Studies show that discourses are important in legitimating emerging fields. However, we still lack understanding of how potential participants’ interpretations of discourses shape their involvement in emerging fields particularly when the field’s definition is ambiguous. Drawing on an indepth study of the emerging nanotechnology field we show that individuals’ affective responses to discourses ...

Theories of CSCL have often focused on the discourse of student groups and their possible modes of participation in this discourse as definitive of collaborative learning. Lave & Wenger (1991), for instance, analyzed the increasing participation of novices in the discourses of communities of practice. Scardamalia & Bereiter (1996) proposed the use of networked computers to promote literate part...

This is a qualitative study with an exploratory approach, situated in the field of cultural studies, using the tool proposed by Michel Foucault for textual analysis. It aims at analyzing how discourses transmitted by the media affect subjects and institute them as organ donors. The analysis corpus was made up of articles from the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, which is considered to be the most ...

this article analyses the effects of post-zionism in israeli ,society and state. by using the discoursive analysis in social theory, the author argues that discourses such as post-zionism are the results of socio-political and economic conditions (processes), but their evolution is basically the result of the mental and value activities of their proponent, rather than the socio-political proces...

We present the first algorithm that computes optimal orderings of sentences into a locally coherent discourse. The algorithm runs very efficiently on a variety of coherence measures from the literature. We also show that the discourse ordering problem is NP-complete and cannot be approximated.

The Internet enables entirely new forms of interactive mass communication, which require novel ways of sociotechnological system design. It is argued that the e-democracy domain is an ideal field of application for what is here called ‘social intelligence design’. We suggest that the democratic and communicative potential of the Internet can be exploited in order to help strengthening the legit...

It is widely accepted that users should be involved in interactive systems development. However, involving users is often difficult and quite rare in software development organizations, especially in the context of product development, referring to the development of commercial software products or systems. This paper critically examines the position of user involvement in three software develo...

Since the late 1990s political leaders in several African countries have pursued legislation to expand criminal penalties for same-sex sex. Yet, much of the research on efforts to expand criminalization of same-sex sexualities in Africa has focused on individual country cases, neglecting the role of national and transnational sociopolitical contexts and economic flows. Focusing on discourses pr...

In political speeches, the audience tends to react or resonate to signals of persuasive communication, including an expected theme, a name or an expression. Automatically predicting the impact of such discourses is a challenging task. In fact nowadays, with the huge amount of textual material that flows on the Web (news, discourses, blogs, etc.), it can be useful to have a measure for testing t...