Discourses on European integration and Euroscepticism have benefitted from increased interest aft... more Discourses on European integration and Euroscepticism have benefitted from increased interest after Brexit. Researchers point out that there is a great variance from one national context to another and that there is a gap in the literature concerning non-elite discourses and perspectives from Central and Eastern European countries such as Romania. The Eurobarometer findings of early 2023 indicate a shift in Romanian public opinion towards Euroscepticism. To better understand the potential causes for these shifts, we approach the politicisation of the issue in Romania through an analysis of online news headlines and related social media news sharing metadata. In the aftermath of the decision not to accept Romania and Bulgaria, this research investigates shifts in the media framing of the Schengen issue and EU over two months (from October 15 to December 15, 2022) in the 14 most accessed Romanian online news sites (with more than 10 million visits per month). Quantitative analysis of news headlines (N = 3,362) shows that the coverage focuses on Romanian politicians in power and emphasises conflict. Furthermore, the analysis of the interactions produced by news sharing of the analysed sample shows the impact of the political rhetoric encouraging the boycotting of Austrian companies in retaliation for the denial of Schengen Area accession: scapegoating and disenchantment with politics and politicians. The two-step approach used and results that use Facebook interactions as indicators of public resonance of politicisation and strategic framing may be replicated in future research.
TikTok’s rapid growth in the past few years, especially in the younger demographic, may signal a ... more TikTok’s rapid growth in the past few years, especially in the younger demographic, may signal a market shift. With children, teens, and young adults reportedly making up 40% to 60% of its user base, the platform is becoming the strongest challenger to YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The most followed TikTok celebrities are mostly young people who have either grown up with the platform or recently extended their popularity from other platforms to reach new audiences. This research investigates the discursive strategies and persona performances employed by the top 25 TikTok celebrities under the age of 25 in both popular content and content marked as advertising. A large sample of TikTok content metadata was collected using API interrogation. From each of the 25 young TikTok celebrities, up to 1,000 videos per user (N = 22,650) are explored using quantitative approaches. Two subsamples are analysed using visual, rhetorical, and narrative analysis to evaluate the most popular conten...
2008 IEEE International Conference on Automation, Quality and Testing, Robotics, 2008
This paper describes a way of improving search engine results conceptual reorganization that uses... more This paper describes a way of improving search engine results conceptual reorganization that uses formal concept analysis. This is done by using redirections to solve conceptual redundancies and by adding preliminary disambiguation and expanding the concept lattice with extra navigation nodes based on Wikipediapsilas ontology and strong conceptual links.
The 2015 refugee crisis, and the ensuing policy debates towards a common European migration polic... more The 2015 refugee crisis, and the ensuing policy debates towards a common European migration policy have held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade. Even though Romania is not situated directly on the main routes on which refugees arrive to European countries, the issue was highly salient for both the news media and the public. In this case, the role of the media is even more important, as the main interface through which the public comes into contact with the related issues. The present research focuses on (1) how the European Union and the member states were pictured by media related to the refugee crisis and the EU refugee and migration politics in the time frame: April 2015- December 2018 and (2) on mediated public diplomacy of the European Commission and of the European Council.
This research tries to explore the popular TED talk video format by analysing the technical aspec... more This research tries to explore the popular TED talk video format by analysing the technical aspects of the visual production and discursive patterns in the verbal content in relation to the most popular ratings applied by the users. Our analysis shows how the visual production format uses direction and editing to convey information and emotion. The results also point towards an increasing trend favouring inspiring emotional human interest stories of personal experience, besides the informative academic treatment of science, technology or design.
Acknowledgement: This study was funded by PATRIR (Peace Action, Training and Research Institute o... more Acknowledgement: This study was funded by PATRIR (Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania) as part of the Switch OFF/ONline Hate Speech project financed through the SEE grants 2009-2014 within the NGO Fund.I. An Introduction to Online Hate-SpeechIn the international and European socio-political context, with economic migrants, refugees and increasing extremism and xenophobia on the public agenda, hate-speech is becoming an increasingly important topic. Where the fundamental human right to freedom of speech and expression collides with the increasing need for tolerance and mutual respect demanded by life in racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, multi-cultural societies, hate-speech becomes and important preoccupation for researchers, law-makers, civil society and stake-holders in public mediated communication, irrespective of the communication medium.The subtopic of online hate-speech is particularly new and important, recently opening up debates on jurisdic...
