Browsing by Subject "Journalism"

During WWII, Japan forced women from China, Korea, and other countries in Asia to become military sex slaves. They were called ianfu (慰安婦) in Japanese, or comfort women. The comfort women's history was neglected in post-war society until the early 1990s; with support from scholars, feminist groups, and human rights groups, the public began to know more about comfort women. The shared stories of comfort women's history are constructed in a representation of the past by the relevant testimonies, historical studies, and coverage, where the media narrative has contributed to the public awareness and collective memories of comfort women. This project investigates the interaction between news media coverage and the word "comfort women": how does Mainland China news media cover comfort women? The research corpus developed for this project contains 3173 newspaper articles in Mainland China from 2016 to 2021. This period starts with a Japan–South Korea Comfort Women Agreement announced at the end of 2015, which sparks coverage of this agreement and Japan-South Korea relations in Chinese news media. Building on previous work on the topic of Chinese news media representations of comfort women, this project explores the news in the following six years, points out the changes from the previous years. It also furthers research comparing central state media and local media. The method of this project incorporates content analysis and textual analysis of the corpus, diction, and relevant news events. The technological intervention includes data crawling, data visualization, and web development. The research finds that the coverage uses the word "comfort women" in both political and humanities contexts; the former means that comfort women can refer to the barrier to Japan-South Korea relations and the war crime, and the latter means comfort women are considered the victims in a documentary and the victims themselves. Although Mainland China media in this period had a particular focus on the Japan-South Korea relation, the fundamental goal was to criticize Japan's right-wing stance on the comfort women issue, demonstrating China's national discourse. Meanwhile, the national discourse has also contributed to the widespread dissemination of comfort women's stories and the success of relevant documentaries. Additionally, the lack of humanistic focus in the coverage may be due to the limited social activities about comfort women in China's society. Regarding the comparison between central state media and local media, this study reveals some similarities, but local media tend to focus more on the domestic news that has the potential to attract the public. The study predicts that the political factor may continue to dominate the comfort women topic in future coverage.

Our media is saturated with claims of ``facts'' made from data. Database research has in the past focused on how to answer queries, but has not devoted much attention to discerning more subtle qualities of the resulting claims, e.g., is a claim ``cherry-picking''? This paper proposes a Query Response Surface (QRS) based framework that models claims based on structured data as parameterized queries. A key insight is that we can learn a lot about a claim by perturbing its parameters and seeing how its conclusion changes. This framework lets us formulate and tackle practical fact-checking tasks --- reverse-engineering vague claims, and countering questionable claims --- as computational problems. Within the QRS based framework, we take one step further, and propose a problem along with efficient algorithms for finding high-quality claims of a given form from data, i.e. raising good questions, in the first place. This is achieved to using a limited number of high-valued claims to represent high-valued regions of the QRS. Besides the general purpose high-quality claim finding problem, lead-finding can be tailored towards specific claim quality measures, also defined within the QRS framework. An example of uniqueness-based lead-finding is presented for ``one-of-the-few'' claims, landing in interpretable high-quality claims, and an adjustable mechanism for ranking objects, e.g. NBA players, based on what claims can be made for them. Finally, we study the use of visualization as a powerful way of conveying results of a large number of claims. An efficient two stage sampling algorithm is proposed for generating input of 2d scatter plot with heatmap, evalutaing a limited amount of data, while preserving the two essential visual features, namely outliers and clusters. For all the problems, we present real-world examples and experiments that demonstrate the power of our model, efficiency of our algorithms, and usefulness of their results.

Scholars, journalists, and religious leaders in the twentieth century widely hailed The Christian Century as the most influential Protestant magazine in America. This dissertation investigates the meaning of such praise. In what ways, and upon whom, did the Century exercise influence? Answering this question directs attention not only to the Century's editorial content but also to the cultural role of magazines and the makeup of the Century's audience, an elite group of white American Protestants who had no collective name for the first half of the twentieth century but came to be called the Protestant mainline.

I focus on the editorial tenure of Charles Clayton Morrison, who bought an obscure Disciples of Christ periodical at a sheriff's sale in 1908 and transformed it, over the next 39 years, into the flagship magazine of liberal Protestantism. Attending to the Century's history as well as its rhetoric, I find that the magazine had a deep effect on its readers but a limited effect on American Protestantism as a whole. Most American Protestants never read the Century or accepted its theologically and politically liberal messages. The mainline, while certainly powerful, was never mainstream.

Studying the Century reveals how the mainline evolved in terms of membership levels, core emphases, and posture vis-à-vis other religious traditions. Likewise, the Century clarifies the role of the mainline as the dominant Protestant tradition in America. If dominance is understood to mean control of positions of power, a plausible case can be made for the dominance of both the mainline writ large and of the subset of this group who read The Christian Century. If dominance has anything to do with numerical preponderance, however, or with the ability to build consensus around key ideals, the supremacy of the mainline should be reexamined.

Lofty estimates of the Century's influence presuppose a transmission model of communication in which the primary role of a periodical is to convey information that alters readers' thinking. The Century did convey information to its readers, but the greatest service the magazine performed was to confirm readers' identity as central figures in the growth of what its editors deemed a vital, progressive, but by no means universally accepted form of Christianity. The Century spoke to its 35,000 readers more than it spoke for them, and those readers frequently felt like members of a beleaguered minority rather than a triumphal majority.

Throughout its upward climb, the Century's rhetoric ran ahead of its accomplishments. Without ever amassing a wide readership, it declared itself the rightful representative of American Protestantism. The Century's rhetoric of unified, progressive, and culturally dominant Protestantism proved compelling, but it obscured many complexities. Examining the Century's struggles to define itself and remain financially viable in its formative years brings to light the difficulties inherent in any attempt to lead America's fractious Protestants.

The contemporary mindfulness movement, while Buddhist in its inspiration and origins, tends to be presented as an American phenomenon that, when replicated in other countries, takes much the same form as it does in America. Yet in the case of Japan, a distinctively and self-consciously “Japanese” mindfulness has emerged as a result of the country’s long and complicated Buddhist history, the demands of its particular social structure, and the degree to which its citizens reflect on their own cultural uniqueness (“Japaneseness”). This study explores mindfulness—a phenomenon characterized even by its practitioners as amorphous and multivalent—by looking at some of the ways it is characterized in Japan: as a mode of community-building, as therapeutic, as Vipassana, as Zen, and as a distinctively Japanese practice. It does so by drawing on popular mindfulness literature as well as participant observation of the Buddhist organizations Zen 2.0, the Mindfulness Village, and the International Zen Culture Center (IZCC). While mindfulness practitioners in Japan take part in a larger transnational movement, with new books on mindfulness continuing to be translated into Japanese even as home-grown mindfulness books are on the rise, the distinctive developments of mindfulness in Japan hint at the hidden diversity that emerges as it takes root in various countries around the world.