374 research outputs found

    Vibes at the Village Vanguard: Hauntings, History, and the Construction of Jazz Place

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    There are ghosts that haunt the Village Vanguard. Or at least that’s what people say. This dissertation examines the role of the contemporary jazz club as a site of heritage and meaning making in jazz cultures. I take New York’s revered jazz club, the Village Vanguard, as a case study, as it is the subject of many fanciful tales. These stories describe the club’s history as alive; the spirits of the legendary musicians from a bygone era of jazz who once performed at the Vanguard are said to haunt the present club’s soundwaves. Often described by writers as the club’s “vibe,” the Village Vanguard’s history is said to be living and perceptible to musicians and audiences at the club. Discussions of the club’s vibe in written discourse work to represent the club as a heritage place for jazz. Not merely a monument to a dead tradition, the Village Vanguard’s vibe offers those invested in the jazz tradition a validating place where they can experience a direct encounter with jazz history—a seemingly unmediated, anachronistic moment of contact between past and present. This dissertation examines the cyclical relationship between history and the social construction of jazz place. I present an analysis of written discourse from 1957—the year the Village Vanguard established itself formally as a jazz club—to the present that reveals how contemporary jazz clubs are represented as spatial realizations of a jazz tradition. As such, these places are infused with power dynamics, including the social, cultural, and aesthetic politics of jazz cultures. This use of history leverages the past to exert control over contemporary jazz place and establishes social structures that are both validating and exclusionary. I combine discourses of (ethno)musicology, popular music studies, and cultural geography to dissect the role of place in current expressions of jazz history and identity. My dissertation, ultimately, reveals how meaning making practices in jazz are spatialized and how the places of jazz participate in processes of jazz politics and identity

    Grounds for a Third Place : The Starbucks Experience, Sirens, and Space

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    My goal in this dissertation is to help demystify or “filter” the “Starbucks Experience” for a post-pandemic world, taking stock of how a multi-national company has long outgrown its humble beginnings as a wholesale coffee bean supplier to become a digitally-integrated and hypermodern cafĂ©. I look at the role Starbucks plays within the larger cultural history of the coffee house and also consider how Starbucks has been idyllically described in corporate discourse as a comfortable and discursive “third place” for informal gathering, a term that also prescribes its own radical ethos as a globally recognized customer service platform. Attempting to square Starbucks’ iconography and rhetoric with a new critical methodology, in a series of interdisciplinary case studies, I examine the role Starbucks’ “third place” philosophy plays within larger conversations about urban space and commodity culture, analyze Starbucks advertising, architecture and art, and trace the mythical rise of the Starbucks Siren (and the reiterations and re-imaginings of the Starbucks Siren in art and media). While in corporate rhetoric Starbucks’ “third place” is depicted as an enthralling adventure, full of play, discovery, authenticity, or “romance,” I draw on critical theory to discuss how it operates today as a space of distraction, isolation, and loss

    Strengthening Privacy and Cybersecurity through Anonymization and Big Data

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    L'abstract Ăš presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

    The Democratization of News - Analysis and Behavior Modeling of Users in the Context of Online News Consumption

