India to address the unique environmental health problems.Methods and analysis The project aims to (A) Develop exposure assessments in seven cities, namely Delhi, Chennai, Sonipat, Vizag, Pune, Hyderabad and Bikaner, for: (1) A fine-scale spatiotemporal model for multiple pollutants (PM2.5, NO2, O3, temperature); (2) Combined ground monitoring and modelling for major chemical species of ambient PM2.5 at seven cities; and (3) Personal exposure assessment in a subsample from the six cities, except Pune, and (B) Conduct health association studies covering a range of chronic non-communicable diseases and their risk factors leveraging a unique approach using interdigitating cohorts. We have assembled existing pregnancy, child, adolescent, adult and older adult cohorts across India to explore health effects of exposomes using causal analyses. We propose to use Bayesian kernel machine regression to assess the effects of mixtures of all pollutants including species of PM2.5 on health while accounting for potential non-linearities and interactions between exposures. This builds on earlier work that constructed a fine spatiotemporal model for PM2.5 exposure to study health outcomes in two Indian cities.Ethics and dissemination Ethical clearance for conduct of the study was obtained from the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) of the Centre for Chronic Disease Control, and all the participating institutes and organisations. National-level permission was provided by the Indian Council of Medical Research. The research findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, policy briefs, print and social media, and communicating with the participating communities and stakeholders. Training of Indian scientists will build the capacity to undertake research on selected adverse environmental exposures on population health in India.
Adult readers’ cognitive effort during text processing is often associated with their reading comprehension, learning ability, and achievement scores. The aim of this review is to examine and analyze the current literature on the use of eye tracking technology as a tool for assessing text comprehension. A systematic review was conducted and, after the final screening, 13 articles were analyzed that fell into three main areas: (a) eye movements during reading in print and digital media, (b) eye tracking in text comprehension with perspective effects, and (c) eye tracking in text comprehension with instructional strategy effects. The findings of this review showed that during reading, the amount of cognitive effort invested in text processing, whether induced by the text, the task, or the readers themselves, is usually reflected in longer total fixation times, both as a result of higher fixation frequencies and longer fixation durations.
Nicholas Rabb, Nitya Nadgir, Jan P. de Ruiter
et al.
How political beliefs change in accordance with media exposure is a complicated matter. Some studies have been able to demonstrate that groups with different media diets in the aggregate (e.g., U.S. media consumers ingesting partisan news) arrive at different beliefs about policy issues, but proving this from data at a granular level -- at the level of attitudes expressed in news stories -- remains difficult. In contrast to existing opinion formation models that describe granular detail but are not data-driven, or data-driven studies that rely on simple keyword detection and miss linguistic nuances, being able to identify complicated attitudes in news text and use this data to drive models would enable more nuanced empirical study of opinion formation from media messaging. This study contributes a dataset as well as an analysis that allows the mapping of attitudes from individual news stories to aggregate changes of opinion over time for an important public health topic where opinion differed in the U.S. by partisan media diet: Covid mask-wearing beliefs. By gathering a dataset of U.S. news media stories, from April 6 to June 8, 2020, annotated according to Howard 2020's Face Mask Perception Scale for their statements regarding Covid-19 mask-wearing, we demonstrate fine-grained correlations between media messaging and empirical opinion polling data from a Gallup survey conducted during the same period. We also demonstrate that the data can be used for quantitative analysis of pro- and anti-mask sentiment throughout the period, identifying major events that drove opinion changes. This dataset is made publicly available and can be used by other researchers seeking to evaluate how mask-wearing attitudes were driven by news media content. Additionally, we hope that its general method can be used to enable other media researchers to conduct more detailed analyses of media effects on opinion.
