conversation

22May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

CULTURE, TOP FOUR

Mimicking The Accents Of Others In Conversation – Why We Do It

Have you ever caught yourself talking a little bit differently after listening to someone with a distinctive way of speaking? Perhaps you’ll pepper in a couple of y’all’s after spending the weekend with your Texan mother-in-law. Or you might drop a few R’s after binge-watching a British period drama on Netflix. Linguists call this phenomenon “linguistic convergence,” and it’s something you’ve likely done at some point, even if the shifts were so subtle you didn’t notice. People tend to converge toward the language they observe around them, whether it’s copying word choices, mirroring sentence structures or mimicking pronunciations. But as a doctoral student in linguistics, I wanted to know more about how readily this behavior occurs: Would people converge based on evidence as flimsy as...

We’re measuring online conversation to track the social and mental health issues surfacing during the coronavirus pandemic

The big idea Social media posts and news reports are rich sources of data about people’s attitudes and behaviors. Using artificial intelligence techniques, it’s possible to sift through billions of words to discern trends in a population’s well-being, or social quality. Performing this analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing the damage the pandemic is doing to the social and psychological well-being of the U.S. At the AI Institute of the University of South Carolina, my colleagues and I have processed more than 700 million social media posts since the beginning of March and more than 700,000 news articles about the COVID-19 pandemic. We are monitoring these information sources to capture the evolving human experience in the U.S. during the pandemic. We have found troubling indi...

How to Be an Antiracist: A Conversation With Ibram X. Kendi

In his new book, the professor challenges traditional definitions of racism, and who can be racist. A universal understanding, particularly in academia and among racial justice advocates and activists, has been that race and racism are based on a concept of whiteness as superior over other racial constructions (such as Black, Brown, or Indigenous). Whole bodies of scholarship under the Critical Race Theory framework have discussed this power dynamic inherent in racism, which also yields to classism, sexism, and most other forms of social injustice. In fact, the term is often substituted with a more specific descriptor: “white supremacy.” Gender scholar bell hooks eventually coined the term “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy,” to capture the intersect...