DOCSLIB.ORG

Using BERT for Qualitative Content Analysis in Psychosocial Online

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Using BERT for Qualitative Content Analysis in Psychosocial Online Using BERT for Qualitative Content Analysis in Psycho-Social Online Counseling Philipp Grandeit, Carolyn Haberkern, Maximiliane Lang, Jens Albrecht, Robert Lehmann Nuremberg Institute of Technology Georg Simon Ohm, Nuremberg, Germany {grandeitph64509, haberkernca76525, langma76539, albrechtje, lehmannro}@th-nuernberg.de Abstract large numbers of consulting communications (Na- varro et al. 2019). It is, however, possible to under- Qualitative content analysis is a systematic stand and describe the meaning of online counsel- method commonly used in the social sci- ing content with qualitative approaches (Bambling ences to analyze textual data from inter- et al. 2008, Gatti et al. 2016). views or online discussions. However, this method usually requires high expertise and This allows linking certain interventions of the manual effort because human coders need counselors to the reactions of the clients on a case- to read, interpret, and manually annotate by-case basis. But generalized statements on causal text passages. This is especially true if the relationships are not possible with the small num- system of categories used for annotation is ber of cases from qualitative studies (Ersahin & complex and semantically rich. Therefore, Hanley 2017). qualitative content analysis could benefit An analysis of large numbers of counseling greatly from automated coding. In this conversations using qualitative social research work, we investigate the usage of machine tools would help to better understand how success- learning-based text classification models ful online counseling works. Few related studies on for automatic coding in the area of psycho- social online counseling. We developed a these topics are available. Althoff et al. (2016) de- system of over 50 categories to analyze fined different models to measure general conver- counseling conversations, labeled over sation strategies like adaptability, dealing with am- 10.000 text passages manually, and evalu- biguity, creativity, making progress or change in ated the performance of different machine perspective and illustrated their applicability on a learning-based classifiers against human corpus of data from SMS counseling. Pérez-Rosas coders. et al. (2019) analyzed the quality of consulting communications based on video recordings. Their 1 Introduction automatic classifier used linguistic aspects of the content and could predict counseling quality with 1.1 Psycho-Social Online Counseling relatively good accuracy. However, neither of the Online counseling has developed into a full- mentioned approaches had the intention to recog- fledged psycho-social counseling service in Ger- nize the meaning of individual phrases even though many since the 1990s. Today, people can get advice this deep understanding is crucial to eliminate on a wide variety of psycho-social topics in web weaknesses in the education of online counselors forums and dedicated text-based counseling plat- (Luitgaarden et al. 2016, Niuewboer et al. 2014). forms. Online counseling is provided by psycho- In addition, systems could be developed to provide social professionals who have received special online advisors with practical suggestions for im- training in this method. Similar to face-to-face psy- proving their work. cho-social counseling, some aspects are known to make up high-quality online counseling, but there 1.2 Qualitative Content Analysis is few empirical evidence for special impact factors Qualitative social research is a generic term for (Fukkink et al 2009, Dowling & Rickwood 2014). various research approaches. It attempts to gain a Due to the complexity of the content, quantita- better understanding of people's social realities and tive approaches have not been able to analyze the to draw attention to recurring processes, patterns of meaning and significance of methodical patterns in 11 Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, pages 11–23 Online, November 20, 2020. c 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17 interpretation, and structural characteristics (Ker- these models can be used for qualitative content gel, 2018). analysis of online counseling conversations. One such research approach deals with the con- tent analysis of texts, the so-called qualitative con- 1.4 Research questions / Contribution tent analysis according to Mayring (2015). It is a Our first research question is whether it is possible central source of scientific knowledge in qualita- to train a model to identify psycho-social codes tive social research. It tries to determine the subjec- with a human-like precision. It also needs to be tive meaning of contents in texts. For this purpose, clarified whether a certain machine learning ap- categories are formed based on known scientific proach is particularly well suited for certain topics. theories