Assessment, Usability, and Sociocultural Impacts of DataONE

DataONE, funded from 2009-2019 by the U.S. National Science Foundation, is an early example of a large-scale project that built both a cyberinfrastructure and culture of data discovery, sharing, and reuse. DataONE used a Working Group model, where a diverse group of participants collaborated on targeted research and development activities to achieve broader project goals. This article summarizes the work carried out by two of DataONE’s working groups: Usability & Assessment (2009-2019) and Sociocultural Issues (2009-2014). The activities of these working groups provide a unique longitudinal look at how scientists, librarians, and other key stakeholders engaged in convergence research to identify and analyze practices around research data management through the development of boundary objects, an iterative assessment program, and reflection. Members of the working groups disseminated their findings widely in papers, presentations, and datasets, reaching international audiences through publications in 25 different journals and presentations to over 5,000 people at interdisciplinary venues. The working groups helped inform the DataONE cyberinfrastructure and influenced the evolving data management landscape. By studying working groups over time, the paper also presents lessons learned about the working group model for global large-scale projects that bring together participants from multiple disciplines and communities in convergence research

Hackathon: Definition, Practice and Perspectives of Use in Higher Education

In the article there are represented results of generalization and systematization of scientific and practical information about hackathons as an educational technology that is used in higher education and is of great interest to researchers and practitioners. The review has been made on the basis of Russian and foreign scientific publications considering the features of the organization and application of hackathons in the practice of higher education. The authors selected 494 articles issued in the period from 2011 to 2022 in publishings of the RSCI and SCOPUS databases by keywords “hachathon” and “education”, and 83 articles of them were analyzed in this review. It was found that publications about personal experience of participation and organization of hackathons and analytical articles revealing the author’s position on the issues considered in them dominate in the scientific literature on various aspects of hackathons use in the practice of higher education. Empirical studies and scientific reviews are presented to lesser extent. The analysis of publications made it possible to clarify the definition of the term “hackathon”, to identify the types of hackathons most often mentioned in the educational context (pedagogical, educational), and to define the term “educational hackathon”. A content analysis of publications has shown that various aspects of organizing and conducting hackathons in an educational context, their potential and impact on the educational process and its results are the subject of pedagogical discourse. Hackathons as educational intensives have found their application in university educational practice, providing new opportunities for improving the educational process in higher education, as they allow to implement project-, practice- and business-oriented approaches in training specialists. The main prospects of the hackathons use in education are identified and summarized. Introducing educational hackathons in the event plan of an educational organization make it possible to solve educational and career-oriented tasks, activate heuristic and creative cognitive activity of students. The analysis and evaluation of the hackathons impact on professionalization, academic motivation and educational achievements of students are promising areas of research on the problem of using hackathons in the educational process of higher education

Factors influencing customers’ attitude to adopt e-government mobile applications

Establishing new relations with new customers and managing customers’ relations with the existing ones is important and considered challenges for each firm nowadays. Thus, studying and understanding different psychological factors like consumers’ emotions and happiness, motivates and attitudes are important while it helps in how to do more business with customers and push them to stay longer especially when adopting e-government mobile applications. This study used a quantitative research approach with survey data collection from different users of government mobile applications (GMA). The sample is around 340 from different backgrounds and levels of using different government services mobile apps. The results revealed the standardized regression and coefficients interpret the direct association between the study variables, hence confirmed the hypothesized model that included several factors such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived skills readiness, and perceived security toward attitudes to GMA and use of GMA effects on customer happiness and positive emotion. Moreover, the conclusion and implications confirmed the literature of this research field and elucidated most of the stated factors that significantly influence the customers’ emotion and happiness. For further study, research directions are given to expand the extant understanding of new different factors with other outcomes of mobile applications use

Digital 3D Technologies for Humanities Research and Education: An Overview

Digital 3D modelling and visualization technologies have been widely applied to support research in the humanities since the 1980s. Since technological backgrounds, project opportunities, and methodological considerations for application are widely discussed in the literature, one of the next tasks is to validate these techniques within a wider scientific community and establish them in the culture of academic disciplines. This article resulted from a postdoctoral thesis and is intended to provide a comprehensive overview on the use of digital 3D technologies in the humanities with regards to (1) scenarios, user communities, and epistemic challenges; (2) technologies, UX design, and workflows; and (3) framework conditions as legislation, infrastructures, and teaching programs. Although the results are of relevance for 3D modelling in all humanities disciplines, the focus of our studies is on modelling of past architectural and cultural landscape objects via interpretative 3D reconstruction methods

Reinventing the Social Scientist and Humanist in the Era of Big Data

This book explores the big data evolution by interrogating the notion that big data is a disruptive innovation that appears to be challenging existing epistemologies in the humanities and social sciences. Exploring various (controversial) facets of big data such as ethics, data power, and data justice, the book attempts to clarify the trajectory of the epistemology of (big) data-driven science in the humanities and social sciences

