A friend in need? The sino-Russian relationship under the coronavirus crisis in twitter: a Russian perspective

The paper focuses on the COVID-19 as a stress test to the Sino-Russian strategic partnership: has it driven Russia and China closer together, farther apart, or made no difference? Employing content analysis of official Russian discourse as expressed by the Kremlin, the Government, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), both via their official web pages (104 online publications) and Twitter accounts (260 tweets), this study focuses on the Russian twiplomacy as a more suitable mean to reflect the real-time changes of an evolving crisis. The analysis demonstrates that the Sino-Russian relationship extends beyond the "axis of convenience." It does not, however, correspond to the support expected from a consolidated (comprehensive) strategic partnership, nor does it achieve the intensity of soft balancing (vis-à-vis the USA) in a particularly polarized and politicized international context.This study was conducted at the Research Centre in Political Science (UIDB/CPO/00758/2020), University of Minho/University of Evora, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute

Congress UPV Proceedings of the 21ST International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators

This is the book of proceedings of the 21st Science and Technology Indicators Conference that took place in València (Spain) from 14th to 16th of September 2016. The conference theme for this year, ‘Peripheries, frontiers and beyond’ aimed to study the development and use of Science, Technology and Innovation indicators in spaces that have not been the focus of current indicator development, for example, in the Global South, or the Social Sciences and Humanities. The exploration to the margins and beyond proposed by the theme has brought to the STI Conference an interesting array of new contributors from a variety of fields and geographies. This year’s conference had a record 382 registered participants from 40 different countries, including 23 European, 9 American, 4 Asia-Pacific, 4 Africa and Near East. About 26% of participants came from outside of Europe. There were also many participants (17%) from organisations outside academia including governments (8%), businesses (5%), foundations (2%) and international organisations (2%). This is particularly important in a field that is practice-oriented. The chapters of the proceedings attest to the breadth of issues discussed. Infrastructure, benchmarking and use of innovation indicators, societal impact and mission oriented-research, mobility and careers, social sciences and the humanities, participation and culture, gender, and altmetrics, among others. We hope that the diversity of this Conference has fostered productive dialogues and synergistic ideas and made a contribution, small as it may be, to the development and use of indicators that, being more inclusive, will foster a more inclusive and fair world

A systematic review of trends and gaps in the production of scientific knowledge on the sociopolitical impacts of emojis in computer-mediated communication.

This systematic literature review analyses trends in original research on emoji use in computer-mediated communications (CMC) published between 2011 to 2021. In total, 823 articles were identified that met the search criteria. The mixedmethod approach included qualitative coding of articles and frequency analysis by year, impact quartile, research topic and multidisciplinarity, as well as a cluster analysis to examine trends in sociopolitical research. The results show that Computer Science, Communications and Social Sciences disciplines accounted for largest proportion of original research on emojis and CMC in the time period analysed and that the degree of scientific impact increased significantly across the time series. In recent years, sociopolitical research has had higher than average growth and can be clustered into various groups based on two broad objects of study: “culture-identity” and “social exclusion”. The study also identified significant knowledge gaps, particularly in relation to emoji standardization and its sociopolitical implications. Overall, multidisciplinary approaches are epistemologically constrained, Spanish-language production is low, and there is an almost complete absence of context appropriate methodologies. The study concludes that there is a need to for more sociopolitical research on emoji use in CMC and multidisciplinary approaches, a shift away from the hegemony of Anglocentrism, and greater questioning of the structural influences of standardization process on questions of cultural, identity and social exclusion.post-print2114 K

Seeking Impact and Visibility: Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was a three-year research and implementation initiative that took place between March 2010 and August 2013. Hosted by the University of Cape Town, the programme engaged the Universities of Botswana, Namibia and Mauritius in a process aimed at better understanding the dynamics around scholarly communication in the Southern African higher education environment and advancing the open access agenda for the purpose of increasing the visibility of African research. This work was made possible by a grant from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC). This report synthesizes research and findings from the four institutional case studies conducted at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity systems at work in these four Southern African universities

Tweet coupling: a social media methodology for clustering scientific publications

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Scientometrics on 18/05/2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03499-1 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2020, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary. We argue that classic citation-based scientific document clustering approaches, like co-citation or Bibliographic Coupling, lack to leverage the social-usage of the scientific literature originate through online information dissemination platforms, such as Twitter. In this paper, we present the methodology Tweet Coupling, which measures the similarity between two or more scientific documents if one or more Twitter users mention them in the tweet(s). We evaluate our proposal on an altmetric dataset, which consists of 3081 scientific documents and 8299 unique Twitter users. By employing the clustering approaches of Bibliographic Coupling and Tweet Coupling, we find the relationship between the bibliographic and tweet coupled scientific documents. Further, using VOSviewer, we empirically show that Tweet Coupling appears to be a better clustering methodology to generate cohesive clusters since it groups similar documents from the subfields of the selected field, in contrast to the Bibliographic Coupling approach that groups cross-disciplinary documents in the same cluster.The authors (Saeed-Ul Hassan & Mudassir Shabbir) were funded by the CIPL (National Center in Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC) grant, received from the Planning Commission of Pakistan, through Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under the projects TIN2017-89517-P and TIN2017-83445-P. Eugenio Martínez Cámara was supported by the Spanish Government Programme Juan de la Cierva Incorporación (IJC2018-036092-I).Published versio

