Witnessing from a Distance: Images and Trauma in Anglophone Literature about the Bosnian War

Bosniakrigen sto i sentrum for den globale medieoppmerksomheten på 1990-tallet og avfødte en mengde litterære reaksjoner. Over 20 år etter krigen er disse forskjellige litterære verkene lite utforsket og sjelden sett i sammenheng med begivenhetene de sprang ut av. Denne avhandlingen tar for seg tre engelskspråklige verk i tre forskjellige sjangre: Sarah Kane’s skuespill Blasted (1995), Adrian Oktenbergs dikt “In the morning” (fra diktsamlingen The Bosnia Elegies 1997), og Joe Saccos dokumentariske tegneserieroman Safe Area Goražde (2000). Disse tre arbeidene formidler traumatiske erfaringer på høyst forskjellig vis, og avhandlingen diskuterer hvordan disse verkene bærer distansert vitnesbyrd i litterær form, gjennom et rammeverk av ekfraseforståelse og traumeteori, med kjernebegreper som ekphrasis, trauma, image, media, witnessing, and witnessing gap. Et hovedspørmsål har vært hvorvidt literære krigsframstillinger fungerer som avstandsskapte vitnesbyrd, og hvordan disse står i forhold til media i sin alminnelighet, samt forholdet mellom invaderende bilder og ekfrastiske bilder. Analysen viser at ekfrase står sentralt i produksjonen av litterære vitnesbyrd, og at disse ekfrasene opptrer forskjellig i ulike sjangre.publishedVersio

Data spaces and the (trans)formations of data innovation and governance

In this thesis, I theorize data innovation and governance as simultaneous processes and account for the distinctive nature of data. Utilizing the concept of space, I show how data innovation and governance in multi-actor environments unfold across certain structures of possible forms, and how the realities data refer to condition the forms innovation and governance can take. The uniqueness of data entities has been of interest to information systems scholars, imparting distinct value-creation possibilities and dedicated governance approaches. In the literature on digital innovation, data have been referred to as semantic entities whose value can be open-endedly explored once assigned meaning by actors to fulfill various goals and purposes. Across the literature on data governance, data have been referred to as strategic assets that are governed by organizations. This duality of data – as valuable resources that at the same time require proper governance – has also been central in practical debates, such as the European Union’s aspirations for developing data spaces as shared infrastructures for innovating with data, while preserving European values, laws and regulations. Data innovation commonly requires recombining data that are produced, copied, shared, and used across multiple actors, requiring forms of governance extending beyond the boundaries of single organizations. In this thesis, I build on the process-oriented, realist ontology of assemblage theory to account for data’s distinctive nature and utilize the concept of space to theorize processes of innovation and governance in multi-actor environments. Data spaces, as argued in this thesis, are neither solely geometrical, nor networked; instead, provide forms across which processes of data innovation and governance can change their spatial configurations. Empirically, I study data spaces through an embedded case study in the highly regulated Norwegian healthcare sector dealing with personal and sensitive health data. The cases take an information infrastructure perspective on studying how health data (including electronic patient record data and patient-generated health data) were innovated with and governed across multiple public and private actors. Overall, the meta-analysis shows how innovation and governance with health data took on different forms as data were processed for various purposes across multiple intertwined data spaces. This thesis is aimed at theory-building and its contribution is two-fold. First, it shows how the concept of data spaces can be used to study processes of data innovation and governance as unfolding across various organizations, digital technologies, legal basis, and data sources, by changing their spatial configurations as certain thresholds are reached. Second, it shows how data do not simply decouple from the realities they refer to, rather, these realities condition the forms data innovation and governance can take and are shaped by these processes in return.publishedVersio

Speech as a writing tool : An exploratory study of speech-to-text technology in lower secondary education

The aim of this project is to explore the potential of STT as a writing tool for lower secondary education pupils with writing difficulties. The project comprises three studies. Study 1 is a scoping review of empirical research on the use of STT among secondary pupils with learning difficulties published from January 2000 to April 2022. Study 2 explores teachers’ perspectives of STT as an inclusive approach in secondary education through focus group interviews. Study 3 explores the use of STT as a writing modality through analyses of screen recordings and interviews with pupils with low writing achievement. The results of Study 1 indicate that very little research has been conducted on the use of such technology for adolescents with learning difficulties at the secondary education level. The review identified eight peer-reviewed studies and five publications of grey literature. Areas of interest include five topics: writing-related skills, text assessment, writing processes, accuracy of the technology and participants’ experiences. The findings further indicate that writing performance among pupils with learning difficulties is improved when using STT and that parents, teachers and pupils report positive experiences with using the technology. The results from Study 2 regarding teachers’ experiences of STT as an inclusive approach reveal that the implementation of STT technology challenges different aspects of inclusion. Furthermore, teachers primarily considered STT an assistive technology that is useful for pupils with writing difficulties. Yet, they also reported that the technology offers opportunities for all pupils to participate in collaborative writing tasks, discuss norms for formal and informal languages and produce first drafts without having to worry about spelling. In addition, whilst STT provides academic opportunities for most learners, it is also described as a disruptive and embarrassing element in a whole-class environment. Finally, the results from Study 3 reveal that pupils with low writing achievement could not rely on STT to be 100% accurate and to provide correct orthography and syntax in Norwegian. Such findings suggest that technological issues must be addressed and that sufficient practice is necessary before STT can be implemented as a truly beneficial tool for adolescents with low writing achievement within the context of Norwegian secondary education.publishedVersio

