Shaping Metrics for HEI Cultural Engagement - Knowledge Transfer

An application was submitted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for support for a project that would identify and define activities deemed relevant to Knowledge Transfer (KT) - Cultural Engagement (CE), and propose appropriate means to evaluate them. It was acknowledged from the outset that efforts at agreeing “metrics” for the impact of such activities had been attempted before, albeit with limited success. (One such notable example has been lately provided by the Higher Education and Business Community Interaction Survey (HEBCIS) which has collected some data on social, community, and cultural engagement for some years; however, the robustness and consistency of the data for these purposes have often been questioned.

University for the Creative Arts staff research 2011

This publication brings together a selection of the University’s current research. The contributions foreground areas of research strength including still and moving image research, applied arts and crafts, as well as emerging fields of investigations such as design and architecture. It also maps thematic concerns across disciplinary areas that focus on models and processes of creative practice, value formations and processes of identification through art and artefacts as well as cross-cultural connectivity. Dr. Seymour Roworth-Stoke

Beyond Classification: Latent User Interests Profiling from Visual Contents Analysis

User preference profiling is an important task in modern online social networks (OSN). With the proliferation of image-centric social platforms, such as Pinterest, visual contents have become one of the most informative data streams for understanding user preferences. Traditional approaches usually treat visual content analysis as a general classification problem where one or more labels are assigned to each image. Although such an approach simplifies the process of image analysis, it misses the rich context and visual cues that play an important role in people's perception of images. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of learning a user's latent visual preferences directly from image contents. We propose a distance metric learning method based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to directly extract similarity information from visual contents and use the derived distance metric to mine individual users' fine-grained visual preferences. Through our preliminary experiments using data from 5,790 Pinterest users, we show that even for the images within the same category, each user possesses distinct and individually-identifiable visual preferences that are consistent over their lifetime. Our results underscore the untapped potential of finer-grained visual preference profiling in understanding users' preferences.Comment: 2015 IEEE 15th International Conference on Data Mining Workshop

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Return to Baguia: an ethnographic museum collection on the edge of living memory

The question of what significance ethnographic museum collections might hold for source communities in the current era, particularly when collections sit on the edge of living memory, is explored in this thesis through a case-study of the Baguia Collection and its virtual return to the Makasae people of Baguia Sub-district, Timor-Leste, in 2014. The Baguia Collection was acquired by Dr Alfred Bühler on behalf of the Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland, in 1935 using salvage ethnology methodologies. This diasporic collection now exists in Switzerland as a record of Bühler's accomplishments and of Swiss ethnographic history, and as a time capsule of Makasae heritage. This research explores an initial phase of engagement between the residents of Baguia and the Baguia Collection. Makasae responses to this Collection, which consists of 691 material culture objects and over 300 historical photos, raise issues pertinent to contemporary museology practice as it seeks to identify appropriate relational processes in collaborating with source communities. The research findings support proposals for the flexible, pro-technological access and digital return of museum collections to source communities, yet considers the inherent limitations and complexities in this methodology as well. I argue that the Baguia Collection has shared heritage values and that digital access arrangements will enhance the restitution of cultural knowledge and its subsequent inter-generational transmission in Baguia while also providing the Museum der Kulturen Basel with more updated and relevant information about the Collection. My project demonstrates that access to digital images of the Collection has enabled residents of Baguia to assert their cultural authority over the Collection, and that with further digital access they would activate the Collection to meet their own development agendas. By animating the Collection through 'acts of transfer' the Baguia community illustrated the potential for the Collection to become a source of metacultural production that reinvigorates contemporary Makasae identity and develops Makasae social and cultural capital, while ultimately enhancing their capacity to aspire

Social Network Analysis on Wisconsin Archival Facebook Community

The purpose of this study was to understand how Wisconsin archives are using Facebook (Wisconson archives Facebook community, WAFC). Few archive studies use quantitative measurements to draw conclusions from social media application use. Quantitative data is needed in order to identify the various ways that social media is being used in an archive. Without the data behind the assumptions, it is impossible to improve service and outreach to the archive users. This study proposed a mixed methods approach to aid in the process, using social network analysis, inferential statistics and thematic analysis. This study measured the effects of implementation of social media in areas of archives in order to begin to identify and evaluate social media for future use by the archive community. These methods provide a better understanding of archives’ use of social media, thus enabling researchers and practitioners with a foundational point to continue research. Social networks allow individuals to connect with individuals and groups with whom they share common interests either personally or professionally. Four research questions and six hypotheses were developed to determine the main actors, the role of the actors, content of each online activity (‘tagging’, ‘sharing’, ‘commenting’, and ‘liking’), and post characteristics. Unique findings of this study were found regarding the information flow of the WAFC and the content. For instance, the research questions determined that archives are a central hub within the WAFC; however, other affiliations like cultural institutions and universities are other contributors to the information flow. Four different themes were discovered by the thematic analysis: archive story, communication, information, and outreach. These findings have theoretical, methodological, and practical implications