-
To recognise the exceptional role of the first Eastern European printer Francysk Skaryna in the culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, intercultural relations, the pro-European society of the neighbouring Belarusian society, and the development of Lithuanian statehood, the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania proclaimed the year 2022 as the Year of Francysk Skaryna. The most important scientific event of the year was the international scientific conference initiated by the Department of Book, Media and Publishing Studies of the Faculty of Communication of Vilnius University and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences and entitled Francysk Skaryna and the Renaissance Book Culture: Skaryna’s Little Traveller’s Book Turns 500 which took place on 22–23 September 2022. In collaboration with foreign and Lithuanian partners – the global Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), the Charles University in Prague, the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, and the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences – the organisers succeeded in bringing together researchers from fifteen European and North American countries representing a variety of academic schools. In order to cover such a wide field of interdisciplinary research, the conference was attended by world-class experts in Renaissance book culture and scholars of Skaryna as the guest speakers: Dr. Alexandra Gillespie from the University of Toronto Mississauga, Prof. Dr. James Raven from the Universities of Essex, Cambridge and Trondheim, Habil. Dr. Alexander Grusha, Associate Professor Habil. Dr. Ilya Lemeshkin from the Charles University in Prague, and Habil. Dr. Sergey Temchin from the Institute of Lithuanian Language. During the two days, in eight sessions, scholars of communication and information, and researchers of ancient literature, language and history addressed questions concerning prominent figures of Renaissance printing culture and the phenomena of the creation, publishing, production, dissemination and reception of print media, the first post-incunabula of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the culture of the manuscript book in the Grand Duchy and other European regions, the spread of printing in Europe, and the special features of print media culture in the Grand Duchy, institutional and private libraries, reading and readers, the dissemination of books in society, and the manuscript and printed heritage of the Grand Duchy and its communication.
In response to the invitation, distinguished guests and sponsors participated in the opening of the conference. The conference participants were greeted by Head of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, the President of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Academician Prof. Habil. Dr. Juras Banys, the Rector of Vilnius University, Prof. Dr. Rimvydas Petrauskas, the President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, the world’s leading organisation in such scholarship, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Shef Rogers from the University of Otago in New Zealand (the fifth president of SHARP who continues his cooperation with the organisers of the Vilnius Book Studies Conferences), and Dr. Małgorzata Stafanowicz-Pecela, Director of the Polish Institute in Vilnius and Counsellor of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Vilnius.
This anniversary-related scientific event continued the tradition of interdisciplinary conferences on book studies in Vilnius. It became the nineteenth international conference initiated by book scholars of Vilnius University and the third conference in Vilnius organised in cooperation with SHARP. It was also the first academic event to gain the status of a Vilnius Municipality-sponsored event. The hybrid mode of the conference delivery, simultaneous translation, and the rich social programme of the event helped the organisers reach a wide multilingual audience of participants and create an environment conducive to informal scholarly communication, which is important for networking, planning collaborations, and sharing research ideas.
This 80th volume of Knygotyra (Book Science), the international academic journal of Vilnius University, is thematic. It publishes scholarly articles on Skaryna studies and Renaissance book culture developed by the authors on the basis of their conference presentations. It also publishes materials relating to the discussion about the time and place of the printing of Skaryna’s Little Traveller’s Book (Malaya podorozhnaya knizhica) which took place during the conference. We hope that this volume will serve as a means of introducing international scholarly audiences to the latest insights of Skaryna studies and scholars of Renaissance book culture from different schools of thought, the achievements of international research in the culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the approach to Skaryna’s publishing as a European and humanist activity and as a phenomenon of Renaissance European book culture.
Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
Abstract: Introduction: The use of various forms of social media has exploded worldwide and is popular among athletes. To date, much research has focused on the potential impact of traditional print media on athletes’ mental health. This study aims to review current literature specifically as it relates to the use of digital social media and athlete mental wellness, identify current research gaps, and present suggestions for future related studies. Methods: A literature review was conducted using PubMed, a database of references on medical research maintained by the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of health. Search terms included “social media”, “digital media” and “athlete mental health”. Results: The collection of published works provided insight on athlete social media use and body image, stress, sleep quality, performance, social connection, and financial implications. Conclusion: Given the psychological and physiological demands of sport, athletes may experience mental health issues that could be exacerbated by social media use. This is an emerging area of research, and there is currently a lack of sufficient data regarding the direct influence of social media upon the mental health of athletes. Training athletes, coaches, trainers, and healthcare providers on the pitfalls of social media use can promote healthy social media consumption.
Iain J. Cruickshank, Jessica Zhu, Nathaniel D. Bastian
With the rise of phenomena like `fake news' and the growth of heavily-biased media ecosystems, there has been increased attention on understanding and evaluating media bias. Of particular note in the evaluation of media bias is writing style bias, which includes lexical bias and framing bias. We propose a novel approach to evaluating writing style bias that utilizes natural language similarity estimation and a network-based representation of the shared content between articles to perform bias characterization. Our proposed method presents a new means of evaluating writing style bias that does not rely on human experts or knowledge of a media producer's publication procedures. The results of experimentation on real-world vaccine mandate data demonstrates the utility of the technique and how the standard bias labeling procedures of only having one bias label for a media producer is insufficient to truly characterize the bias of that media producer.
