Neologismen in Coronatijd – een steekproef

In times of crisis language is often enriched with new words called neologisms. After all, extraordinary circumstances call for new words. This also applies to the corona crisis. For example, the Dutch have had to deal with the anderhalvemetersamenleving and other corona measures. Moreover, the crisis has caused a lot of “corona damage”, both economically, psychologically and physically. The vaccination campaign has set the stage for a return to normality. This route also provides necessary neologisms. This article takes a look at which neologisms were used on one day in a particular newspaper. Since most neologisms consist of compound nouns, the sample will focus on these only. The De Volkskrant online edition, dated 16 April 2021, will be used for this purpose, using the articles obtained after entering the search term corona. After a short introduction to neologisms and the different types of compositions, the neologisms obtained are then categorised according to different composition categories and according to corona themes. Finally, a conclusion is drawn based on the results obtained.

Die Kritische Online-Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis (1917–1929)

Eugenio Pacelli, the later Pope Pius XII, was already considered a leading diplomat of the Holy See when he served as nuncio in Germany. Using the critical online edition of his nuncial reports, digital humanities methodologies will be used to explore which topics dominated his reports, the diplomatic style of his nunciature and whether Pacelli adapted the form and content of his reports to the various recipients. To this end, quantitative methods of textual analysis such as the frequency distribution of types in relation to tokens as well as recourse to key terms and multi-word units (N-grams) will be employed. Moreover, methods from the field of corpus linguistics, information retrieval (TF-IDF) and quantitative stylometry (contrastive analyses with Burrows’ Delta and Zeta) are applied to evaluate both stylistic and content-related issues.

Jürg Frey, String Quartet no. 4. Quatuor Bozzini. MaerzMusik live-stream, 25 March 2021

Jürg Frey is at the point where the premiere of his String Quartet no. 4 at the online edition of MaerzMusik this March had the feel of the release of the newest film from a cult director. For my generation, this has largely meant someone like Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers: every two to four years a new movie with sameness (recurring actors) and differences (genre) comes out, and with it a new opportunity to spend an interval of time with something carefully crafted by a unique mind with one foot in the real world and one foot out of it. We dutifully check them out, interested not just in the ‘next big thing’ but also in the moment surrounding this bit of culture.

Structural and Organizational and Content Characteristics of Media Discourse on the Example of Web-Site «The Guardian».

The article considers the issues of media discourse on the example of the web-site «The Guardian» as a product of convergent journalism. Structural and organizational as well as content peculiarities of this electronic edition are described on the basis of the integrative methods of discourse analysis. These methods include formal criteria, criteria of multimedia technologies, extra- and intralinguistic criteria. The analysis of the representation of these criteria allowed to reveal its organizational structure and design; the degree of presence and severity of the phenomenon of convergence; the specificity of content via the realization on the site a range of discourse categories such as audience, communicative purpose, self-identification, space, time, intertextuality, intereventness, intersubjectivity. The category “stylistic range” reflects the text organization of the online edition.

Children's (Mis)understanding of the Balance Beam (Online Edition)

The balance-scale task, proposed by Inhelder and Piaget, illustrates children understanding of weight-distance relationships. Piaget used the clinical interview method in order to investigate children's reasoning. Over the last five decades, Siegler's Rule-Assessment Approach has been used to explain children reasoning in the balance-scale task according to rules children would use to solve the task. However, this approach does not take into account some key perceptual properties of the task. This study evaluates whether different task demands would alter children's errors. Forty children (twenty children aged 4–5 years and twenty children aged 9–10 years) predicted the movement of both arms of 16 balance-scale problems administered online. Nine 4–5-year-olds produced non-plausible responses whereas none of the 9–10-year-olds provided non-plausible responses. These results seem to indicate a basic misunderstanding of the scale from some younger children, one that eludes traditional measures used with this task.

Training experiences in cyberspace and creative processes in social isolation

This article was prepared from the conference that the author gave at the opening of ANIMA UDESC - Internacional Seminar of Studies in the Arts of Puppetry - Online Edition, onMay 21, 2021. The conference had as its theme Training experiences in cyberspace and creative processes in social isolation, and addressed aspects of the link between PuppetTheater and the pandemic, and reflections based on the author's work with her students in thefirst six months of the pandemic.