By 2022, social media platforms had become more prominent access points to news than traditional news media platforms. Although news media also draw benefits from online platforms, they find themselves in an increasingly asymmetric relationship that appears to harm journalists and new media’s ability to generate revenues online. Remedying the uneven playing field between big tech and news media has been a recurring ambition of European media policy. In the context of literature on corporate political activity, this chapter investigates how three big tech companies, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, have positioned themselves in relation to EU policymaking that aims to strengthen the rights of journalists, news media and press publishers online. The chapter argues that while these big tech companies primarily seek to preserve their own business models and reputations, the media policy domain also reveals a split in their lobby narratives. Due to lower exposure to reforms in digital media policy, Microsoft has been less opposed to, and in fact has campaigned for, stronger protection for news media against digital platforms.

This chapter examines the underexplored role of affective doubt in contemporary political polarisation and marginalisation. We distinguish between two forms of affective doubt: doubting feelings and feeling doubtful. The first involves questioning the appropriateness or authenticity of emotional responses, while the second refers to doubt itself as an embodied feeling of tension and uncertainty. We analyse how affective doubt operates antagonistically across structural, interpersonal and intrapersonal levels, contributing to polarisation through phenomena such as emotion policing and gaslighting. Drawing on cases from Black Lives Matter protests to experiences of internalised homophobia, we demonstrate how doubt can be weaponised to silence marginalised voices and undermine political agency. However, we conclude by noting doubt’s potential for critical resistance and emancipatory politics, suggesting that affective doubt, while often oppressive, may also foster critical awareness of our emotional situatedness.

How might we read Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet of place and landscape? Dunbar wrote his poetry in an era where local color, regionalism, and realism were dominant forces in American literature, and his poetry engages in complex ways with these generic traditions. At the same time, Dunbar’s poetry, particularly his writing in non-dialect verse, is deeply influenced by his lifelong study of and engagement with British Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, and the modes of environmental representation through apostrophe, lyric meditation, and balladic narrative central to these traditions. I read Dunbar’s explorations of place and landscape in dialogue with these intersecting influences, in and through which Dunbar develops a sustained reflection on struggle, displacement, violence, and unfreedom as the fundamental conditions of Black experience in the post-Reconstruction era United States. Less oriented by local specificity or realist detail, evocations of landscape and place in Dunbar’s work engender abstract and self-reflexive meditations on terrains of anti-Black violence and pain as well as sites of retreat and resilience in the face of these conditions.

My records were transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The treatment was decidedly postmodern, compared to the University of Tokyo's modernist approach. I also discuss some of the other points of comparison, along with some racist incidents the girls had to deal with.

Chapter 1 assesses the evidence beyond the charter corpus for literary activity in Kent, Mercia and Wessex in the mid-ninth century. This evidence comprises five categories: surviving manuscripts with contemporary English provenances, letters, inscribed objects, the events of the 850s, and Asser’s account of King Alfred’s childhood engagement with books. The importance of understanding survival patterns and the nature of the evidence is stressed, particularly because attempts were rarely made to preserve letters for posterity, and because different ways of engaging with books and inscribed objects generated varyingly large fingerprints for twenty-first-century eyes. Asser’s famous account, furthermore, needs to be approached with caution, though it does in several ways align with the impression of literary activity that one gets from mid-ninth-century sources. A good deal remains unknown about many of the contexts in which literary activity took place, but it is nonetheless clear that the written word was conspicuous in many mid-ninth-century social settings, despite the likelihood that in some contexts resources for new literary productions were limited. Much of this literary culture was fundamentally social, and it was often inspired by international exchange.

This book concludes with a summary of key types of machine translation use discussed in the project. The conclusion outlines ethical principles of multilingual AI use including the potential or intended legal value of a message, the stability of the information and its potential to be reused, and the need for any uses of machine translation to be transparent and as far as possible consensual and cybersecure. The conclusion also examines some of the challenges posed by the broader project. It offers a reflection on the question of accountability and on the difficulties of living well with technology in environments that elevate cost efficiency above other values.