This paper proposes a framework for capturing semantics from eye tracking data during the process... more This paper proposes a framework for capturing semantics from eye tracking data during the process of text skimming/scanning by readers of electronic documents and HTML user interfaces. RDFa and HTML microformats are some of the easier ways proposed by the Semantic Web paradigm for embedding semantics in web pages. XSLT transformations or specialized parsers may easily convert such documents to RDF/XML semantic repositories. However, semantics do not usually have an absolute character. Although a variety of web 2.0 oriented ontologies and microformats have been widely adopted or even standardized (Dublin Core, FOAF, XFN etc.), in order to achieve semantic interoperability, there are scenarios in which user-relative semantics are especially important, such as in the development of customization engines (web session customization, recommender systems, targeted advertising), when a certain user must only share semantics with himself or with similar persons. Having the same web document,...
This paper outlines computational thinking, language independent methodology for identifying and ... more This paper outlines computational thinking, language independent methodology for identifying and analyzing the contexts, targets and contents of online hate speech manifested in Facebook comments on popular Fan Pages or open groups. The three-step process involves data collection via API tools, a preliminary co-occurrence analysis of user-defined semantic field codes and clustering and visual analysis using triadic formal concept analysis navigation tools.
Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty Across Europe, 2021
This chapter analyses social media discourses disparaging the poor in Romania and Hungary, where ... more This chapter analyses social media discourses disparaging the poor in Romania and Hungary, where groups receiving benefits, labelled ‘the assisted’ are regularly shamed for their ‘ways’. The chapter combines quantitative analysis of discursive patterns in comments to social media posts of news organisations with the qualitative analysis of visual content posted. Apart from being disparaged and shamed, ‘the assisted’ are also blamed for various other phenomena, from economic hardships to political processes. Thus, social media discourses use references to ‘the assisted’ as an empty signifier providing a language for expressing a wide range of experiences, grievances and public anxieties.
Eye tracking is an emerging field with multiple applications in medicine, marketing, cognitive sc... more Eye tracking is an emerging field with multiple applications in medicine, marketing, cognitive sciences and others. This paper proposes a framework for capturing semantics from eye tracking data during the process of text skimming by readers of electronic documents, mainly from the Web. The research is part of an eye-tracking oriented project which aims at formalizing and defining web frameworks that exploit eye tracking data for better customization and adaptability with respect to each user’s ocular activity during the user-computer interaction and the browsing experience. However, the scope of the paper is limited to the process of reading textual information which, according to recent studies, tends to become a process of text skimming for visual cues and keywords. Key-Words: eye tracking, semantics, text skimming
With the relatively recent technological, social and economic changes, journalism education and t... more With the relatively recent technological, social and economic changes, journalism education and training need rethinking. The journalism curricula should be adapted in order to provide graduates with skills and competences that could answer the professional challenges of the 21 st century: reflectivity, problem-solving, initiative and the ability to develop new products or formats. Critical thinking, innovation and entrepreneurial skills are key aspects of the new direction in Journalism education worldwide.
This research takes a big data quantitative content analysis approach to studying discursive patt... more This research takes a big data quantitative content analysis approach to studying discursive patterns in online satirical news parody or " fake news " in Romania. In the context of a global increase in the interest towards news parody, as demonstrated by shows like The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report – U.S. based shows whose content is being syndicated or distributed globally, but also The Onion fake news website, many national cultures have gone through different formats in an attempt to satisfy this increasing need, possibly stimulated by distrust in the traditional media formats. The paper presents an investigation of discursive and publishing patterns in over five years of publishing history of the most popular Romanian satirical news parody website – timesnewroman.ro.
