La présente étude s’intéresse à l’existence d’une pluricompétence qui permettrait aux utilisateurs de nouveaux médias de communication de passer de l’écrit traditionnel à la CEMO (communication écrite médiée par ordinateur) de la même façon qu’ils changent de registre. Nous avons récolté les productions écrites de jeunes de 14 à 15 ans à travers deux supports (électronique / papier) et dans trois situations de communication (dictée, activité en classe, Facebook) afin d’étudier l’influence de ces variables sur la gestion de l’orthographe. Les résultats aux dictées indiquent un niveau relativement bas (une erreur tous les 5 ou 6 mots) avec une majorité d’erreurs grammaticales, ce qui est conforme aux études précédemment menées sur le sujet. L’observation des unités communes aux trois corpus montre que l’on retrouve la forme graphique standard dans au moins un des corpus (sinon plusieurs), et ce, chez tous les élèves. Le même type d’analyse d’unités communes menée sur le corpus Facebook uniquement montre que la forme standard est maîtrisée dans un grand nombre de cas (88 % des formes) par les élèves. Enfin, nous observons que la palette de variantes graphiques utilisée dans les conversations Facebook est assez limitée (principalement abréviations, smileys et caractères échos) et que le taux de compression des formes est assez faible, indiquant que la plupart des formes sont respectées dans leur totalité ou réduites d’un seul caractère.

"TU TE PRENDS POUR THE KING OF THE WORLD? LANGUAGE CONTACT IN TEXT MESSAGING CONTEXT" published on 01 Jan 2011 by Brill.

The increasing popularity of electronic messages challenges social science researchers, particularly regarding data representativeness and quality. We propose and evaluate a methodology to create a corpus of Twitter data for a given population by sampling the targeted user population. In our case, the population is the groups of citizens, media and politicians using Twitter in Belgium (French and Dutch languages), Norway and France. We present in particular a machine-learning based methodology that enables the population sampling. We also present a methodology to evaluate the representativeness of our corpus compared to the Full Twitter stream of the targeted population.

Since the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has profoundly impacted public health and the economy worldwide. But there are not the only ones to be hit. The COVID-19 pandemic has also substantially altered mental health, with anxiety symptoms being one of the most frequently reported problems. Especially, the number of people reporting anxiety symptoms increased significantly during the first lockdown-phase compared to similar data collected before the pandemic. Yet, most of these studies relied on a unitary approach to anxiety, wherein its different constitutive features (i.e., symptoms) were tallied into one sum-score, thus ignoring any possibility of interactions between them. Therefore, in this study, we seek to map the associations between the core features of anxiety during the first weeks of the first Belgian COVID-19 lockdown-phase (n = 2,829). To do so, we implemented, in a preregistered fashion, two distinct computational network approaches: a Gaussian graphical model and a Bayesian network modelling approach to estimate a directed acyclic graph. Despite their varying assumptions, constraints, and computational methods to determine nodes (i.e., the variables) and edges (i.e., the relations between them), both approaches pointed to excessive worrying as a node playing an especially influential role in the network system of the anxiety features. Altogether, our findings offer novel data-driven clues for the ongoing field’s larger quest to examine, and eventually alleviate, the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our paper investigates Belgian young peoples’ discussions about climate change, specifically how they distance themselves from various dimensions related to climate issues. The study includes a pluridisciplinary analysis combining sociological, linguistic and semiotic approaches to process textual data collected in 2022 from six focus groups organised within local youth associations. This study focuses on 33 socially and economically diverse young people who joined a youth club. The paper explores the strategies employed by the respondents to distance themselves from climate change issues. It sheds light on various aspects related to climate distancing: How young people embody their vision of climate change through voice-switching, how societal norms and beliefs influence them, how they perceive the global impact of the changes, and how education plays a role in the issue of climate change. The study highlights the barriers, paradoxes and conflicts that hinder young people’s active involvement in addressing climate change. It goes on to propose a set of recommendations aimed at transforming these barriers into actionable steps that can drive positive change. By identifying and addressing the contributing factors to climate distancing, this research offers potential pathways for empowering young people to become more engaged in the fight against climate change.