Exploring Living Nature : Modes of observation in history, teaching and learning

The purpose of this study is to phenomenologically explore the practices of observing living nature in history, teaching, and learning, and to discuss potentials and constraints with teaching and learning observational practices in primary school. The main research question is: What is the nature and meaning of observing living nature in science education in primary school? In my experience the study of biology requires careful observation, but research show that the process of observation is often underestimated in science teaching and learning or taken for granted or even ignored. In all sciences, observational practices are of fundamental importance but still, these practices seem to be a blind spot in school. In addition, research reports of an ongoing massive loss of species and nature, an ongoing loss of knowledge about nature, and a seemingly parallel ongoing loss of attention in terms of what several studies describe as a blindness to nature. The research design of my PhD-project has three phases: Phase 1 prepare four teaching cases from the history of science that demonstrate complementary modes of observing living nature, Phase 2 implements the four cases in a course for teachers in primary school, and Phase 3 explores how the teachers implement the cases in school. Phases two and three are both related to the same case study where the unit of inquiry is a case with five teachers and their students in fifth grade in primary school. In the case study, my investigations have a phenomenological approach with the purpose to examine the students and teachers’ lived experiences with observing living nature. I have made classroom observations, collected notes and reflection logs, and conducted interviews with both teachers and students. In Phase 1, my analysis leads to a typology of four modes of observation: Case I about Aristotle demonstrates a comparative mode of observation. Case II about Maria Sibylla Merian demonstrates a holistic and aesthetical mode of observation. Case III about Carl von Linné demonstrates an analytical and systemic mode of observation. Case IV about Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin demonstrates an explanatory and synthetical mode of observation. I further apply an analysis to design and prepare the cases for teaching, and I summarize the analysis in a general structure for designing teaching cases. In phases two and three, my phenomenological analysis of the interviews with both teachers and students, suggests eight themes that describe essential aspects of their experiences with observing living nature. The themes specify, among other things, how observation has an ontological meaning by bringing out the things in the world of the students and teachers, the interplay between learning observational skills and other skills, how practicing observation might change the role of the teacher, and the complexity in describing and understanding scientific observational practices for both teachers and students. The results of the analysis show that the teachers and students have different perceptions of what matter in practicing observation of living nature that sometimes challenge each other. My findings suggest that teaching observational practices that invite the students to pay attention and respond to what living nature presents to them, may be an alternative to teaching as telling the students what to look for. The criteria for what matter in an observation are not given and what kind of skills the students practice may change their perception of what is relevant to observe. The question is not only what kind of knowledge the students get when practicing different modes of observation, but how both the ‘things’ in living nature and the students come into being through these practices. Implications of my findings from all the three phases point to two issues that I explore further in the last part of this thesis: (i) Ethical attention in observational practices. In a model I suggest conditions for practicing an ethical attention in the triangle of teacher, student, and phenomena in living nature. In teaching, the model can support the teacher in considering what is valuable, good, or important, to pay attention to in nature, and how the students can be invited to explore those phenomena in nature in responsible ways. (ii) Conditions for more sensible observational practices in primary school. By sensible observational practices I mean observational practices that are contextualized within the students’ familiar world, and that emphasize students’ sensuous, embodied experiences and emotional involvement in these practices. I present two models as a basis to discuss the relationship between the students, the phenomena in living nature, and (scientific) representations in science teaching and learning. The first model show how (scientific) representations may become a wedge between the students and the phenomena in living nature under certain conditions, instead of bringing them together. The second model is a development of the first and illustrates observational practices as dynamic processes where the phenomena in living nature and the students are brought together, and where scientific representations may develop from the students’ own experiences and induce an opening to new experiences. Finally, I point towards a fifth teaching case which suggest a mode of observation that complements an anthropocentric perspective. Case V describes a participatory and empathetic mode of observation to investigate multiple meaning-making processes, a mode of observation that invites the students to identify themselves with other living beings in a very concrete and fundamental way.acceptedVersio

