Bianca Wright

Recognizing both literal and figurative meanings is crucial to understanding users’ opinions on various topics or events in social media. Detecting the sarcastic posts on social media has received much attention recently, particularly because sarcastic comments in the form of tweets often include positive words that represent negative or undesirable characteristics. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement was used to understand the application of different machine learning algorithms for sarcasm detection in Twitter. Extensive database searching led to the inclusion of 31 studies classified into two groups: Adapted Machine Learning Algorithms (AMLA) and Customized Machine Learning Algorithms (CMLA). The review results revealed that Support Vector Machine (SVM) was the best and the most commonly used AMLA for sarcasm detection in Twitter. In addition, combining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and SVM was found to offer a high predi...

Recognizing both literal and figurative meanings is crucial to understanding users’ opinions on various topics or events in social media. Detecting the sarcastic posts on social media has received much attention recently, particularly because sarcastic comments in the form of tweets often include positive words that represent negative or undesirable characteristics. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement was used to understand the application of different machine learning algorithms for sarcasm detection in Twitter. Extensive database searching led to the inclusion of 31 studies classified into two groups: Adapted Machine Learning Algorithms (AMLA) and Customized Machine Learning Algorithms (CMLA). The review results revealed that Support Vector Machine (SVM) was the best and the most commonly used AMLA for sarcasm detection in Twitter. In addition, combining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and SVM was found to offer a high predi...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the major findings of published research on the factors influencing students’ knowledge building in an online collaborative environment. Design/methodology/approach The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses was used to review and synthesize existing empirical studies on knowledge building in a collaborative learning context. In total, 24 studies were identified from major electronic bibliographic databases. The research was conducted between 2017 and 2019. Results of these studies were analyzed to determine potential factors that may influence the knowledge-building process among students. Findings Factors related to interaction and participation, task, student and support were found to be the major factors driving students’ knowledge building in the online collaborative learning environment. The association between these factors and certain collaborative tasks was mapped. Originality/value Findings from th...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the major findings of published research on the factors influencing students’ knowledge building in an online collaborative environment. Design/methodology/approach The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses was used to review and synthesize existing empirical studies on knowledge building in a collaborative learning context. In total, 24 studies were identified from major electronic bibliographic databases. The research was conducted between 2017 and 2019. Results of these studies were analyzed to determine potential factors that may influence the knowledge-building process among students. Findings Factors related to interaction and participation, task, student and support were found to be the major factors driving students’ knowledge building in the online collaborative learning environment. The association between these factors and certain collaborative tasks was mapped. Originality/value Findings from th...

The 2011 Local Government elections in the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (NMBM) represented the beginning of a potentially significant shift in the political landscape of South Africa. The Democratic Alliance increased its vote total from the 2006 Local Government Elections by 14.8% to 40.2% and won 10 single member ward districts previously held by the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC held on to its majority position but gained only 51.9% of the votes and 63 of the 120 councillor positions in the NMBM. Understanding the patterns of vote shift is crucial to understanding whether or not the 2011 Local Government Elections portends the permanent decline of the ANC as a dominant electoral force in the NMBM. Additionally, to what extent the decline in an ANC-stronghold signals a possible decline nationally for the 2014 General Elections emerges as a crucial question for the future of South African electoral politics.

The use of games to communicate messages is not new; however the evolution of the digital environment has opened up opportunities for brand communicators to use games as a means to communicate with audiences in ways that were previously impossible. In South Africa, so-called advergaming currently does not reach a mass audience because of the low number of Internet users and the high cost of Internet access. However, as a brand communication tool, advergaming has the potential to be used as a viral marketing tactic. The article analyses the perceptions of advertising agencies about the use of advergaming in the South African context.

In South Africa, advergaming currently does not reach a mass audience because of the low number of Internet users and the high cost of Internet access. However, as a brand communication tool, advergaming has the potential to be used as a viral marketing tactic. The article analyses the potential of the mobile environment as a catalyst for enabling the use of advergaming as a viral marketing tool in South Africa and proposes a theoretical model derived from an analysis of existing literature and observation, for operationalising mobile advergaming.

