Computational timeline reconstruction of the stories surrounding Trump: Story turbulence, narrative control, and collective chronopathy

Measuring the specific kind, temporal ordering, diversity, and turnover rate of stories surrounding any given subject is essential to developing a complete reckoning of that subject’s historical impact. Here, we use Twitter as a distributed news and opinion aggregation source to identify and track the dynamics of the dominant day-scale stories around Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. Working with a data set comprising around 20 billion 1-grams, we first compare each day’s 1-gram and 2-gram usage frequencies to those of a year before, to create day- and week-scale timelines for Trump stories for 2016–2021. We measure Trump’s narrative control, the extent to which stories have been about Trump or put forward by Trump. We then quantify story turbulence and collective chronopathy—the rate at which a population’s stories for a subject seem to change over time. We show that 2017 was the most turbulent overall year for Trump. In 2020, story generation slowed dramatically during the first two major waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, with rapid turnover returning first with the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder and then later by events leading up to and following the 2020 US presidential election, including the storming of the US Capitol six days into 2021. Trump story turnover for 2 months during the COVID-19 pandemic was on par with that of 3 days in September 2017. Our methods may be applied to any well-discussed phenomenon, and have potential to enable the computational aspects of journalism, history, and biography.

Maß (Moderation, Measure)

This entry on Maß (moderation, measure) explores a concept that has not received much attention in Goethe scholarship and makes a case for its usefulness and versatility in tracking how Goethe addresses a philosophical issue with a history stretching at least back to Aristotle’s conception of “the golden mean.” It shows how Goethe’s writings respond to numerous issues connected with the concept of moderation, ranging from the problem of self-moderation, when an individual’s own internal calibration comes in conflict with societal norms, to the more theoretical question of how to define the correct standard of measure (Maßstab). The discussion of moderation in Goethe’s work is, to be sure, coupled with its opposite, namely the potentially deadly threat of immoderation and excess, such as one finds in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and Torquato Tasso (1790). Such potential conflicts, which also raise questions of where to position the standard of measure (Maßstab) of behavior, lead naturally into contexts of scientific experimentation, as in Goethe’s essay “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1792; The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject), where such standards take on a different valence from their role in mathematically based natural sciences. In addition, Goethe’s novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities), provides a poetic model where conflicts between individually and socially calibrated notions of measure and moderation play out with major ethical consequences. The entry concludes with a reflection on different kinds of aesthetic experience, each with its particular understanding of Maß: the individual’s appreciation of the sublime, the theatrical performance, and the embodiment of the self through poetic meter. Throughout these examples, the entry will underscore the role of narrative constraints: regardless of whether the medium is prose or poetry, one finds that questions of Maß as moderation in Goethe’s writings are often accompanied by questions of narrative control and excess. The following overview and analysis of Maß in Goethe’s writing will show that this term is a nodal point of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic concerns.

Performing Identities in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Encounter with the Other Between Politics, Tourism, Migration and Culture in the Late Victorian Context

Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents an investigation of identity from multiple perspectives: the political stance of the Victorian fin de siècle intersects with questions of identity and their liminal articulation through narrative control. The count becomes a “thick” synecdoche for the East and his arrival to England symbolises a reverse political and cultural colonisation that leads to a new image of the individual, revealing the innermost recesses of Western culture.

Gen Z as Security Content Creators: Recreating the Terms of the Social Contract

On November 27, 2020, Natalie Archutowski and Serge Bergler presented on the topic of Generation Z (Gen-Z) as security content creators, at the 2020 CASIS West Coast Security Conference. The presentation was followed by a question and answer period. Key points of discussion included: Narrative control, framing and influencer activity, generational differences, ethics, and what role gen-z plays.

