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Item Connecting Forecast and Warning: A Partnership Between Communicators and Scientists(Springer Nature Switzerland AG on behalf of the Met Office, 2022-06-21) Anderson CL; Rovins J; Johnston DM; Lang W; Golding B; Mills B; Kaltenberger R; Chasco J; Pagano TC; Middleham R; Nairn J; Golding BIn this chapter, we examine the ways that warning providers connect and collaborate with knowledge sources to produce effective warnings. We first look at the range of actors who produce warnings in the public and private sectors, the sources of information they draw on to comprehend the nature of the hazard, its impacts and the implications for those exposed and the process of drawing that information together to produce a warning. We consider the wide range of experts who connect hazard data with impact data to create tools for assessing the impacts of predicted hazards on people, buildings, infrastructure and business. Then we look at the diverse ways in which these tools need to take account of the way their outputs will feed into warnings and of the nature of partnerships that can facilitate this. The chapter includes examples of impact prediction in sport, health impacts of wildfires in Australia, a framework for impact prediction in New Zealand, and communication of impacts through social media in the UK.Item Rethinking female representation in superhero(ine) media through audiences’ digital engagement : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2024-09) de Meneses, Bruna MariaIn recent years, debates about gender and feminism have become more easily accessible due to digital platforms such as social media. These debates often intertwine with films and television series that attempt to present characters and stories in consonance with claims for better representation. Superhero(ine) live action films and television are one example of this, with the representation of gender in this media becoming a topic of online discussion. But how are audiences engaging with these representations and this online discussion? In this study I undertook qualitative research with two groups of fans of the superhero genre from Brazil and New Zealand, using a combination of methods: digital diaries, interviews, and focus groups. Through this research, I sought to understand more about their experiences with such texts, and how they interpret them. I argue that the participants’ engagement with superhero(ine) media and related online discussion leads to questioning, critiquing, and learning about gender representation and feminism. This starts with superhero(ine) media, but exceeds it, reaching participants’ own life experiences. In this sense, the online culture surrounding superhero(ine) media acts as a form of digital feminism, providing a platform for consciousness-raising. This digital feminism has a transnational dimension, whilst also being inflected slightly differently by the national contexts in which the participants are situated, including their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, any consciousness-raising comes with the caveat that the participants cannot completely escape the neoliberal logics and postfeminist sensibility underpinning the production and promotion of superhero(ine) media.Item Bryde’s whale (Balaenoptera edeni) occurrence and foraging behaviour along the east coast of Australia(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-10-09) Pirotta V; Cagnazzi D; Dixon B; Millar S; Millar J; Pickering G; Butcher PA; Stockin KA; Peters KJDespite their global occurrence in warm-temperate waters and their suspected non-migratory lifestyle, Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera edeni spp.) are considered the least-known large baleen whale species. In Australian waters, information on their distribution, ecology and behaviour is scarce. This study documents Bryde’s whale occurrence and foraging behaviours along the Australian East Coast using opportunistic citizen science sightings via drone aerial photography, vessel and land-based observations. We observed foraging in both shallow (seafloor visible, beach and breaking waves present) and deep waters. We observed a range of foraging behaviours including lunge feeding (exhibited by individual whales and in pairs), sub-surface and surface skim feeding (shallow waters only) and described multispecies associations. We describe a potentially novel feeding behaviour in shallow waters, where Bryde’s whales are feeding directly within or behind the surf break (shallow water surf feeding). We quantify the presence of mother-calf pairs in Australian waters, highlighting the use of these waters for potential calving. This study provides insights into Bryde’s whale occurrence and foraging behaviour in both shallow and deep waters of eastern Australia.Item Dares in the virtual : the construction of social media challenges : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand(Massey University, 2023-12-30) Nazari, VictoriaSocial Media Challenges (SMC), which are structured activities completed by participants with the engagement posted to social media, have resulted in injury and even death. Conceptualised as a social phenomenon, SMC involve a range of stakeholders, including participants, consumers, journalists and researchers. This article-based thesis explores how different stakeholders construct dangerous SMC and what the implications of these constructions are for participants. News reports, academic material, and YouTube comments were analysed using thematic discourse analysis grounded in a social constructionist paradigm. A qualitative systematic review and evidence synthesis was used to critically explore the existing research on dangerous SMC. The review indicates SMC to be a relatively understudied, complex, and dynamic phenomenon. Yet explanations for participation tend to be developmental, psychological, and individualistic, imposing a range of common, acontextual explanations for youth behaviour. The subsequent three analysis chapters consider constructions of risk, participants, reasons for participation, and attributions of responsibility. The referencing of SMC as ‘challenges’ and as forms of fun and entertainment are portrayed as misleading by some stakeholders. Instead, the danger involved in participation is emphasized. Dangerous SMC are constructed by most stakeholders as an undesirable youth activity