European Crowdfunding Market Report 2023

The European crowdfunding market is dynamic and constantly evolving, while often representing balancing acts between harmonization trends, as driven by cross-border scaling opportunities, and fragmentation trends, as resulting from the local anchoring of activities (Wenzlaff et al., 2020). The current report is set to provide an up-to-date review of the European Crowdfunding industry covering facts and insights for the years 2021 and 2022. In its modern manifestation, crowdfunding is defined as a fundraising method involving the collection of relatively small amounts from a large pool of funding providers via the Internet and with no or little involvement of traditional financial intermediaries. Earlier reports presenting insights on the crowdfunding industry have often covered a wider scope of services under the broad term of “alternative finance” (e.g., Ziegler et al., 2018; Ziegler et al., 2019; Ziegler et al., 2021; Ziegler et al., 2020). However, the current report focuses only on crowdfunding services. This means the report only presents data collected from platforms which are open to crowd participation as both fundraisers (demand) and funding providers (supply). Accordingly, online platforms offering fundraising services outside the traditional financial systems (e.g., digital lenders, digital invoice traders, etc.), while relying solely on institutional or non-retail private funding (i.e., not open for funding by the crowd), were excluded. At the heart of the industry are the firms providing crowdfunding services, also commonly referred to as ‘crowdfunding platforms’ after the technology underlying their operations. The platforms they operate are Internet applications linking fundraisers and prospective fund providers while facilitating exchanges between them under pre-specified conditions (Shneor & Flåten, 2015). Accordingly, all data reported in the current report have been collected from crowdfunding platforms (hereafter ‘platforms’). Throughout the report, data is presented in a comparative manner either with respect to core underlying models (i.e., equity, lending, and non-investment models) or geographical location (i.e., platforms from Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Europe). Table 1 presents the detailed model clustering approach. Here, services offering investments in return-yielding assets are grouped under an equity cluster. Services offering investments in return-yielding credit are grouped under a lending cluster. And services offering transactions with no expectation of financial returns, such as purchases of products/services or donations, are grouped under a non-investment models’ cluster.publishedVersio

Cross-Cultural Competencies and Diversity in International Teams: A Comprehensive Exploration

This thesis comprises three essays that investigate cross-cultural competencies in a diverse international team context. The first essay conducts a systematic review of 158 seminal CQ, GM, and CC publications. Utilising advanced bibliometric methodologies, key journals, influential publications, and ground-breaking researchers in this domain are identified. Further co-citations are examined through factor and cluster analyses, deciphering the complex knowledge structure in this research spectrum. Five predominant research streams emerge, bridging the overlap between CQ, GM, and CC constructs. Burst analyses further spotlight the prevailing trends and rapidly growing research avenues, laying a foundation for impending scholarly endeavours. The second essay addresses the multifaceted nature of 'diversity' - a term that remains largely enigmatic despite its widespread use in International Business literature. The context in this paper is on Global Virtual Teams (GVTs), which are inherently infused with diversity. This paper presents the conceptual framework of personal diversity, which clarifies three salient diversity types - the variety of demographic attributes, disparity in functional attributes, and separation along covert attributes. Using a sample of 345 GVTs, the implications of these diversity types on intermediary team processes, barriers to collaboration, and psychological and task outcomes are empirically tested employing PLS-SEM modelling. Key findings reveal that demographic variety augments collaboration and enhances psychological outcome. Additionally, disparity, especially concerning English proficiency and technical skills, can increase barriers to collaboration and adversely impact psychological outcome. The third essay pioneers a nuanced conceptual framework tailored to assess the configurations of team cultural intelligence. The framework originates from the multiple intelligence theory and is enhanced by foundational theories specific to each CQ dimension. Simultaneously, it integrates three diversity theories: information processing, (in)justice perspective, and categorisation paradigms. The delineation elucidates how diverse CQ configurations, characterised by CQ ranges, dimension disparities, and separations, associate with different team outcomes. An illustrative example of global virtual teams tests the theoretical framework empirically to present further theoretical and practical implications.acceptedVersio

Initiating the PREPARED project : a digital dietary intervention for preconception young adults – protocol development, validation of dietary methods, and DOHaD knowledge-diet quality insights

