Visualisations with semantic icons: Assessing engagement with distracting elements

As visualisations reach a broad range of audiences, designing visualisations that attract and engage becomes more critical. Prior work suggests that semantic icons entice and immerse the reader; however, little is known about their impact with informational tasks and when the viewer’s attention is divided because of a distracting element. To address this gap, we first explored a variety of semantic icons with various visualisation attributes. The findings of this exploration shaped the design of our primary comparative online user studies, whereparticipants saw a target visualisation with a distracting visualisation on a web page and were asked to extract insights. Their engagement was measured through three dependent variables: (1) visual attention, (2) effort to write insights, and (3) self-reported engagement. In Study 1, we discovered that visualisations with semantic icons were consistently perceived to be more engaging than the plain version. However, we found no differences in visual attention and effort between the two versions. Thus, we ran Study 2 using visualisations with more salient semantic icons to achieve maximum contrast. The results were consistent with our first Study. Furthermore, we found that semantic icons elevated engagement with visualisations depicting less interestingand engaging topics from the participant’s perspective. We extended prior work by demonstrating the semantic value after performing an informational task (extracting insights) and reflecting on the visualisation, besides its value to the first impression. Our findings may be helpful to visualisation designers and storytellers keen on designing engaging visualisations with limited resources. We also contribute reflections on engagement measurements with visualisations and provide future directions

Changing Priorities. 3rd VIBRArch

In order to warrant a good present and future for people around the planet and to safe the care of the planet itself, research in architecture has to release all its potential. Therefore, the aims of the 3rd Valencia International Biennial of Research in Architecture are: - To focus on the most relevant needs of humanity and the planet and what architectural research can do for solving them. - To assess the evolution of architectural research in traditionally matters of interest and the current state of these popular and widespread topics. - To deepen in the current state and findings of architectural research on subjects akin to post-capitalism and frequently related to equal opportunities and the universal right to personal development and happiness. - To showcase all kinds of research related to the new and holistic concept of sustainability and to climate emergency. - To place in the spotlight those ongoing works or available proposals developed by architectural researchers in order to combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. - To underline the capacity of architectural research to develop resiliency and abilities to adapt itself to changing priorities. - To highlight architecture's multidisciplinarity as a melting pot of multiple approaches, points of view and expertise. - To open new perspectives for architectural research by promoting the development of multidisciplinary and inter-university networks and research groups. For all that, the 3rd Valencia International Biennial of Research in Architecture is open not only to architects, but also for any academic, practitioner, professional or student with a determination to develop research in architecture or neighboring fields.Cabrera Fausto, I. (2023). Changing Priorities. 3rd VIBRArch. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/VIBRArch2022.2022.1686

A Handbook of Theories on Designing Alignment Between People and the Office Environment

Although workplace design and management are gaining more and more attention from modern organizations, workplace research is still very fragmented and spread across multiple disciplines in academia. There are several books on the market related to workplaces, facility management (FM), and corporate real estate management (CREM) disciplines, but few open up a theoretical and practical discussion across multiple theories from different fields of studies. Therefore, workplace researchers are not aware of all the angles from which workplace management and effects of workplace design on employees has been or could be studied. A lot of knowledge is lost between disciplines, and sadly, many insights do not reach workplace managers in practice. Therefore, this new book series is started by associate professor Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands) and postdoc researcher Vitalija Danivska (Aalto University, Finland) as editors, published by Routledge. It is titled ‘Transdisciplinary Workplace Research and Management’ because it bundles important research insights from different disciplinary fields and shows its relevance for both academic workplace research and workplace management in practice. The books will address the complexity of the transdisciplinary angle necessary to solve ongoing workplace-related issues in practice, such as knowledge worker productivity, office use, and more strategic workplace management. In addition, the editors work towards further collaboration and integration of the necessary disciplines for further development of the workplace field in research and in practice. This book series is relevant for workplace experts both in academia and industry. This first book in the series focuses on the employee as a user of the work environment. The 21 theories discussed and applied to workplace design in this book address people’s ability to do their job and thrive in relation to the office workplace. Some focus more on explaining why people behave the way they do (the psychosocial environment), while others take the physical and/or digital workplace quality as a starting point to explain employee outcomes such as health, satisfaction, and performance. They all explain different aspects for achieving employee-workplace alignment (EWA) and thereby ensuring employee thriving. The final chapter describes a first step towards integrating these theories into an overall interdisciplinary framework for eventually developing a grand EWA theory. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003128830, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

