Crowd-sourced Photographic Content for Urban Recreational Route Planning

Routing services are able to provide travel directions for users of all modes of transport. Most of them are focusing on functional journeys (i.e. journeys linking given origin and destination with minimum cost) while paying less attention to recreational trips, in particular leisure walks in an urban context. These walks are additionally predefined by time or distance and as their purpose is the process of walking itself, the attractiveness of areas that are passed by can be an important factor in route selection. This factor is hard to be formalised and requires a reliable source of information, covering the entire street network. Previous research shows that crowd-sourced data available from photo-sharing services has a potential for being a measure of space attractiveness, thus becoming a base for a routing system that suggests leisure walks, and ongoing PhD research aims to build such system. This paper demonstrates findings on four investigated data sources (Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa and Geograph) in Central London and discusses the requirements to the algorithm that is going to be implemented in the second half of this PhD research. Visual analytics was chosen as a method for understanding and comparing obtained datasets that contain hundreds of thousands records. Interactive software was developed to find a number of problems, as well as to estimate the suitability of the sources in general. It was concluded that Picasa and Geograph have problems making them less suitable for further research while Panoramio and Flickr require filtering to remove photographs that do not contribute to understanding of local attractiveness. Based on this analysis a number of filtering methods were proposed in order to improve the quality of datasets and thus provide a more reliable measure to support urban recreational routing

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

A comparative study of online news retrieval and presentation strategies

We introduce a news retrieval system on which we evaluated three alternative presentation strategies for online news retrieval. We used a user-oriented and task-oriented evaluation framework. The interfaces studied were Image, giving a grid of thumbnails for each story together with query-based summaries presented as tooltips, Summary, which displayed the summary information alongside each thumbnail, and Cluster, which grouped similar stories together and used the same display format as Image. The evaluation showed that the Summary Interface was preferred to the Image Interface, and that the Cluster Interface was helpful to users with a set task to complete. The implications of this study are also discussed in this paper

Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital

This article examines the changing landscape of moving image archiving in the wake of recent developments in online video sharing services such as YouTube and Google Video. The most crucial change to moving image archives may not be in regard to the collections themselves, but rather the social order that sustains cultural institutions in their role as the creators and sustainers of objectified cultural capital. In the future, moving image stewardship may no longer be the exclusive province of institutions such as archives and libraries, and may soon be accomplished in part through the work of other interested individuals and organizations as they contribute to and define collections. The technologies being built and tested in the current Internet environment offer a new model for the reimagined moving image archive, which foregrounds the user in the process of creating the archive and strongly encourages the appropriation of moving images for new works. This new archetype, which in theory functions on democratic principles, considers moving images???along with most other types of cultural heritage material???to be building blocks of creative acts or public speech acts. One might argue that the latter represents a new model for creating an archive; this new democratic archive documents and facilitates social discourse.published or submitted for publicatio