Carlo Bono, Mehmet Oğuz Mülâyim, Cinzia Cappiello
et al.
Social media have the potential to provide timely information about emergency situations and sudden events. However, finding relevant information among millions of posts being posted every day can be difficult, and developing a data analysis project usually requires time and technical skills. This study presents an approach that provides flexible support for analyzing social media, particularly during emergencies. Different use cases in which social media analysis can be adopted are introduced, and the challenges of retrieving information from large sets of posts are discussed. The focus is on analyzing images and text contained in social media posts and a set of automatic data processing tools for filtering, classification, and geolocation of content with a human-in-the-loop approach to support the data analyst. Such support includes both feedback and suggestions to configure automated tools, and crowdsourcing to gather inputs from citizens. The results are validated by discussing three case studies developed within the Crowd4SDG H2020 European project.
Social Media platforms have been seeing adoption and growth in their usage over time. This growth has been further accelerated with the lockdown in the past year when people's interaction, conversation, and expression were limited physically. It is becoming increasingly important to keep the platform safe from abusive content for better user experience. Much work has been done on English social media content but text analysis on non-English social media is relatively underexplored. Non-English social media content have the additional challenges of code-mixing, transliteration and using different scripture in same sentence. In this work, we propose an approach for abusiveness identification on the multilingual Moj dataset which comprises of Indic languages. Our approach tackles the common challenges of non-English social media content and can be extended to other languages as well.
In classical electrodynamics, by motion for either the observer or the media, it always naturally assumed that the relative moving velocity is a constant along a straight line (e.g., in inertia reference frame), so that the electromagnetic behavior of charged particles in vacuum space can be easily described using special relativity. However, for engineering applications, the media have shapes and sizes and may move with acceleration, and recent experimental progresses in triboelectric nanogenerators have revealed evidences for expanding the Maxwell's equations to include media motion that could be time and even space dependent. Therefore, we have developed the expanded Maxwell's equations for a mechano-driven media system (MEs-f-MDMS) by neglecting relativistic effect. This article first presents the updated progresses made in the field. Secondly, we extensively investigated the Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction for a media system that moves with an acceleration. We concluded that, the newly developed MEs-f-MDMS are required for describing the electrodynamics inside a media that has a finite size and volume and move with and even without acceleration. The classical Maxwell's equations are to describe the electrodynamics in vacuum space when the media in the nearby are moving.
The existence of print mass media keeps the quality of journalism. In this case, journalism is not just pursuing new/actual news but presenting deep information that can be accounted for intelligently. The moral responsibility of the print mass media in this context makes the nation enlightened. Society is not easily dragged into the fast-paced news, instant information, and first-to-appear information hunting. Print media journalism presents meaningful journalism.
This paper argues for Ebony’s effective intervention during the Black revolts that swept the U.S between 1966 and 1967. While Ebony was a glossy magazine designed for promoting Black fashion, advertising, and consumerism, it also proved to be a critical outlet aiming at bringing about a social reformation to Black America. At the time when the popular and the regional White and Black-owned media did not provide a practical resolution to the race riots whilst others generated instances of sensationalism to vilify the Black revolt, Ebony appeared as a sui generis magazine by providing viable social resolutions to quell the Black revolts and the social problems impinging upon Black Americans. This intervention was culminated in a special issue which critically addressed the Black youth and their rationale behind sparking off the revolts. Its intervention, however, paid off, with the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders approaching the magazine to procure copies to use them on its investigation of the riots while inviting its senior editor Lerone Bennett Jr. to participate in its close meetings on the civil disorder. Based on archival materials as well as Ebony’s special issues, this article sheds new light on Ebony’s social standing in Post-war America.
A tension runs through Nathan Shockey’s well-researched book of essays on the topic of the medial transition to print culture; it is this: does the value of print material lie within its semantic content or within its market value? Although at several points the book refers to this as a dialectic as though each side of the tension were in equal balance, ultimately Shockey is more concerned with the latter notion of books and print as media objects in the world rather than as conveyors of meaning. This is evidenced by the preponderance of instances in which he highlights that reading does not matter and where writing (in the sense of the noun not the gerund) does or simply is matter.
