Readers and Reading in the First World War

This essay consists of three individually authored and interlinked sections. In ‘A Digital Humanities Approach’, Francesca Benatti looks at datasets and databases (including the UK Reading Experience Database) and shows how a systematic, macro-analytical use of digital humanities tools and resources might yield answers to some key questions about reading in the First World War. In ‘Reading behind the Wire in the First World War’ Edmund G. C. King scrutinizes the reading practices and preferences of Allied prisoners of war in Mainz, showing that reading circumscribed by the contingencies of a prison camp created an unique literary community, whose legacy can be traced through their literary output after the war. In ‘Book-hunger in Salonika’, Shafquat Towheed examines the record of a single reader in a specific and fairly static frontline, and argues that in the case of the Salonika campaign, reading communities emerged in close proximity to existing centres of print culture. The focus of this essay moves from the general to the particular, from the scoping of large datasets, to the analyses of identified readers within a specific geographical and temporal space. The authors engage with the wider issues and problems of recovering, interpreting, visualizing, narrating, and representing readers in the First World War

Technology Culture of Mobile Maintenance Men

Technology plays a major role in our life and the role is increasing as a result of fast technological development occurring all the time. Technology’s impact on our everyday life sets new challenges also to designers. In order to design products which are usable. We need to understand technologies and devices we are developing, users of our designed products, and the relationships our users have with different kinds of technologies. User-centred design (UCD) has emerged as a counter part for traditional technology centred product development. UCD emphasizes the role of the users in every phase of product design and development. However, it seems that the users’ relationships with technologies is underestimated and sometimes even forgotten also in UCD. The users’ current tools and technological environment is seen as just surroundings and task related tools instead of as an important factor that affects to users’ actions and opinions. This article presents a case study where mobile IT maintenance men where studied with traditional UCD methods and in addition the user research was deepened with focusing on users’ relationships with technology. The results show that UCD’s methods can miss some critical phenomena relating to users’ relationships with technology and affecting to usability and quality of the developed products. Understanding how users comprehend the technologies they use, i.e. understanding what kind of technology culture the users are a part of, enables designers to better evaluate how well the developed product will fit in the lives of it’s users and what sorts of changes are possibly going to happen or required to happen in order the new product to be included in the users’ technology culture. These kinds of evaluations help the designers to design better products and the companies to better estimate business risks relating to for example technology acceptance. Keywords: Technology Culture, User-Centred Design, User Research, Distributed and Mobile Work</p

The Ghent Psychotherapy Study (GPS) on the differential efficacy of supportive-expressive and cognitive behavioral interventions in dependent and self-critical depressive patients : study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Background: Major depressive disorder is a leading cause of disease burden worldwide, indicating the importance of effective therapies. Outcome studies have shown overall efficacy of different types of psychotherapy across groups, yet large variability within groups. Although patient characteristics are considered crucial in understanding outcome, they have received limited research attention. This trial aims at investigating the interaction between therapeutic approach (pre-structured versus explorative) and the personality style of patients (dependent versus self-critical), which is considered a core underlying dimension of depressive pathology. Methods/design: This study is a pragmatic stratified (dependent and self-critical patients) parallel trial with equal randomization (allocation 1: 1) conducted in Flanders, Belgium. One hundred and four patients will be recruited and randomized to either 16-20 sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy for depression (pre-structured approach) or 16-20 sessions of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression (explorative approach) conducted by trained psychotherapists in private practices. The primary outcome is the severity of depression as measured by the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression at completion of therapy. Secondary outcome measures include self-reported depressive and other symptoms, interpersonal functioning, idiosyncratic complaints, and the presence of the diagnosis of depression. Additional measures include biological measures, narrative material (sessions, interviews), and health care costs. Discussion: This trial presents the test of an often-described, yet hardly investigated interaction between important personality dimensions and therapeutic approach in the treatment of depression. Results could inform therapists on how to match psychotherapeutic treatments to specific personality characteristics of their patients

Web data extraction systems versus research collaboration in sustainable planning for housing: Smart governance takes it all

