Digital Anthropology: Projects and Platforms

pdf of website textMark Turin has agreed with the copyright holder the right to host a copy of this piece (whether audio, text or video) on University of Cambridge archives and servers.Article published 28 November, 2011. The article reports presentations given at the American Anthropological Association meeting. The article includes a review of Dr Mark Turin's presentation, entitled: 'Multimedia Archives for Anthropology of the Himalayan Region'. URL accessed week of 07/12/2011: http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/11/28/digital-anthropology-projects-and-platforms

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Using Cloudworks to Support OER Activities

This report forms the third and final output of the Pearls in the Clouds project, funded by the Higher Education Academy. It focuses on evaluation of the use of a social networking site, Cloudworks, to support evidence-based practice. The aim of this project (Pearls in the Clouds) has been to evaluate the ways in which web 2.0 tools like Cloudworks can support evidence-informed practices in relation to learning and teaching. We have reviewed evidence from empirically grounded studies surrounding the uses of web2.0 in higher education and highlighted the gap between using web2.0 to support learning and teaching, and using it to support learning about learning and teaching (in an evidence-informed way) (Conole and Alevizou, 2010). We have reported on findings from a case study focusing on the use of Cloudworks by a community of practice - educational technologists - reflecting upon, and, negotiating their role in enhancing teaching and learning in higher education (Galley et al., 2010). The object of this study is to explore and evaluate the use of the site by individuals and communities involved in the production of, and research on, the development, delivery and use of Open Educational Resources (OER)

Evaluative Language and Its Solidarity-Building Role on TED.com: An Appraisal and Corpus Analysis

Language is a key resource in the formation of online communities, which are in turn central to an understanding of contemporary social relations. This study looks at TED.com, an educational video-hosting platform with few in-built community-building functionalities, to explore the potential for users to affiliate through their language choices. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study uses the Appraisal framework, extended using corpus linguistic methods, in order to analyse users’ reactions to TED videos. The study shows that online participants use evaluative language to align with certain ideas and, based on these affinities, form affiliations characterized by sociability and solidarity. These affiliations raise important questions about the conception of ‘community’ in twenty-first century society