Language and Literature, Japanese language and literature
Hannes Fassold, Antonis Karakottas, Dorothea Tsatsou
et al.
Spherical 360° video is a novel media format, rapidly becoming adopted in media production and consumption of immersive media. Due to its novelty, there is a lack of tools for producing highly engaging interactive 360° video for consumption on a multitude of platforms. In this work, we describe the work done so far in the Hyper360 project on tools for mixed 360° video and 3D content. Furthermore, the first pilots which have been produced with the Hyper360 tools and results of the audience assessment of the produced pilots are presented.
Photonic components responsive to external optical stimuli are attracting increasing interest, because their properties can be manipulated by light with fast switching times, high spatial definition, and potentially remote control. These aspects can be further enhanced by novel architectures, which have been recently enabled by the availability of 3D printing and additive manufacturing technologies. However, current methods are still limited to passive optical materials, whereas photo-responsive materials would require the development of 3D printing techniques able to preserve the optical properties of photoactive compounds and to achieve high spatial resolution to precisely control the propagation of light. Also, optical losses in 3D printed materials are an issue to be addressed. Here we report on advanced additive manufacturing technologies, specifically designed to embed photo-responsive compounds in 3D optical devices. The properties of 3D printed devices can be controlled by external UV and visible light beams, with characteristic switching times in the range 1-10 s.
Information about world events is disseminated through a wide variety of news channels, each with specific considerations in the choice of their reporting. Although the multiplicity of these outlets should ensure a variety of viewpoints, recent reports suggest that the rising concentration of media ownership may void this assumption. This observation motivates the study of the impact of ownership on the global media landscape and its influence on the coverage the actual viewer receives. To this end, the selection of reported events has been shown to be informative about the high-level structure of the news ecosystem. However, existing methods only provide a static view into an inherently dynamic system, providing underperforming statistical models and hindering our understanding of the media landscape as a whole. In this work, we present a dynamic embedding method that learns to capture the decision process of individual news sources in their selection of reported events while also enabling the systematic detection of large-scale transformations in the media landscape over prolonged periods of time. In an experiment covering over 580M real-world event mentions, we show our approach to outperform static embedding methods in predictive terms. We demonstrate the potential of the method for news monitoring applications and investigative journalism by shedding light on important changes in programming induced by mergers and acquisitions, policy changes, or network-wide content diffusion. These findings offer evidence of strong content convergence trends inside large broadcasting groups, influencing the news ecosystem in a time of increasing media ownership concentration.
Одним з головних завдань поліграфічної галузі є підвищення продуктивності друкарського обладнання, яка визначається робочими швидкостями машин. Швидкість листових друкарських машин безпосередньо пов’язана з процесом виведення та укладання надрукованих листів у стапель, який починається з моменту передачі листа від друкарського циліндра в захоплювачі аркушевивідного пристрою. Знімання листа з друкарського циліндра і його подальше транспортування виконується на швидкості друкування з наступним зменшенням її до допустимої для забезпечення надійного виводу і рівного укладання відбитків різноманітних форматів і маси у стапель без їх пошкодження, змазування зображення, перетискування фарби тощо.
Дослідження процесу викладення показало, що існуючі варіанти зниження швидкості руху листів для середніх (50×70 см) та великих форматів (від 70×100 см і більше), а також для малих (30×50 см) з максимальним заповненням листа, не достатньо ефективні.
Сучасні друкарські машини характеризуються високою швидкістю, підвищеною фарбовістю та можливістю друкування на різноманітних матеріалах і повинні забезпечувати викладання листів та формування стапеля на всьому діапазоні швидкостей з високою якістю та можливістю подальшої обробки стосу віддрукованої продукції в найкоротші терміни.
Стаття присвячена дослідженню можливостей зміни жорсткості паперових аркушів у процесі викладення віддрукованої продукції на приймальний стапель листових друкарських машин.
Проведені дослідження дозволили деталізувати процес виведення листа при роботі друкарських машин, визначити основні фактори впливу на процес викладу надрукованої продукції, розробити вимоги до можливого підвищення швидкості роботи вивідних пристроїв і надати рекомендації зі стабілізації і підвищення якості викладання надрукованої продукції та формування стапеля з використанням допоміжних конструктивних елементів та заходів, що забезпечить підвищення ефективності роботи машин.