16 research outputs found

    From the projected to the transmitted image: the 2.0 construction of tourist destination image and identity in Catalonia

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    This thesis aims to explore online projected and perceived images of a tourist destination, to assess their mutual correspondence, and to shed light on the role of online user-generated images in destination image formation. It also seeks to analyse the spatial distribution of image by tourists and the complex image identity issues concerning a destination. To achieve this, online image sources regarding the case study of Catalonia were analysed through massive computerized quantitative content analysis of some 25,000 travel blog and review entries (perceived image) and around 3,000 official tourism webpages (projected image). The results showed significant dissonance between tourists’ images and official images of the destination in several aspects, notably its attraction factors and cultural identity. Tourists' destination images were found to be greatly concentrated on certain elements and spaces. Finally, this thesis proposes the concept of "transmitted image" to reflect the new central role of tourists’ online images in the creation, dissemination and formation of destination image. Keywords: tourist destination image; destination identity; online image; perceived image; projected image; transmitted image; travel blog; travel review; official tourism websites; Web 2.0; quantitative content analysis; Catalonia.Aquesta tesi té com a objectiu explorar les imatges projectades i percebudes online d’una destinació turística, examinar la seva correspondència mútua, i contribuir a aclarir el rol de les imatges online generades pels usuaris en la formació de la imatge d’una destinació. Amb aquests propòsits, es van analitzar fonts d’imatge online sobre el cas d’estudi de Catalunya a través d’una anàlisi computeritzada quantitativa de contingut massiu d’aproximadament 25.000 entrades de travel blogs i travel reviews (imatge percebuda) i aproximadament 3.000 pàgines de webs oficials (imatge projectada). Els resultats mostren que hi ha una dissonància important entre les imatges dels turistes i les imatges oficials de la destinació en diversos aspectes, notablement en els seus factors d’atracció i identitat cultural. S’ha trobat que les imatges dels turistes sobre la destinació estaven altament concentrades en certs elements i espais. Finalment, aquesta tesi proposa el concepte d’ “imatge transmesa” per tal de reflectir el nou rol central de les imatges online dels turistes en la creació, disseminació i formació de la imatge d’una destinació. Paraules clau: imatge d’una destinació turística; identitat de la destinació; imatge online; imatge percebuda; imatge projectada; imatge transmesa; blog de viatges; review de viatges; webs oficials de turisme; web 2.0; anàlisi de contingut quantitatiu; Catalunya.Esta tesis tiene como objetivo explorar las imágenes proyectadas y percibidas online de un destino turístico, examinar su correspondencia mutua, y contribuir a aclarar el rol de las imágenes online generadas por los usuarios en la formación de la imagen de un destino. Con estos propósitos, se analizaron fuentes de imagen online sobre el caso de estudio de Cataluña a través de un análisis computerizado cuantitativo de contenido masivo de aproximadamente 25.000 entradas de travel blogs y travel reviews (imagen percibida) y aproximadamente 3.000 páginas de webs oficiales (imagen proyectada). Los resultados muestran que hay una disonancia importante entre las imágenes de los turistas y las imágenes oficiales del destino en varios aspectos, notablemente en sus factores de atracción e identidad cultural. Se ha encontrado que las imágenes de los turistas sobre el destino estaban altamente concentradas en ciertos elementos y espacios. Finalmente, esta tesis propone el concepto de “imagen transmitida” para reflejar el nuevo rol central de las imágenes online de los turistas en la creación, diseminación y formación de la imagen de un destino. Palabras clave: imagen de un destino turístico; identidad del destino; imagen online; imagen percibida; imagen proyectada; imagen transmitida; blog de viajes; review de viajes; webs oficiales de turismo; web 2.0; análisis de contenido cuantitativo; Cataluña.Cette thèse a pour objectif d’explorer les images projetées et perçues en ligne d'une destination touristique, examiner sa correspondance mutuelle, et contribuer à clarifier le rôle des images en ligne générées par les usagers dans la formation de l'image d'une destination. Dans ce but, des sources d’image en ligne sur le cas d'étude de la Catalogne ont été analysées à travers d'une analyse informatisée quantitative d'un contenu massif d'à peu près 25.000 travel blogs et travel reviews (image perçue) et à peu près 3.000 pages de sites web officiels (image projetée). Les résultats montrent qu'il y a une dissonance importante entre les images des touristes et les images officielles de la destination selon quelques aspects, surtout dans ses facteurs d'attraction et d'identité culturelle. On a trouvé que les images des touristes sur la destination étaient hautement concentrées dans certains éléments et des espaces. Finalement, cette thèse propose le concept d’ "image transmise" pour refléter le nouveau rôle central des images en ligne des touristes dans la création, la dissémination et la formation de l'image d'une destination. Mots clés: image d'une destination touristique; identité de la destination; image en ligne; image perçue; image projetée; image transmise; blog de voyage; review de voyage; sites web officiels de tourisme; web 2.0; analyse de contenu quantitatif; Catalogne