“A Fine, Sunshiny Night":

The Third Franklin Expedition of the British Royal Navy set sail in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage. There were no survivors of the expedition, and nearly all records associated with it were lost. This personal and textual disappearance severed the narrative control of those who participated in the expedition and sought to write about their experiences. This article examines the authorship and the authorial afterlife of Captain James Fitzjames, an officer of the Third Franklin Expedition, with an emphasis on the ways in which Fitzjames’ legacy has been contextualized and recontextualized across time, discourse, and format.

Narrative Control or Aesthetic Ideal: Cognitive Narrative Reading of Milan Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere

This study, which is inspired by Cognitive Poetics, aims to test the feasibility of its basic methods on the analysis of Milan Kundera’s novel Life Is Elsewhere (1973). Kundera’s style seems at first plain, but greater importance was given to his philosophical and psychological treatment of subjects than the narratological world that he creates. He brilliantly mixes many narrative techniques to expose his existential and aesthetic ideals. The aesthetic value of the novel studied under the cognitive stylistic approach in this study sought answers to the following question. How can Life Is Elsewhere (1973) be read from a cognitive linguistic perspective? The findings confirmed the relevance of the cognitive poetic approach to the narrow reading of Milan Kundera’s works. Life Is Elsewhere (1973) is a merit of narrative control in that the author allows the reader to live the life story of a young poet, to appreciate his ups and downs, at the same time, read his philosophical ideas about life and his artistic control of the novel. Though a cognitively inspired approach might seem odd at the thematic level, for a purely hermeneutic researcher, the level at which both author and reader would exchange meaning from the text is catered for in the rich textual world of the novel. The latter sustains the universality of the works and confirms the suitability of the cognitive poetic framework to any piece of literature.

Narrative Control or Aesthetic Ideal: Cognitive Narrative Reading of Milan Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere

This study, which is inspired by Cognitive Poetics, aims to test the feasibility of its basic methods on the analysis of Milan Kundera’s novel Life Is Elsewhere (1973). Kundera’s style seems at first plain, but greater importance was given to his philosophical and psychological treatment of subjects than the narratological world that he creates. He brilliantly mixes many narrative techniques to expose his existential and aesthetic ideals. The aesthetic value of the novel studied under the cognitive stylistic approach in this study sought answers to the following question. How can Life Is Elsewhere (1973) be read from a cognitive linguistic perspective? The findings confirmed the relevance of the cognitive poetic approach to the narrow reading of Milan Kundera’s works. Life Is Elsewhere (1973) is a merit of narrative control in that the author allows the reader to live the life story of a young poet, to appreciate his ups and downs, at the same time, read his philosophical ideas about life and his artistic control of the novel. Though a cognitively inspired approach might seem odd at the thematic level, for a purely hermeneutic researcher, the level at which both author and reader would exchange meaning from the text is catered for in the rich textual world of the novel. The latter sustains the universality of the works and confirms the suitability of the cognitive poetic framework to any piece of literature.

Mediatization and journalistic agency: Russian television coverage of the Skripal poisonings

The 2018 Skripal poisonings prompted the heavy securitisation of UK-Russian relations. Despite the ensuing tight coordination between the Russian government and state-aligned television, this article argues that in today’s mediatised environment – in which social and political activities fuse inextricably with their own mediation – even non-democracies must cope with the shaping of global communications by media logics and related market imperatives. With a range of media actors responding to events, and to each other, on multiple digital platforms, no state could assert full narrative control over the Skripal incident. Counterintuitively, Russian journalists’ journalistic agency was enhanced by mediatisation processes: their state sponsors, seeking to instrumentalise reporting, delegated agency to journalists more attuned to such processes; yet commercial imperatives obliged them to perform independence and professional credibility. These competing forms of agency clashed with one another, and with that of the audiences engaging in real time with the journalists’ outputs, ultimately undermining the Russian state’s efforts to harness news coverage to its political and security goals. The article concludes that in today’s global communications environment, mediatisation substantially constrains the ability of non-democracies to micro-manage journalists’ treatment of major events relating to national security.