cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p47
title: Anti-vaccination Conspiracy Theories and Theorists: Analysis of a Corpus of Offline and Online Argumentative Texts in the Guardian and the Daily Mail

description: The present paper explores the discourses of and about anti-vaccination conspiracy theories in two national British newspapers, the Guardian and the Daily Mail, following a corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Studies approach. The analysis focuses on the frequency and usage of the lemma conspiracy in articles dealing with the controversy surrounding the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine in the UK; both traditional, printed genres like editorials and letters to the editor and newer, social media genres like comments posted on the two newspapers' Facebook pages are investigated. The results show that conspiratorial beliefs concerning the science and politics of vaccination are widely discussed both offline and online; however, the noun phrases conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist have a marked negative connotation and are mainly used by their opponents as insults. Supporters may avoid or refute these labels and the stigma attached to them, or they may reclaim their use to underline their feeling of superior knowledge compared to the general population, who has allegedly been brainwashed by the establishment's propaganda. Moreover, the analysis of conversations unfolding on Facebook confirms the antagonising quality of such interactions, where the interlocutors' only aim is to defend their pre-existing point of view from the other side's attacks. Discourses of and about anti-vaccination conspiracy theories thus deviate from scientific and health communication to express strong ideological positionings and ultimately to create and defend identities.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p69
title: Science-related Populism and Social Actors in Martin Geddes' Early Representations of COVID-19. A Case Study

description: This article focuses on five blogs written by British conspiracy theorist Martin Geddes, available on his personal website. The blogs were written from March to December 2020 and represent an early testimony of COVID-19 scepticism. The article aims to analyse Geddes' conspirational counter-narrative of the coronavirus syndemic by focusing on four elements: the generic characteristics of the corpus, Geddes' construal of ethos, his texts' connection to the theoretical framework of science-related populism and, lastly, the representation of select social actors in the corpus and how such representation sustains Geddes' conspirational arguments. These elements provide insight into the idiom of conspiracy theorists and their construction of counter-information and counter- knowledge.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p87
title: "Don't Mask the Truth". Analyzing Anti-Mask Discourses Advanced by a 'Trusted Expert' and Activists Acting On- and Offline

description: This paper investigates how health-related disinformation and conspiracy theories (CTs) about masks were constructed in the US in the roughly eighteen months since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic. It examines the anti-mask discourses propagated by different actors using different media – renowned conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, users who signed an online petition against school mask mandates, and anti-mask activists speaking at Board of education meetings – to create a more comprehensive view of the processes involved in the delegitimization of scientific, political, and mediatic authority, and the development and perpetuation of alternative truths. These discourses were analyzed principally by means of critical discourse analysis (CDA), and specifically the strategies of self- and other-presentation (Reisigl, Wodak, 2001; van Dijk 2000; Wodak 2011) and of (de)legitimation (Reyes 2011; van Leeuwen 2007). Findings suggest that these anti-mask actors leveraged extant conspiratorial beliefs and distrust of authorities to foster anti-mask sentiment, cast doubt on the interests served by key political and scientific figures, and question the veracity of the information imparted by left-leaning news networks, government institutions, and the scientific community, undermining trust in health recommendations.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p115
title: Discourses of Public Health-related Controversies. A Comparison between the Conspiracist Video Plandemic and the VIOXX Medical Scandal

description: Conspiracy theories related to public health have been proliferating since the outbreak of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The release of the viral Plandemic video interview, where former National Cancer Institute scientist Judy Mikovits alleges that US public health institutions have planned and profited from the pandemic, falls within this phenomenon. The appeal of Plandemic potentially draws on documented episodes of unethical behaviour on the part of scientists and health institutions, raising questions as to what analogies and differences may exist between the representation of public health conspiracy theories and that of actual cases of medical science misconduct. To address these questions, the present study applies a qualitative, discourse analytical approach to compare Plandemic with a 2005 PBS interview to FDA Associate Director of Drug Safety-turned-whistleblower David Graham, whose work was instrumental in uncovering serious and sometimes fatal health risks linked to the use of painkiller Vioxx, withdrawn in 2004. Drawing on the assumption that both Mikovits and Graham used language to promote their standpoints, which inevitably involves a degree of persuasion and ideology, the analysis focuses on linguistic and textual features that can be used to convey ideological messages – such as lexical choices, actor representation, recurring themes, coherence and evidentiality – identifying and comparing them across the two interviews. Results reveal some points in common, for instance in the representation of involved actors, as well as profound differences involving, for example, argumentation and evidentiality strategies. The concluding section thus elaborates on how these results raise further questions concerning how close and credible the two interviews may be perceived by recipients who do not engage in fact-checking.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p145
title: Institutional Communication Concerning the COVID-19 Pandemic. A Critical Discourse Analysis of WHO Director-General's Speeches

