This article examines policies and ideas of European settlement in Africa through the lens of imperial rhetoric and nationalist imaginations in Portugal during the first decades of Salazar’s... Show moreThis article examines policies and ideas of European settlement in Africa through the lens of imperial rhetoric and nationalist imaginations in Portugal during the first decades of Salazar’s dictatorship. Even though European settlement in Africa was under discussion since Brazil’s independence, the debate was invigorated in the 1930s. This article will place the renewed interest within the wider context of transnational migration, world economic crisis and inter-European competition for colonial dominance before the Second World War. Although European settlement was perceived as necessary both in terms of domestic social regulation and international competition at the time, state-sponsored settlements in Portuguese Africa were not a reality until the worldwide process of decolonization had started. On the contrary, not only did Portuguese political elites not invest in settlement schemes, but they actually adopted measures to curb migration to the colonies up until 1945, contradicting their imperialist rhetoric at home. The author argues that the contradiction between rhetoric and practice needs to be analysed in light of the growing desire to intensify control over space and people in European settlements in Africa. Barriers to block undesirable migrants from the metropole were only one part of the process of forcing an idealized vision of Portugal and Portugueseness into reality in both the colonies and the metropole. This article concludes that policies and ideas of European Settlement cannot be dissociated from the anti-urban rhetoric and anti-modernizing agenda of Estado Novo.Show less
Landulfo Teixeira P. Cunha, E.; Magno, G.; Gonçalves, M.A.; Cambraia, C.; Almeida, V. 2014
The analysis of user-generated content on the Web provides tools to better understand users' behavior and to the development of improved Web services. Here, we consider a large dataset of Google+... Show moreThe analysis of user-generated content on the Web provides tools to better understand users' behavior and to the development of improved Web services. Here, we consider a large dataset of Google+ status updates to evaluate linguistic features among members of distinct social groups. Our study reveals that groups hold linguistic particularities - such as a tendency to use professional vocabulary, suggesting that Google+ might be employed, by certain users, for professional activities, or that members do not dissociate from their jobs when interacting in this environment. To illustrate a possible application of our outcomes, we present a classification experiment aiming to infer users' social information through the analysis of their posts, with satisfactory preliminary results. Our findings help to understand not only collective peculiarities of online social media users, but also important characteristics of the textual genre post, being one of the first and most comprehensive studies on this topic. Show less
Las Casas, D.; Magno, G.; Landulfo Teixeira P. Cunha, E.; Gonçalves, M.A.; Cambraia, C.; Almeida, V. 2014
Google+ provides a feature that has been overlooked in social media studies: the possibility of users setting their gender information not only as female or male, but as other instead. In this... Show moreGoogle+ provides a feature that has been overlooked in social media studies: the possibility of users setting their gender information not only as female or male, but as other instead. In this paper, we discuss this particularity and, more broadly, the issue of non-binary gender roles in the Web. By analyzing a large dataset, we characterize some aspects of self presentation, word use, network information and country of residence among users who choose different alternatives in the field Gender. On the whole, our main contributions are to present preliminary results and to shed light into the topic considered here - namely, the implications of having a third gender option to present oneself in an online social networking service. Show less
Landulfo Teixeira P. Cunha, E.; Magno, G.; Gonçalves, M.A.; Cambraia, C.; Almeida, V. 2014
In this paper, we conduct a study about differences between female and male discursive strategies when posting in the microblogging service Twitter, with a particular focus on the hashtag... Show moreIn this paper, we conduct a study about differences between female and male discursive strategies when posting in the microblogging service Twitter, with a particular focus on the hashtag designation process during political debate. The fact that men and women use language in distinct ways, reverberating practices linked to their expected roles in the social groups, is a linguistic phenomenon known to happen in several cultures and that can now be studied on the Web and on online social networks in a large scale enabled by computing power. Here, for instance, after analyzing tweets with political content posted during Brazilian presidential campaign, we found out that male Twitter users, when expressing their attitude toward a given candidate, are more prone to use imperative verbal forms in hashtags, while female users tend to employ declarative forms. This difference can be interpreted as a sign of distinct approaches in relation to other network members: for example, if political hashtags are seen as strategies of persuasion in Twitter, imperative tags could be understood as more overt ways of persuading and declarative tags as more indirect ones. Our findings help to understand human gendered behavior in social networks and contribute to research on the new fields of computer-enabled Internet linguistics and social computing, besides being useful for several computational tasks such as developing tag recommendation systems based on users' collective preferences and tailoring targeted advertising strategies, among others. Show less
Landulfo Teixeira P. Cunha, E.; Magno, G.; Gonçalves, M.A.; Cambraia, C.; Almeida, V. 2013
Gender plays a key role in the process of language variation. Men and women use language in different ways, according to the expected behavior patterns associated with their status in the... Show moreGender plays a key role in the process of language variation. Men and women use language in different ways, according to the expected behavior patterns associated with their status in the communities. In this paper, we present a first description of gender distinctions in the usage of Twitter hashtags. After analyzing data collected from more than 650,000 tagged tweets concerning three different subjects, we concluded that gender can be considered a social factor that influences the user's choice of particular hashtags about a given topic. This study aims to increase knowledge about human behavior in free tagging environments and may be useful to the development of tag recommendation systems based on users' collective preferences. Show less
Landulfo Teixeira P. Cunha, E.; Magno, G.; Comarela, G.; Almeida, V.; Gonçalves, M.A.; Benevenuto, F. 2011
Hashtags are used in Twitter to classify messages, propagate ideas and also to promote specific topics and people. In this paper, we present a linguistic-inspired study of how these tags are... Show moreHashtags are used in Twitter to classify messages, propagate ideas and also to promote specific topics and people. In this paper, we present a linguistic-inspired study of how these tags are created, used and disseminated by the members of information networks. We study the propagation of hashtags in Twitter grounded on models for the analysis of the spread of linguistic innovations in speech communities, that is, in groups of people whose members linguistically influence each other. Differently from traditional linguistic studies, though, we consider the evolution of terms in a live and rapidly evolving stream of content, which can be analyzed in its entirety. In our experimental results, using a large collection crawled from Twitter, we were able to identify some interesting aspects - similar to those found in studies of (offline) speech - that led us to believe that hashtags may effectively serve as models for characterizing the propagation of linguistic forms, including: (1) the existence of a "preferential attachment process", that makes the few most common terms ever more popular, and (2) the relationship between the length of a tag and its frequency of use. The understanding of formation patterns of successful hashtags in Twitter can be useful to increase the effectiveness of real-time streaming search algorithms. Show less