Background The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) theory suggests that environmental exposures during critical developmental periods can profoundly affect long-term health and disease risk of both the individual and subsequent generations. Within the theory of DOHaD, maintaining a healthy diet offers a triple dividend in health, encompassing short- and long-term health of the individual and potential benefits for future generations. An individual’s diet and nutrition before conceiving a child is commonly referred to as preconception nutrition. Adopting a public health perspective on preconception nutrition is essential for promoting a healthier future, as it sets the foundation for long-term health and lifestyle behaviours that can significantly influence the prospect of future offspring health. Aims and objectives The current thesis aimed to plan and establish the basis for the PREPARED project, with a specific emphasis on validating dietary assessment methods to be utilized throughout the entire project, while also conducting a specific analysis of DOHaD knowledge and diet quality on the baseline data. This was to be accomplished through four specific objectives: (a) develop a study protocol outlining the research process for the PREPARED project, (b) develop digital food item image-series to aid portion size estimation accuracy in a 24-hour dietary recall system to be used in PREPARED project, and validate their accuracy by comparing them with pre-weighed food portions, (c) validate a dietary screener against a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) for rapid dietary assessment in the PREPARED project, and (d) assess preconception young adults’ DOHaD knowledge and diet quality, and the association between the two, using the baseline data from the PREPARED study.publishedVersio

Identification of Irregularities in Salmon Fish in Aquaculture by Using Key Point Detection

This project aims to deliver an AI based solution to find out irregularities and deformities in farmed salmon fish by using Keypoint detectio

Organic transformation of ERP documentation practices: Moving from archival records to dialogue-based, agile throwaway documents

Implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems remains challenging and requires organizational changes. Given the scale and complexity of ERP projects, documentation plays a crucial role in coordinating operational details. However, the emergence of the agile approach raises the question of how adequate lightweight documentation is in agile ERP implementation. Unfortunately, both academia and industry often overlook the natural evolution of documentation practices. This study examines current documentation practices through interviews with 23 field experts to address this oversight. The findings indicate a shift in documentation practices from retrospective approaches to dialogue-based, agile throwaway documents, including audiovisual recordings and informal emails. Project managers who extensively engage with throwaway documents demonstrate higher situational awareness and greater effectiveness in managing ERP projects than those who do not. The findings show an organic transformation of ERP documentation practices. We redefine documentation to include unstructured, relevant information across different media, emphasizing searchability. Additionally, the study offers two vignettes for diverse organizational contexts to illustrate the best practices of agile ERP projects.Organic transformation of ERP documentation practices: Moving from archival records to dialogue-based, agile throwaway documentspublishedVersionPaid open acces

Machine Learning for Signal Reconstruction from Streaming Time-series Data

Papers I and II are extracted as separate files to meet IEEE publication policy for accepted manuscripts.Paper IV is extracted from the dissertation pending publication.Nowadays, deploying cyber-physical networked systems generates tremendous streams of data, with data rates increasing as time goes by. This trend is especially noticeable in several fairly automated sectors, such as energy or telecommunications. Compared to the last decades, this represents not only an additional large volume of data to explore and the need for more efficient and scalable data analysis methods but also raises additional challenges in the design and analysis of real-time streaming data processing algorithms. In many applications of interest, it is required to process a sequence of samples from multiple, possibly correlated, data time series that are acquired at different sampling rates and which may be quantized in amplitude at different resolutions. A commonly sought goal is to obtain a low-error signal reconstruction that can be uniformly resampled with a temporal resolution as fine as desired, hence facilitating subsequent data analyses. This Ph.D. thesis consists of a compendium of four papers that incrementally investigate the task of sequentially reconstructing a signal from a stream of multivariate time series of quantization intervals under several requirements encountered in practice and detailed next. First, we investigate how to track signals from streams of quantization intervals while enforcing low model complexity in the function estimation. Specifically, we explore the use of reproducing kernel Hilbert space-based online regression techniques expressly tailored for such a task. More specifically, the core techniques we devise and employ are influenced by the abundant theoretical and practical benefits in the literature about proximal operators and multiple kernel approaches. Second, we require the signal to be sequentially reconstructed, subject to smoothness constraints, and as soon as a data sample is available (zero-delay response). These well-motivated requirements appear in many practical problems, including online trajectory planning, real-time control systems, and high-speed digital-to-analog conversion. We address this challenge through a novel spline-based approach underpinned by a sequential decision-making framework and assisted with deep learning techniques. Specifically, we use recurrent neural networks to capture the temporal dependencies among data, helping to reduce the roughness of the reconstruction on average. Finally, we analyze the requirement of consistency, which amounts to exploiting all available information about the signal source and acquisition system to optimize some figure of reconstruction merit. In our context, consistency means guaranteeing that the reconstruction lies within the acquired quantization intervals. Consistency has been proven to entail a profitable-in-practice asymptotic error-rate decay as the sampling rate increases. Particularly, we investigate the impact of consistency on zero-delay reconstruction and also incorporate the idea of exploiting the spatiotemporal dependencies among multivariate signals.publishedVersio