demanding intervention and prevention. Risk, however, is predominantly understood as involving physical harm with emotional consequences seldom being addressed. Participants are portrayed in diverse ways; as asinine inferior specimens deserving harm, as neurologically immature, as psychologically vulnerable, or as competitive fun-seekers. Self-identified participants, in contrast, speak of forced participation and of participation utilised as a coping strategy. A range of groups are identified as responsible for addressing risk, including social media companies, parents, and participants themselves. Attempts to control participation, such as the use of age restrictions are demonstrated to be by passable. Largely absent from discourse around risky SMC are the larger structural and contextual issues, which draw attention to dynamics specific to social media platforms and the financial investment of companies in SMC proliferation. There is a silence expressed in the form of ineffective and limited interventions that externalise responsibility onto individual participants and their families.Item Social media: Where customers air their troubles—How to respond to them?(Elsevier España, S L, 2021-11-26) Sigurdsson V; Larsen NM; Gudmundsdottir HK; Alemu MH; Menon RGV; Fagerstrøm ADissatisfied customers often use social media to voice their complaints effectively, and firms strive to find solutions about how to respond to publicly visible service failure posts. We add to the emerging literature on complaint handling via social media by examining how complaining customers on a company's Facebook page prefer to be treated. We built on the multi-attribute product concept and conducted four sequential studies in the air transport industry. Studies 1–3 were conducted to identify the service failures with a high magnitude of negative utilities as judged by consumers. The studies also served to build a service failure scenario involving relevant service recovery attributes related to the entire complaint process. The results showed that lost baggage had the highest magnitude of negative utility. The attributes that consumers found most appropriate in the case of lost baggage were timeliness and type of initial response, communication modes, compensation type, and types of information throughout the complaint process. Study 4 took this further by putting participants into the scenario to analyze their preferences, segments, and profiles. The findings presented in this study have practical implications for airlines and consumers because the results reveal four distinct consumer segments and indicate the presence of heterogeneous preferences for communication modes and interaction types across segments.Item Wisdom of the crowds : developing a social media platform for socially responsible research : a thesis by publication. EMBARGOED to 6 September 2025.(Massey University, 2023) Yu, JiThe recent proliferation of social media and the underlying technical applications have provided important opportunities for researchers to obtain wisdom-of-the-crowds (WoC)-type data to address their research questions for the benefit of society. In particular, complex or wicked social problems, e.g., COVID-19-like issues, may need more attention from researchers. As the contemporary world is filled with uncertainty and highly unpredictable, such kinds of problems are increasingly emerging, which require appropriate attention from researchers as well as new ways to tackle them. However, most currently available social media applications have not been designed with researchers as their primary audience, and issues, such as ethical concerns and data acquisition restrictions, are also of concern with current applications. To better fulfil the needs of researchers, and address the challenges, this study designed and developed an experimental and research-oriented social media platform, Wisenet, for socially responsible research (SRR), which refers to studies that are conducted with consideration for the benefit of society at large. Wisenet is positioned as a specialized platform for researchers, enabling them to generate, collect, and analyze WoC-type data in a research-oriented environment. The mission of the platform is to provide valuable, accessible, ethically sourced data and analysis for researchers and to facilitate participants’ interest, interaction, and cognitive skills while maintaining the values of ethical principles and social responsibility. Wisenet reaches and engages target participants – people over 50 – to obtain their perspectives on current significant social problems. People over 50 have been selected as the target group because their relatively high level of accumulated life experience makes them more likely to be able to provide meaningful insights on current social issues. Further, offering such insights may require them to use, reflect on, and synthesize their wisdom, knowledge, and experience, and these can be a pathway to develop or maintain their cognitive capabilities. Therefore, participating in Wisenet can be beneficial for both people over 50 and researchers. A design science research methodology (DSRM) approach is employed, which includes six stages: problem identification and motivation, defining the objectives of a solution, design and development, demonstration, evaluation, and communication. Socio-technical theory and WoC provide the main theoretical underpinnings of this study, and along with SRR principles, guide both the purpose of the study and the design and development of the platform. Both qualitative and quantitative data can be generated and collected from the platform, and advanced data analytics methods (e.g., sentiment analysis and topic modelling) are employed to analyse data for WoC. The demonstration and evaluation phases provide evidence of the efficacy, effectiveness, usefulness and ease of use of this newly developed platform. For the contributions, this study mainly provides an artefactual contribution, i.e., Wisenet. It is a comprehensive information system artefact, integrating the technology, social, and information artefacts. Additionally, this study contributes to theoretical understanding by applying design principles (i.e., interaction, understanding, trust and ethics, and simplicity) in the design and development of the artefact. While some of these principles may be found discussed in design literature, this study takes a comprehensive