About Challenges in Data Analytics and Machine Learning for Social Good

The large number of new services and applications and, in general, all our everyday activities resolve in data mass production: all these data can become a golden source of information that might be used to improve our lives, wellness and working days. (Interpretable) Machine Learning approaches, the use of which is increasingly ubiquitous in various settings, are definitely one of the most effective tools for retrieving and obtaining essential information from data. However, many challenges arise in order to effectively exploit them. In this paper, we analyze key scenarios in which large amounts of data and machine learning techniques can be used for social good: social network analytics for enhancing cultural heritage dissemination; game analytics to foster Computational Thinking in education; medical analytics to improve the quality of life of the elderly and reduce health care expenses; exploration of work datafication potential in improving the management of human resources (HRM). For the first two of the previously mentioned scenarios, we present new results related to previously published research, framing these results in a more general discussion over challenges arising when adopting machine learning techniques for social good

Reading Mediated Identities: Auto/biographical Agency in the Material Book, Museum Space, Social Media Platforms, and Archives

Ph.D

Icelandic street art. An analysis of the formation and development.

This thesis aims to form the basis of research on the Icelandic street art by detailing the main events that spurred the development of this art movement and by describing the key factors that shaped the evolution of this artistic movement in Iceland and the societal reaction towards it. The presented theoretical material aims to enable discussion on street art substance in this one particular country, taking into consideration the scope of definitions applied in international street art research. While regarding already existing studies on this artistic movement in other countries, this thesis presents the local specifics in order to highlight the differences in artistic and social approach. The topic was chosen due to personal interests that grew expansively while the author was living in Iceland. The possibilities to directly observe the evolving contemporary art scene and participate in the ongoing changes served as a factual basis for further research. Author noticed the sizeable gap in the research on Icelandic art, especially available to international academic forums. Moreover, there has been no previously conducted research on Icelandic street art, and, to date, only limited study on Icelandic contemporary art is available. Another factor for the choice of theme was the particular interest in the contemporary artistic movements that raise the question of applicable art definitions and hence also the scope of research, which demands a multidisciplinary approach. Street art, as a dynamic socio – artistic movement, encompasses such an approach and challenges the researchers to apply various methods of art history, combined with sociological approach, in order to conduct research on graffiti, street art or broader urban creativity. Due to the ambivalent nature of street art as well as the possible legal consequences it carries, accessing the functional sources for academic purposes is crucial. This study involves materials obtained direct in local research, through interviews and field work but also municipal documentation and information provided in domestic press and social media. It seemed essential to present the most important occurrences in local political and social history and to summarize the factors that allowed the formation and development of Icelandic street art. Due to the pioneering element of the study, the monography of the movement seemed more appropriate than a detailed analysis of particular artworks or artists’ biographies adopting methodologies designed for the history of art.:PART I Theory 1. Methodology and research goals 1.1 Subject matter and research tools 1.2 Historical background reasoning the topic choice 1.3 Development of history of art as a discipline reasoning the topic choice 1.4 Information sources used in research, collection methods and value assessment 1.5 Specifics of Iceland 2. Fluctuating scope of the area of interest 2.1 Change in the approach 2.2 Widening research and multidisciplinary approach 3. Nomenclature in the street art and urban activity studies 3.1 Overview of milestones in attempts of street art definitions 3.2 Newest points of view 3.3 Definitions used hereby 4. Institutionalization as an inseparable part of street art history 4.1 Scope of definition 4.2 Institutionalization as an inseparable part of street art 4.3 The side effect of sponsored street art 4.3.1 Graffiti in large-format advertising 4.3.2 Substitute for freedom in curated urban space 4.3.3 Zero Tolerance Policies and clean cities 4.4 Publicity of the public art 4.5 Research on the institutionalization of street art 5. Icelandic street art in the context of the current state of international research 5.1 Area of interest – social studies and the edge of different disciplines 5.2 Different means of research on street art 5.2.1 Festivals, conferences and street art museums as a research tool 5.2.1.1 Street art festivals 5.2.1.2 Street art conferences 5.2.1.3. Street art museums 5.2.2 Material published in book forms 5.2.3 Online accessible articles and reviews, blogs 5.3 Icelandic art 5.4 Street art in Reykjavík 5.4.1 The Reykjavík Grapevine 5.4.2 Online sources: personal blogs, tourist information, social media accounts 5.4.3 Hard copy published materials 5.4.4. Social media and sharing platforms 5.4.5 Film materials 5.4.6 Publications of cultural and educational institutions 6. Icelandic street art 6.1 Environment for street art development in Iceland. Artistic society after the Second World War 6.2 Hlíðargöngin as the first scene for Icelandic street art 6.3 Bloom and expansion time 6.4. Zero Tolerance Policy Implementation in Reykjavík 6.4.1 Reasons for the implementation of Zero Tolerance 6.4.2 Scandinavian inspirations for Implementation of Zero Tolerance Policy 6.4.3 The costs of Zero Tolerance Policy 6.4.4 Obtaining permission for graffiti 6.4.5 An assigned place for graffiti 6.4.6 Icelandic version of Zero Tolerance Policy 6.5 The peak of urban creativity around 2012 6.5.1 Hjartagarðurinn 6.5.2 Guido van Helten Sailors, Skagaströnd 2013 Afi, Reykjavík 2013 No exit, Reykjavík 2013 – 2014 Halla, Vestmannaeyar, 2014 Girl, Akureyri 2014 Jón from Vör, Kópavogur 2015 Sæfari, 2015 6.5.3. Sara Riel 6.5.3.1 Education, early recognition and awards 6.5.3.2 Beginnings on the street art scene 6.5.3.3 Time of growing up 6.5.3.4 In the vibrant city 6.5.3.5 Natural Kingdoms 6.5.3.6 Memento Mori 6.5.3.7 Is it legal? 6.5.3.8 Turn into abstract organic art 6.5.3.9 What plant would you like to be and why? 6.6 Street art intensity around 2012 – 2013 and balancing the scene off 6.7 Wall Poetry 6.7.1 Iceland Airwaves Festival 6.7.2 Urban Nation 6.7.3 Wall Poetry 2015 6.7.3.1 Project description 6.7.3.2 Artworks 6.7.4 Wall Poetry 2016 6.8 Current situation on Icelandic street art scene 7 The official and social approach towards street art in Iceland 7.1 Street art reception 7.2 Reykjavík´s mayor Jón Gnarr and Banksy 7.3 Educational institutions 7.4 Artists associations 7.5 Exhibition rooms and artists-run spaces 8. ”Icelandness”? 9. Summary List of the Icelandic names and their translation in English Photography credentials Bibliography PART II Photographic material Fig. 1 Research on social reception of street art Photograph

