The New Politics of Numbers

This open access book offers unique insight into how and where ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted, and how they have come to matter. Rather than asking what quantification is, New Politics of Numbers explores what quantification does, its manifold consequences in multiple domains. It scrutinizes the power of numbers in terms of the changing relations between numbers and democracy, the politics of evidence, and dreams and schemes of bettering society. The book engages Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, it provides a rich account of the plurality of possible ways in which numbers have come to govern, highlighting not only their disciplinary effects, but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer. This book will be invaluable reading for academics and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as policymakers interested in the opportunities and pitfalls of governance by numbers

Information filtering in high velocity text streams using limited memory - An event-driven approach to text stream analysis

This dissertation is concerned with the processing of high velocity text streams using event processing means. It comprises a scientific approach for combining the area of information filtering and event processing. In order to be able to process text streams within event driven means, an event reference model was developed that allows for the conversion of unstructured or semi-structured text streams into discrete event types on which event processing engines can operate. Additionally, a set of essential reference processes in the domain of information filtering and text stream analysis were described using event-driven concepts. In a second step, a reference architecture was designed that described essential architectural components required for the design of information ltering and text stream analysis systems in an event-driven manner. Further to this, a set of architectural patterns for building event driven text analysis systems was derived that support the design and implementation of such systems. Subsequently, a prototype was built using the theoretic foundations. This system was initially used to study the effect of sliding window sizes on the properties of dynamic sub-corpora. It could be shown that small sliding window based corpora are similar to larger sliding windows and thus can be used as a resource-saving alternative. Next, a study of several linguistic aspects of text streams was undertaken that showed that event stream summary statistics can provide interesting insights into the characteristics of high velocity text streams. Finally, four essential information filtering and text stream analysis components were studied, viz. filter policies, term weighting, thresholds and query expansion. These were studied using three temporal search profile types and were evaluated using standard information retrieval performance measures. The goal was to study the efficiency of traditional as well as new algorithms within the given context of high velocity text stream data, in order to provide advise which methods work best. The results of this dissertation are intended to provide software architects and developers with valuable information for the design and implementation of event-driven text stream analysis systems