on the topic and the discursive examina- It is assumed that this training does not work tion of the content. The definitions of those catego- equally well with all codes of the codebook. There- ries along with representative text passages are fore, the second question is which characteristics summarized in a codebook. codes must have in order to be learned particularly Then, human coders are coached in using the well or particularly poorly. codebook. The coaching process and the imple- In social science research, the discussion of dif- mentation of the coding require high human exper- ferent assessments of text passages is an important tise and manual effort because the coders must part of the scientific process. Therefore, the analy- read, interpret, and annotate each text passage. sis of codes incorrectly assigned by a model is an Thus, qualitative studies can only be applied to a important part of this work. The third research limited number of texts. Furthermore, it is hardly question is, therefore: What differences can be ob- possible to define the categories so precisely that served between the machine and human coding of all coders find identical results, as human language text passages? If the deviations are plausible, they is inherently ambiguous and its interpretation al- can be perceived as enriching the discursive pro- ways partly subjective. cess. Machine learning could be a solution to the di- lemma: If a trained model was able to categorize 1.5 Methodology and Structure of the Paper parts of the conversations according to a given For the experimental evaluation, the social scien- codebook with similar accuracy as a human, the tists in our interdisciplinary team created a code- time-consuming text analysis could be automated. book consisting of over 50 fine-grained categories and labeled over 10.000 text sequences of psycho- 1.3 Machine Learning for Qualitative Con- social counseling conversations (described in Sec- tent Analysis tion 2). The computer scientists then trained and Previous studies have shown that supervised ma- evaluated a support-vector machine and different chine learning is generally suitable for qualitative state-of-the-art models (e.g. ULMFit and BERT) content analysis (Crowston e.a. 2010, Scharkow on the provided data set (Section 3). Finally, the 2013). However, these studies used only a few cat- team investigated how human coders from the so- egories that could be distinguished relatively good, cial sciences perform in comparison to the BERT e.g. news categories like sports and business. model on a subset of the data (Section 4). Online counseling, in contrast, is a complex do- main. A detailed system of categories is necessary 2 Creating the Data Set to identify impactful patterns in counseling conver- sations. Additionally, many categories such as Online forums for psycho-social counseling pro- “Empathy” or “Compassion” are quite similar in vide a good basis for an empirical evaluation be- terms of the words used and can only be distin- cause they contain large amounts of publicly acces- guished if the model is able to somehow "under- sible data. For our study, we used posts from a Ger- stand" the meaning of the texts. man site for parent counseling. Here, parents who Recent neural models have drastically outper- have problems in bringing up their children are formed previous approaches for sophisticated seeking advice. Possible topics are, for example, problems like sentiment analysis and emotion de- drug abuse by the child or inadequate school per- tection (Howard&Ruder 2018, Devlin e.a. 2018, formance. A user can start a new thread with a Chatterjee e.a. 2019). We wanted to investigate if problem description. Professional counselors reply and discuss solution approaches with the initial 12 Figure 2: Example of three labeled sequences. The original texts are in German. In the end, we obtained a heavily imbalanced data set: The average number of samples per cate- gory is about 200, but the numbers vary greatly (see Appendix A for more details). For some cate- Figure 1: Illustration of the codebook with an gories in the area “Impact factors“, e.g. “Evalua- exemplary breakdown of the categories tion / understanding / calming“ or “Experience / explanation / example“ we obtained over 1000 user and others. Thus, each thread contains a series samples, whereas other categories including of posts with questions and suggestions about the “Change“ or “Suggestion to put oneself in a prob- initially described problem. Since we are espe- lem situation physically“ are barely represented. cially interested in counseling patterns, we focused Such an unequal distribution
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Personalizing Predictions of Video-Induced Emotions Using Personal Memories As Context