description: During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, institutional communication has been playing a crucial role. For instance, WHO (World Health Organization) has been involved in criticism concerning information related to the origins of the pandemic delivered or not in due time.1 Starting from this assumption, the study is aimed at investigating the WHO Director-General communication concerning news related to the pandemic through the analysis of speeches delivered by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, from 22nd January to 29th May 2020. From a methodological perspective, the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis will be adopted with particular emphasis on semantic / syntactic relations. Furthermore, the representation of social actors will be explored in order to better understand the roles played by both WHO and China in the news concerning the pandemic. In short, this work will try to explore the processes involved in the communication concerning the pandemic and the representations of the roles played by both WHO and China in order to understand legitimation strategies enacted by these two social actors.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6826193
title: Antimicrobial susceptibility data for six lactic acid bacteria

description: Raw data from antimicrobial susceptibility testing of six lactic acid bacteria.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p159
title: Rumor has it. The COVID-19 Infodemic as the Repository of Conspiracy

description: Access to the right information, at the right time and through trustworthy sources, is not only critical but necessary, especially during health-related emergencies such as the current COVID-19 pandemic which has forced billions of people into isolation. During this worldwide phenomenon, digital access to information has been at its highest, but it has also posed new challenges such as the surge of an infodemic (Zarocostas 2020) or an overabundance of information generated by the practices of eliciting and disseminating half-truths and conspiracy theories especially via independent or alternative media outlets (Del Vicario et al. 2019). By focusing on the US media landscape, this study intends to explore the critical workings of such platforms, and provide evidence of how they support and intensify the infodemic phenomenon by acting as seed sources or primary online providers of (mis)information with direct access to secondary sources such as social media accounts and other knowledge-sharing platforms. In particular, the study argues that these seed sources appeal to the constitutional principle of freedom of expression to justify a conspiratorial representation of COVID-19 disseminated in its many variants, namely fake news, rumors, scams, stigma, magical cures, and alarming conspiracy claims. By drawing from critical discourse studies, and social semiotics theory (van Leeuwen 2005), and by adopting a multimodal discourse analysis approach (Kress, van Leeuwen 2020; Machin, Mayr 2012; Ledin, Machin 2018), the study investigates a corpus of linguistic and other semiotic resources collected from the London Real and its affiliated Digital Freedom Platform, both held responsible for the dissemination of the highly contested Plandemic video series containing conspiratorial content accused of influencing public opinion (Del Vicario et al. 2016; Kulshrestha et al. 2017).
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6826192
title: Antimicrobial susceptibility data for six lactic acid bacteria

description: Raw data from antimicrobial susceptibility testing of six lactic acid bacteria.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p191
title: A Mixed-method Corpus Approach to the COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

description: Social media have contributed to the recent proliferation of online discussions on the COVID-19 vaccines. The paper explores the evolution of this debate by analysing an ad hoc corpus of tweets (over 5.5 million words) collected from March 15th to April 14th, 2021. We deploy sentiment, emotion, and emoji analysis to uncover the users' affective states, perceptions, and reactions regarding the COVID-19 vaccination. Our results show that vaccine sentiment is influenced by real-time news and by other information that circulates on the Internet, displaying polarizations on both the negative and the positive extremities of the sentiment scale. The emotion analysis indicates that trust issues (either trust or mistrust) regarding the COVID-19 vaccination prevail in our data, amounting to 21.29% of the overall emotional valence of tweets. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis suggests that the infodemic relies primarily on strong negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and disgust). Finally, the emoji analysis reveals that, besides iconicity functions, emoji act as boosters of emotions, contributing to the semantic dimension of the Twitter debate on the COVID-19 vaccination.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p225
title: The Racist Pandemic. A Semantico-Pragmatic Study of Anti-Asian Overtones in COVID-19-related Twitter Discourse