    Clinical trial information: developing an effective model of dissemination and a framework to improve transparency

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    Purpose: The research aim has two parts: Firstly, to characterise and evaluate clinical trial information and the dissemination of that information by constructing a conceptual model structuring the processes of information generation. Secondly, to test the model by identifying the dissemination methods used, consider their effectiveness and what factors affect dissemination. The research findings contribute to outline a framework of recommendations with an optimal model of effective dissemination for improved transparency in clinical research. Design and methodology: Based on the literature review, a conceptual model was constructed outlining the structure of information generation throughout the clinical research process. A mixed approach with qualitative and quantitative studies were undertaken to form a comprehensive picture of the dissemination of clinical trial information and in order to test the model. Key findings: The model identified that clinical trial information is very complex, scattered across many resources and many factors affect how, where and what clinical trial information is disseminated. A model of effective dissemination and a framework of recommendations for improved transparency in dissemination were drawn up for three areas; regulations and standards, communication planning and the organisation of clinical trial information. Limitations: This research has been done during a time of significant and rapid change in the clinical research environment and therefore this thesis is a snapshot of a time when new web tools allows for information to be disseminated rapidly. A series of small studies were made to gather an overall picture of information transparency in clinical trials as we lack evidence in these new areas. Originality/value: There is no existing conceptual model that explains and tests the dissemination and transparency of clinical trial information. Models can structure processes, suggest improvements in the processes and be used as a basis for further research

    Understanding Crowd-Powered Search Groups: A Social Network Perspective

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    Background: Crowd-powered search is a new form of search and problem solving scheme that involves collaboration among a potentially large number of voluntary Web users. Human flesh search (HFS), a particular form of crowd-powered search originated in China, has seen tremendous growth since its inception in 2001. HFS presents a valuable test-bed for scientists to validate existing and new theories in social computing, sociology, behavioral sciences, and so forth. Methodology: In this research, we construct an aggregated HFS group, consisting of the participants and their relationships in a comprehensive set of identified HFS episodes. We study the topological properties and the evolution of the aggregated network and different sub-groups in the network. We also identify the key HFS participants according to a variety of measures. Conclusions: We found that, as compared with other online social networks, HFS participant network shares the power-law degree distribution and small-world property, but with a looser and more distributed organizational structure, leading to the diversity, decentralization, and independence of HFS participants. In addition, the HFS group has been becoming increasingly decentralized. The comparisons of different HFS sub-groups reveal that HFS participants collaborated more often when they conducted the searches in local platforms or the searches requiring a certain level of professional knowledge background. On the contrary, HFS participants did not collaborate much when they performed the search tas

    e-Business challenges and directions: important themes from the first ICE-B workshop

