Extracting locations from sport and exercise-related social media messages using a neural network-based bilingual toponym recognition model

Funding: This study is a part of the “Equality in suburban physical activity environments, YLLI” research project (in Finnish: Yhdenvertainen liikunnallinen lähiö, YLLI). The project is being financed by the research program about suburban in Finland “Lähiöohjelma 2020-2022” coordinated by the Ministry of Environment (grant recipient: Dr. Petteri Muukkonen). Sport and exercise contribute to health and well-being in cities. While previous research has mainly focused on activities at specific locations such as sport facilities, “informal sport” that occur at arbitrary locations across the city have been largely neglected. Such activities are more challenging to observe, but this challenge may…

Book review : David Machin (ed.), Visual Communication

Individual and Collaborative Semiotic Work in Document Design

This article examines the concepts of agency, transformation and transduction in the context of document design. These concepts have been previously used to describe communicative actions and sign-making among individuals: whereas agency focuses on the individual’s capabilities as a sign-maker, transformation and transduction describe how individuals transform meanings within one mode of communication or from one mode to another. Organizational communication, however, is rarely an individual effort, particularly in corporate settings: producing multimodal documents that communicate on behalf of entire organizations, such as annual reports, constitutes a collaborative effort involving a vari…

The Multimodality of Digital Longform Journalism

Digital longform journalism has recently attracted increased attention among both academics and professionals. This study contributes to the growing body of research by dissecting the multimodal structure of digital longform journalism, that is, how the emerging genre combines written language, photography, short videos, maps and other graphical elements, and joins them together into a seamless narrative using subtle transitions. The data consist of 12 longform articles published in 2012–2013, which have been annotated for their visual and verbal content, their underlying principle of organization and the transitions that hold between them. The annotation is stored into a digital corpus, wh…

Semi-automated annotation of page-based documents within the Genre and Multimodality framework

This paper describes ongoing work on a tool developed for annotating document images for their multimodal features and compiling this information into a corpus. The tool leverages open source computer vision and natural language processing libraries to describe the content and structure of multimodal documents and to generate multiple layers of XML annotation. The paper introduces the annotation schema, describes the document processing pipeline and concludes with a brief description of future work.

Combining Computer Vision and Multimodal Analysis: A Case Study of Layout Symmetry in Bilingual In-Flight Magazines

An overview of research within the Genre and Multimodality framework

This review article provides an overview of the research conducted within the Genre and Multimodality framework, which has been used to describe the multimodality of page-based documents and other multimodal artefacts over the past 15 years. The article explicates the motivation and inspiration for developing the framework, introduces its central theoretical concepts and presents its applications across a number of case studies. Finally, the article discusses the criticism directed towards the model and identifies avenues of future development. peerReviewed

Uncovering Illegal Wildlife Trade on Social Media: Automatic Data Collection, Deep Learning Filters and Identification

Illegal wildlife trade is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity conservation, as many species, including iconic species such as rhinoceros and elephant taxa, are targeted for their meat, trophies and other body parts. Over the last years, the scale and nature of illegal wildlife trade has changed dramatically. The Internet is becoming a major market for wildlife products, as it provides cost-effective solutions, vast outreach and anonymity for illegal wildlife traders. A 2014 study by the International Fund for Animal Welfare found 33 000 items for sale on 280 online marketplaces. More recent findings suggest that the illegal market for wildlife has moved to social media and, to a less…