E-government is quite a late achievement of the information society, although in theory, it could... more E-government is quite a late achievement of the information society, although in theory, it could have been the first application of the Internet, since Internet itself started as a governmental project. Many factors have been delaying the implementation of e-government, the most important ones being the digital divide, the privacy and security concerns and the availability of common data models on a national and international scale. Since its implementation comes much later than other on-line organizational models (e-business, social networks etc.), e-government also lags technologically. In Romania, but not only, e-government and public administration applications are data-driven rather than knowledge-driven, since databases are quite popular and robust as a standard model for storing the information behind traditional Web applications. On the other hand, the World Wide Web authorities invest a great deal of effort in raising the awareness of the so-called “knowledge society”, def...
East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures
The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most... more The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue-specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top-ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6,183), from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2017. Using a computer-assisted, clusters-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, nonexclusive frames: European crisis, context/victimization, relocation/distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian/international. The variations in their salience follow the ge...
Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and polit... more Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and political debate in Europe and globally - from the fragmentation of network publics to echo chambers and bubble phenomena, from networked outrage to networked populism, from trolls and bullies to propaganda and non-linear cyberwarfare. Both researchers and Facebook Community standards see the identification of the potential targets of hateful or antagonistic speech as key to classifying and distinguishing the latter from arguments that represent political viewpoints protected by freedom of expression rights. This research is an exploratory analysis of mentions of targets of hate speech in comments in the context of 106 public Facebook pages in Romanian and Hungarian from January 2015 to December 2017. A total of 1.8 million comments were collected through API interrogation and analyzed using a text-mining niche-dictionaries approach and co-occurrence analysis to reveal connections to events o...
Discourses on European integration and Euroscepticism have benefitted from increased interest aft... more Discourses on European integration and Euroscepticism have benefitted from increased interest after Brexit. Researchers point out that there is a great variance from one national context to another and that there is a gap in the literature concerning non-elite discourses and perspectives from Central and Eastern European countries such as Romania. The Eurobarometer findings of early 2023 indicate a shift in Romanian public opinion towards Euroscepticism. To better understand the potential causes for these shifts, we approach the politicisation of the issue in Romania through an analysis of online news headlines and related social media news sharing metadata. In the aftermath of the decision not to accept Romania and Bulgaria, this research investigates shifts in the media framing of the Schengen issue and EU over two months (from October 15 to December 15, 2022) in the 14 most accessed Romanian online news sites (with more than 10 million visits per month). Quantitative analysis of news headlines (N = 3,362) shows that the coverage focuses on Romanian politicians in power and emphasises conflict. Furthermore, the analysis of the interactions produced by news sharing of the analysed sample shows the impact of the political rhetoric encouraging the boycotting of Austrian companies in retaliation for the denial of Schengen Area accession: scapegoating and disenchantment with politics and politicians. The two-step approach used and results that use Facebook interactions as indicators of public resonance of politicisation and strategic framing may be replicated in future research.
TikTok’s rapid growth in the past few years, especially in the younger demographic, may signal a ... more TikTok’s rapid growth in the past few years, especially in the younger demographic, may signal a market shift. With children, teens, and young adults reportedly making up 40% to 60% of its user base, the platform is becoming the strongest challenger to YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The most followed TikTok celebrities are mostly young people who have either grown up with the platform or recently extended their popularity from other platforms to reach new audiences. This research investigates the discursive strategies and persona performances employed by the top 25 TikTok celebrities under the age of 25 in both popular content and content marked as advertising. A large sample of TikTok content metadata was collected using API interrogation. From each of the 25 young TikTok celebrities, up to 1,000 videos per user (N = 22,650) are explored using quantitative approaches. Two subsamples are analysed using visual, rhetorical, and narrative analysis to evaluate the most popular conten...