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The use of the Internet as a publishing tool is often seen as a threat by those in the traditional media. Claims that online publishing will one day supplant magazines, newspapers and books fuel this negative perception of the medium, yet the Internet holds a host of possibilities for those in these traditional media. Magazine publishers in particular can leverage the Internet as an audience research tool and bridge the gap between long lead-time, thereby cementing the relationship with readers. By examining what magazines in South Africa and the United States are already doing with the Internet and by surveying the views of South African and US media and the general South African public, this study hopes to propose a set of flexible guidelines for the successful utilisation of the Internet as a supplement to and complement of the traditional print magazine. This study has found the importance that media and users place on the creation of an online community as part of Internet use ...

A business cellphone is no longer a luxury but a necessity for most executives. But choosing the right package to meet your needs can be a minefield. We looked at what's on offer for the savvy business person who needs a reliable, always-on service that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

This article describes how new technology has developed tools that assist professionals in all sectors in reducing their daily drive time while still being able to meet with relevant stakeholders. It is simply a matter of leveraging information and communication technology (ICT) tools that are currently available. Employers, particularly large employers such as government, need to think about traffic congestion and road construction that affects employees and productivity and therefore public funds. Enabling employees to work from home can result in general time and cost savings, as well as on fuel consumption. Another benefit is improved morale.

Narcissism is increasingly being regarded as one of the most serious sociocultural problems of the contemporary era. Indeed, recent studies by Baldwin and Stroman (2007) and Buffardi and Campbell (2008), among others, have advanced the opinion that new media technologies - particularly social networking websites - have significantly exacerbated the rise and spread of narcissism in contemporary society. Based on this premise that social media provide the perfect platform for the promotion of self-infatuation, this research paper provides a critical analysis of the potential influence of social media in the development of a widespread narcissistic sociocultural condition. In this regard, claims that increasingly consumerist, individualist and media-saturated societies are nurturing a culture of extreme narcissism, vanity and entitlement are examined in relation to an increase in the use of consumer-orientated new media technologies. In particular, by examining the structural component...

For many years, certain climatic factors have been used to predict potential disease outcomes of relevance to humans. This is because early discovery of disease (or its symptoms) would help people or healthcare professionals to take the necessary precautions. Since microblogs can be used to create new connections and maintain existing relationships, disease detection in microblogs is still considered a serious problem for many healthcare systems, especially for establishing a successful epidemic recognition procedure. To tackle this issue, this study proposed a novel tracking approach to diagnose illnesses in microblogs. It is based on the interconnection between certain emotional type and climatic factors associated with a specific disease (e.g., migraine). In this study, detailed migraine data were collected from Twitter. We used K-means and Apriori algorithms to extract migraine-related emotions and investigate the potential associations between migraine symptoms and climatic factors. The results showed that sad emotions were highly interrelated with migraine symptoms. The classification results showed that Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) was efficient (95.53% accuracy) in detecting the migraine symptoms from Twitter. The proposed mechanism can be used efficiently in biosurveillance systems due to its capability in identifying the hidden symptoms of a sickness on microblogs. This study paves the way to discover disease-related features using both emotional and climatic factors.

Abstract: Within the new education context in South Africa, French has to re invent itself in order to demonstrate its relevance in a multicultural and multilingual society. Traditionally the teaching of language at tertiary institutions has been inward-focused and the ...

PurposeNews research scholars define immediacy as constant news updating, whereas scholars in other fields conceptualize it more broadly as meaning closeness. The present study explicates the concept of immediacy and proposes a multidimensional notion of news immediacy that reflects physical and psychological closeness to the news.Design/methodology/approachA scale for measuring multifaceted immediacy was developed and tested in a between-subjects design experiment. Four dimensions were extracted from the analysis: transportation, involvement, vividness and timeliness.FindingsThe results reveal greater immediacy in online than print news contexts. Involvement is key to the experience of immediacy in both contexts; yet the feeling of being transported to the places of the news events was stronger among online than print news users. The latter relied more on vividness of the news presentation to attain closeness to the news.Originality/valueImplications of the study were discussed.

Abstract: A business cellphone is no longer a luxury but a necessity for most executives. But choosing the right package to meet your needs can be a minefield. We looked at what's on offer for the savvy business person who needs a reliable, always-on service that doesn't ...