5 steps to make art museums tweet influentially

A growing number of museums has started using social networks as different forms of engagement that can act outside museum architectural bounds. Specifically, museum leaders are praising Twitter as a necessary tool to any online programming or presence in museums today. Nevertheless, using Twitter in a satisfactory way so to increase museums' influence is not an easy task and there has been a gap between its usage and the possibilities it represents. In this paper, we propose an easily understandable framework to analyze the key content factors in museum conversations, including novel formulas for the evaluation of tweets and Twitter accounts influence. We apply the framework to a dataset of 100,000 messages related to 26 museum accounts to understand which museum is more influential in writing tweets, and which features have more impact on the influence of a tweet. Finally, we propose 5 key steps that museums can perform in order to write more influential tweets

Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption

Understanding Well-being Data

‘Following the data’ is a now-familiar phrase in Covid-19 policy communications. Well-being data are pivotal in decisions that affect our life chances, livelihoods and quality of life. They are increasingly valuable to companies with their eyes on profit, organisations looking to make a social impact, and governments focussed on societal problems. This book follows well-being data back centuries, showing they have long been used to track the health and wealth of society. It questions assumptions that have underpinned over 200 years of social science, statistical and policy work. Understanding Well-being Data is a readable, introductory book with real-life examples. Understanding the contexts of data and decision-making are critical for policy, practice and research that aims to do good, or at least avoid harm. Through its comprehensive survey and critical lens, this book provides tools to promote better understanding of the power and potential of well-being data for society, and the limits of their application

Fictive institutions: contemporary British literature and the arbiters of value.

My thesis assesses the relationship between contemporary British literature and institutions. Literary culture is currently rife with anxieties that some institutions, such as prizes, exert too much influence over authors, while others, such as literary criticism, are losing their cultural power. As authors are increasingly caught up in complex, ambivalent relationships with institutions, I examine how recent British novels, short stories and ‘creative-critical’ texts thematise these engagements. My thesis mobilises Derrida’s term ‘fictive institution’, which marks the fact that institutions are self-authorising; they are grounded in fictitious or invented origins. Institutions, then, share with literary texts a certain fictionality. My project considers how Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing, Gordon Burn, Alan Hollinghurst, and—most prominently—Ali Smith, have used the instituting or inventive power of fiction to reflect on the fictionality of institutions. Each chapter assesses how a different institution—academic criticism, public criticism, the book award and publishing—reproduces aesthetic discourses and values which my corpus of literary texts shows to be grounded in an institutional fiction. In making this argument, my thesis marries three disparate strands of contemporary criticism: literary sociology, aesthetic theory and deconstruction. This approach repositions Derrida—a figure maligned by postcritique and the aesthetic turn—as an important and surprisingly timely thinker of the literary. Situating my readings in terms of a resurgent critical discourse on the value of the novel, my project traces how a wide range of twenty-first-century writing mounts a defence of literature by asserting fiction’s power to ‘speak back’ to institutions. While contemporary culture seems to suffer more and more from what David Shields calls ‘reality hunger’, and the rise of autofiction seems to augur the outmodedness of fiction, this thesis ultimately suggests that it is precisely as a fictional medium that literature retains its cultural power

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH)––that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic. The domain of DH is typically segmented into the two seemingly disparate strands of criticism and building, with scholars either studying the synthesis between cultural expression and screens or the use of technology to make artifacts in themselves. This book regards electronic literature as fundamentally DH in that it synthesizes these two constituents. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities provides a context for the development of the field, informed by the forms and practices that have emerged throughout the DH moment, and finally, offers resources for others interested in learning more about electronic literature

Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture

In Platonic Occasions, Richard Begam and James Soderholm reflect upon a wide range of thinkers, writers and ideas from Plato, Descartes and Nietzsche to Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Moderns—from Evil, Love and Death to Art, Memory and Mimesis. The dialogues suggest that Percy Shelley was right when he claimed “We are all Greeks,” and yet what have we learned about the initiatives of culture and literature since our classical predecessors? Begam and Soderholm’s ten dialogues function as a series of dual-meditations that take Plato as an intellectual godfather while presenting a new form of dialogic knowledge based on the friction and frisson of two minds contending, inventing and improvising. The authors discuss not only what is healthy and vigorous about Western culture but also consider where that culture is in retreat, as they seek to understand the legacy of the Enlightenment and its relation to the contemporary moment.Platonic Occasionsis an experiment in criticism that enjoins the reader to imagine what the dialogic imagination can do when inspired by Platonic inquiry, but not bound by a single master and the singular mind. Beyond Socratic maieutics and Cartesian meditation is a form of intellectual interplay where it is impossible not to be of two minds