Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing

The volume collect the proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities (Aiucd 2013), which took place at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, 11-12 December 2013. The general theme of Aiucd 2013 was “Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing” so we particularly welcomed submissions on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field, encouraging proposals relating to the theme of the conference, or more specifically: interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, legal and economic issues, tools and collaborative methodologies, measurement and impact of collaborative methodologies, sharing and collaboration methods and approaches, cultural institutions and collaborative facilities, infrastructures and digital libraries as collaborative environments, data resources and technologies sharing

The Rise of the Global South on the World Wide Web: Bridging Internet Policies and Web User Behavior

Scholars of internet governance have traditionally focused on how institutions such as sovereign nation states and multilateral organizations establish public policy. In doing so, experts and policy makers often presume the impact of Internet policies on Internet usage, but rarely do they examine usage aggregated from the behavior of individual web users. In this study, authors Harsh Taneja and Angela Xiao Wu examine the relationship between internet governance and internet user behavior, empirically investigating web user behavior on a global scale. The authors utilize web use data from ComScore to construct a network for the 1,000 most visited websites globally in September 2009, 2011 and 2013. Analysis of these networks revealed a number of “clusters” of websites, whereby sites within the cluster had more users in common than they did with sites outside the cluster. In each of the three years, the most salient means upon which websites clustered together were both language and geography (and not content type). Thus, the authors interpret such clusters as online expressions of place-based cultures, or “regional cultures”, with data suggesting a de-Americanization and rise of the Global South on the WWW since 2009

Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing

The volume collect the proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities (Aiucd 2013), which took place at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, 11-12 December 2013. The general theme of Aiucd 2013 was “Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing” so we particularly welcomed submissions on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field, encouraging proposals relating to the theme of the conference, or more specifically: interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, legal and economic issues, tools and collaborative methodologies, measurement and impact of collaborative methodologies, sharing and collaboration methods and approaches, cultural institutions and collaborative facilities, infrastructures and digital libraries as collaborative environments, data resources and technologies sharing

Harnessing the Power of Collaborative Filtering

China’s Internet development raises questions on the interplay of user autonomy and Internet governance in the larger Chinese-language online cultural sphere. To what extent has user autonomy been established to conduct information gatekeeping collaboratively online? To examine how the power of Chinese-language Internet users has been harnessed in relation to the filtering and censorship regime, the article applies the concept of “network gatekeeping” to analyse two major user-generated websites, Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike, as different examples of collaborative filtering projects. Effectively they share “word-of-mouth” recommendations on encyclopaedic knowledge and information by user-contributors to edit content from different parts of the world. Two salient network gatekeeping mechanisms have emerged: the censorship mechanisms in Baidu Baike and internationalisation/localisation mechanisms in Chinese Wikipedia. The findings show a contrast between the two interaction patterns, indicating mainland-centric versus transnational Chinese gatekeeping processes employing different kinds of collaborative filtering and different levels of user autonomy

Digital Spatial Practices and Linguistic Landscaping in Beirut

This article describes research done on language and script variation in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Beirut, Lebanon. It discusses how the cityscape itself became an archive for researchers and how digital humanities’ (DH) methods were used to capture and analyze patterns in written language found in public space. It also discusses the DH project, Linguistic Landscapes of Beirut (LLB) at the heart of this research and the benefits and challenges of its two core methods: mobile data collection for documentation of linguistic diversity and geospatial visualization. The article argues that knowledge production in non-Western locations such as Beirut is both impacted and enriched by the complex political and social environment. This research, carried out with under-resourced infrastructures and at the frontiers of DH practice in the Arab world, blended theory, practice and pedagogy, ultimately illustrates that context profoundly changes computational research.Cet article décrit des recherches effectuées sur la variation de la langue et de l’écriture dans le paysage linguistique (LL) de Beyrouth, au Liban. Il explique la façon dont le paysage urbain lui-même est devenu une archive pour les chercheurs et celle dont les méthodes des humanités numériques (DH) ont été utilisées pour capturer et analyser les modèles du langage écrit dans l’espace public. Il aborde également le projet DH, Paysages linguistiques de Beyrouth (LLB) au cœur de cette recherche et les avantages et les défis de ses deux méthodes principales : la collecte mobile de données pour la documentation de la diversité linguistique et la visualisation géospatiale. L’article soutient que la production de connaissances dans des endroits non occidentaux comme Beyrouth est à la fois influencée et enrichie par un environnement politique et social complexe. Cette recherche, menée avec des infrastructures sous-financées et aux frontières des pratiques des humanités numériques dans le monde arabe, mêlant théorie, pratique et pédagogie, illustre finalement que le contexte change profondément la recherche informatisée

