Journalistic organisations with regard to training and professional changes. Parallelisms with academic discourse

The present paper analyses the parallelism existing between academic and professional discourse regarding three interrelated subjects: journalists´ training needs, their adaptation to multimedia profile changes and recognition of University graduates via professional regulation. This study relies on a bibliographical review and brings together the opinion of five professional groups by means of an interview using an openended questionnaire. The results show a coincidence in both discourses regarding the need for firmly grounded training of the journalists with study plans which integrate the new profiles. At the same time, it reflects the discrepancy of the journalistic groups with regard to professional regulation based on the University degree, whose vindication does not appear to be a priority in academic circles.

Correlation between anxiety and academic self-concept in interpreter trainees

This paper focuses on two basic issues: the anxiety-generating nature of the interpreting task and the relevance of interpreter trainees’ academic self-concept. The first has already been acknowledged, although not extensively researched, in several papers, and the second has only been mentioned briefly in interpreting literature. This study seeks to examine the relationship between the anxiety and academic self-concept constructs among interpreter trainees. An adapted version of the Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (Horwitz et al., 1986), the Academic Autoconcept Scale (Schmidt, Messoulam & Molina, 2008) and a background information questionnaire were used to collect data. Students’ t-Test analysis results indicated that female students reported experiencing significantly higher levels of anxiety than male students. No significant gender difference in self-concept levels was found. Correlation analysis results suggested, on the one hand, that younger would-be interpreters suffered from higher anxiety levels and students with higher marks tended to have lower anxiety levels; and, on the other hand, that younger students had lower self-concept levels and higher-ability students held higher self-concept levels. In addition, the results revealed that students with higher anxiety levels tended to have lower self-concept levels. Based on these findings, recommendations for interpreting pedagogy are discussed.

Theory as Noir: a cartoon version of an academic article

Expanding on the growing movement to take academic and other erudite subjugated knowledges and distill them into some graphic form, this “cartoon” is a recounting of the author’s 2014 article,  “Big Data, Actionable Information, Scientific Knowledge and the Goal of Control,” Teknokultura, Vol. 11/no. 3, pp. 529-54.  It is an analysis of the idea of Big Data and an argument that its power relies on its instrumentalist specificity and not its extent. Mind control research in general and optogenetics in particular are the case study. Noir seems an appropriate aesthetic for this analysis, so direct quotes from the article are illustrated by publically available screen shots from iconic and unknown films of the 20th century. The only addition to the original article is a framing insight from the admirable activist network CrimethInc.