Timeline Generation: Tracking individuals on Twitter

In this paper, we propose a unsupervised framework to reconstruct a person's life history by creating a chronological list for {\it personal important events} (PIE) of individuals based on the tweets they published. By analyzing individual tweet collections, we find that what are suitable for inclusion in the personal timeline should be tweets talking about personal (as opposed to public) and time-specific (as opposed to time-general) topics. To further extract these types of topics, we introduce a non-parametric multi-level Dirichlet Process model to recognize four types of tweets: personal time-specific (PersonTS), personal time-general (PersonTG), public time-specific (PublicTS) and public time-general (PublicTG) topics, which, in turn, are used for further personal event extraction and timeline generation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work focused on the generation of timeline for individuals from twitter data. For evaluation, we have built a new golden standard Timelines based on Twitter and Wikipedia that contain PIE related events from 20 {\it ordinary twitter users} and 20 {\it celebrities}. Experiments on real Twitter data quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach

Applying Wikipedia to Interactive Information Retrieval

There are many opportunities to improve the interactivity of information retrieval systems beyond the ubiquitous search box. One idea is to use knowledge bases—e.g. controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, thesauri and ontologies—to organize, describe and navigate the information space. These resources are popular in libraries and specialist collections, but have proven too expensive and narrow to be applied to everyday webscale search. Wikipedia has the potential to bring structured knowledge into more widespread use. This online, collaboratively generated encyclopaedia is one of the largest and most consulted reference works in existence. It is broader, deeper and more agile than the knowledge bases put forward to assist retrieval in the past. Rendering this resource machine-readable is a challenging task that has captured the interest of many researchers. Many see it as a key step required to break the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that crippled previous efforts. This thesis claims that the roadblock can be sidestepped: Wikipedia can be applied effectively to open-domain information retrieval with minimal natural language processing or information extraction. The key is to focus on gathering and applying human-readable rather than machine-readable knowledge. To demonstrate this claim, the thesis tackles three separate problems: extracting knowledge from Wikipedia; connecting it to textual documents; and applying it to the retrieval process. First, we demonstrate that a large thesaurus-like structure can be obtained directly from Wikipedia, and that accurate measures of semantic relatedness can be efficiently mined from it. Second, we show that Wikipedia provides the necessary features and training data for existing data mining techniques to accurately detect and disambiguate topics when they are mentioned in plain text. Third, we provide two systems and user studies that demonstrate the utility of the Wikipedia-derived knowledge base for interactive information retrieval

Social Learning Systems: The Design of Evolutionary, Highly Scalable, Socially Curated Knowledge Systems

In recent times, great strides have been made towards the advancement of automated reasoning and knowledge management applications, along with their associated methodologies. The introduction of the World Wide Web peaked academicians’ interest in harnessing the power of linked, online documents for the purpose of developing machine learning corpora, providing dynamical knowledge bases for question answering systems, fueling automated entity extraction applications, and performing graph analytic evaluations, such as uncovering the inherent structural semantics of linked pages. Even more recently, substantial attention in the wider computer science and information systems disciplines has been focused on the evolving study of social computing phenomena, primarily those associated with the use, development, and analysis of online social networks (OSN\u27s). This work followed an independent effort to develop an evolutionary knowledge management system, and outlines a model for integrating the wisdom of the crowd into the process of collecting, analyzing, and curating data for dynamical knowledge systems. Throughout, we examine how relational data modeling, automated reasoning, crowdsourcing, and social curation techniques have been exploited to extend the utility of web-based, transactional knowledge management systems, creating a new breed of knowledge-based system in the process: the Social Learning System (SLS). The key questions this work has explored by way of elucidating the SLS model include considerations for 1) how it is possible to unify Web and OSN mining techniques to conform to a versatile, structured, and computationally-efficient ontological framework, and 2) how large-scale knowledge projects may incorporate tiered collaborative editing systems in an effort to elicit knowledge contributions and curation activities from a diverse, participatory audience

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

Reconstructing the Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Daily Life in the 19th Century City: A Historical GIS Approach

In recent years, historians and historical geographers have become interested in the use of GIS to study historical patterns, populations, and phenomena. The result has been the emergence of a new discipline, historical GIS. Despite the growing use of GIS across geography and history, the use of GIS in historical research has been limited largely to visualization of historical records, database management, and simple pattern analysis. This is, in part, due to a lack of accessible research on methodologies and spatial frameworks that outline the integration of both quantitative and qualitative historical sources for use in a GIS environment. The first objective of this dissertation is to develop a comprehensive geospatial research framework for the study of past populations and their environments. The second objective of this dissertation is to apply this framework to the study of daily life in the nineteenth-century city, an important area of scholarship for historical geographers and social historians. Other daily life studies have focused on various experiences of daily life, from domestic duties and child rearing to social norms and the experience of work in early factories. An area that has received little attention in recent years is the daily mobility of individuals as they moved about the ‘walking city’. This dissertation advances our understanding of the diurnal patterns of daily life by recreating the journey to work for thousands of individuals in the city of London, Ontario, and its suburbs in the late nineteenth century. Methodologies are created to capture past populations, their workplaces, and their relationship to the environments they called home. Empirical results outline the relationship between social class, gender, and the journey to work, as well as how social mobility was reflected through the quality of individuals’ residential and neighbourhood environments. The results provide a new perspective on daily mobility, social mobility, and environment in the late nineteenth-century city. Results suggest that individuals who were able to be upwardly socially mobile did so at the expense of substantial increases in their journey to work

