Does context really collapse in social media interaction?

'Context collapse' (CC) refers to the phenomenon widely debated in social media research, where various audiences convene around single communicative acts in new networked publics, causing confusion and anxiety among social media users. The notion of CC is a key one in the reimagination of social life as a consequence of the mediation technologies we associate with the Web 2.0. CC is undertheorized, and in this paper we intend not to rebuke it but to explore its limits. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from "online communication" in general to specific forms of social action performed, not by predefined "group" members, but by actors engaging in emerging kinds of sharedness based on existing norms of interaction. This approach is a radical choice for action rather than actor, reaching back to symbolic interactionism and beyond to Mead, Strauss and other interactionist sociologists, and inspired by contemporary linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, notably the work of Rampton and the Goodwins. We apply this approach to an extraordinarily complex Facebook discussion among Polish people residing in The Netherlands - a set of data that could instantly be selected as a likely site for context collapse. We shall analyze fragments in detail, showing how, in spite of the complications intrinsic to such online, profoundly mediated and oddly 'placed' interaction events, participants appear capable of 'normal' modes of interaction and participant selection. In fact, the 'networked publics' rarely seem to occur in practice, and contexts do not collapse but expand continuously without causing major issues for contextualization. The analysis will offer a vocabulary and methodology for addressing the complexities of the largest new social space on earth: the space of online culture

Good practices for a literature survey are not followed by authors while preparing scientific manuscripts

The number of citations received by authors in scientific journals has become a major parameter to assess individual researchers and the journals themselves through the impact factor. A fair assessment therefore requires that the criteria for selecting references in a given manuscript should be unbiased with respect to the authors or the journals cited. In this paper, we advocate that authors should follow two mandatory principles to select papers (later reflected in the list of references) while studying the literature for a given research: i) consider similarity of content with the topics investigated, lest very related work should be reproduced or ignored; ii) perform a systematic search over the network of citations including seminal or very related papers. We use formalisms of complex networks for two datasets of papers from the arXiv repository to show that neither of these two criteria is fulfilled in practice

MC2: MPEG-7 content modelling communities

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe use of multimedia content on the web has grown significantly in recent years. Websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr cater for enormous amounts of multimedia content uploaded by users. This vast amount of multimedia content requires comprehensive content modelling otherwise retrieving relevant content will be challenging. Modelling multimedia content can be an extremely time consuming task that may seem impossible particularly when undertaken by individual users. However, the advent of Web 2.0 and associated communities, such as YouTube and Flickr, has shown that users appear to be more willing to collaborate in order to take on enormous tasks such as multimedia content modelling. Harnessing the power of communities to achieve comprehensive content modelling is the primary focus of this research. The aim of this thesis is to explore collaborative multimedia content modelling and in particular the effectiveness of existing multimedia content modelling tools, taking into account the key development challenges of existing collaborative content modelling research and the associated modelling tools. Four research objectives are pursued in order to achieve this; first, design a user experiment to study users’ tagging behaviour with existing multimedia tagging tools and identify any relationships between such user behaviour; second, design and develop a framework for MPEG-7 content modelling communities based on the results of the experiment; third, implement an online service as a proof of concept of the framework; fourth, validate the framework through the online service during a repeat of the initial user experiment. This research contributes first, a conceptual model of user behaviour visualised as a fuzzy cognitive map and, second, an MPEG-7 framework for multimedia content modelling communities (MC2) and its proof of concept as an online service. The fuzzy cognitive model embodies relationships between user tagging behaviour and context and provides an understanding of user priorities in the description of content features and the relationships that exist between them. The MC2 framework, developed based on the fuzzy cognitive model, is deep-rooted in user content modelling behaviour and content preferences. A proof of concept of the MC2 framework is implemented as an online service in which all metadata is modelled using MPEG-7. The online service is validated, first, empirically with the same group of users and through the same experiment that led to the development of the fuzzy cognitive model and, second, functionally against the folksonomy and MPEG-7 content modelling tools used in the initial experiment. The validation demonstrates that MC2 has the advantages without the shortcomings of existing multimedia tagging tools by harnessing the ease of use of folksonomy tools while producing comprehensive structured metadata.Supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Designing a digital ecosystem for the new museum environment: the Virtual Museum of the Pacific

