Browsing by Author "MacCall, Steven L."
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Item Cross-Cultural Analysis of HPV Vaccine Sentiment and Misinformation on X: a Comparative Study of Iran and the United States(University of Alabama Libraries, 2025) Shirani Lapari, Samaneh; Britt, Brian C.This dissertation examines how public sentiment and misinformation about the HPV vaccine differ between the United States and Iran. Despite the vaccine's proven efficacy in preventing HPV-related cancers, global uptake remains below public health targets, with cultural values, misinformation, and media environments shaping public perceptions in complex ways. This study applies Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) and machine learning models (mBERT for English; ParsBERT for Persian) to more than half a million tweets (≈ 491,000 U.S., ≈ 13,000 Iran) collected via Sprinklr from 2015 to 2024. Sentiment patterns are examined across key themes such as vaccine safety, side effects, trust in health authorities, and moral or religious concerns. Support Vector Machine (SVM) models identify misinformation, while network analysis detects influential sources and dissemination structures. In the United States, discussions are polarized but spread across many voices, led by influencers and advocacy groups, reflecting an individualistic, low power-distance culture. In Iran, misinformation originates more often from lay users, circulating within smaller, collectivist networks shaped by higher power distance and greater uncertainty avoidance. Misinformation spikes often occurred around major health announcements or policy changes. These results show that cultural context strongly shapes how misinformation and sentiment evolve on X. This study indicates the value of real-time social media monitoring for detecting shifts in public discussion. It also recommends culturally adaptive health communication strategies that emphasize community partnerships, narrative framing, and early intervention to strengthen HPV vaccine confidence across diverse societies.Item Historical Text Datafication and Loss: Computational Recovery of Typographical Layout Logic on an RDF Graph Featuring ML Methods(Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), 2022-10-29) Liu, Huapu; MacCall, Steven L.Item How Much Statistical Data can be Recovered from Alabama Football History?(2019) MacCall, Steven L.; Liu, Huapa; Anderson, Melissa; University of Alabama TuscaloosaWe presented on the results of a pilot project that investigated the recoverability of historical statistical play-by-play data from the documentary football collection at the Paul W. Bryant Museum at the University of Alabama using Wikibase as our data repository. The recovery of data from the historical record for purposes of reconstructing the past in digital form is an active area of research across many areas, such as the recovery of climate data from historical ships’ logbooks. Our crowdsourced approach included volunteers who transcribed documentary materials in order to “mine” statistical play-by-play data from the 1992 and 1961 Alabama football season.Item Printed books versus e-book formats: a study using Niche Gratification Theory(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Cowan, Christi; Lowrey, Wilson Hugh; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThe study evaluates how college students interact with different book formats. It addresses factors such as time and location to measure reading activity across printed books, e-readers, tablet devices and computer e-books. A survey of 603 college students measured factors within Niche Gratification Theory and provides a hierarchy of market strength that explains how the formats are being used. Printed books were found to have the best market strength, following by e-readers, tablet devices and computer e-books. The study also presents potential benefits of reading in each of those formats, offering reasons that students may enjoy or appreciate a format for specific purposes, such as using printed textbooks to study and take notes or an e-reader for relaxation. Results should inform the publishing industry on the status of e-books. Suggestions are given for adapting formats in light of the reading habits found here. Results suggest publishers should not make an immediate jump to e-books but should instead ease them into the marketplace slowly, as more people begin to use digital reading devices.Item Toward distant reading of the New Testament commentary: exploring bibliographical and structured textual data(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Adams, Richard Manly; MacCall, Steven L.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis study argues for distant reading techniques as a new form of understanding the genre of the New Testament commentary. Though it is a dominant form of New Testament scholarship, the commentary is a difficult genre to understand, due to the size of the corpus and the close reading techniques common in Biblical studies. The scholar who wants to understand the genre, therefore, is forced to choose representative samples, a subjective process that distorts understanding of the genre. This study introduces a reading technique that looks for patterns of development over this large corpus, distant reading that will help scholars understand the changes in the commentary over time and help identify places where close reading is warranted. To introduce an alternative form of reading this study demonstrates two modes of reading the genre. The first is a mining of the bibliographical metadata to demonstrate trends in the publication patterns and sizes of New Testament commentaries. The second is to structure commentaries based on their treatment of individual chapters and verses of New Testament texts, as a way of charting the priorities of given commentators over time. The study concludes with an invitation to librarians to work to better prepare the corpus of the New Testament commentary for distance reading.Item Virtue ethics and the narrative identity of American librarianship 1876 to present(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Burgess, John; Bennett, Beth Susan; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThe purpose of this study is to propose a means of reconciling the competing ideas of library and information science's identity, thereby strengthening professional autonomy. I make the case that developing a system of virtue ethics for librarianship would be an effective way to promote that reconciliation. The first step in developing virtue ethics is uncovering librarianship's function. Standard approaches to virtue ethics rely on classical Greek ideas about the nature of being to determine function. Since classical ideas of being may no longer be persuasive, I introduce another approach to uncover librarianship's function that still meets all of the criteria needed to establish a foundation for a system of virtue ethics. This approach is hermeneutical phenomenology, the philosophical discipline of interpreting the meaning given to historical events. Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic circle technique and Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative intelligence are used to engage in a dialogue with three crises in the history of American librarianship. These pivotal events are the fiction question, librarian nationalism during World War I, and the dispute between supporters of the "Library Bill of Rights" and social responsibility. From these crises, three recurring themes become apparent: the tendency to reconcile idealism and pragmatism, the intent to do good for individuals and society, and the role of professional insecurity in precipitating the conflicts. Through emplotment of these themes, an identity narrative for librarianship emerges. My finding is that librarianship's function is the promotion of stability-happiness. This is the dual-process of supporting dominant socio-cultural institutions as a means of protecting librarianship's ability to offer the knowledge, cultural records, and avenues for information literacy that can improve lives and facilitate individuals' pursuit of happiness. In the conclusion, the ethical implications of having stability-happiness as the profession's function are considered. It includes a discussion of how librarianship's narrative identity could be applied to develop an ethical character for the profession and how such a character, combined with knowledge of function, might address persistent problems of race and gender disparity in library and information science.