    A Blast From the Past: Personalizing Predictions of Video-Induced Emotions using Personal Memories as Context Bernd Dudzik∗ Joost Broekens Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology Delft, South Holland, The Netherlands Delft, South Holland, The Netherlands [email protected] [email protected] Mark Neerincx Hayley Hung Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology Delft, South Holland, The Netherlands Delft, South Holland, The Netherlands [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT match a viewer’s current desires, e.g., to see an "amusing" video, A key challenge in the accurate prediction of viewers’ emotional these will likely need some sensitivity for the conditions under responses to video stimuli in real-world applications is accounting which any potential video will create this experience specifically for person- and situation-specific variation. An important contex- for him/her. Therefore, addressing variation in emotional responses tual influence shaping individuals’ subjective experience of avideo by personalizing predictions is a vital step for progressing VACA is the personal memories that it triggers in them. Prior research research (see the reviews by Wang et al. [68] and Baveye et al. [7]). has found that this memory influence explains more variation in Despite the potential benefits, existing research efforts still rarely video-induced emotions than other contextual variables commonly explore incorporating situation- or person-specific context to per- used for personalizing
    [Show full text]
  • Affective Image Content Analysis: a Comprehensive Survey∗
    Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-18) Affective Image Content Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey∗ Sicheng Zhaoy, Guiguang Dingz, Qingming Huang], Tat-Seng Chuax, Bjorn¨ W. Schuller♦ and Kurt Keutzery yDepartment of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, USA zSchool of Software, Tsinghua University, China ]School of Computer and Control Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China xSchool of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore ♦Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK Abstract Specifically, the task of AICA is often composed of three steps: human annotation, visual feature extraction and learn- Images can convey rich semantics and induce ing of mapping between visual features and perceived emo- strong emotions in viewers. Recently, with the ex- tions [Zhao et al., 2017a]. One main challenge for AICA is plosive growth of visual data, extensive research ef- the affective gap, which can be defined as “the lack of coinci- forts have been dedicated to affective image content dence between the features and the expected affective state in analysis (AICA). In this paper, we review the state- which the user is brought by perceiving the signal” [Hanjalic, of-the-art methods comprehensively with respect to 2006]. Recently, various hand-crafted or learning-based fea- two main challenges – affective gap and percep- tures have been designed to bridge this gap. Current AICA tion subjectivity. We begin with an introduction methods mainly assign an image with the dominant (average) to the key emotion representation models that have emotion category (DEC) with the assumption that different been widely employed in AICA.
    [Show full text]
  • Thematic Content Analysis (TCA) 1 Descriptive Presentation of Qualitative Data
    Thematic Content Analysis (TCA) 1 Descriptive Presentation of Qualitative Data Rosemarie Anderson, PhD 2 Professor, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (www.itp.edu) Consultant, Wellknowing Consulting (www.wellknowingconsulting.org) Introduction. Thematic Content Analysis (TCA) is a descriptive presentation of qualitative data. Qualitative data may take the form of interview transcripts collected from research participants or other identified texts that reflect experientially on the topic of study. While video, image, and other forms of data may accompany textural data, this description of TCA is limited to textural data. A number of software programs are available to automate the labeling and grouping of texts and are especially useful in the analysis of numerous transcripts. Generally speaking, though, Microsoft Word can be used effectively for most TCAs and the steps are described below. A satisfactory TCA portrays the thematic content of interview transcripts (or other texts) by identifying common themes in the texts provided for analysis. TCA is the most foundational of qualitative analytic procedures and in some way informs all qualitative methods. In conducting a TCA, the researcher’s epistemological stance is objective or objectivistic. In teaching Qualitative Research Methods, I describe TCA as a form of “low hovering” over the data. The researcher groups and distills from the texts a list of common themes in order to give expression to the communality of voices across participants. Every attempt reasonable is made to employ names for themes from the actual words of participants and to group themes in manner that directly reflects the texts as a whole. While sorting and naming themes requires some level of interpretation, “interpretation” is kept to a minimum.
