8. Conversation and Text Generation - [E1] 1. Bail, Christopher .A. 2012.

[JunsolKim]

Post questions here for this week's exemplary readings: 1. Bail, Christopher .A. 2012. “The fringe effect: Civil society organizations and the evolution of media discourse about Islam since the September 11th attacks.” American Sociological Review 77(6):855-879.

[GabeNicholson]

Interesting article! Also replicates what we see today with the news continuously filled with the most fringe and outlandish characters being interviewed or written about. It seems that there is a tradeoff between news networks gaining more views from publishing crazy fringe ideas, and the more boring—yet accurate—news coverage.

[isaduan]

I enjoyed the author's ecological perspective! My question is about sampling: the author sampled from 3 sources, but how to evaluate whether the sample is 'good/representative' enough of the discursive field?

[NaiyuJ]

I think one shortcoming of the software search is that it can directly find what we defined as "Islam" and "Muslims", but may systematically ignore the shared and overlapping but nuanced histories such as things related to "Arab", “Palestinian,” or “Lebanese", which are also the same content we should pay attention to.

[LuZhang0128]

I really like Bail's papers since he does not use very sophisticated methods but proposes fascinating theories. Here, I'm concerned about how he coded "fear or anger." Probably by using models like BERT, as well as social media data like Reddit or Twitter, Bail can scale up his research and conclude more about organizations' behaviors.

[hshi420]

The author studied a tragic event and the display of fear and/or anger of fringed organizations. I wonder if we can further study the level of "tragic" and the power of emotions? For instance, if there's an earthquake with no casualties, will the effect of "fear and anger" be less significant for fringe organizations?

[Emily-fyeh]

I also had the same question about the selection of data--how do we claim our data choice in event study (such as this paper) is representative and "adequate" for the whole incident? But overall this paper is really well written!

[ttsujikawa]

I understand the relation between media and civil society organizations but it is still unclear stories behind this phenomena. I think this is because the paper is missing one important agent, consumers.