To date, there are no clear insights in the spatial patterns and micro-dynamics of the housing market. The objective of this study is to collect real estate micro-data for the development of policy-support indicators on housing market dynamics at the local scale. These indicators can provide the requested insights in spatial patterns and micro-dynamics of the housing market. Because the required real estate data are not systematicly published as statistical data or open data, innovative forms of data collection are needed. This paper is based on a case study approach of the greater Leuven area (Belgium). The research question is what are suitable methods or strategies to collect data on micro-dynamics of the housing market. The methodology includes a technical approach for data collection, being Web data extraction, and a governance approach, being explorative interviews. A Web data extraction system collects and extracts unstructured or semi-structured data that are stored or published on Web sources. Most of the required data are publicly and readily available as Web data on real estate portal websites. Web data extraction at the scale of the case study succeeded in collecting the required micro-data, but a trial run at the regional scale encountered a number of practical and legal issues. Simultaneously with the Web data extraction, the dialogue with two real estate portal websites was initiated, using purposive sampling and explorative semi-structured interviews. The interviews were considered as the start of a transdisciplinary research collaboration process. Both companies indicated that the development of indicators about housing market dynamics was a good and relevant idea, yet a challenging task. The companies were familiar with Web data extraction systems, but considered it a suboptimal technique to collect real estate data for the development of housing dynamics indicators. They preferred an active collaboration instead of passive Web scraping. In the frame of a users’ agreement, we received one company’s dataset and calculated the indicators for the case study based on this dataset. The unique micro-data provided by the company proved to be the start of a collaborative planning approach between private partners, the academic world and the Flemish government. All three win from this collaboration on the long run. Smart governance can gain from smart technologies, but should not loose sight of active collaborations

Distance matters: a look at crime trip distances in Flanders

Most journey-to-crime studies are flawed in two ways: they predominantly rely on local police data and although a number of studies hint at the presence of substantially longer crime trips than commonly reported, long trips are deliberately removed from further analysis. Consequently, the scope of the conclusions of current journey-to-crime studies is limited to local offending and their empirical design is biased towards finding short trips. This paper substantiates the need for dedicated criminological research into long crime trips and provides an initial insight into journey-to-crime distances in the greater Ghent area, Belgium. By analyzing 5 year public prosecutor data on property crimes from the greater Ghent area, the length of the journey to crime and the number of long crime trips is assessed. Findings demonstrate a substantial amount of long crime trips with 35% of crime trips over 10 km. The criminological implications for future journey-to-crime research are discussed

Monitoring Peatland Damage and Restoration Using Testate Amoebae as Indicator Organisms

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/862 on 22.03.2017 by CS (TIS)This thesis has examined the response of testate amoebae communities to restoration at three peatland sites in the UK. It builds upon the use of testate amoebae analysis as a palaeoenvironmental tool by exploring the hypothesis that testate amoebae respond to hydrological conditions in restored mires. Previous research has found that testate amoebae act as good proxies for hydrological condition of intact mires and past conditions but little has been done on their reaction to conditions at damaged sites in the UK. The research aimed to further the understanding of testate amoebae ecology including seasonal variability of communities, a poorly understood area. The secondary aim was to assess the potential for using testate amoebae as biological indicators of peatland damage and restoration. These aims were achieved through studies at three sites covering a range of damage commonly affecting UK sites. The experiments entailed repeated monitoring of a ditch blocking experiment at Coom Rigg Moss which has been affected by peripheral forestry drains, a study of forest removal treatments at Flanders Moss and a study of rewetted cutover surfaces at Fenn's and Whixall Mosses. The results were analysed using a variety of statistical and multivariate methods. Data on water table and moisture conditions were also analysed and the results of the two were compared. The results showed that testate amoebae communities responded to hydrological conditions but depth to water table was not always the primary factor affecting community composition. The results of the research indicate that testate amoebae analysis does have potential as a tool for monitoring peatland restoration but further research is necessary to fully understand the factors affecting distributions

Velopark : a linked open data platform for bicycle parkings

Cycling as a mean of urban transportation is positively correlated with cleaner, healthier and happier cities. By providing more infrastructure, such as secure parking facilities, cities aim on attracting more cyclists. However, authoritative information about parking facilities is heavily decentralized and heterogeneous, which makes secure parking facilities harder to be discovered by cyclists. Can an open dataset about bike parkings be managed decentrally? In this paper, we present the results of the Velopark project, carried out in Belgium by different actors that include local public authorities, public transport operators and pro-cycling organizations. During the project execution we (i) introduced the Open Velopark Vocabulary as a common semantic data model; and (ii) implemented the Velopark platform, an open data publishing environment for both static and live authoritative parking data. So far, 1599 parking facilities were published through the Velopark platform, 31 different Belgian municipalities and 4 parking related organizations use the platform to describe, publish and manage their parking facilities. A common data publishing environment supports organizations for providing access to their information, while guaranteeing data reliability for cyclists. In future work we will further extend our data model to cover other kinds of infrastructure and bicycle-related services