    [Show full text]
  • A Content Analysis of Client Hope in Psychotherapy Sessions
    Pepperdine University Pepperdine Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations 2008 A content analysis of client hope in psychotherapy sessions Stacie Lyn Cooper Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/etd Recommended Citation Cooper, Stacie Lyn, "A content analysis of client hope in psychotherapy sessions" (2008). Theses and Dissertations. 10. https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/etd/10 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Pepperdine Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Pepperdine Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF CLIENT HOPE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY SESSIONS A clinical dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Psychology by Stacie Lyn Cooper November, 2008 Susan Hall, J.D., Ph.D. – Dissertation Chairperson This clinical dissertation, written by Stacie Lyn Cooper under the guidance of a Faculty Committee and approved by its members, has been submitted to and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PSYCHOLOGY June 27th, 2008 Faculty Committee: ___________________ Susan Hall, J.D., Ph.D., Chairperson ____________________ David Elkins, Ph.D. ____________________ Thomas Greening, Ph.D __________________________
    [Show full text]
  • A CONTENT ANALYSIS SPANNING 30 YEARS of MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP Camille Velarde
    University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Communication ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 7-1-2014 A CONTENT ANALYSIS SPANNING 30 YEARS OF MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP Camille Velarde Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds Recommended Citation Velarde, Camille. "A CONTENT ANALYSIS SPANNING 30 YEARS OF MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP." (2014). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds/83 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Camille R. Velarde Candidate Communication & Journalism Department This thesis is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Thesis Committee: Dr. Tamar Ginossar, Chairperson Dr. Judith White Dr. Stephen Littlejohn ii A CONTENT ANALYSIS SPANNING 30 YEARS OF MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP By Camille R. Velarde B.A., Communication, University of New Mexico, 2009 THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Communication The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2014 iii Dedication “I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.” ― Frida Kahlo This thesis is dedicated to my sister, Merica.
    [Show full text]
  • Death: a Qualitative Content Analysis of Counseling Journals, 1986–2016
    Minnesota State University, Mankato Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato All Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects Projects 2019 Death: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Counseling Journals, 1986–2016 Aaron Suomala Folkerds Minnesota State University, Mankato Follow this and additional works at: https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds Part of the Counseling Psychology Commons, and the Counselor Education Commons Recommended Citation Folkerds, A. S. (2019). Death: A qualitative content analysis of counseling journals, 1986-2016 [Doctoral dissertation, Minnesota State University, Mankato]. Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/942/ This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects at Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. Death: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Counseling Journals, 1986–2016 By Aaron Suomala Folkerds A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education In Counselor Education and Supervision Minnesota State University Mankato, MN June 2019 June 19, 2019 Death: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Counseling Journals, 1986-2016 Aaron Suomala Folkerds This dissertation has been examined and approved by the following members of the student’s committee. Dr. Diane Coursol Advisor Dr. Jacqueline Lewis Committee Member Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Gazeta De Ámsterdam: History and Content Analysis
    ARTÍCULOS Historia y comunicación social ISSN: 1137-0734 http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/hics.62466 Gazeta de Ámsterdam: History and content analysis Javier Díaz Noci1 Recibido el: 22 de mayo de 2018. / Aceptado: 31 de mayo de 2019. Abstract. One of the most interesting Spanish-language newspapers of the second half of the seventeenth century was published by a Jewish printer, David de Castro Tartas, and appeared in Amsterdam at least from 1672 and at least until 1702, allegedly with continuity, under the title Gazeta de Amsterdam. It was partially based in translations of news items from other Dutch-language newspapers of its time. Nevertheless, it included news items presumedly collected in Castro’s (and, in the latest years, Manuel Texeira’s) office. The weekly newspaper was addressed to a community of Jewish who were born as Catholics in Portugal and Spain, emigrated to the Republic of the Netherlands due to religious tolerance. David de Castro Tartas launched another Italian-language newspaper,Gazzetta d’Amsterdam. Since new issues of both newspapers have been found recently, we propose to complete the history of Castro’s activity as newspaper editor, not only printer. Using content analysis, we try to underline the importance of this Spanish (and Italian) language printer and editor in the reproduction of material translated and adapted from other newspapers and in the production of news items originally managed in his office. Keywords: Early modern history; Journalism history; Spanish language journalism; Newspaper history [es] Gazeta de Ámsterdam: Historia y análisis de contenido Resumen. Uno de los periódicos más interesantes en lengua española durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVII fue publicado en Ámsterdam por un impresor judío, David de Castro Tartas, quien dio a la luzGazeta la de Amsterdam, ciertamente con continuidad, entre al menos 1672 y hasta al menos 1702, si bien en los últimos años cedió el testigo a Manuel Teixeira.