approach by integrating them to guide the design and development of the platform, and they can be used to design similar artefacts in the future. For the research implications, Wisenet can be generalized as a class of artefact, which is a type of online platform focusing on generating WoC-type data for various purposes. Future research may develop a corresponding design theory to create this class of artefact. As for practical implications, this study mainly demonstrates a proof-of-concept, which shows the functional feasibility of Wisenet, and partially demonstrates the proof-of-value level implication, in which stakeholders (i.e., researchers) can use Wisenet to create value. In addition, Wisenet could also have important applications for both business and government; for example, in the development of policies and processes that affect people over 50. Wisenet also has practical implications for commercial social media providers. It emphasizes the idea that instead of concentrating solely on profits, providers may also consider promoting ethical, trustworthy, and socially responsible online environments for the benefit of society and their companies.Item Chinese social media representation of Taiwanese legalisation of same-sex marriage : a queer analysis of the Weibo discussion : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Journalism at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2023) Xiao, FeiTaiwanese Judicial Ruling on Same-sex Marriage which announced prohibition of same-sex marriage unconstitutional on 24th, May 2017 has caused interesting responses on social media in Mainland China. This research investigates how legalisation of same-sex marriage legalisation as well as gender and sexual identities were both represented on Chinese Mainland’s social media in the event of Taiwanese legalisation of same-sex marriage from a queer-theory-based perspective with attention to the complexities of sexual citizenship rights as well as exclusions in globalisation. Previous scholarship in non-Western social media public spheres and in LGBT and queer representation often left out such local complexities and global disparity. User generated content on Weibo during this time when Taiwanese attempted to achieve marriage equality was collected by a computer programme. A mixed-method research design was applied. Quantitative and qualitative content analysis as well as semi-structured interviews were conducted. The research contributed to the knowledge about social media representations of gender and sexual identities and of same-sex marriage in relation to global and local complexities in a non-Western Chinese Mainland context. The limitations in the Mainland social media public spheres led to a mostly one-sided supportive opinion expressions about Taiwanese legalisation of same-sex marriage. Identities were analysed at their intersections. The heteronormative stereotyping and assumptions as well as homonormative depoliticisation were found in the representations of gender and sexual identities. The findings show the influences of globalisation, especially the global LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) movement. Also, the studied Weibo discussion found to reflect the Chinese Mainland context in locally concerned issues such as marriage, identities’ disclosure and queer visibility. The study suggests the universalised content of sexual citizenship has harmed local persons’ agency in collective innovation of localised activism on social media public spheres in non-Western context. Future communication studies can confront and examine heteronormativity more directly by investigating the heteronormativity and its manifestations including family ideals across cultures, especially in non-Western contexts, to help the development of localised strategies for inclusion.Item Multi-source multimodal deep learning to improve situation awareness : an application of emergency traffic management : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Emergency Management at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2023) Hewa Algiriyage, Rangika NilaniTraditionally, disaster management has placed a great emphasis on institutional warning systems, and people have been treated as victims rather than active participants. However, with the evolution of communication technology, today, the general public significantly contributes towards performing disaster management tasks challenging traditional hierarchies in information distribution and acquisition. With mobile phones and Social Media (SM) platforms widely being used, people in disaster scenes act as non-technical sensors that provide contextual information in multiple modalities (e.g., text, image, audio and video) through these content-sharing applications. Research has shown that the general public has extensively used SM applications to report injuries or deaths, damage to infrastructure and utilities, caution, evacuation needs and missing or trapped people during disasters. Disaster responders significantly depend on data for their Situation Awareness (SA) or the dynamic understanding of “the big picture” in space and time for decision-making. However, despite the benefits, processing SM data for disaster response brings multiple challenges. Among them, the most significant challenge is that SM data contain rumours, fake information and false information. Thus, responding agencies have concerns regarding utilising SM for disaster response. Therefore, a high volume of important, real-time data that is very useful for disaster responders’ SA gets wasted. In addition to SM, many other data sources produce information during disasters, including CCTV monitoring, emergency call centres, and online news. The data from these sources come in multiple modalities such as text, images, video, audio and meta-data. To date, researchers have investigated how such data can be automatically processed for disaster response using machine learning and deep learning approaches using a single source/ single modality of data, and only a few have investigated the use of multiple sources and modalities. Furthermore, there is currently no real-time system designed and tested for real-world scenarios to improve responder SA while cross-validating and exploiting SM data. This doctoral project, written within a “PhD-thesis-withpublication” format, addresses this gap by investigating the use of SM data for