In 1790, a printer in Barcelona published a booklet to guide the reader in eight days’ worth of prayers for Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1491–1556) starting on his feast day (31 July). Known as both the founder of the Society of Jesus and the preparer of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius had been canonized in 1622, a procedure in which the pope together with the Congregation of Sacred Rites (hereafter CSR) and the Roman Rota determined a candidate’s sainthood. Witness testimonies supplied evidence of the exemplary virtues and the miracle-working of an aspiring saint. While a global religious order, the Society or Jesuits as they are also known, experienced an immense change of fortune by 1790. At the time of the booklet’s publication, the organization was outlawed in Spanish dominions and suppressed by papal decree. The veneration of Ignatius, however, persisted as seen in this small tome, which included a rudimentary image to accompany the text containing prayers and snippets of biographical detail. This was one of many specimens from a genre published regularly during the eighteenth century in Spain and Mexico.

Pointing is used across cultures, across languages and throughout the lifespan. It is transmitted to and produced by children through multimodal interlanguaging in their everyday collective and individual experience. This chapter explores the use of pointing in multiparty and multi-activity interactions in deaf-signing and hearing families. The family dinner data includes adults and children at different ages. A collection of sequences is presented that illustrate the use of pointing to present participants in a specific situation which has the characteristics of involving 1) multiparty conversations, 2) co-activity (interlanguaging and eating/serving food as well as other actions) and 3) the socialization by adults of their children to language and food-related practices. The focus is on analyses on the referential and interactive functions of pointing, and in particular pointing at family dinner participants. The chapter highlights differences and similarities between hearing and deaf-signing adults and children’s uses of pointing.

In this chapter, we adapt two concepts from the theory of ordinary graphs to the setting of signed graphs. A signed graph is called integral if its spectrum consists entirely of integers. Two signed graphs are said to be cospectral if they are switching non-isomorphic yet share the same spectrum. In both cases, the term ‘spectrum’ refers to the eigenvalues of a prescribed matrix associated with the signed graph. Integral signed graphs are studied within the class of graphs with vertex degree at most four, with a complete classification provided for those with degree at most three. Numerous sporadic constructions of cospectral signed graphs are considered, alongside two basic operations transferred from the domain of ordinary graphs: GM-switching and WQH-switching, both of which produce signed graphs with identical spectra. As a central result, a pivotal and distinguishing construction is presented that consistently generates cospectral signed graphs, representing a fundamental phenomenon unique to the domain of signed graphs. A survey of signed graphs that do not have a cospectral pair is given at the end of the chapter.

This introduction offers an overview of the evolving role of artificial intelligence in civil dispute resolution, discussing current developments against the background of broader technological, regulatory and institutional contexts. It examines the dual forces of genuine innovation and persistent hype, clarifies the book’s open and technology-neutral definition of AI, and articulates an equally broad conception of civil dispute resolution encompassing adjudicative but also consensual, formal but also informal mechanisms. The introduction also outlines the book’s comparative ambition and structural organisation, ultimately framing AI as a transformative yet contested actor whose integration into justice systems demands careful, context-sensitive governance.

By the end of January my treatment was over, and successful. I went back to work, too soon really, and this chapter recounts some of the struggles with my body and colleagues.

The Object Choice Task (OCT) is widely used to assess an individual or group’s ability to comprehend human deictic cues, most commonly, pointing cues. Since its inception in the 1990s, findings from OCT studies have been used as the basis for claims about species-wide capacities in understanding human communicative gestures, and for the proliferation of theories regarding their phylogenetic histories. However, the extent to which such theories can be supported by the data on which they stand is questionable due to a number of procedural and methodological inconsistencies in cross-species applications of the OCT. This chapter reviews the findings of OCT studies, with a particular focus on nonhuman primates and domestic dogs, discusses the systematic inconsistencies in sampling and procedural aspects of the OCT across the literature, and emphasizes the necessity for improved testing and reporting in the conducting of OCT studies.