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    Die Erfindung des Internets ebnete den Weg fĂŒr die Demokratisierung von Information. Die Tatsache, dass Nachrichten fĂŒr die breite Öffentlichkeit zugĂ€nglicher wurden, barg wichtige politische Versprechen, wie zum Beispiel das Erreichen von zuvor uninformierten und daher oft inaktiven BĂŒrgern. Diese konnten sich nun dank des Internets tagesaktuell ĂŒber das politische Geschehen informieren und selbst politisch engagieren. WĂ€hrend viele Politiker und Journalisten ein Jahrzehnt lang mit dieser Entwicklung zufrieden waren, Ă€nderte sich die Situation mit dem Aufkommen der sozialen Online-Netzwerke (OSN). Diese OSNs sind heute nahezu allgegenwĂ€rtig – so beziehen inzwischen 67%67\% der Amerikaner zumindest einen Teil ihrer Nachrichten ĂŒber die sozialen Medien. Dieser Trend hat die Kosten fĂŒr die Veröffentlichung von Inhalten weiter gesenkt. Dies sah zunĂ€chst nach einer positiven Entwicklung aus, stellt inzwischen jedoch ein ernsthaftes Problem fĂŒr Demokratien dar. Anstatt dass eine schier unendliche Menge an leicht zugĂ€nglichen Informationen uns klĂŒger machen, wird die Menge an Inhalten zu einer Belastung. Eine ausgewogene Nachrichtenauswahl muss einer Flut an BeitrĂ€gen und Themen weichen, die durch das digitale soziale Umfeld des Nutzers gefiltert werden. Dies fördert die politische Polarisierung und ideologische Segregation. Mehr als die HĂ€lfte der OSN-Nutzer trauen zudem den Nachrichten, die sie lesen, nicht mehr (54%54\% machen sich Sorgen wegen Falschnachrichten). In dieses Bild passt, dass Studien berichten, dass Nutzer von OSNs dem Populismus extrem linker und rechter politischer Akteure stĂ€rker ausgesetzt sind, als Personen ohne Zugang zu sozialen Medien. Um die negativen Effekt dieser Entwicklung abzumildern, trĂ€gt meine Arbeit zum einen zum VerstĂ€ndnis des Problems bei und befasst sich mit Grundlagenforschung im Bereich der Verhaltensmodellierung. Abschließend beschĂ€ftigen wir uns mit der Gefahr der Beeinflussung der Internetnutzer durch soziale Bots und prĂ€sentieren eine auf Verhaltensmodellierung basierende Lösung. Zum besseren VerstĂ€ndnis des Nachrichtenkonsums deutschsprachiger Nutzer in OSNs, haben wir deren Verhalten auf Twitter analysiert und die Reaktionen auf kontroverse - teils verfassungsfeindliche - und nicht kontroverse Inhalte verglichen. ZusĂ€tzlich untersuchten wir die Existenz von Echokammern und Ă€hnlichen PhĂ€nomenen. Hinsichtlich des Nutzerverhaltens haben wir uns auf Netzwerke konzentriert, die ein komplexeres Nutzerverhalten zulassen. Wir entwickelten probabilistische Verhaltensmodellierungslösungen fĂŒr das Clustering und die Segmentierung von Zeitserien. Neben den BeitrĂ€gen zum VerstĂ€ndnis des Problems haben wir Lösungen zur Erkennung automatisierter Konten entwickelt. Diese Bots nehmen eine wichtige Rolle in der frĂŒhen Phase der Verbreitung von Fake News ein. Unser Expertenmodell - basierend auf aktuellen Deep-Learning-Lösungen - identifiziert, z. B., automatisierte Accounts anhand ihres Verhaltens. Meine Arbeit sensibilisiert fĂŒr diese negative Entwicklung und befasst sich mit der Grundlagenforschung im Bereich der Verhaltensmodellierung. Auch wird auf die Gefahr der Beeinflussung durch soziale Bots eingegangen und eine auf Verhaltensmodellierung basierende Lösung prĂ€sentiert

    An Empirical Analysis of Cyber Deception Systems

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    Google search and the mediation of digital health information: a case study on unproven stem cell treatments

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    Google Search occupies a unique space within broader discussions of direct-to-consumer marketing of stem cell treatments in digital spaces. For patients, researchers, regulators, and the wider public, the search platform influences the who, what, where, and why of stem cell treatment information online. Ubiquitous and opaque, Google Search mediates which users are presented what types of content when these stakeholders engage in online searches around health information. The platform also sways the activities of content producers and the characteristics of the content they produce. For those seeking and studying information on digital health, this platform influence raises difficult questions around risk, authority, intervention, and oversight. This thesis addresses a critical gap in digital methodologies used in mapping and characterising that influence as part of wider debates around algorithmic accountability within STS and digital health scholarship. By adopting a novel methodological approach to Blackbox auditing and data collection, I provide a unique evidentiary base for the analysis of ads, organic results, and the platform mechanisms of influence on queries related to stem cell treatments. I explore the question: how does Google Search mediate information that people access online about ‘proven’ and ‘unproven’ stem cell treatments? Here I show that, in spite of a general ban on advertisements of stem cell treatments, users continue to be presented with content promoting unproven treatments. The types, frequency, and commercial intent of results related to stem cell treatments shifted across user groups including geography and, more troublingly, those impacted by Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis. Additionally, I find evidence that the technological structure of Google Search itself enables primary and secondary commercial activities around the mediation and dissemination of health information online. It suggests that Google Search’s algorithmically-mediated rendering of search results – including both commercial and non-commercial activities - has critical implications for the present and future of digital health studies

    Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

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    This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research

    Video Conferencing: Infrastructures, Practices, Aesthetics

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    The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts
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