2008 IEEE International Conference on Automation, Quality and Testing, Robotics, 2008
This paper describes a way of improving search engine results conceptual reorganization that uses... more This paper describes a way of improving search engine results conceptual reorganization that uses formal concept analysis. This is done by using redirections to solve conceptual redundancies and by adding preliminary disambiguation and expanding the concept lattice with extra navigation nodes based on Wikipediapsilas ontology and strong conceptual links.
The 2015 refugee crisis, and the ensuing policy debates towards a common European migration polic... more The 2015 refugee crisis, and the ensuing policy debates towards a common European migration policy have held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade. Even though Romania is not situated directly on the main routes on which refugees arrive to European countries, the issue was highly salient for both the news media and the public. In this case, the role of the media is even more important, as the main interface through which the public comes into contact with the related issues. The present research focuses on (1) how the European Union and the member states were pictured by media related to the refugee crisis and the EU refugee and migration politics in the time frame: April 2015- December 2018 and (2) on mediated public diplomacy of the European Commission and of the European Council.
This research tries to explore the popular TED talk video format by analysing the technical aspec... more This research tries to explore the popular TED talk video format by analysing the technical aspects of the visual production and discursive patterns in the verbal content in relation to the most popular ratings applied by the users. Our analysis shows how the visual production format uses direction and editing to convey information and emotion. The results also point towards an increasing trend favouring inspiring emotional human interest stories of personal experience, besides the informative academic treatment of science, technology or design.
Acknowledgement: This study was funded by PATRIR (Peace Action, Training and Research Institute o... more Acknowledgement: This study was funded by PATRIR (Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania) as part of the Switch OFF/ONline Hate Speech project financed through the SEE grants 2009-2014 within the NGO Fund.I. An Introduction to Online Hate-SpeechIn the international and European socio-political context, with economic migrants, refugees and increasing extremism and xenophobia on the public agenda, hate-speech is becoming an increasingly important topic. Where the fundamental human right to freedom of speech and expression collides with the increasing need for tolerance and mutual respect demanded by life in racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, multi-cultural societies, hate-speech becomes and important preoccupation for researchers, law-makers, civil society and stake-holders in public mediated communication, irrespective of the communication medium.The subtopic of online hate-speech is particularly new and important, recently opening up debates on jurisdic...
This paper proposes a framework for capturing semantics from eye tracking data during the process... more This paper proposes a framework for capturing semantics from eye tracking data during the process of text skimming/scanning by readers of electronic documents and HTML user interfaces. RDFa and HTML microformats are some of the easier ways proposed by the Semantic Web paradigm for embedding semantics in web pages. XSLT transformations or specialized parsers may easily convert such documents to RDF/XML semantic repositories. However, semantics do not usually have an absolute character. Although a variety of web 2.0 oriented ontologies and microformats have been widely adopted or even standardized (Dublin Core, FOAF, XFN etc.), in order to achieve semantic interoperability, there are scenarios in which user-relative semantics are especially important, such as in the development of customization engines (web session customization, recommender systems, targeted advertising), when a certain user must only share semantics with himself or with similar persons. Having the same web document,...
This paper outlines computational thinking, language independent methodology for identifying and ... more This paper outlines computational thinking, language independent methodology for identifying and analyzing the contexts, targets and contents of online hate speech manifested in Facebook comments on popular Fan Pages or open groups. The three-step process involves data collection via API tools, a preliminary co-occurrence analysis of user-defined semantic field codes and clustering and visual analysis using triadic formal concept analysis navigation tools.
Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty Across Europe, 2021
This chapter analyses social media discourses disparaging the poor in Romania and Hungary, where ... more This chapter analyses social media discourses disparaging the poor in Romania and Hungary, where groups receiving benefits, labelled ‘the assisted’ are regularly shamed for their ‘ways’. The chapter combines quantitative analysis of discursive patterns in comments to social media posts of news organisations with the qualitative analysis of visual content posted. Apart from being disparaged and shamed, ‘the assisted’ are also blamed for various other phenomena, from economic hardships to political processes. Thus, social media discourses use references to ‘the assisted’ as an empty signifier providing a language for expressing a wide range of experiences, grievances and public anxieties.
