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| 1st step: Follow the white rabbit to find Wonderland... |
In the first Lecture of the course the proper way in finding high quality journals and articles was approached, specially referring to the use of the Web of Knowledge and Google Academic tool.
The “impact factor” (IF) of a publication – a way to measure the quality of a publication by the average number of citations it has – was also explained and suggested to be evaluated in the searches performed on a research.
The first task of the theme 1 was to select both a research journal and a research paper for media technology with impact factor 1.0 or above.
The journal I chose was the “Social Science Computer Review”, which has an IF of 1.075 (link). The journal is interdisciplinary and covers mainly research applications of computing, as well as the impacts of information technology in society.
The article I selected was “The Impacts of Emoticons on Message Interpretation in Computer-Mediated Communication” and it was cited 49 times in the Web of Knowledge, which characterizes it as high quality. Considering the content the main question is to determine the effects of three common emoticons on message interpretations and 7 hypothesis were draw in the experiment. The main concepts are well structured as well as the relationship between them. The background information is logical, relevant and it is possible to see the progression of ideas. The only problem was that the work was published in 2001, and focusing on the use of emails, which nowadays in my opinion are not a media in which emoticons are mostly used. It would be interesting to check if the results would be the same in different channels as well. The research method used was an experiment to assess affective and attitude interpretations of emoticons. The data presentation was comprehensive and the results discussion very rich. While rreading the description of the research it occurred to me some of the same implications the author describes, like the impact of not having someone from the personal network sending the message and also the familiarity of the responder with the use of emoticons. Besides the discussion aspects, I think the author should also have written a conclusion of the study.
The second task of the theme 1 was to read the book “The Problems of Philosophy” from Bertrand Russell and reflect on some concepts that the author presents.
In my opinion the book reading was intense not only because it questions the reader about so many different aspects of the same thing but also makes you confront your own beliefs when exposing strong and eloquent arguments.
During some passages the book reminded me a lot of two movies, The Truman Show and Matrix, especially considering the existence of matter “There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us.”
Concepts to keep in mind:
1. sense-data: the things that are immediately known in sensation such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardness, roughnesses and so on. Related to physical objects.
Why is this notion is important? Lead us to adopt the natural view, that there really are objects other than ourselves and our sense-data which have an existence not dependent on perceiving them.
sensation: the experience of being immediately aware of this things.
2. proposition: it is a statement for consideration, based in logic.
- a priori: two and two are four;
- a priori (ethics) may also be elicited by experience: happiness is more desirable than misery;
- empirical generalizations: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.
statement of fact: based in experiences; can be verified by experiments.
Propositions and statement of facts are based on the truth. Other verbal kinds of expression are based in each person's perception of reality and it can be true or false.
3. definite description: unique, nothing else has. “The so-and-so”, the nature of our knowledge concerning objects in cases where we know that there is an object answering to a definite description though we are not acquainted with any such object.
4. theory of knowledge (epistemology):
How can we know what is true and what is false? There can be no doubt that some of our beliefs are erroneous.
One cannot be totally skeptical, otherwise no logical argument can be advanced. Example of religion, you need to have a start point of beliefs.
Your journal was just above the threshold of 1.0. However, it is often discussed wether impact factor is a good measure or not. Did you feel that this is a high quality journal?
ReplyDelete49 citations is good, but we also need to take into account that the paper was published back in 2001. I agree with you that it is good with papers that present a clear conclusion. In some research traditions the main conclusions are put forth in the beginning or end of the Discussion/Analysis section. Also, the abstract often includes key conclusions, although formulated very briefly.
I am curious to know more about the conclusions... And do you think these conclusions are still relevant today?
Hi Stefan!
DeleteWe are now in the second week of the course and I still think it is very hard to find an interesting article in a journal that has a high impact factor. I do agree this one was just a little above the average established of 1.0. Although I thought this journal would be good and reliable because it is being published since 1983.
The citation average per year is of 4,45 times, which as you said is not high, but still not really low.
About the conclusions I will add a comment above because Miriam has written some nice inputs about it.
Fernanda, I liked your article choice, but what the three most common emoticons are? (According to this recearch)
ReplyDeleteI assume that the most popular one is this :)
Hi Katya!
DeleteThe research experimented this emoticons :-) ;-) :-(
But nowadays I think that we don`t use the nose (-) icon anymore, as it takes longer to type it. It's a lot easier like this :) ;) :( and have the same effect.
Another emoticon that me and my friends use a lot is the one with the tongue :P to indicate we are making fun or being ironic. In the research they tried to check if the winkle ;-) would bring an irony feeling to the message and it didn't.
But nowadays I think that the hashtags are replacing the use of emoticons in some types of messages. In social media networks I believe that the use of the hashtags are more frequent. And also that the use of emoticons are more frequent on instant messages, especially on mobile apps like whatsapp.
;)
I think the result of this study could still be used since communicating trough text-messaging or in social mediums isn’t that different from emailing. I believe the thing investigated in the study is the way we react to emoticons and I think it may not differ so much in other mediums. But even so it’s an interesting point you have, it would be interesting to do the study again and see if there’s any differences in for example social media. In a study about, let’s say Facebook, it would also be fun to see if there’s any difference in how we think of the emoticons since they there are like small smiling faces =) (more like a image of a smiling face)
ReplyDeleteAnother think I thought about (if I got it right) is that the article only been cited 49 times in 11 years, it’s not so much and I wonder if there’s many studies done on emoticons course all studies I’ve read are written around 2000.
Hi Miriam!
DeleteI wrote in Katya comment reply the different uses of emoticons I believe might exist when using social medias and also mobiles apps. In fact most of the tools and applications nowadays either interpret the icons you type and transform it in a emoticon or you can choose from a list of lots of different ones.
I'll try to find some more interesting papers on emoticons and see if I can post them here.
tks for the comment! ;)
As Stefan commented previously in this paper although there is no conclusion item, the "conclusions" are mostly made in the discussion item.
ReplyDeleteThe ideas I considered the most interesting one are as follow:
- emoticons bring a personal contact to a written message; it can be seen as a non-verbal attribute in a written msg.
- women use emoticons half times more than men;
- only the use of smile emoticons reinforce and influence the interpretation of the msg. Frown emoticons don't make a msg more negative, but smile ones do.
- the idea of the research was to evaluate the use of emoticons on e-mails, but the experiment was made on a system and not with real e-mails. So the results could be transferred to other media channels as Miriam suggested in a previous comment.
;)