Connotation

About: Connotation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2096 publications have been published within this topic receiving 8265 citations.

The influence of connotation on readability and obfuscation in Australian chairman addresses

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to extend and improve prior readability and obfuscation research by investigating the effect of connotation on readability and obfuscation. Furthermore, the paper aims to develop and apply a novel connotation‐based obfuscation assessment approach.Design/methodology/approach – In total, 87 chairman reports of firms included in the Standard & Poor's ASX200 index were analyzed. The readability of sections and connotation‐based groups of sentences within these narratives were assessed using the Flesch readability formula. The presence or absence of obfuscation within the analyzed chairman addresses was determined using a novel connotation‐based obfuscation assessment approach.Findings – The study demonstrates that the mid section within the analyzed chairman addresses was significantly more difficult to read than the first and last sections. However, the notion that these reading difficulty differences were due to the prevalence of positive and negative news within these...

Learning to network and networking to learn: facilitating the process of adaptive management in a local response to the UK's national air quality strategy

Abstract: The adaptive management leitmotiv of “learning to manage and managing to learn” sets out an attractive agenda for dealing with the overwhelming complexity of environmental phenomena that humans have problematized. To ensure that this rallying cry translates into effective action, it is important to give consideration to structures and procedures for facilitating the efforts of those willing or able to respond to the adaptive management call. To date, calls to establish the right organization to coordinate multiagency responses have tended to emphasize the noun, or bounded-entity, sense of the word organization. We believe that this is at the expense of its other, verb or process, connotation. In this paper, rather than searching for the perfect organization structure that mandates mutual trust and collective action shaped by all relevant parties' perspectives and possible contributions, we direct attention towards the process of nurturing integrated adaptive responses among individuals who have diverse organizational allegiances. By shifting the balance towards the process connotation of the right organization, we hope that a new mindscape can be discerned for those interested in putting adaptive management principles into practice. We seek to conjure up an image of this mindscape through the phrase “learning to network and networking to learn,” and set out to strengthen this by demonstrating how adaptive response networks can arise from the mutually defining relationship between stakeholders and issues. This is demonstrated through a local response to the United Kingdom's National Air Quality Strategy.

Financial Phantasmagoria: Corporate Image-Work in Times of Crisis

Abstract: Over the period January-December 2008 we collected 241 separate advertisements from 61 financial institutions published in the Financial Times. Reading across the ensemble of ads for themes and evocative images, sketching an outline in symbolic space as it were, provides an impression of the financial imaginaries created by these organizations as the global financial crisis unfolded. In using the term ‘phantasmagoria’ we move beyond its colloquial sense of a set of strange images designed to dazzle, towards the more technical connotation used by Ranciere (2004) who suggested that words and images can offer a trace of an overall determining set-up if they are torn from their obviousness so they become phantasmagoric figures. The latter connotation encourages a search for dissonances, juxtapositions and contradictions in particular imaginaries and is thus close to Jameson’s (1998, 2007) notion of dialectical criticism. Such an approach is a response to the realization that too much has been ceded too readily to powerful naturalizing forces which have made certain aspects of the recent period of ‘capitalism in crisis’ very hard to question.

ConnotationWordNet: Learning Connotation over the Word+Sense Network

Abstract: We introduce ConnotationWordNet, a connotation lexicon over the network of words in conjunction with senses. We formulate the lexicon induction problem as collective inference over pairwise-Markov Random Fields, and present a loopy belief propagation algorithm for inference. The key aspect of our method is that it is the first unified approach that assigns the polarity of both wordand sense-level connotations, exploiting the innate bipartite graph structure encoded in WordNet. We present comprehensive evaluation to demonstrate the quality and utility of the resulting lexicon in comparison to existing connotation and sentiment lexicons.