Capturing and indexing rehearsals: the design and usage of a digital archive of performing arts

Preserving the cultural heritage of the performing arts raises difficult and sensitive issues, as each performance is unique by nature and the juxtaposition between the performers and the audience cannot be easily recorded. In this paper, we report on an experimental research project to preserve another aspect of the performing arts—the history of their rehearsals. We have specifically designed non-intrusive video recording and on-site documentation techniques to make this process transparent to the creative crew, and have developed a complete workflow to publish the recorded video data and their corresponding meta-data online as Open Data using state-of-the-art audio and video processing to maximize non-linear navigation and hypervideo linking. The resulting open archive is made publicly available to researchers and amateurs alike and offers a unique account of the inner workings of the worlds of theater and opera

Modeling Digital Humanities Collections as Research Objects

Advancing digital libraries to increase the sustainability and usefulness of digital scholarship depends on identifying and developing data models capable of representing increasingly complex scholarly products. This paper considers the potential for an emergent model of scientific communication, the research objects data model, to accommodate the complexities of digital humanities collections. Digital humanities collections aggregate and enrich diverse sources of evidence and context, serving simultaneously as "publications" and dynamic, interactive platforms for research. The research objects model is an alternative to traditional formats of publication, facilitating aggregation and description of all of the inputs and outputs of a research process, ranging from datasets to papers to executable code. This model increasingly underpins research infrastructures in some scientific domains, yet its efficacy for representing humanities scholarship, and for undergirding humanities cyberinfrastructure, remains largely untested. This study offers a qualitative content analysis of digital humanities collections relying on a content/context analytical framework for characterizing collection components and their interrelationships. This study then maps those components and relationships into a research objects model to identify the model’s strengths and limitations for representing diverse digital humanities scholarship

3D Applications in Conservation and Connoisseurship: Investigating and Supplementing the Scholarly Catalogues of the Red Faun

Focusing on the Capitoline Red Faun, this paper concerns the 3-dimensional digital model (3DDM) and its potential utility in creating accurate conservation condition reports. Tradition condition reports verbally express information about the state of a work of art, such as its preservation or past restorations, and are often supplemented with photographs or drawings. The various historical catalogues that have appraised the condition of the Capitoline Red Faun, more aptly referred to as “scholarly catalogues” demonstrate the potential for ambiguity within this practice; of the five accounts appraising the state of the Red Faun, no two agree on which parts are ancient and which belong to the eighteenth-century restorations of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Clemente Bianchi. Given that this sculpture is included within the art historical canon of Hellenistic sculpture, a new condition report is timely. This paper undertakes an exhaustive analysis of the various joins and offers another condition report, this one illustrated with an interactive, annotated 3DDM. When served to the public and scholars alike, these interactive condition reports can act as a critical tool, garnering interest in and facilitating re-appraisals of status such as the Capitoline Red Faun

Accessing 3D Data

The issue of access and discoverability is not simply a matter of permissions and availability. To identify, locate, retrieve, and reuse 3D materials requires consideration of a multiplicity of content types, as well as community and financial investment to resolve challenges related to usability, interoperability, sustainability, and equity. This chapter will cover modes, audiences, assets and decision points, technology requirements, and limitations impacting access, as well as providing recommendations for next steps

On the Promotion of the Social Web Intelligence

Given the ever-growing information generated through various online social outlets, analytical research on social media has intensified in the past few years from all walks of life. In particular, works on social Web intelligence foster and benefit from the wisdom of the crowds and attempt to derive actionable information from such data. In the form of collective intelligence, crowds gather together and contribute to solving problems that may be difficult or impossible to solve by individuals and single computers. In addition, the consumer insight revealed from social footprints can be leveraged to build powerful business intelligence tools, enabling efficient and effective decision-making processes. This dissertation is broadly concerned with the intelligence that can emerge from the social Web platforms. In particular, the two phenomena of social privacy and online persuasion are identified as the two pillars of the social Web intelligence, studying which is essential in the promotion and advancement of both collective and business intelligence. The first part of the dissertation is focused on the phenomenon of social privacy. This work is mainly motivated by the privacy dichotomy problem. Users often face difficulties specifying privacy policies that are consistent with their actual privacy concerns and attitudes. As such, before making use of social data, it is imperative to employ multiple safeguards beyond the current privacy settings of users. As a possible solution, we utilize user social footprints to detect their privacy preferences automatically. An unsupervised collaborative filtering approach is proposed to characterize the attributes of publicly available accounts that are intended to be private. Unlike the majority of earlier studies, a variety of social data types is taken into account, including the social context, the published content, as well as the profile attributes of users. Our approach can provide support in making an informed decision whether to exploit one\u27s publicly available data to draw intelligence. With the aim of gaining insight into the strategies behind online persuasion, the second part of the dissertation studies written comments in online deliberations. Specifically, we explore different dimensions of the language, the temporal aspects of the communication, as well as the attributes of the participating users to understand what makes people change their beliefs. In addition, we investigate the factors that are perceived to be the reasons behind persuasion by the users. We link our findings to traditional persuasion research, hoping to uncover when and how they apply to online persuasion. A set of rhetorical relations is known to be of importance in persuasive discourse. We further study the automatic identification and disambiguation of such rhetorical relations, aiming to take a step closer towards automatic analysis of online persuasion. Finally, a small proof of concept tool is presented, showing the value of our persuasion and rhetoric studies