Nonhistory: Slavery and the Black Historical Imagination

This dissertation examines the theoretical significance of slavery in contemporary novels by black writers of English and French expression. I contend that black authors like Gayl Jones, Edouard Glissant, Léonora Miano, Sherley Anne Williams, Jean Métellus, and Fred D’Aguiar use literature to revise historical narratives and generate new histories of slavery. By reading novels as historical texts, I theorize nonhistory as a critique of the epistemological limitations of historiography. I argue that Black Francophone and Anglophone Atlantic writers of the postcolonial and post-Jim Crow era narrate the past as a nonhistory whose discursive and aesthetic afterimages expose the disjointed experience of time engendered by the lived experience of antiblackness. This project questions the endurance of slavery in the black historical imagination. In thinking with black Anglophone and Francophone writers, I consider how literary texts explore complementary dimensions to historical inquiry. By theorizing nonhistory as a historiographical tool, I question what kinds of subjunctive knowledges might be invented to explain the often-disjointed experience of black time

'Living from loan to loan': tracing networks of gifts, debt and trade in the Mongolian borderlands

This thesis explores the reliance on diverse economic networks in the margins of the neoliberal Mongolian state. Despite wanting to be included in contemporary economic and political narratives, residents of the border town of Magtaal feel largely neglected by the contemporary state and its political representatives. The remoteness of Magtaal, the recent Mongolian economic crisis and the inflation of cash money have submerged the township into a ‘regime of debt’ (Sneath 2012) manifested in what locals call ‘living from loan to loan’—subsisting off temporally-spaced cash influxes from bank loans and other sources. Yet, residents have appropriated these local economic, political and legal ambiguities through the creation of debt-motivated and/or resource extractive networks that engender monetary returns for the township. Through experience living and traveling with cross-border natural resource bulkers, local moneylenders and debt-based trade participants, this thesis explores debt-motivated economic networks that function to mobilize and distribute diverse sources of value. The power of these lies in their ability to bridge the multiple disjunctures between the bank-based formal system and the temporalities and values of the local social world. For one, these networks are driven by bank-based debt, yet enabled by social-based, ‘gift-like’ (Pedersen 2016) debt. Additionally, these chains can ‘translate’ (Tsing 2015) across moral worlds through the inclusion of local registers of patronage, care, assistance and prestige into economic calculi. As a result, these networks are increasingly utilized and morally sanctioned for their provisioning and distribution functions in lieu of the state. But in doing so, cosmoeconomic narratives are reconceptualized to sanction the increasing monetization, financialization and resource extraction in the Mongolian economic landscape

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 1: Change, Voices, Open

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 1 includes papers from Change, Voices and Open tracks of the conference

“Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level possible?”: Speculative Radicalism and the Planetary Topics

This dissertation problematizes the hegemony of “critique” within the humanities in general and communication studies in particular. I argue that critique in the current mode, a reading and engagement practice that valorizes suspicion and purports to unmask allegedly concealed ideologies, does not equip scholars or students with the imaginative capacity necessary to confront the problems of the Anthropocene. Drawing upon the resources of speculative realism and speculative fiction, I propose speculative radicalism as an alternative practice. Speculative radicalism is an affirmative mode of reading, engagement, and theorizing that encourages the imagining of alternative future ways of living and modes of production, proceeding stepwise from a posited point of difference, or “novum.” Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is offered as a model of invention in the speculative radicalist mode. With the goal of elaborating how speculative radicalism operates in this context, I repurpose the rhetorical topics of invention, or topoi. I argue that to fully appreciate the Mars Trilogy, one must understand that its applicable topics are, in fact, the planetary features of Mars itself: its gravity, landforms, and more. I develop and analyze this list of the planetary topics in the context of the Trilogy. In addition, I use the planetary topics to reevaluate established critical readings of the strategy video game series Sid Meier’s Civilization, as well as Robert Zubrin’s nonfiction space advocacy monograph The Case for Mars. I conclude that a reading of these artifacts informed by the planetary topics can yield more nuanced judgements than those produced by the prevailing style of academic critique; furthermore, this conclusion points the way toward the development of a speculative radicalist mode of engagement and imagination that is capable of meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene

Translation and Réécriture in the Middle Ages: Rewriting Merlin in the French and Italian Vernacular Traditions

This thesis will investigate the processes of translation and rewriting (réécriture) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, through a study of the French and Italian Merlin corpus. In particular, it will focus upon the products of translation between vernacular languages, which, as a practice, displays a greater degree of heterogeneity than translations into the vernacular from Latin. Medieval translation will be studied through a comparative analysis of the story of Merlin’s conception in Robert de Boron’s Merlin and Paulino Pieri’s La Storia di Merlino, in addition to an examination of the translation of Merlin’s prophecies as recounted in the Prophecies de Merlin, the Storia and the Vita di Merlino. These instances of translation will be compared to and studied alongside the processes of intralingual réécriture. Rewriting within the French tradition will be investigated through an analysis of the interpretative transition from the Vulgate Estoire de Merlin to the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin; in particular, the reinterpretations of Merlin’s prophetic discourse and the character of Merlin’s lover, Viviane, will be examined. The study will take as its methodological basis the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, particularly the concept of semiosis; this defines interpretation as an exchange of signs, through which meaning is transmitted and developed. In this way, the Merlin corpus will be regarded as a continuum of interpretation, through which the meaning of narratives is interpreted by other signs, thought patterns and extra-textual cultural discourses; more broadly, the whole medieval tradition of translation and réécriture will also be regarded as a part of this same continuum, displaying the same interpretative patterns