The use of natural details in English poetry: 1645-1668

This dissertation examines the use made of details from the natural world by English poets of the mid-seventeenth century. It is concerned with two main aspects of the subjects the function of natural imagery; and the rhetorical methods by which details from nature are exploited in poetry. It also seeks to demonstrate that the way a poet manipulates his material is influenced both by inherited literary tradition, and also by his age's changing conception of the nature of the universe and of man's relationship to it. Part One of the thesis explores the implications of the title in the light of some early critical treatments of the subject of Nature in poetry and of more recent theories of seventeenth-century imagery and rhetoric, and surveys those changes in the thought and sensibility of the period which seem to have had a bearing on the poetic handling of natural imagery. Part Two investigates the various ways in which details from nature were employed by poets during the years 1645-1668. The material has been organised under three general headings, dictated by the function of the images in the poems in which they occur. Part Three examines the work of seven poets whose contribution is deemed to be of particular interest. Their poetry is related to the wider cultural setting discussed in Part One and to the literary background provided in Part Two. Part Four furnishes a brief survey of some of the major lines of development in the use of natural details in the poetry of the period immediately following the years studied in the main body of the thesis. The study concludes with three appendices and a bibliography of books and articles cited and consulted in the course of its composition

Colour and Colorimetry Multidisciplinary Contributions Vol. XIb

It is well known that the subject of colour has an impact on a range of disciplines. Colour has been studied in depth for many centuries, and as well as contributing to theoretical and scientific knowledge, there have been significant developments in applied colour research, which has many implications for the wider socio-economic community. At the 7th Convention of Colorimetry in Parma, on the 1st October 2004, as an evolution of the previous SIOF Group of Colorimetry and Reflectoscopy founded in 1995, the "Gruppo del Colore" was established. The objective was to encourage multi and interdisciplinary collaboration and networking between people in Italy that addresses problems and issues on colour and illumination from a professional, cultural and scientific point of view. On the 16th of September 2011 in Rome, in occasion of the VII Color Conference, the members assembly decided to vote for the autonomy of the group. The autonomy of the Association has been achieved in early 2012. These are the proceedings of the English sessions of the XI Conferenza del Colore

Sentiment Analytics and Financial Markets

From major news outlets to social media and the general public, it is common to find mentions of the existence of relationships between narratives and economic outcomes. By definition, those narratives are forms of soft information, which until recently have been difficult to quantify and are often propagated through natural language and text in particular. This thesis seeks to leverage this soft information and harness one key dimension of text in particular: Sentiment. In the context of this thesis, sentiment is defined as the disposition of an entity toward another entity, expressed via a specific medium. In the first three chapters of this thesis, the medium of interest is “News”, specifically news stories published in the financial press. The first paper uses firm-specific news sentiment to understand why market anomalies earn a premium on earnings announcement days. News sentiment shows that this premium for value firms is concentrated on bad news events, which permits us to propose new avenues to understand this market anomaly. The second and third chapters investigate more generally how news can help understand drivers of market anomalies. Market anomalies have played a central role in asset pricing research over the past decades, and numerous competing theories seek to accommodate empirical observations that deviate from the classical model. Chapter two proposes a framework based on cash-flow and discount rate news, allowing us to capture the driving forces behind anomaly returns and disentangle competing explanations for anomalies. The third chapter investigates drivers of anomaly returns and characterizes news of momentum and value stocks, in particular, highlighting the strong negative correlation between the two. It is also the first to link cash-flow news, discount rate news, and news sentiment. The economic outcome of interest in the fourth chapter is to understand how changes in company ownership, especially following leveraged buy-outs, affect employee welfare. We gather millions of online reviews of employees about their employers and investigate the underlying text data to characterize the impact private equity firms have on those narratives. Overall, employees’ satisfaction drops sharper following leverage buy-outs than in other types of ownership changes and we can trace those problems back to specific issues related to lack of management care and fear of cost-cutting and layoffs

The idea of the sequel : a theoretically oriented study of literary sequels with special emphasis on three examples from the first half of the eighteenth century.

The literary sequel has received little sustained or comprehensive critical attention. In view of this neglect the aim of this thesis is to present the sequel as a fruitful subject for discussion and analysis. The task undertaken here necessitates three interrelated procedures, the first of which seeks to produce a widely applicable definition of the word "sequel". The second procedure is the describing of the sequel as a literary form. This process demands a theoretical approach which views the sequel as a concept, or, as the thesis title indicates, an idea. In order to give coherence and unity to this activity the range of reference is limited almost exclusively to prose fiction in English from the late sixteenth century to the present day. In the three main central chapters the focus further narrows to consider in turn three examples of the sequel drawn from the first half of the eighteenth century. The close analysis of individual works highlights paradoxical aspects of the sequel. These special characteristics derive from a governing paradox common to all sequels: a sequel both continues a prior work and has an independent existence. The sequel cannot, however, be fully characterised without reference to its immediate historical circumstances. A third procedure examines the ways in which the contemporary response to a first part can prompt the composition of a sequel and influence its content and structure