Everyday Virtuality: A Multimodal Analysis of Political Participation and Newsworthiness

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, this is an interesting and novel article. It is supported by three complementary studies. In addition, it reports findings from the Ecuadorian context and this is not common. However, it can be improved by attending to some amendments:

-Further engagement with sources and recent literature (last 5 years) is required. Especially articles from indexed journals.

-Section 2.1 does not clearly describe how 20,071 replies and 96,260 retweets were filtered and the final working corpus was composed of tweets and retweets (n=3,255).

-In the third study (line 256 approx) it is necessary to know how many examples were analyzed.

-In the results it would be interesting to incorporate visual examples of memes (from 3rd study).

-In the final discussion it is necessary to return to a) the research objectives of the article and b) make references to research limitations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment with the point-by-point response and the final document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The article does not meet the standards to be published in a quality journal. The objectives are not clearly stated, nor is the methodology clearly detailed. There is no review of the literature consistent with what is being proposed, the results are not clearly stated and there is no careful language. It should be reconsidered

Author Response

Please see the attachment with the point-by-point response and the revised document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The article presented is very interesting and provides knowledge about political discourse in Latin America. However, there are some problems that make it difficult to accept. I believe that these problems can be solved. That is why I encourage the authors to think a little about the comments in order to make the appropriate changes in the paper. However, and unfortunately, I believe that the article cannot be accepted as it currently stands.

In line 39 and 40 it states "Until the 1970s, language was studied as a static linguistic system, without variation 39 and in some way, decontextualized." I humbly believe that this does not conform to reality. The works of Charles Sanders Peirce analyzed language from a dynamic perspective. Before Peirce, Gottfried Leibniz also conceives of the sign in motion, as a vehicle. I suggest that the authors could approach to the interesting book by Mauricio Beuchot La semiotica. Mexico, FCE where a brief summary of these and other ideas is made. I suggest, in addition, that you clarify this sentence a little.

On page 2, first line, when it is stated: "The social context is described as a multidimensional semiotic space" it would be convenient to indicate that this is due to the fact that the social context is a symbolic environment and, as Marcus (1990) indicated, symbols operate in a multidimensional space.

Marcus, S. (1990): "Symbols in a multidimensional space", Semiotics 1990, 115-126 https://doi.org/10.5840/cpsem199050 

Please check the line where it says "13orientation".

In section 1.2., the authors reference to phenomenology, but there is no mention of any work by Husserl, or Alfred Schütz. I believe that, at the very least, it should be indicated that social phenomenology began with Schütz and has developed as a result of his work.

Figure 1 is in Spanish, please put it in English.

In section 2, Materials and Methods, they refer to what they have done, but make no mention of how they use phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. Reading the introduction it seems that they are going to use these approaches but, reading this section it is not clear to me. Similarly, they talk about CDA and MDA but do not indicate in this section how they have used it. I think it would be necessary to adjust this aspect. This aspect is extremely important. In addition, later they also talk about hermeneutics. All this generates confusion and is detrimental to the article. It would be necessary to modify all this and clarify it well.

The discussion is very brief. It would be advisable to explain in more detail the implications of the results obtained and to discuss these results with analogous work by other authors. The information obtained could also be discussed with other regions. The authors could also discuss some of the methodological approaches and whether they have been able to see if it is more appropriate to use one approach or another.

In paragraph 4, page 11 (line 465) they talk about a hypothesis that has not previously been mentioned. Furthermore, hypotheses do not usually refer to the establishment of methodology, since this would require a contrast analysis, with the same data, between different methodologies.

It would be necessary to include a section or paragraph on the limitations of the study.

Author Response

Please see the attachment with the point-by-point response and the revised document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Many thanks to the authors for the revision of the article, which, however, in my opinion, does not make the text suitable for publication for various reasons. 

1/ The structure. The article still lacks a clear structure that would allow a clear understanding of the state of the question, the research objectives, the methodology, and the results. 

According to the text of the abstract,-the objective of the article is to determine "the most appropriate method or methodology to determine political participation and newsworthiness in digital contexts".  Political participation is one thing and newsworthiness is another. If the objective is to determine the appropriateness ¿of what? to determine how political participation -there is extensive literature- and newsworthiness -there is also the article:

-Should do a review ON METHODS used to measure ONE OF THE TWO THINGS ABOVE.

- SHOULD IN THE INTRODUCTION, EXPLAIN THE THREE METHODS IT  TALKS ABOUT (it gets into phenomenology, but does not explain the methods).

-It should clearly explain the rationale.

2/ The objectives. They are not clear. If they focus on determining which method is the most appropriate, he will have to explain and operationalize the concept of "appropriateness". Also does not operationalize political participation and newsworthiness or explain the connection between the two concepts.

3/ There is no section dedicated to the methodology, where what is done and how the application of the methods is compared on what sample and with what parameters is clearly explained 

4/ The results are not clearly stated. If methods are being compared, it would be convenient to specify which parameters and to show them in a table or graph (the comparison).

5/ Based on the above, the discussion is insufficient.

I think the article needs to be rethought. They have the intuition of an interesting topic, but perhaps it needs more reflection and to raise it from the beginning in another way. 

Author Response

Thank you for the revision, we send attached the response.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Modifications made by authors have greatly improved the paper. Congratulations! However, I have detected some errors in the bibliographic references, please review this aspect very carefully. Also, I think it is essential to cite Husserl's work directly.

Author Response

Thank you for the revision, we send attached the response.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx