‘Perhaps this is not fiction’: The discursive construction of national and regional identities in Belgium’s public television broadcast hoax on Flemish independence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article sets out to reveal and evaluate the strength and scope of those units of media discourse that are connoted by identity. More specifically, it seeks to demonstrate which discursive strategies the media adopt in the case of a hoax news broadcast that announced ‘the end of Belgium as we know it’ in order to construct and stage the opposition between Walloon region-building (‘Us’) and Flemish nation building (‘Them’). For this purpose, it will focus on lexico-grammatical choices, co-textual deployment of rhetorical devices and socio-referential correlations. Relating these observations to social theory on national identity (specifically, Anderson’s historical materialist approach and Smith’s work on ethnosymbolism), as well as relevant sociopolitical perspectives, will allow for a demonstration of the ways in which discursive strategies exploit the symbiosis between language as a functional means of communication and as the carrier of a shared set of values to construct national and regional identities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".