    [Show full text]
  • Unit 2 Content Analysis : Quantitative and Qualitative Aspects
    UNIT 2 CONTENT ANALYSIS : QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE ASPECTS Structure 2.0 Objectives 2.1 Introduction 2.2 History of Content Analysis 2.3 Use of Content Analysis 2.4 Types of Content Analysis 2.4.1 Quantitative or Conceptual Analysis 2.4.2 Qualitative or Relational Analysis 2.4.3 Advantages of contint Analysis 2.4.4 Disadvantages of Content Analysis 2.5 Evaluating Web Documents 2.6 Summary 2.7 Answers to Self Check Exercises 2.8 Keywords 2.9 References and Further Reading -. 2.0 OBJECTIVES After studying this unit you will able to: understand what is content? analyze a document using quantitative as well as qualitative techniques; and evaluate a web document using various techniques. 2.1 INTRODUCTION Content analysis is a tool to identify the occurrence of concepts in an exposition. It is nothing but quantification of text or its meaning. An exposition can be an article, book, lecture, interview, conversation, Web page or any other reading material. To conduct a content analysis of any text, the text maybe coded or broken down, into manageable meaningful categories on a variety of levels- word, word sense, phrase, sentence, or theme-and then examined using any one of the two basic methods of content analysis viz. conceptual analysis or relational analysis. 2.2 HISTORY OF CONTENT ANALYSIS Content analysis is an important job for developing a product in the library parlance, particularly, when we think of bringing information consolidation packages for the user community. It not only consists of analysis of text matter but also the idea that the text carries.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Do Universities Need Either Happiness Education Or Religion Education?
    Why do Universities Need either Happiness Education or Religion Education? -Jeong-Kyu Lee, Ph.D.- <Abstract> This article examines why universities need either happiness education or religion education. To discuss this study systematically, four research questions are stated. First, what are the concepts of religion and happiness? Second, what is the relation between religion and happiness? Third, why do universities need happiness education or religion education? Last, what are the implications for Korean universities? In order to defend the research questions, a descriptive content analysis method will be utilized with a cross cultural approach. As for the limitations of this study, the subject of happiness is adjusted the focus of two lenses of religion and education. The field of religion is limited to three major religions, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity, which greatly influencing Korean religion and culture. This paper is especially focused on The Analects in Confucian Classics, Dahmmapada in Buddhist Sutras, and The Gospels in the Christian Bible. Additionally, education is directed the lens to South Korean higher education. One of research results is that educational administrators and policy makers in Korean higher education should design “Teaching & Research Happiness Frameworks,” providing useful “happiness curricula” and “religious programs” for their students to boost their life satisfaction and well-being. *Completion Date: Sep. 16, 2019. *This academic article is a descriptive position paper. *Key Words: higher education, Korean education, happiness education, religion education, happiness, religion, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity I. Introduction The purpose of this article is to examine why universities need either happiness education or religion education. To discuss this study systematically, four research questions are stated.
