Topic Maps as Indexing Tools in the Educational Sphere: Theoretical Foundations, Review of Empirical Research and Future Challenges

Non

ABSTRACTS OF POSTERS

N/

A Soulful Egg Can Break a Rock: A Case Study of a South Korean Social Movement Leader\u27s Rhetoric

This dissertation introduces and analyzes Ven. Hyemoon’s rhetoric emanating from his leadership of the civic group, the Committee for the Return of Korean Cultural Property in South Korea. On the surface, he seems focused on retrieving cultural artifacts, pillaged by the Japanese colonial invasion. His work, upon deeper analysis, emerges to be about regaining a Korean cultural and national identity that is historically grounded, civically engaged and morally reflective. This study is informed by multiple theories (i.e., framing, narrative, social semiotics, critical geography, rhetoric, and social movement) to examine aspects of a phenomenon in depth – involving nationalism, social movement, rhetoric, repatriation, colonialism, and cultural resources – that work together to dissect or dismantle the complex construction of meanings and processes of specific social movement rhetoric. The central focus is on the examination of Hyemoon’s discursive construction of what it means to be authentic Koreans within the context of South Korea situated within a post-colonial, post-cold war, and post-democratizing movement as well as within global capitalism. The primary focus is on how historical, cultural, and moral landscapes mediated by Korean cultural artifacts are constructed and represented to the public in Hyemoon’s rhetoric and performance. In particular, the ways in which Korean collective-identity landscapes are depicted by relating cultural artifacts to specific places in history is considered. Moreover, the study examines discursive and performative practices and strategies that Hyemoon has adopted and developed to construct and represent his message by using linguistic, visual, and other material signs and symbols. Each chapter explores Hyemoon’s discourse by adopting different theories and focusing on specific events. The study concludes that Hyemoon’s discourse and performance appeals to the Korean public, engaging this audience in associating particular cultural assets with experiential, historic, and social collective memory. Most importantly, he reframes the meaning of cultural artifacts while also searching for cultural assets in terms of morality and civic agency. By offering a new interpretive framework, this work also finds that Hyemoon’s activism is effective in specific historic, political contexts of South Korea, in particular during the extension of the previous democratization social movement that had become quiescent

Topic Maps and library and information science : an exploratory study of Topic Maps principles from a Knowledge and Information Organization perspective

Purpose: This master thesis attempts to present a ‘state of the art’ of the placement of Topic Maps (ISO13250) in Library and Information Science, through an extensive literature review and a synthesis based on their principles. It was sited from a Knowledge and Information Organization perspective, represented by the work by Elain Svenonius The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization and some of the concepts of Knowledge Organization. This thesis also intends to present a conceptual and theoretical framework for future research. Design/methodology/approach: The study under review presents a qualitative approach based on Grounded Theory principles to analyse the literature and build the conceptual framework for its analysis. The literature reviewed consisted of more than sixty documents, which included, among others, journal articles, conference presentations and papers, student reports and thesis, as well as a book chapter. Moreover, this was complemented with information obtained from mailing lists, blog postings and websites, and some unstructured interviews. Findings: Topic Maps appears to be a development aligned within the tradition of Knowledge and Information Organization but is completely adapted to the context of the Web and the digital environments. In a LIS perspective, it is bibliographic meta-language able to represent, extend and mostly integrate all the existing Knowledge Organization Systems in a standards-based generic model applicable to digital content and online presentation. Conceptually, Topic Maps is in the borders of the LIS discipline with Knowledge Representation and Computer Science, where LIS conceptual models play the role of intermediaries by providing the ontologies to the ‘bibliographic universe’. Topic Maps questions traditional LIS views and principles. Even though some of them still remain the same, as the meaning-based identification of entities, the notions of ‘document’ and ‘subject’ require further studies. Some important applications give account of the capabilities and potentials for further developments and research on Topic Maps in LIS. The main field of application is the Digital Humanities and TEIcodified texts presentation.Joint Master Degree in Digital Library Learning (DILL

Novel Applications Of Music And Digital Media In Global Health Intervention And Education Initiatives During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Case Study Of Bts And Army

The Korean musical group BTS (full name Bangtan Seoyeondan/방탄소년단) is one of the world’s most commercially and artistically successful entertainment acts. BTS is primarily known for their domination of both Western and Korean musical markets, impressive digital media presence, major role in supporting the South Korean economy, and highly mobilized 400,000 member fandom known as ARMY. BTS and their parent company HYBE’s artistic creation and marketing model has long focused on creating “Music and Artists for Healing,” or using music and various forms of primarily digital content to connect with and improve health outcomes for fans. In response, ARMY have developed significant grassroots public health organizing to improve health of other fans and general populations. Both BTS and ARMY’s intervention work regularly reaches global audiences of millions through primarily digital media delivery mechanisms.This interdisciplinary, mixed methods study uses qualitative analysis of BTS’ digital content (n = 478) and an introductory exploration of ARMY public health organizations to demonstrate that BTS’ music, HYBE’s digital content production and dissemination strategies, and ARMY’s community grassroots organizing produced one of the largest-reaching public health interventions in response to the early COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020- December 2021). Major intervention strategies included mitigating negative mental health outcomes, distributing health information, modeling safe behaviors, and engaging in both mutual aid and anti-racist health equity work. This exploratory research illuminates new directions in effective, novel public health intervention and education practices and posits that critical, nuanced study of BTS and ARMY’s impact on public health may hold important keys to re-imagining digitally delivered health interventions and their subsequent economic profitability