Cyber Counterintelligence: Assets, Audiences, and the Rise of Disinformation

In April 2021, Facebook suffered yet another data breach that affected hundreds of millions of accounts. The private information of over 500 million people had been stolen by hackers - names, phone numbers, email addresses, locations and more. The cache is potentially valuable to a host of malicious actors, from criminals motivated by financial gain to hostile foreign actors microtargeting voters through information operations. It follows an evolution of threats in cyberspace targeting government agencies, utilities, businesses, and electoral systems. With a focus on state-based actors, this thesis considers how state threat perception of cyberspace has developed, and if that perception is influencing the evolution of cyber counterintelligence (CCI) as a response to cyber-enabled threats such as disinformation. Specifically, this thesis traces the threat elevation of cyberspace through the evolution of the published national security documentation of the United Kingdom, asking how threat elevation corresponds to the development of CCI, if at all, and what sort of responses these processes generate to combat the rising threat of disinformation campaigns conducted against liberal democracies. Democratic audiences are a target of influence and information operations, and, as such, are an intelligence and security vulnerability for the state. More so than in previous decades, to increase national resilience and security in cyberspace, the individual, as part of the democratic audience, is required to contribute to personal counterintelligence and security practices. This research shows that while assets and infrastructure have undergone successful threat elevation processes, democratic audiences have been insufficiently recognised as security vulnerabilities and are susceptible to cyber-enabled disinformation

An Autoethnographic Account of Innovation at the US Department of Veterans Affairs

The history of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health information technology (HIT) has been characterized by both enormous successes and catastrophic failures. While the VA was once hailed as the way to the future of twenty-first-century health care, many programs have been mismanaged, delayed, or flawed, resulting in the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Since 2015 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has designated HIT at the VA as being susceptible to waste, fraud, and mismanagement. The timely central research question I ask in this study is, can healthcare IT at the VA be healed? To address this question, I investigate a HIT case study at the VA Center of Innovation (VACI), originally designed to be the flagship initiative of the open government transformation at the VA. The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) was designed to promote the open innovation ecosystem public-private-academic partnership. Based on my fifteen years of experience at the VA, I use an autoethnographic methodology to make a significant value-added contribution to understanding and modeling the VA’s approach to innovation. I use several theoretical information system framework models including People, Process, and Technology (PPT), Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE), and Technology Adaptive Model (TAM) and propose a new adaptive theory to understand the inability of VA HIT to innovate. From the perspective of people and culture, I study retaliation against whistleblowers, organization behavioral integrity, and lack of transparency in communications. I examine the VA processes, including the different software development methodologies used, the development and operations process (DevOps) of an open-source application developed at VACI, the Radiology Protocol Tool Recorder (RAPTOR), a Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) radiology workflow module. I find that the VA has chosen to migrate away from inhouse application software and buy commercial software. The impact of these People, Process, and Technology findings are representative of larger systemic failings and are appropriate examples to illustrate systemic issues associated with IT innovation at the VA. This autoethnographic account builds on first-hand project experience and literature-based insights

Implementing data-driven systems for work and health: The role of incentives in the use of physiolytics

Following the recent success of health wearable devices (smartwatches, activity trackers) for personal and leisure activities, organizations have started to build digital occupational health programs and data-driven health insurance around these systems. In this way, firms or health insurance companies seek to both support a new form of health promotion for their workforce/clients and to take advantage of large amounts of collected data for organizational purposes. Still, the success in the implementation of wearable health devices (also known as physiolytics) in organizational settings is entirely dependent on the individual motivation to adopt and use physiolytics over time (since organizations cannot establish a mandated use). Therefore, organizations often use incentives to encourage individuals to participate in such data-driven programs. Yet, little is known about these mechanisms that serve to align the interests of an organization with the interests of a group of individuals. This is an important challenge because these incentives may blunder the frontiers between what is voluntary and what is not. Against this background, this thesis aims, from a critical realist perspective, to build general knowledge regarding incentives in physiolytics-centered organizational programs. By doing so, individuals may be able to recognize challenges linked to participation in such programs; organizations may create sensible incentives; policymakers may identify new social issues that appear with this form of digitalization in organizations; and, finally, researchers may investigate new practical and social challenges regarding digitalization in organizations. In concrete terms, the first explorative phase of the thesis shows that feedback, gamification features and financial incentives are the most implemented incentives in physiolytics-centered organizational programs. There is also an overrepresentation of financial incentives for data-health plans, indicating that health insurance companies are building their strategy on external motivators. A second, more explanatory phase serves to further explore these types of incentives and specify recommendations by taking a higher perspective than normative views, so that it is possible to create more alternative managerial strategies or develop other policy perspectives. This part principally shows that the most influential incentives on user behavior are the ones that are transparent, that stimulate individual empowerment, and that propose defined benefits. In terms of contributions, this thesis allows individuals to evaluate how their autonomy and integrity is impacted by incentives in such data-driven programs. This thesis also outlines the necessity for organizations to invest time and resources to know their audience. Organizations additionally need to develop several strategies, by mixing incentives or gradually introducing them. Policymakers must ensure that regulations permit the clear consent of participants; guarantee a proportionality of incentives, and involve entities that can guide individuals through data-sharing. Finally, this thesis enables researchers to further investigate how organizations can develop appropriate and desirable environments regarding data-driven technology, so that individuals may enhance their decision-making processes and organizations may succeed in their implementation