The nation-state of Sierra Leone crumbled during the 1990s. A decade-long civil war destroyed the state and brutalized the national imaginings. Despite the lack of institutional structure, some members of its society chose to keep the nation alive through discourse on a listserv, an email forum called Leonenet. Using a multi-methodological approach that incorporated content analysis, interviews...

This chapter is an analysis of a 100,000-word corpus consisting of message-board postings on hip-hop websites. A discourse analysis of this corpus reveals three strategies employed by the posters to identify themselves as members of the hip-hop community in the otherwise anonymous setting of the internet: (1) defined openings and closings, (2) repeated use of slang and taboo terms, and (3) perf...

The availability in machine-readable form of descriptions of the structure of documents, as well as of the document discourse (e.g. the scientific discourse within scholarly articles), is crucial for facilitating semantic publishing and the overall comprehension of documents by both users and machines. In this paper we introduce DoCO, the Document Components Ontology, an OWL 2 DL ontology that ...

The online discussion forum (ODF) is one of the most widely used e-learning tools in open distance learning (ODL) environments. A popular line of research focuses on producing instruments that can be used to assess the level and amount of learning that takes place via transcript analysis of ODF-discourse. Of current interest is the influential community of inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework, f...

Academic writing is not just about presenting a set of ideas, but through the act of writing, the authors position themselves as individuals having particular identities which mostly reflect the dominant sociocultural values and practices of the discourse communities in which they are living and performing. The present study, using a mixed method approach, attempted to explore the evidences of ...

This study investigated metadiscourse and its subcategories in English research articles (RAs) written by nonnative (Iranian) and native English writers from the two disciplines of applied linguistics and civil engineering. The study aimed at seeing whether language and discipline influenced the frequency of occurrence of metadiscourse elements in research articles. To this end, a sample of 120...

In recent years, intelligent conversational agents have been used with some level of effectiveness as dynamic support for collaborative learning in online chat. The classroom discourse community offers insights from analysis of effective classroom discussion facilitation practices that might productively inspire the design of such facilitator agents. In this paper, we evaluate one such conversa...

The most prominent anti-realist program in recent metaethics is the expressivist strategy of treating ethical claims as expressing not beliefs but noncognitive attitudes of some sort. Its popularity stems in part from the fact that, by construing ethical claims as expressing noncognitive attitudes rather than beliefs, one can reject a realist ontology of morality without rejecting moral discour...

The complex relationship of networks of information that exist on the web and in modem computer systems requires advanced link-analysis capabilities in order to make sense of the deluge of data. Applications are emerging which use "intelligent agents" to gather data, however, they are rarely more than specially tuned search engines with the goal of gathering individual’s purchasing and chat pro...