Eye tracking is an emerging field with multiple applications in medicine, marketing, cognitive sc... more Eye tracking is an emerging field with multiple applications in medicine, marketing, cognitive sciences and others. This paper proposes a framework for capturing semantics from eye tracking data during the process of text skimming by readers of electronic documents, mainly from the Web. The research is part of an eye-tracking oriented project which aims at formalizing and defining web frameworks that exploit eye tracking data for better customization and adaptability with respect to each user’s ocular activity during the user-computer interaction and the browsing experience. However, the scope of the paper is limited to the process of reading textual information which, according to recent studies, tends to become a process of text skimming for visual cues and keywords. Key-Words: eye tracking, semantics, text skimming
With the relatively recent technological, social and economic changes, journalism education and t... more With the relatively recent technological, social and economic changes, journalism education and training need rethinking. The journalism curricula should be adapted in order to provide graduates with skills and competences that could answer the professional challenges of the 21 st century: reflectivity, problem-solving, initiative and the ability to develop new products or formats. Critical thinking, innovation and entrepreneurial skills are key aspects of the new direction in Journalism education worldwide.
This research takes a big data quantitative content analysis approach to studying discursive patt... more This research takes a big data quantitative content analysis approach to studying discursive patterns in online satirical news parody or " fake news " in Romania. In the context of a global increase in the interest towards news parody, as demonstrated by shows like The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report – U.S. based shows whose content is being syndicated or distributed globally, but also The Onion fake news website, many national cultures have gone through different formats in an attempt to satisfy this increasing need, possibly stimulated by distrust in the traditional media formats. The paper presents an investigation of discursive and publishing patterns in over five years of publishing history of the most popular Romanian satirical news parody website – timesnewroman.ro.
E-government is quite a late achievement of the information society, although in theory, it could... more E-government is quite a late achievement of the information society, although in theory, it could have been the first application of the Internet, since Internet itself started as a governmental project. Many factors have been delaying the implementation of e-government, the most important ones being the digital divide, the privacy and security concerns and the availability of common data models on a national and international scale. Since its implementation comes much later than other on-line organizational models (e-business, social networks etc.), e-government also lags technologically. In Romania, but not only, e-government and public administration applications are data-driven rather than knowledge-driven, since databases are quite popular and robust as a standard model for storing the information behind traditional Web applications. On the other hand, the World Wide Web authorities invest a great deal of effort in raising the awareness of the so-called “knowledge society”, def...
East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures
The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most... more The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue-specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top-ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6,183), from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2017. Using a computer-assisted, clusters-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, nonexclusive frames: European crisis, context/victimization, relocation/distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian/international. The variations in their salience follow the ge...
Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and polit... more Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and political debate in Europe and globally - from the fragmentation of network publics to echo chambers and bubble phenomena, from networked outrage to networked populism, from trolls and bullies to propaganda and non-linear cyberwarfare. Both researchers and Facebook Community standards see the identification of the potential targets of hateful or antagonistic speech as key to classifying and distinguishing the latter from arguments that represent political viewpoints protected by freedom of expression rights. This research is an exploratory analysis of mentions of targets of hate speech in comments in the context of 106 public Facebook pages in Romanian and Hungarian from January 2015 to December 2017. A total of 1.8 million comments were collected through API interrogation and analyzed using a text-mining niche-dictionaries approach and co-occurrence analysis to reveal connections to events o...
This chapter traces the development of Romanian digital culture from its origins in early persona... more This chapter traces the development of Romanian digital culture from its origins in early personal computing in the 1 980s to a detailed overview ofkey-phenomena over the 19905, the 20005 and the 2010s-from rapidly catching-up to Western culture through internet-cafes, piracy and leap-frogging to fast and cheap internet infrastructure on the backdrop scarce regulation, then to online news, forums and blogging, social context collapse on social media, and the rise of new types of satire and textual poaching, and finally to fake news, disinformation, online antagonisms, memes, virals and wave after wave of digital media celebrities.
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Papers by Radu Meza