What is the REFI-QDA Standard: Experimenting With the Transfer of Analyzed Research Projects Between QDA Software

The open REFI-QDA standard allows for the exchange of entire projects from one QDA software to another, on condition that software vendors have built the standard into their software. To reveal the new opportunities emerging from overcoming QDA software lock-in, we describe an experiment with the standard in four separate research projects done by several researchers during a week at the Lorentz Centre (The Netherlands) in August 2019. Each researcher exchanged some processed research data between two qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) packages. We start by envisaging the development of the REFI-QDA standard, followed by the context of each research project, the type(s) of data in it, the reasons for wanting to do the transfer to another program and the lessons learnt in doing so. We conclude with the benefits of the REFI-QDA standard and the issues to be taken into account when considering a transfer between QDAS.Der offene REFI-QDA-Standard ermöglicht es, Daten zwischen verschiedenen QDA-Programmen auszutauschen, vorausgesetzt, die Softwarehersteller*innen haben den Standard in ihre Programme integriert. Um die neuen Möglichkeiten aufzuzeigen, die sich aus dieser Überwindung der Beschränkung auf einzelne Analyseprogramme ergeben, beschreiben wir die Ergebnisse eines Experiments zur Nutzung des Standards in vier verschiedenen Forschungsprojekten. Das Experiment wurde im August 2019 am Lorentz Centre (Niederlande) durchgeführt. Alle beteiligten Forscher*nnen tauschten mithilfe des Standards zuvor verarbeitete Forschungsdaten zwischen zwei Softwarepaketen zur qualitativen Datenanalyse (QDAS) aus. Unser Artikel beginnt zunächst damit, die Entstehungsgeschichte des REFI-QDA Standards zu erläutern. Anschließend stellen wir die einzelnen Forschungsprojekte samt der darin verwendeten Daten vor und erläutern die Beweggründe für deren Übertragung in eine zweite QDA-Software sowie die daraus gewonnenen Erkenntnisse. Im letzten Schritt fassen wir den Mehrwehrt des REFI-QDA-Standards zusammen und diskutieren Aspekte, die bei einem Transfer zwischen QDAS zu beachten sind

Gender differences in grant submissions and research topics : An approach to study proposals of the Experiment! program of the Volkswagen Foundation across science and engineering fields

Research persistently shows that women are underrepresented in most science and engineering fields and obtain fewer research grants than men. In this paper we consider gender-related interests to investigate female and male scientists’ rates of submitted grant proposals and their selection of research topics in research areas of life science, engineering science, physical science and mathematics. Do men and women differ in their research preferences? Do they vary in respect of numbers of submissions and topics? To study submission rates, we analysed data about applications of the Experiment! Grant programme of the German Volkswagen Foundation to do unconventional research. To identify research topics, we additionally applied an LDA-based topic model. The findings reveal uneven proportions of submissions among men and women in different research areas. Regarding research themes, results suggest that men dominate in more topics than women

Analyse von Rechtsextremismus und Gruppenbezogener Menschenfeindlichkeit: Text Mining der Dokumentation von chronik.LE 2008-2019

Der Beitrag untersucht in einer Längsschnittanalyse die Entwicklung der Ereignisse, die aus Gruppenbezogener Menschenfeindlichkeit (GMF) und Rechtsextremismus heraus motiviert sind. Grundlage hierfür ist die Dokumentation von chronik.LE, in der Gewalt- und Propaganda-Aktionen organisierter und nichtorganisierter Neonazis und rechter Akteur*innen sowie Vorfälle von Rassismus, Antisemitismus und Sexismus in der Stadt Leipzig und den Landkreisen Leipzig und Nordsachsen dokumentiert sind. Dabei werden drei Perspektiven herausgearbeitet: eine diachrone, eine inhaltliche und eine geografische. Die inhaltliche Auswertung wird mittels Topic Modeling umgesetzt. Dadurch werden verschiedene Akteur*innen, Veränderungen der Ausdrucksformen einzelner Diskriminierungsformen und der Aktionen rechter und rechtsextremer Akteur*innen sowie darauf aufbauend geografische Schwerpunkte aufgezeigt. Der Beitrag ist ein Beispiel dafür, wie umfangreiche Dokumentensammlungen mittels computergestützten Analyseverfahren ausgewertet werden und damit Methoden der Digital Humanities zur Rechtsextremismusforschung beitragen können.Since 2008 chronik.LE is documenting violence and propaganda actions of organized and non-organized neo-Nazis and right-wing actors as well as incidents of racism, anti-Semitism and sexism in the city of Leipzig and the districts of Leipzig and Northern Saxony. Based on this documentation, this paper examines three perspectives on the development of incidents motivated by group-focused enmity and right-wing extremism: temporal, content-related and geographical. In order to evaluate the content-related development, the documents are analysed by topic modeling. This reveals various actors, changes in the expression of different forms of discrimination and in the actions of right-wing actors, as well as geographical focuses. Overall, the paper is an example of how large document collections can be evaluated by means of computational analysis

Software Support for Discourse-Based Textual Information Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review and Software Guidelines in Practice

