MediaFest 2009: The Sexualisation Of Culture?

• Speakers:
• Rosa Gill
• Jessica Ringrose
• Feona Attwood
• Steve McDermott
• Dr. Marcia Worrell

In recent years a number of concerns have been raised about the sexualised representation of women in the media, in advertising, pop videos, and on the Internet. There have been moral panics about everything from Lady Gaga videos to the merchandising of Playboy stationery and toys to young girls, and in 2009 the government launched a review into the relationship between sexualisation and violence against women. In this session, we will go behind the headlines to explore whether and in what ways women are sexualised in the media with a panel of experts and interested parties, including an educationalist, an activist, a psychologist and an external independent reviewer of a report that will be submitted to the Home Office.

The Sexualisation Of Culture? (mp3, 27Mb)
In this session, we go behind the headlines to explore whether and in what ways women are sexualised in the media.

Hypermancer

Hypermancer is a new way to rapidly understand any web search.

1. You simply enter your search terms in the query box at the top left of the window.
2. You can choose whether to search the Web or News articles, and just hit return to preview the search results in the left column.
3. Finally, click the Leximancer Map button to the right of the query box. You can choose how many of the top ranked hits to analyse.

Now Hypermancer goes and gets all those pages, and reads them for you to create a concept map and index of the material. You can see the topics, people, places, etc. related to your search, and you can explore the text which supports these concepts.

The right hand side of the map screen lets you make your own queries within the returned documents (on the Query tab). You can also explore the discovered thesaurus or a thematic summary of the documents. Hypermancer doesnot use predefined categories, entities, or precalculated networks. It calculates these concepts and networks in real time based on the data you are exploring. It normally takes the system under 10 seconds to fetch the data and generate the map. However, if some of the web sites you are searching are slow or unavailable, there may be unavoidable delays.

Here are some screenshots of Hypermancer searches which we really liked. We do most of our web searching this way now. It gives us a faster and more complete view of any topic, and we can search within the search results for any other terms.

Personas – Computational Methods are Socially Ignorant

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Launch Personas

http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

 

Try typing your name in

Pornography Conference 15th & 16th June 2009

Leeds 2009

Unsupervised Semantic Mapping

Guess what I want for Christmas or my birthday even…

Here  is a paper by the guys who are designing this nifty piece of software followed by my few early attempts at using it with data measuring over 12mbs. The blurb on the software assures me that it can handle over 300mbs. of data. It is a neat and tidy piece of software. From what I can tell the scholarly foundations of this software are second to none.

Only problem is that its going to cost me or rather the department over £300. Worth every penny.

 

 

Evaluation of unsupervised semantic mapping of natural language with Leximancer concept mapping

 

ANDREW E. SMITH and MICHAEL S. HUMPHREYS

 

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

 

The Leximancer system is a relatively new method for transforming lexical co-occurrence information from natural language into semantic patterns in an unsupervised manner. It employs two stages of co-occurrence information extraction—semantic and relational—using a different algorithm for each stage. The algorithms used are statistical, but they employ nonlinear dynamics and machine learning. This article is an attempt to validate the output of Leximancer, using a set of evaluation criteria taken from content analysis that are appropriate for knowledge discovery tasks. Link.