Conceptual Foundations of Online Communities

The purpose of this working paper is to provide conceptual foundations for the reader interested in online communities. A useful summary of research conducted on online communities is provided in this paper. Beside several classifications for online communities, we will also pay attention to the questions why consumers belong to online communities, and what are the reasons and motives for consumers to join these communities. The different perspectives for the reasons and motives complement each other. We have proposed a valueinterest framework where several theories are combined into one, integrated model. The value-interest framework looks the motives from several perspectives simultaneously. It must be remembered, however, that beside this integrated model, it is fruitful to look at the motives and reasons from the different perspectives separately, too

Linking Music Metadata.

PhDThe internet has facilitated music metadata production and distribution on an unprecedented scale. A contributing factor of this data deluge is a change in the authorship of this data from the expert few to the untrained crowd. The resulting unordered flood of imperfect annotations provides challenges and opportunities in identifying accurate metadata and linking it to the music audio in order to provide a richer listening experience. We advocate novel adaptations of Dynamic Programming for music metadata synchronisation, ranking and comparison. This thesis introduces Windowed Time Warping, Greedy, Constrained On-Line Time Warping for synchronisation and the Concurrence Factor for automatically ranking metadata. We begin by examining the availability of various music metadata on the web. We then review Dynamic Programming methods for aligning and comparing two source sequences whilst presenting novel, specialised adaptations for efficient, realtime synchronisation of music and metadata that make improvements in speed and accuracy over existing algorithms. The Concurrence Factor, which measures the degree in which an annotation of a song agrees with its peers, is proposed in order to utilise the wisdom of the crowds to establish a ranking system. This attribute uses a combination of the standard Dynamic Programming methods Levenshtein Edit Distance, Dynamic Time Warping, and Longest Common Subsequence to compare annotations. We present a synchronisation application for applying the aforementioned methods as well as a tablature-parsing application for mining and analysing guitar tablatures from the web. We evaluate the Concurrence Factor as a ranking system on a largescale collection of guitar tablatures and lyrics to show a correlation with accuracy that is superior to existing methods currently used in internet search engines, which are based on popularity and human ratingsEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Travel grant from the Royal Engineering Society

The rhetorical constitution of online community: Identification and constitutive rhetoric in the community of reddit

The concepts of online identity and online community within the context of social media have been major research interests in the field of communication in recent years. Questions of interest include how the Internet and social media contribute to the construction of identity both online and offline, and what factors encourage participation in and contribution to online communities. This thesis will address these questions related to online identity and community from a rhetorical perspective to examine the role rhetoric plays in these processes and build on the application of rhetorical approaches to online contexts. Specifically, this project proposes a rhetorical analysis of the online community of Reddit, which encourages its users to submit and vote on content that is valued by the overall community. The analysis will focus on the use of identification and constitutive rhetoric in both the communication Reddit provides about itself and the everyday communication of its members. Overall, this thesis argues that identification and constitutive rhetoric create a strong collective identity within the community that contributes to the loyalty and commitment of its members, but also constrains its members\u27 behavior within the community in ways that are consistent with this identity, which ultimately may create challenges to the community\u27s continued success. However, this thesis also finds evidence of dissent from some of Reddit\u27s established guidelines, which creates tension between those who adhere to Reddit\u27s unified, constituted identity and those who choose to ignore or deviate from it

Towards a hypermedia model for digital scholarly edition of musical texts based on MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) standard: Integration of hidden traditions within social editing paradigm

[ES]Las ediciones académicas digitales están modificando sustancialmente la forma en que la que se ha conceptualizado la edición crítica de textos musicales durante largos períodos de tiempo. Sus capacidades hipermedia y su estructura multidimensional permiten poner en contexto diferentes fuentes y testimonios en un espacio virtual donde todos los objetos están relacionados semánticamente. En este contexto, la presente tesis doctoral tiene como objetivo desarrollar un modelo para la integración de las anotaciones interpretativas (técnicas y/o expresivas) que de manera sistemática el intérprete inscribe en los textos musicales con los que trabaja. Estas se trasmiten a través canales informales que se mantienen al margen del ámbito editorial. De este modo se propone un modelo de edición digital para integrar este tipo de anotaciones dentro del paradigma de la edición social. Para ello se han analizado las posibilidades que ofrece el estándar MEI para capturar y codificar la información que representan estas anotaciones sobre el texto musical. De igual manera se han considerado recursos alternativos, como el estándar Web Annotation para anotar recursos digitales, con el fin de articular mecanismos paralelos para la codificación de anotaciones complejas. Además, se analizan las características más definitorias de las anotaciones interpretativas y se propone un marco de clasificación que permita contextualizar la información aportada por los usuarios de la edición. Esta clasificación se contrasta con el análisis de un corpus de anotaciones musicales que incorpora algunas de las anotaciones más comunes dentro la práctica musical. En función de los resultados obtenidos se propone un modelo de edición académica digital para textos musicales que permite integrar de manera colaborativa la información presente en este tipo de anotaciones, como parte esencial de la información que caracteriza la obra musical y las distintas instanciaciones y concepciones artísticas que la definen