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a social media platform for a digital ecosystem, which enables a variety of user communities to engage with the Pacific Collection of the Australian Museum. The success of the system depends on facilitating the development of culturally relevant folksonomies and encouraging a conversation between online communities. In this paper we explore the relationships between stakeholders, folksonomy and taxonomy, to reveal the design strategies which inform this digital ecosystem. Our analysis defines the scope for the social tagging component of our information model and discusses how users might interact with objects (in terms of their knowledge base) and also contribute to ongoing taxonomic definitions. Given its capacity to span both collection management and community access issues, we contend that the Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a significant model for online community interaction in the contemporary museum environment

An asynchronous instruction length decoder

Journal ArticleAbstract-This paper describes an investigation of potential advantages and pitfalls of applying an asynchronous design methodology to an advanced microprocessor architecture. A prototype complex instruction set length decoding and steering unit was implemented using self-timed circuits. [The Revolving Asynchronous Pentium® Processor Instruction Decoder (RAPPID) design implemented the complete Pentium II® 32-bit MMX instruction set.] The prototype chip was fabricated on a 0.25-CMOS process and tested successfully. Results show significant advantages-in particular, performance of 2.5-4.5 instructions per nanosecond-with manageable risks using this design technology. The prototype achieves three times the throughput and half the latency, dissipating only half the power and requiring about the same area as the fastest commercial 400-MHz clocked circuit fabricated on the same process

Does context really collapse in social media interaction?

‘Context collapse’ (CC) refers to the phenomenon widely debated in social media research, where various audiences convene around single communicative acts in new networked publics, causing confusion and anxiety among social media users. The notion of CC is a key one in the reimagination of social life as a consequence of the mediation technologies we associate with the Web 2.0. CC is undertheorized, and in this paper we intend not to rebuke it but to explore its limits. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from “online communication” in general to specific forms of social action performed, not by predefined “group” members, but by actors engaging in emerging kinds of sharedness based on existing norms of interaction. This approach is a radical choice for action rather than actor, reaching back to symbolic interactionism and beyond to Mead, Strauss and other interactionist sociologists, and inspired by contemporary linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, notably the work of Rampton and the Goodwins. We apply this approach to an extraordinarily complex Facebook discussion among Polish people residing in The Netherlands – a set of data that could instantly be selected as a likely site for context collapse. We shall analyze fragments in detail, showing how, in spite of the complications intrinsic to such online, profoundly mediated and oddly ‘placed’ interaction events, participants appear capable of ‘normal’ modes of interaction and participant selection. In fact, the ‘networked publics’ rarely seem to occur in practice, and contexts do not collapse but expand continuously without causing major issues for contextualization. The analysis will offer a vocabulary and methodology for addressing the complexities of the largest new social space on earth: the space of online culture

An asynchronous instruction length decoder

Journal ArticleThis paper describes an investigation of potential advantages and pitfalls of applying an asynchronous design methodology to an advanced microprocessor architecture. A prototype complex instruction set length decoding and steering unit was implemented using self-timed circuits. [The Revolving Asynchronous Pentium® Processor Instruction Decoder (RAPPID) design implemented the complete Pentium II® 32-bit MMX instruction set.] The prototype chip was fabricated on a 0.25-CMOS process and tested successfully. Results show significant advantages-in particular, performance of 2.5-4.5 instructions per nanosecond-with manageable risks using this design technology. The prototype achieves three times the throughput and half the latency, dissipating only half the power and requiring about the same area as the fastest commercial 400-MHz clocked circuit fabricated on the same process