    [Show full text]
  • Defining Content Analysis 3
    Defining 1 Content Analysis Distribute _____________________________________An Introductionor Content analysis is one of the most popular and rapidly expanding techniques for quantitative research. Advances in computer applications and in digital media have made the organized study of messages quicker and easier . but not automatically better. This book explores the current optionsPost for quantita - tive analyses of messages. Content analysis may be briefly defined as the systematic, objective, quan- titative analysis of message characteristics. It includes both human-coded analyses and computer-aided text analysis (CATA). Its applications can include the careful examination of face-to-faceCopy, human interactions; the analy- sis of character portrayals in media venues ranging from novels to online videos; the computer-driven analysis of word usage in news media and politi- cal speeches, advertising, and blogs; the examination of interactive content such as video gaming and socialNot media exchanges; and so much more. Content analysis has been applied to many areas of inquiry. It has been used to investigate naturally occurring language (Markel, 1998), newspaper coverage of the greenhouseDo effect (Miller, Boone, & Fowler, 1992), letters to the editor (Perrin & Vaisey, 2008), and how characters of different genders are shown on TV (Greenberg, 1980). It has been used in such highly specific studies as those analyzing Turkish elementary school math books (Özgeldi & Esen, 2010), greenway plans in northwest Indiana (Floress et al., 2009),
    [Show full text]
  • The Quest for Today's Totemic Psychology: a New Look at Wundt
    The Quest for Today’s Totemic Psychology: A New Look at Wundt, Freud and Other Scientists Yueh-Ting Lee,1 Xiangyang Chen,2 Yongping Zhao,3 and Wenting Chen4,∗ 1 Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale 2 Department of Psychology, Hunan Normal University, China 3 Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, China 4 College English Department, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China otems are symbols or representations of human’s affiliations with, and/or categorizations of, animals, T plants and inanimate objects. Totemism is related to fundamental human belief systems based on totems. Investigating totems and totemism psychologically is a unique way to explore human minds. We have critically examined Wundt, Freud and many other scholars and scientists who made distinguished contributions to scientific research on totems and totemism almost in the past two centuries –i.e., totemic psychology, which is the study of our mind’s categorization and affiliation in the human and natural world today. Understanding and appreciating their totemic psychology can help psychologists today enhance their understanding in other fields—e.g., ecological and environmental psychology, biological psychology, cognitive psychology, personality, social and ethnic psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, cultural psychology, and religious or spiritual psychology. Unfortunately, recent data from a content analysis via PsycInfo and a cross-cultural survey study (N=273) showed that well-trained psychologists around the world and psychology students in the United States and in China are unfamiliar with Wundt and Freud’s totemic contributions to psychology today. The implications, benefits, and lessons of totems and today’s totemic psychology are discussed here.
    [Show full text]
  • A Dialogic Search for the Depictions of Death on the Covers of 41 Picture Books About Death and Dying
    DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Death On The Cover: A Dialogic Search For The Depictions Of Death On The Covers Of 41 Picture Books About Death And Dying Csaba Osvath University of South Florida 1 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Death On The Cover: A Dialogic Search For The Depictions Of Death On The Covers Of 41 Picture Books About Death And Dying Introduction “Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere.” (Baruch Spinoza) Investigating the artistic representations of death on the covers of selected children’s picture books might be viewed as a futile or anemic academic exercise; a sort of misguided and forced project, engendered by a hurried decision and a desperate desire to meet certain curricular requirements. My added resentment toward, or perhaps my periodic abandonment of this project was due to a life circumstance that brought the reality of decay into a tangible, unavoidable closeness. The building that houses the life of my family’s embodied existence started to collapse, due to structural decay. This material death, expanding under the painted covers of our exterior walls of our home, no unlike a sudden emergency call, had pushed me away from a deskbound analysis of picture books to fight the real and really dreadful prognoses of a possible calamity. However, I soon discovered that facing death or decay through a privileged place of aliveness, armed with viable tools is never futile. Thus, I am encouraged by Spinoza’s advice, as I am staring down the signs of death on our construction site, as well as the artistic depictions of death on the printed pages, stating that this endeavor calls for, “not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.” 2 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Purpose As such, the primary purpose of this study is to examine and analyze the cover art of 41 picture books in order to understand how death is portrayed/represented through visual or linguistic expressions.
    [Show full text]