description: 2019 saw the emergence of a new human pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, which causes a disease currently known as COVID-19. There are, however, other names which expose the Asian origin of the virus. These ways of reference – although discouraged by the scientific community – still remain in frequent use in various COVID-19-related discourses. Such names explicitly point to the geographical place of origin of the virus, but at the same time are likely to provoke associations and solidify pre-existing stereotypes about Asians as well as strengthen misconceptions about the virus itself. The intention of the use of terms such as Chinese virus may be purely referential, but they are, nonetheless, marked with accusatory or downright racist overtones. The present paper is maintained within the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework (van Dijk 1993), as CDA aims specifically to examine the ways in which discourses shape power relations, maintain social stigmas, perpetuate stereotypes and widen inequalities. We use CDA as a framework for conducting a semantic analysis of expressions such as Asian virus, Chinese virus, Sinovirus or Wuhan virus used on Twitter. Specifically, we intend to select the usages that are unequivocally intentional and whose aim is not only to emphasise the geographical origin of the virus, but also to justify blaming China for the global pandemic that SARS-CoV-2 eventually has caused. We have found that potentially harmful names such as Chinese virus have been used intentionally and are accompanied by even more blatant cases of defamatory and accusatory language targeting the Chinese. It is even more significant, as the proliferation of anti-Asian hate speech has culminated in a serious aftermath in the form of anti-Asian violence, especially in the US.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p245
title: Pour une relecture de la querelle du XVIIIe siècle sur l'inoculation. Analyse des procédés discursifs utilisés par Diderot

description: This article proposes discursive and argumentative reflections that are particularly concerned with the differences between Diderot and D'Alembert on the question of inoculation, one of the most important subjects of their time. The polemic is articulated around several axes: pragmatic, when it focuses on the modalities of experimentation; epistemological, when it attacks the intellectualism that antecedes mathematical axioms to their benefits for society; personal, with direct accusations against the opponent. The first two parts illustrate the scientific context in which the main ideas arise and circulate, drawing a complex chessboard in which two works by Denis Diderot are focused. The third part, more substantial, studies the discursive procedures used to make more effective the attacks which target the mathematical abstraction of which Jean Le Rond D'Alembert is the leader.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p259
title: Unhealthy COVID-19 Communication: A Morphosynctactic Analysis of German AfD Party's Counter-discourse

description: According to a recent statistic, in Germany 56% of the electors of the right- wing populist political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) believe in conspiracy theories (Roose, 2020). Moreover, with reference to COVID-19, 25% of the German adult population think that Bill Gates is more powerful than the government in Germany (Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung, 2020). Against this background, it does not come as a surprise that the health discourse has been strongly politicized by the AfD party, whose electors are – in a good number – prone to welcome pseudoscientific health information and to oppose all measures which have been taken to stop the COVID-19 pandemic. This contribution investigates to what extent AfD's COVID-19 communication exhibits conspiratorial or misinformative traits and how morphologic and syntactic mechanisms are used to deliver health counter-discourse. The analysis will be carried out on a corpus of official parliamentary speeches given by AfD parliamentarians in the period from March 2020 to April 2021 and on a corpus of Facebook posts which appeared in the AfD's profile in the same time span. This makes it possible to draw a diamesic comparison between two different communication channels used by the AfD. It will be shown that the morphological analysis is particularly insightful to explore hostile counter-discourse. The possibilities offered by German affixation and compounding are explored also in a comparative perspective. Moreover, syntactic aspects such as personal deixis, the use of moods and deontic modality, as well as clausal linking will be examined to understand how syntactic mechanisms have been used to deliver pseudo factual narratives and oppose official health discourse.
DOI: 10.3886/e119802v1-123120
title: Data and Code for: Network Structure and the Aggregation of Information: Theory and Evidence from Indonesia

description: We use unique data from over 600 Indonesian communities on what individuals know about the poverty status of others to study how network structure influences information aggregation. We develop a model of semi-Bayesian learning on networks, which we structurally estimate using within-village data. The model generates qualitative predictions about how cross-village patterns of learning relate to network structure, which we show are borne out in the data. We apply our findings to a community-based targeting program, where citizens chose households to receive aid, and show that the networks that the model predicts to be more diffusive differentially benefit from community targeting<br><br>
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p331
title: Tackling Online Disinformation. The Construction of 'Trustworthiness' and 'Best Practices' in the European Commission Discourse on COVID-19

description: Over the last few decades, misleading healthcare information and deceptions with false claims, conspiracy theories (CTs) and consumer fraud have endangered public health on a global scale. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a substantial flow of false information and unceasing attempts by conspirators to influence debates in the official discourses, breeding on the fertile ground of people's most basic anxieties and the present-day social and economic uncertainty. This paper investigates the discourse of the European Commission on disinformation in order to achieve institutional legitimation through the linguistic and discursive construction of 'trustworthiness', 'credibility', and 'transparency'. The analysis considers the documents produced by the European Commission over the last few years (2018- 2021), to tackle the discourse that supports alternative views on official science. The results of the analysis reveal the EU discursive process of conceptualising 'verifiably false or misleading information' as 'public harm', while distancing it from the EU's fight against disinformation' that is discursively constructed as 'the protection of the EU values'. In particular, the investigation will show how the lexical and phraseological interaction discursively removes the harmful potential of conspiracy theories activists, legitimises massive control measures as the most effective way to guarantee freedom of expression and pluralistic democratic debate, and empowers the EU's image as the shield protecting the European citizens' awareness and societal resilience (Flowerdew, Richardson 2018).
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p361
title: COVID-19 and the Global Health Threat of "V accine Hesitancy". Analyzing anti-vax Discourses in Brazilian Portuguese and in German on Twitter