Spatio-temporal patterns of human mobility from geo-social networks for urban computing: Analysis, models & applications

The availability of rich information about fine-grained user mobility in urban environments from increasingly geographically-aware social networking services and the rapid development of machine learning applications greatly facilitate the investigation of urban issues. In this setting, urban computing emerges intending to tackle a variety of challenges faced by cities nowadays and to offer promising approaches to improving our living environment. Leveraging massive amounts of data from geo-social networks with unprecedented richness, we show how to devise novel algorithmic techniques to reveal underlying urban mobility patterns for better policy-making and more efficient mobile applications in this dissertation. Building upon the foundation of existing research efforts in urban computing field and basic machine learning techniques, in this dissertation, we propose a general framework of urban computing with geo-social network data and develop novel algorithms tailored for three urban computing tasks. We begin by exploring how the transition data recording human movements between urban venues from geo-social networks can be aggregated and utilised to detect spatio-temporal changes of local graphs in urban areas. We further explore how this can be used as a proxy to track and predict socio-economic deprivation changes as government financial effort is put in developing areas by supervised machine learning methods. We then study how to extract latent patterns from collective user-venue interactions with the help of a spatio-temporal aware topic modeling approach for the benefit of urban infrastructure planning. After that, we propose a model to detect the gap between user-side demand and venue-side supply levels for certain types of services in urban environments to suggest further policymaking and investment optimisation. Finally, we address a mobility prediction task, the application aim of which is to recommend new places to explore in the city for mobile users. To this end, we develop a deep learning framework that integrates memory network and topic modeling techniques. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed architecture can enhance the prediction performance in various recommendation scenarios with high interpretability. All in all, the insights drawn and the techniques developed in this dissertation make a substantial step in addressing issues in cities and open the door to future possibilities in the promising urban computing area

The Individual and the Collective in Institutional Translation: A Case Study of Political News in Kuwait

The translation phenomenon is one that is affected by many factors. In an institutional setting these factors can vary. Institutions are collective in nature with translators being individuals in these institutions. This research has three aims. First, to explore the influence of the individual and the collective on the translation process and product in an institutional translation setting. Second, the research aims to examine the agency of the translator in an institutional setting dealing with political news. Third, to examine the effects of personal social attributes (nationality, religion, and political views) of translators in an institutional setting. This research examined the institutional translation of political news in Kuwait as a case study to achieve these aims. This case study explores the previous phenomena by analysing three qualitative data sets and one quantitative data set. The qualitative data sets are critical discourse analysis (CDA) of political news texts in Kuwait (30 texts), translators’ interviews analysis (33 participants), and three open-ended questions analysis. the quantitative data set is from a multiple-choice questionnaire (33 participants). This corpus was collected from four Kuwaiti news translation institutions, two public institutions and two private ones. The public institutions are the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information and the Kuwait News Agency, the private ones are the Arab Times newspaper and the Kuwait Times newspaper. The results show that, in the institutional translation of political news, collective (institutional) influence on the translation process and product exceeds that of the individual (translator) influence. This institutional influence was observed in the guidelines and protocols of each studied institution. This was more prominent in public institutions compared to the private ones. Mainly, this is due to public institutions having to be reflective of the state’s political views and policies. The translator’s agency in an institutional setting was found to be limited, due to the translator having to be in line with the institution’s guidelines and established translation process. The translator’s agency seems to also be affected by the general policy of the institution, which makes a translator working in an institutional setting likely to have limited agency. The effects of the personal factors of political views, religion, and social background were limited as the translators and their translations were found to be more affected by institutional factors rather than personal ones. This was observed in two main instances. First, the majority of interviewed translators argued against the effects of personal factors. Second, the translations’ analysis showed that the translations were more affected by collective/institutional factors rather than personal ones. This made the translations more reflective of their respective institution. A general overview of the state of institutional translation of political news in Kuwait was established. This was achieved by studying the recent translation processes and products of four prominent news translation institutions in Kuwait as a case study. Institutional translation of political news in Kuwait follows a defined translation process at the four institutions. This process is governed by strict procedures, guidelines, and protocols that the translators and their translations must abide by for the translations to be published. The translation process and product were found to be affected by external factors such as strict Kuwaiti publication laws, Kuwait’s foreign state policy, Kuwait’s diplomatic relationships, and the Amiri Diwan