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    A three-day asynchronous, interactive workshop was held at ICE-B’10 in Piraeus, Greece in July of 2010. This event captured conference themes for e-Business challenges and directions across four subject areas: a) e-Business applications and models, b) enterprise engineering, c) mobility, d) business collaboration and e-Services, and e) technology platforms. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methods were used to gather, organize and evaluate themes and their ratings. This paper summarizes the most important themes rated by participants: a) Since technology is becoming more economic and social in nature, more agile and context-based application develop methods are needed. b) Enterprise engineering approaches are needed to support the design of systems that can evolve with changing stakeholder needs. c) The digital native groundswell requires changes to business models, operations, and systems to support Prosumers. d) Intelligence and interoperability are needed to address Prosumer activity and their highly customized product purchases. e) Technology platforms must rapidly and correctly adapt, provide widespread offerings and scale appropriately, in the context of changing situational contexts

    Hierarchical categorisation of tags for delicious

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    In the scenario of social bookmarking, a user browsing the Web bookmarks web pages and assigns free-text labels (i.e., tags) to them according to their personal preferences. In this technical report, we approach one of the practical aspects when it comes to represent users' interests from their tagging activity, namely the categorization of tags into high-level categories of interest. The reason is that the representation of user profiles on the basis of the myriad of tags available on the Web is certainly unfeasible from various practical perspectives; mainly concerning the unavailability of data to reliably, accurately measure interests across such fine-grained categorisation, and, should the data be available, its overwhelming computational intractability. Motivated by this, our study presents the results of a categorization process whereby a collection of tags posted at Delicious #http://delicious.com# are classified into 200 subcategories of interest.Preprin

    Hierarchical categorisation of web tags for Delicious

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    In the scenario of social bookmarking, a user browsing the Web bookmarks web pages and assigns free-text labels (i.e., tags) to them according to their personal preferences. The benefits of social tagging are clear – tags enhance Web content browsing and search. However, since these tags may be publicly available to any Internet user, a privacy attacker may collect this information and extract an accurate snapshot of users’ interests or user profiles, containing sensitive information, such as health-related information, political preferences, salary or religion. In order to hinder attackers in their efforts to profile users, this report focuses on the practical aspects of capturing user interests from their tagging activity. More accurately, we study how to categorise a collection of tags posted by users in one of the most popular bookmarking services, Delicious (http://delicious.com).Preprin

    Combining granularity-based topic-dependent and topic-independent evidences for opinion detection