description: On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic. Along with that, discussions regarding vaccination have revived anti-vaccine movements around the globe. Social media play a key role in the spread of disinformation and conspiracy narratives (Maci 2019). Having that in mind, this study's objective is to describe discursive patterns and arguments of anti-vax campaigns posted on Twitter in Brazilian Portuguese and in German in January 2021 under the hashtags #vacina and #impfung. This piece of research relies on Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (KhosraviNik 2018) and made use of a software-based corpus linguistic approach to identify recurrent themes and textual patterns in anti-vax campaigns. Linguistic resources were examined with a focus on the Transitivity System proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004, 2014). The comparative analysis has shown that the socio-political context in which the users formulate the Tweets clearly shapes the German and Brazilian Portuguese anti-vax Tweets. At the same time, similarities were found in terms of the discursive patterns of anti-vax arguments. These include a strong focus on interrogative statements and a de- and recontextualization of discourses originally put forward by (historically) marginalized groups to construct anti-vax activists as victims of a "dictatorship of pro-vaccine policies". To address issues such as "vaccine hesitancy", it is necessary to understand arguments and ideologies that support and are spread through anti-vax movements. Analyzing anti-vax discourses in Brazilian Portuguese and German has been a first step to provide new insights from a context-sensitive and language- comparative perspective.
DOI: 10.1285/i22390359v47p395
title: Colophon
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.13440218
title: TAR_regions

description: Tartrate utilization (TAR) regions
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.13440218.v1
title: TAR_regions

description: Tartrate utilization (TAR) regions
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6826215
title: Data for 'Experimental Determination of a Single Atom Ground State Orbital through Hyperfine Anisotropy'

description: This folder contains the raw data and scripts used for the paper <em>'Experimental Determination of a Single Atom Ground State Orbital through Hyperfine Anisotropy'</em>.
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.17105267
title: Genome assemblies and annotation files

description: In the present work, draft whole-genome sequences were obtained for 11 All. vitis strains. <i>De novo</i> genome assemblies were performed using the SPAdes genome assembler (Galaxy Version 3.12.0+galaxy1). The genome sequences were annotated using Prokka (Galaxy Version 1.13). These files were used as an input for analyses performed in our study.
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.17105267.v1
title: Genome assemblies and annotation files

description: In the present work, draft whole-genome sequences were obtained for 11 All. vitis strains. <i>De novo</i> genome assemblies were performed using the SPAdes genome assembler (Galaxy Version 3.12.0+galaxy1). The genome sequences were annotated using Prokka (Galaxy Version 1.13). These files were used as an input for analyses performed in our study.
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.17125568
title: Pan-genome analyses - GET_HOMOLOGUES and GET_PHYLOMARKERS

description: Outputs of pan-genome analyses performed by GET_HOMOLOGUES pipeline.The GET_HOMOLOGUES analysis was run on the following datasets:- 14 All. vitis species complex strains and four Allorhizobium spp. (All. oryziradicis N19T, All. taibaishanense 14971T, All. terrae CC-HIH110T and All. undicola ORS 992T)- All. vitis sensu stricto, All. ampelinum and Allorhizobium sp. Av2<br>- All. vitis sensu stricto and All. ampelinum strains<br>
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.17125568.v1
title: Pan-genome analyses - GET_HOMOLOGUES and GET_PHYLOMARKERS

description: Outputs of pan-genome analyses performed by GET_HOMOLOGUES pipeline.The GET_HOMOLOGUES analysis was run on the following datasets:- 14 All. vitis species complex strains and four Allorhizobium spp. (All. oryziradicis N19T, All. taibaishanense 14971T, All. terrae CC-HIH110T and All. undicola ORS 992T)- All. vitis sensu stricto, All. ampelinum and Allorhizobium sp. Av2<br>- All. vitis sensu stricto and All. ampelinum strains<br>
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.17125571
title: Core-genome phylogeny - GET_PHYLOMARKERS

description: Outputs of core-genome analyses performed by GET_PHYLOMARKERS pipeline.The GET_PHYLOMARKERS analysis was run on the following datasets:- 69 <i>Rhizobiaceae</i> strains, including 14 strains of <i>All. vitis</i> and 55 reference <i>Rhizobiaceae</i> strains (vitis2)- extended dataset that also included 34 <i>All. vitis</i> genomes available from GenBank but not yet published in peer-review journals by sequence depositors (vitis1)