Popular culture as a powerful destination marketing tool: an Australian study

This thesis is concerned with the marketing possibilities of popular culture tourism (PCT). There is promise in developing alternative forms of cultural communication and cultural representation in tourism. Specifically, PCT is explored as a way to enhance and reshape the current approach to destination promotion in Australia. Through the arrival of new and diversified cultural experiences, Australia can improve the existing tourism portfolio. Although there have been many studies which describe the marketing practice of using elements of popular culture in destination promotion, few, if any, effectively address the issue of usability of such methods in Australia. To understand the nature of the challenge, it is important to acknowledge the diversity inherent within popular culture, as well as the huge diversity of individual experiences and responses to such cultural practices. This work is concerned with the richness of individual experience, the multi-form qualities of interpersonal encounters with popular culture in Australia. This thesis uses pragmatism as the main interpretive framework, with its powerful ability to disambiguate and clarify the research questions. To study the phenomenon the researcher uses a combination of three research methods: survey research, descriptive study, and exploratory study. Each study contributes a unique perspective to the literature on popular culture tourism. To answer the research questions considerable data comprising 253 detailed questionnaires, 20 unstructured interviews, 648 blogs and social media posts, and marketing materials of over 50 DMOs were collected and analysed. The thesis has six chapters in total. The first chapter introduces the concept of PCT. It discusses how popular media and tourism, and thoughtful engagement of these forces, have created a phenomenon with great potential and strong commercial and popular impact. PCT is an umbrella term comprising several fields, such as film-induced, literary, and music tourism, as well as special events, and technology tourism, among others. The chapter argues that PCT can encourage youth tourism and help accommodate the needs of tourists coming from diverse households and families (multi-generational groups, singles, 'second' families). The chapter highlights the need to diversify the traditional tourism product by embracing specialty markets. The second chapter outlines the theoretical framework, rationale, and conceptual structure for the materials to follow. The third chapter introduces Study 1. The first study uses survey data to uncovers behaviour patterns and preferences of local popular culture tourists. It compares the events and locations in the context of PCT, and works with important cues (e.g., associations and preferences) and key features (e.g., consumption rates and travel intentions) by matching them with several hypotheses related to the consumption of popular culture. In Chapter 4, the scope of the investigation widens to include the international perspective. Study 2 is concerned with qualitative aspects of the cultural economy, namely the subjective experiences and expectation of past, existing and potential visitors. This study employs social listening and content analysis to observe and analyse online discussions related to popular culture events and locations in Australia. The captured experiences (impressions, feelings, thoughts, and observations) helped: (1) identify how Australia is being represented in popular culture discourse; (2) identify how the particular imagery of local popular culture commodities can influence the Australian tourism development strategy. The last study, Chapter 5, is concerned with practical applications. It offers a rigorous analysis of the marketing strategies that utilise popular culture in destination promotion. It discusses how these integrations are carried out by the DMOs in real-world practices. The chapter identifies seven advanced destination marketing tactics as efficient methods that can be used for tourism promotion in Australia. It offers recommendations and comments on the use of PCT in national tourism campaigns. Chapter 6 is devoted to the discussion of findings, implications, and limitations. The key findings contribute to the academic literature on cultural tourism. This thesis investigates the possibilities of using location-specific popular culture tools in 'narrative' marketing campaigns. The work identifies different PCT activities and their impacts on destination's image and tourists' experiences. The results and work also emerge as practical solutions for implementation of PCT tools in destination promotion for Australia

User-centric Music Information Retrieval

The rapid growth of the Internet and the advancements of the Web technologies have made it possible for users to have access to large amounts of on-line music data, including music acoustic signals, lyrics, style/mood labels, and user-assigned tags. The progress has made music listening more fun, but has raised an issue of how to organize this data, and more generally, how computer programs can assist users in their music experience. An important subject in computer-aided music listening is music retrieval, i.e., the issue of efficiently helping users in locating the music they are looking for. Traditionally, songs were organized in a hierarchical structure such as genre-\u3eartist-\u3ealbum-\u3etrack, to facilitate the users’ navigation. However, the intentions of the users are often hard to be captured in such a simply organized structure. The users may want to listen to music of a particular mood, style or topic; and/or any songs similar to some given music samples. This motivated us to work on user-centric music retrieval system to improve users’ satisfaction with the system. The traditional music information retrieval research was mainly concerned with classification, clustering, identification, and similarity search of acoustic data of music by way of feature extraction algorithms and machine learning techniques. More recently the music information retrieval research has focused on utilizing other types of data, such as lyrics, user access patterns, and user-defined tags, and on targeting non-genre categories for classification, such as mood labels and styles. This dissertation focused on investigating and developing effective data mining techniques for (1) organizing and annotating music data with styles, moods and user-assigned tags; (2) performing effective analysis of music data with features from diverse information sources; and (3) recommending music songs to the users utilizing both content features and user access patterns

3D Information Technologies in Cultural Heritage Preservation and Popularisation

This Special Issue of the journal Applied Sciences presents recent advances and developments in the use of digital 3D technologies to protect and preserve cultural heritage. While most of the articles focus on aspects of 3D scanning, modeling, and presenting in VR of cultural heritage objects from buildings to small artifacts and clothing, part of the issue is devoted to 3D sound utilization in the cultural heritage field