Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives

The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general

Europeana communication bug: which intervention strategy for a better cooperation with creative industry?

Although Europeana as well as many GLAMs are very engaged - beside the main mission, i.e. spreading cultural heritage knowledge- in developing new strategies in order to make digital contents reusable for creative industry, these efforts have been successful just only in sporadic cases. A significant know how deficits in communication often compromises expected outcomes and impact. Indeed, what prevails is an idea of communication like an enhancement “instrument” intended on the one hand in purely economic (development) sense, on the other hand as a way for increasing and spreading knowledge. The main reference model is more or less as follows: digital objects are to be captured and/or transformed by digital technologies into sellable goods to put into circulation. Nevertheless, this approach risks neglecting the real nature of communication, and more in detail the one of digital heritage where it is strategic not so much producing objects and goods as taking part into sharing environments creation (media) by engaged communities, small or large they may be. The environments act as meeting and interchange point, and consequently as driving force of enhancing. Only in a complex context of network interaction on line accessible digital heritage contents become a strategic resource for creating environments in which their re/mediation can occur – provided that credible strategies exist, shared by stakeholders and users. This paper particularly describes a case study including proposals for an effective connection among Europeana, GLAMs and Creative Industry in the framework of Food and Drink digital heritage enhancement and promotion. Experimental experiences as the one described in this paper anyway confirm the relevance of up-to-date policies based on an adequate communication concept, on solid partnerships with enterprise and association networks, on collaborative on line environments, on effective availability at least for most of contents by increasing free licensing, and finally on grassroots content implementation involving prosumers audience, even if filtered by GLAMs

Muddled Boundaries of Digital Shrines

International audienceBased on an online ethnography study of 274 YouTube videos posted during the Virginia Tech or the Newtown massacres, this article discusses how users resort to participatory media during such mediatized events to create a digital spontaneous shrine. The assemblage of this sanctuary on a website hosting billions of user-generated contents is made possible by means of folksonomy and website architecture, and a two-fold social dynamic based on participatory commitment and the institutionalization of a collective entity. Unlike “physical” spontaneous shrines erected in public spaces, these digital shrines connect the bereaved with provocative or outrageous contributions, notably tributes from school shooting fans using participatory media to commemorate the killer’s memory. This side effect, generated by the technical properties of the platform, compromises the tranquility of the memorial and muddles the boundaries and the contents of such sanctuaries

Web 2.0 and destination marketing: current trends and future directions

Over the last decade, destination marketers and Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) have increasingly invested in Web 2.0 technologies as a cost-effective means of promoting destinations online, in the face of drastic marketing budgets cuts. Recent scholarly and industry research has emphasized that Web 2.0 plays an increasing role in destination marketing. However, no comprehensive appraisal of this research area has been conducted so far. To address this gap, this study conducts a quantitative literature review to examine the extent to which Web 2.0 features in destination marketing research that was published until December 2019, by identifying research topics, gaps and future directions, and designing a theory-driven agenda for future research. The study’s findings indicate an increase in scholarly literature revolving around the adoption and use of Web 2.0 for destination marketing purposes. However, the emerging research field is fragmented in scope and displays several gaps. Most of the studies are descriptive in nature and a strong overarching conceptual framework that might help identify critical destination marketing problems linked to Web 2.0 technologies is missing

Reading Matters in the Academic Library: Taking the Lead from Public Librarians

With the increasing virtualization of resources, reference service, and instruction, college students have fewer reasons to visit the academic library, a place they believe lacks relevance in their lives. This article explores the idea of revitalizing academic libraries by reconsidering the place of pleasure reading in them. Considerable research has been conducted on reading in the last quarter century. Reading serves a host of essential functions, far more than we have ever guessed. The first part of this paper looks at the social, psychological, moral, emotional, and cognitive role it plays in our lives. The second half examines readers’ advisory services that we can borrow or adapt from public libraries, services that can attract new users, promote lifelong reading, and transform academic libraries to be more community, user, and reader focused

Affect-based information retrieval

One of the main challenges Information Retrieval (IR) systems face nowadays originates from the semantic gap problem: the semantic difference between a user’s query representation and the internal representation of an information item in a collection. The gap is further widened when the user is driven by an ill-defined information need, often the result of an anomaly in his/her current state of knowledge. The formulated search queries, which are submitted to the retrieval systems to locate relevant items, produce poor results that do not address the users’ information needs. To deal with information need uncertainty IR systems have employed in the past a range of feedback techniques, which vary from explicit to implicit. The first category of feedback techniques necessitates the communication of explicit relevance judgments, in return for better query reformulations and recommendations of relevant results. However, the latter happens at the expense of users’ cognitive resources and, furthermore, introduces an additional layer of complexity to the search process. On the other hand, implicit feedback techniques make inferences on what is relevant based on observations of user search behaviour. By doing so, they disengage users from the cognitive burden of document rating and relevance assessments. However, both categories of RF techniques determine topical relevance with respect to the cognitive and situational levels of interaction, failing to acknowledge the importance of emotions in cognition and decision making. In this thesis I investigate the role of emotions in the information seeking process and develop affective feedback techniques for interactive IR. This novel feedback framework aims to aid the search process and facilitate a more natural and meaningful interaction. I develop affective models that determine topical relevance based on information gathered from various sensory channels, and enhance their performance using personalisation techniques. Furthermore, I present an operational video retrieval system that employs affective feedback to enrich user profiles and offers meaningful recommendations of unseen videos. The use of affective feedback as a surrogate for the information need is formalised as the Affective Model of Browsing. This is a cognitive model that motivates the use of evidence extracted from the psycho-somatic mobilisation that occurs during cognitive appraisal. Finally, I address some of the ethical and privacy issues that arise from the social-emotional interaction between users and computer systems. This study involves questionnaire data gathered over three user studies, from 74 participants of different educational background, ethnicity and search experience. The results show that affective feedback is a promising area of research and it can improve many aspects of the information seeking process, such as indexing, ranking and recommendation. Eventually, it may be that relevance inferences obtained from affective models will provide a more robust and personalised form of feedback, which will allow us to deal more effectively with issues such as the semantic gap

'R.I.P. man...u are missed and loved by many': entextualising moments of mourning on a Facebook Rest in Peace group site

Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday selves, as well as to share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions on an unprecedented scale (Barton and Lee 2013; Georgakopoulou 2006; Jones and Hafner 2012). The recent emergence of online environments as new sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013) has attracted scholarly interest in digital post-death rituals of mourning and memorialisation as an important social phenomenon (Walter et al. 2011; de Vries and Roberts 2004). While previous studies have been largely based on content analyses of individual MySpace logs and Facebook or discussion forum posts, the present study approaches digital memorial posts as entextualised moments of mourning shared with and for a networked audience (John 2013; Androutsopoulos 2014). The article analyses a corpus of Facebook memorial posts (N=525) as post sequences, wall events and texts, looking at how content on the site is produced, shared and discursively regimented. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the intextualisation of moments of mourning on Facebook is participatory: it involves users’ selection of moments for public display relating to offline ceremonies of mourning, calendar-important dates or personal updates and contributing to the production of a textured wall in memory of the dead. The textuality of posts is found to rely on an ad hoc blending of formal genres of mourning and vernacular genres of writing dependent on (i) situational (date of posting activity, position in the post sequence) and (ii) extra-textual parameters (gender of poster, relationship with the deceased). The present socio-discursive investigation contributes to the growing, in-depth understanding of the texture and textuality of Web 2.0 mourning practices