Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication

Cultural heritage collections that have been digitised present a great opportunity for engagement by users with different levels of expertise. Unfortunately, the metadata around these collections can often be sparse, limiting user exploration. To help counteract this, the CULTURA project is using Entity-Relationship extraction to great effect in enriching cultural archives with a new layer of semantics. Furthermore, CULTURA is enabling curators to manually improve the accuracy of the outputted entities through the use of its graph based PreMapper tool. This paper gives an overview of PreMapper and details how changes made to the entity graph impact the data flow within the CULTURA architecture.

At present, terrorism is still an ambiguous concept. The multiplicity of types and causes of terrorism is often concealed by the factual similarity of terroristic acts in their consequences. In addition, as 'terrorism' continues to reinvent itself, its ever-changing nature persists in puzzling academics around the world. Nevertheless, there are some common themes which have outlined the directions for terrorism research over the last decades. Most of them are applicable to particular aspects of the phenomenon rather than its holistic structure due to limitations, partly described above. In an attempt to present 'terrorism' as fully as possible, the present work focuses on its specifics as a communication approach. Through a detailed analysis of theoretical work and a comparative analysis of case study materials, the article demonstrates significant benefits in perceiving terrorism as a strategic communication concept. The positives of placing the phenomenon within this framework include, but are not limited to, the opportunity to examine the role of different actors, define their positions and aspirations, and account for both the rational and emotional aspects of their behavior. Using a classical set of tools for analyzing a communication process, the research provides a new approach towards understanding and countering terrorists' activity in the future.

The article provides a wide theoretical analysis of the relatively new phenomenon - the transmedia narrative. The work starts with a broader overview of the historical and social aspects related with the narrative structures. Subsequently, it reviews the wide spectrum of literature outlining the very concept of " narrative ". Towards the end, the most prominent scholar definitions of the term " transmedia narrative " are examined and analyzed. As a result, a coherent definition is offered in order to serve as a basis for further research into the diminishing attention spans of the modern audience, the media convergence and the applications of user-generated content.

This paper shares the approach of social constructivism, and maintains that diversity should be examined not 'par excellence', as an entity in itself, but as reflected in people's minds and expressed in their attitudes and perceptions. On the basis of an empirical Bulgarian-Finnish intercultural research the paper states that diversity is not essential, given and unproblematic. Rather, it undergoes constant evolution. What is considered now 'different' can in future be seen as more or less 'similar'. The informants characterized people with a religious, ethnic or racial background, other than theirs, as 'distant' and 'different', while people belonging to groups with the same origin were designated as 'similar' and 'close'. This means that cultural diversity can also be translated into a social-psychological distance. Thus diversity is context-bound and cultural groups are always seen and appraised from the perspective of one's own particular cultural paradigm.

This paper presents the results of an intercultural study done at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA in the period September 2006 to February 2007 when 23 informants from 17 countries were interviewed face-toface and recorded on tapes. It outlines three distinct phases in the perception of culture shock: 1 unawareness 2 partial awareness 3 full awareness and argues that culture shock appears out of the conflict between local codes and perceived meanings. The process of cultural hybridisation is a natural outcome of the coping strategies with culture shock. However, the paper also argues that full adaptation is not at all equal to cultural assimilation.

Silence has been studied in relation to basic cultural parameters, such as high/low context, collectivism/individualism, masculinity/femininity, high/low power distance. Thus, silence in Japan has often been attributed to the high context, collectivism, masculinity and high power distance in the Japanese society. However, in the cross-cultural comparison between Finland and Japan it becomes clear that Finland is an individualist culture with low power distance, low context of culture and high femininity. Yet, there are similarities in the way silence is perceived, used and appreciated in the two countries. Thus, this paper claims that no dichotomies, as the above mentioned characteristics, can comprehend such a complex phenomenon as silence. This is why the paper proposes three main hypotheses. According to the first one, silence can dawn in societies, where a special emphasis is put on listening. According to the second hypothesis, the preference for silence might be generated by the high value attributed to privacy in Finland and Japan. The choice of privacy might also be related to a special sensitivity to communication feedbacks, 'face saving' and communication apprehension in certain communication situations. And according to the third hypothesis, silence can also be triggered by emotions, which are both individual and universal and which are not necessarily culture specific. This is the way silence has been used by various religious and spiritual traditions. This is the case also of the Japanese Zen Buddhism where silence is perceived as an existential and transcendental phenomenon. The latter can only be attained and realized experientially.