disaster response while improving reliability through validating data from multiple sources in real-time. This doctoral research was guided by Design Science Research (DSR), which studies the creation of artefacts to solve practical problems of general interest. An artefact: a software prototype that integrates multisource multimodal data for disaster response was developed adopting a 5-stage design science method framework proposed by Johannesson et al. [175] as the roadmap for designing, developing and evaluating. First, the initial research problem was clearly stated, positioned, and root causes were identified. During this stage, the problem area was narrowed down to Emergency traffic management instead of all disaster types. This was done considering the real-time nature and data availability for the artefact’s design, development and evaluation. Second, the requirements for developing the software artefacts were captured using the interviewing technique. Interviews were conducted with stakeholders from a number of disaster and emergency management and transport and traffic agencies in New Zealand. Moreover, domain knowledge and experimental information were captured by analysing academic literature. Third, the artefact was designed and developed. The fourth and final step was focused on the demonstration and evaluation of the artefact. The outcomes of this doctoral research underpin the potential for using validated SM data to enhance the responder’s SA. Furthermore, the research explored appropriate ways to fuse text, visual and voice data in real-time, to provide a comprehensive picture for disaster responders. The achievement of data integration was made through multiple components. First, methodologies and algorithms were developed to estimate traffic flow from CCTV images and CCTV footage by counting vehicle objects. These outcomes extend the previous work by annotating a large New Zealand-based vehicle dataset for object detection and developing an algorithm for vehicle counting by vehicle class and movement direction. Second, a novel deep learning architecture is proposed for making short-term traffic flow predictions using weather data. Previous research has mostly used only traffic data for traffic flow prediction. This research goes beyond previous work by including the correlation between traffic flow and weather conditions. Third, an event extraction system is proposed to extract event templates from online news and SM text data, answering What (semantic), Where (spatial) and When (temporal) questions. Therefore, this doctoral project provides several contributions to the body of knowledge for deep learning and disaster research. In addition, an important practical outcome of this research is an extensible event extraction system for any disaster capable of generating event templates by integrating text and visual formats from online news and SM data that could assist disaster responders’ SA.Item Analysing underpinning patterns in social media posts that promote fat stigmatisation : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) in Information Technology, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand(Massey University, 2022) Wanniarachchi, Vajisha UdayangiSocial media offers users an online platform to freely express themselves; however, when users post opinionated and offensive comments that target certain communities, this could instigate hatred towards them. With the global increase in obese/fat populations, social media discourses laced with fat hatred have become commonplace, leading to much fat stigmatising content being posted online. This research aims to investigate the patterns of fat stigma, and how female and male genders are positioned in fat stigmatising discourses that are being conducted over social media. To achieve this objective, a methodological framework is proposed for unearthing underlying stigmatising patterns prevalent in social media discussions, with specific focus on fat stigma. Methods incorporating natural language processing techniques such as sentiment analysis and topic modelling, along with discourse analysis have been described for classifying users’ emotions and comprehending the stigma patterns embedded in social big data. The framework has been applied to weight-based textual data, extracted from Twitter and Reddit, to identify emergent gender-based themes, emotions and word frequency patterns that underpin the fat stigmatising content posted online. The experiential consequences of being considered fat across both genders have been analysed with objectification theory. The findings from this study have provided a holistic outlook on fat stigmatising content that is posted online which can further inform policymakers in planning suitable props to facilitate more inclusive social media spaces. This study showcases how lexical analytics can be conducted by combining a variety of data mining methods to draw out insightful subject related themes that add to the existing knowledge base; therefore, has both practical and theoretical implications.Item Exploring organisational dissent in the online setting : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Organizational Communication at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2022) Chen, HuiOnline organisational dissent is an emerging phenomenon in our digital world. It occurs when employees express disagreement or contradictory opinions about organisational practices, policies, and operations via the internet. Organisational dissent research has investigated face-to-face dissent, but online employee dissent is at an early stage. However, online organisational dissent can improve effective digital and cross-cultural communication. Miss Chen explored the digital communication issue and built the scholarship of conceptualizing online dissent. The main findings and implications include: a) illustrated face is an explanatory mechanism for organisational dissent; b) organisational assimilation serves as a conflict-ridden process for dissent c) virtual organisational dissent relates more confidence in technology than fear of approaching communication; d) employees used the online platform to negotiate face in organisational dissent. This project contributes to our understanding of how online dissent is influenced by different psychological and cultural factors such as face concerns and anxiety in computer-mediated communication.