[Abstract] The intrinsic characteristics of humanities research require technological support and software assistance that also necessarily goes through the analysis of textual narratives. When these narratives become increasingly complex, pragmatics analysis (i.e., at discourse or argumentation levels) assisted by software is a great ally in the digital humanities. In recent years, solutions have been developed from the information visualization domain to support discourse analysis or argumentation analysis of textual sources via software, with applications in political speeches, debates, online forums, but also in written narratives, literature or historical sources. This paper presents a wide and interdisciplinary systematic literature review (SLR), both in software-related areas and humanities areas, on the information visualization and the software solutions adopted to support pragmatics textual analysis. As a result of this review, this paper detects weaknesses in existing works on the field, especially related to solutions’ availability, pragmatic framework dependence and lack of information sharing and reuse software mechanisms. The paper also provides some software guidelines for improving the detected weaknesses, exemplifying some guidelines in practice through their implementation in a new web tool, Viscourse. Viscourse is conceived as a complementary tool to assist textual analysis and to facilitate the reuse of informational pieces from discourse and argumentation text analysis tasks.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad; FJCI-2016-6 28032Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades; RTI2018-093336-B-C2

Public sector facility management at military unit level: an exploratory study

The purpose of this research is to explore the scope and understanding of facility management (FM) in the public sector, and specifically at military unit level, and compare it to a normative model. The principles of applied research are used in a single exploratory and instrumental case study with a mixed-method approach of data gathering. The literature review studied secondary data to create context, and open-ended and closed-ended questions in a questionnaire produced primary data on the actual scope and understanding of FM. A sequential mixed research approach was used to discuss the five research propositions. The research found that FM policies do not extend to military unit level. Furthermore, that FM practitioners have some understanding and competencies but there is no consistency in and between units, and therefore, support is needed in some. Support is required in the form of training/education, career development, budgets and structures as identified by FM practitioners. The Department of Defence (DOD) needs to define and communicate FM; structure FM down to unit level; staff structures; train, educate, and promote FM practitioners as FM professionals; and fund FM activities. FM practitioners need to be informed and skilled, they should build networks, and be cost conscious. This research is limited by studying FM at only a few military units on the West Coast of South Africa, which limits statistical inference and the establishment of FM within the whole of the DOD. Although FM research has been done within the South African public sector, and the DOD has made contributions, no previous research has focussed on FM at military unit level. The value of this research is a consolidated and focussed effort towards FM, which ultimately contributes to state security and the cost thereof. Future research should find the optimal structure, staffing and competencies for FM in military units

Enhancing numerical modelling efficiency for electromagnetic simulation of physical layer components.

The purpose of this thesis is to present solutions to overcome several key difficulties that limit the application of numerical modelling in communication cable design and analysis. In particular, specific limiting factors are that simulations are time consuming, and the process of comparison requires skill and is poorly defined and understood. When much of the process of design consists of optimisation of performance within a well defined domain, the use of artificial intelligence techniques may reduce or remove the need for human interaction in the design process. The automation of human processes allows round-the-clock operation at a faster throughput. Achieving a speedup would permit greater exploration of the possible designs, improving understanding of the domain. This thesis presents work that relates to three facets of the efficiency of numerical modelling: minimizing simulation execution time, controlling optimization processes and quantifying comparisons of results. These topics are of interest because simulation times for most problems of interest run into tens of hours. The design process for most systems being modelled may be considered an optimisation process in so far as the design is improved based upon a comparison of the test results with a specification. Development of software to automate this process permits the improvements to continue outside working hours, and produces decisions unaffected by the psychological state of a human operator. Improved performance of simulation tools would facilitate exploration of more variations on a design, which would improve understanding of the problem domain, promoting a virtuous circle of design. The minimization of execution time was achieved through the development of a Parallel TLM Solver which did not use specialized hardware or a dedicated network. Its design was novel because it was intended to operate on a network of heterogeneous machines in a manner which was fault tolerant, and included a means to reduce vulnerability of simulated data without encryption. Optimisation processes were controlled by genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimisation which were novel applications in communication cable design. The work extended the range of cable parameters, reducing conductor diameters for twisted pair cables, and reducing optical coverage of screens for a given shielding effectiveness. Work on the comparison of results introduced ―Colour maps‖ as a way of displaying three scalar variables over a two-dimensional surface, and comparisons were quantified by extending 1D Feature Selective Validation (FSV) to two dimensions, using an ellipse shaped filter, in such a way that it could be extended to higher dimensions. In so doing, some problems with FSV were detected, and suggestions for overcoming these presented: such as the special case of zero valued DC signals. A re-description of Feature Selective Validation, using Jacobians and tensors is proposed, in order to facilitate its implementation in higher dimensional spaces

A resource-based view of the firm : integrating the role of IT as a strategic resource - an empirical study of South African personal financial services (Assurance) firms, 1999-2003

Includes bibliographical references (p. 502-531).This research explores an "inside the black box" view on how IT enables sustainable competitive advantage. Most researchers have investigated IT competitive competencies that make up a firm's strategic framework to understand competitive advantage. However, Resource-Based Theory (RBT) probes into the inner workings of a firm, suggesting that a firm's IT assets and resources are the basis of a firm's "rare" core competencies to compete successfully. Using RBT and research in the economics, strategy, and IT literatures, an initial "Framework of Sustainability" was created, against which the case studies were conducted. This framework was used as foundation to develop semi-structured questionnaires in which 45, 90 minute (on average) interviews were conducted with managers in the four firms. Both internal and external documents about the firms and the industry were used as sources of corroborating evidence. In addition, a "bottoms up" view was obtained with evidence gathered from a short questionnaire and focus groups discussions held with 178 staff employees in the four firms