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    Fouille des opinion, une sous-discipline dans la recherche d'information (IR) et la linguistique computationnelle, fait référence aux techniques de calcul pour l'extraction, la classification, la compréhension et l'évaluation des opinions exprimées par diverses sources de nouvelles en ligne, social commentaires des médias, et tout autre contenu généré par l'utilisateur. Il est également connu par de nombreux autres termes comme trouver l'opinion, la détection d'opinion, l'analyse des sentiments, la classification sentiment, de détection de polarité, etc. Définition dans le contexte plus spécifique et plus simple, fouille des opinion est la tâche de récupération des opinions contre son besoin aussi exprimé par l'utilisateur sous la forme d'une requête. Il y a de nombreux problèmes et défis liés à l'activité fouille des opinion. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur quelques problèmes d'analyse d'opinion. L'un des défis majeurs de fouille des opinion est de trouver des opinions concernant spécifiquement le sujet donné (requête). Un document peut contenir des informations sur de nombreux sujets à la fois et il est possible qu'elle contienne opiniâtre texte sur chacun des sujet ou sur seulement quelques-uns. Par conséquent, il devient très important de choisir les segments du document pertinentes à sujet avec leurs opinions correspondantes. Nous abordons ce problème sur deux niveaux de granularité, des phrases et des passages. Dans notre première approche de niveau de phrase, nous utilisons des relations sémantiques de WordNet pour trouver cette association entre sujet et opinion. Dans notre deuxième approche pour le niveau de passage, nous utilisons plus robuste modèle de RI i.e. la language modèle de se concentrer sur ce problème. L'idée de base derrière les deux contributions pour l'association d'opinion-sujet est que si un document contient plus segments textuels (phrases ou passages) opiniâtre et pertinentes à sujet, il est plus opiniâtre qu'un document avec moins segments textuels opiniâtre et pertinentes. La plupart des approches d'apprentissage-machine basée à fouille des opinion sont dépendants du domaine i.e. leurs performances varient d'un domaine à d'autre. D'autre part, une approche indépendant de domaine ou un sujet est plus généralisée et peut maintenir son efficacité dans différents domaines. Cependant, les approches indépendant de domaine souffrent de mauvaises performances en général. C'est un grand défi dans le domaine de fouille des opinion à développer une approche qui est plus efficace et généralisé. Nos contributions de cette thèse incluent le développement d'une approche qui utilise de simples fonctions heuristiques pour trouver des documents opiniâtre. Fouille des opinion basée entité devient très populaire parmi les chercheurs de la communauté IR. Il vise à identifier les entités pertinentes pour un sujet donné et d'en extraire les opinions qui leur sont associées à partir d'un ensemble de documents textuels. Toutefois, l'identification et la détermination de la pertinence des entités est déjà une tâche difficile. Nous proposons un système qui prend en compte à la fois l'information de l'article de nouvelles en cours ainsi que des articles antérieurs pertinents afin de détecter les entités les plus importantes dans les nouvelles actuelles. En plus de cela, nous présentons également notre cadre d'analyse d'opinion et tâches relieés. Ce cadre est basée sur les évidences contents et les évidences sociales de la blogosphère pour les tâches de trouver des opinions, de prévision et d'avis de classement multidimensionnel. Cette contribution d'prématurée pose les bases pour nos travaux futurs. L'évaluation de nos méthodes comprennent l'utilisation de TREC 2006 Blog collection et de TREC Novelty track 2004 collection. La plupart des évaluations ont été réalisées dans le cadre de TREC Blog track.Opinion mining is a sub-discipline within Information Retrieval (IR) and Computational Linguistics. It refers to the computational techniques for extracting, classifying, understanding, and assessing the opinions expressed in various online sources like news articles, social media comments, and other user-generated content. It is also known by many other terms like opinion finding, opinion detection, sentiment analysis, sentiment classification, polarity detection, etc. Defining in more specific and simpler context, opinion mining is the task of retrieving opinions on an issue as expressed by the user in the form of a query. There are many problems and challenges associated with the field of opinion mining. In this thesis, we focus on some major problems of opinion mining

    Talking Bits:An investigation into the nature of digital communication technology and its impact on society

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    Collaboration and the use of online collaborative toolsets in the project management environment

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    The research aims to develop an understanding of the extent to which collaboration occurs through the use of online technologies in the project management environment. Given the breadth of the technological landscape, this research focuses on the use of online collaborative toolsets (OCTs). The research investigates six Project Management Environments (PMEs) and their use of OCTs, and uses a Collaboration scale developed specifically to measure the level of collaboration existing within each PME. The Collaboration scale presents collaboration not as a single entity, but as a scale ranging from low to high across six elements. Central to this theory is that for collaboration to exist, all elements must rate highly against the scale. The research argues that although all collaborative elements are found within a PME, it is the level of each element that determines the degree to which collaboration is occurring. A case study approach incorporated three broad strategies to collect data. The first strategy included a Likert questionnaire using the Dichotomous scale, which was administered to collect data on the operations of the individual projects. The second strategy included interviews that asked the project manager of each case specific questions regarding the PME. The third strategy involved desk research to scan for literature and web artefacts. The conclusions drawn from this research are: 1. OCTs can contain a variety of features, several of which are common amongst all. The research identified common requirements and use of the OCTs within the cases. 2. Although OCTs are capable of facilitating a high level of collaboration, Project Managers do not use OCTs for this purpose. The different project environments reviewed are not necessarily collaborative, nor do they use OCTs to assist with collaborative exercises. 3. OCTs are used predominantly for cooperation and coordinating activities within the PME. 4. Collaboration in the PMEs reviewed exists in degrees, at times being identified with cooperative functions, and at other times coordinating functions. 5. The findings demonstrate a pattern of collaboration, which is consistent across all cases. This pattern demonstrates a variation in the collaborative elements across the PME, and indicates a priority that may exist in regard to how these elements are prescribed within the actual project environment
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