Understanding spatial media

Over the past decade a new set of spatial and locative technologies have been rolled out, including online, interactive mapping tools with accompanying application programming interfaces (APIs), interactive virtual globes, user-generated spatial databases and mapping systems, locative media, urban dashboards and citizen reporting geo-systems; and geodesign and architectural and planning tools. In addition, social media produces spatial (meta)data that can be analysed geographically. These technologies, their practices, and the effects they engender have been referred to in a number of ways, including the geoweb, neogeography, volunteered geographic information (VGI), and locative media, which collectively constitute spatial media. This chapter untangles and defines these terms before setting out the transformative effects of spatial media with respect to some fundamental geographic and social concepts: spatial data/information; mapping; space and spatiality; mobility, spatial practices and spatial imaginaries; and knowledge politics. We conclude by setting out some questions for further consideration

Diglosia Geolingüística en las Naciones del Consejo de Cooperación para los Estados Árabes del Golfo

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, leída el 06-09-2021This sociolinguistic research falls within the broad field of diglossic cross-cultural communication, the social evaluation of accents and social identity theories. The study of dialectal variations in the pronunciation of Educated Standard Arabic (ESA) is central to the understanding of the degree of agreement that the informants showed regarding their interpersonal evaluations in terms of the standard accented varieties and according to the standardised rating constructs (see Wiggins and Trobst, 1999). The aim of this research was to analyse a specific international reference framework of standard dialectal variations in the Arabic dialectal continuum from Gulf Cooperation Council countries between men and women alike who are likely to attach more prestige to a specific oral language variety. This research proposes that the degree of agreement that the informants showed for a particular accent is a determinant in the implementation of effective communication in order to achieve concord and harmony in interpersonal cross-cultural interactions...El presente estudio sociolingüístico se enmarca dentro del extenso campo de la comunicación diglósica transcultural, la evaluación social de acentos, y las teorías de identidad social. El estudio de las variaciones dialectales de la pronunciación de una misma lengua resulta de vital importancia en sociolingüística para entender hasta qué punto los diferentes acentos influyen en la evaluación personal de acuerdo con determinados valores racionales estimativos estandarizados (ver Wiggins y Tobst, 1999). El propósito de esta investigación reside en analizar un marco específico internacional de referencia sobre las variaciones dialectales comprendidas en las naciones del consejo de cooperación para los estados árabes del golfo entre hombres y mujeres por igual, esperando encontrar la variedad de mayor prestigio. Esta investigación propone que el grado de conformidad expresado por los informantes con respecto a un acento en particular es determinante para la implementación de una comunicación efectiva que aglutine la concordia y la armonía en las interacciones comunicativas transculturales e interpersonales...Fac. de FilologíaTRUEunpu

Why a Virtual Assistant for Moral Enhancement When We Could have a Socrates?

This article was written as a part of the research project Digital Ethics. Moral Enhancement through an Interactive Use of Artificial Intelligence (PID2019-104943RB-I00), funded by the State Research Agency of the Spanish Government. The author is very grateful for the helpful suggestions and comments given on earlier versions of this paper by Jon Rueda, Juan Ignacio del Valle, Blanca Rodriguez, Miguel Moreno and Jan Deckers.Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) be more effective than human instruction for the moral enhancement of people? The author argues that it only would be if the use of this technology were aimed at increasing the individual’s capacity to reflectively decide for themselves, rather than at directly influencing behaviour. To support this, it is shown how a disregard for personal autonomy, in particular, invalidates the main proposals for applying new technologies, both biomedical and AI-based, to moral enhancement. As an alternative to these proposals, this article proposes a virtual assistant that, through dialogue, neutrality and virtual reality technologies, can teach users to make better moral decisions on their own. The author concludes that, as long as certain precautions are taken in its design, such an assistant could do this better than a human instructor adopting the same educational methodology.State Research Agency of the Spanish Government PID2019-104943RB-I0

The Literacies of Adolescents With International Experiences

This dissertation reports the findings of a study on how international experiences impact adolescents. Data were gathered from interviews with and writing samples from seven participants with varying international experiences. A critical perspective and existing research in New Literacy Studies (NLS), on study abroad programs, and on transnationalism framed the study and predicted much of what was found about the literacies of adolescents with international experiences. However, five new findings emerged as significant about adolescents’ utilitarian, oral, geolingual, critical, and cosmopolitan literacies uniquely impacted by travel. From these findings, new insights emerged about the importance of embracing multiple forms of travel as beneficial, of emphasizing the positive and advantageous impact of travel on literacies, and of recognizing the increasing frequency with which adolescents have international experiences. The findings and insights respond to calls to improve adolescents’ literacies and global competencies and have implications for innovative teachers, researchers, and stakeholders invested in empowering adolescents

Shifts in Mapping: Maps as a Tool of Knowledge

Depicting the world, territory, and geopolitical realities involves a high degree of interpretation and imagination. It is never neutral. Cartography originated in ancient times to represent the world and to enable circulation, communication, and economic exchange. Today, IT companies are a driving force in this field and change our view of the world; how we communicate, navigate, and consume globally. Questions of privacy, authorship, and economic interests are highly relevant to cartography's practices. So how to deal with such powers and what is the critical role of cartography in it? How might a bottom-up perspective (and actions) in map-making change the conception of a geopolitical space