The Human Flesh Search Engine in China: a case-oriented approach to understanding online collective action

There has been a growing interest in online politics in China. The research mostly focuses on the role of the Internet in two areas, one is its creation of a public sphere and the challenges it poses to the existing communication and political system, and the other one is online censorship undertaken by Chinese authorities to reduce the scope of political discussion online and keep the domestic cyberspace from being merged with foreign cyberspace. However, some political uses of the Internet in China have tended to be overlooked. This thesis seeks to redress this lacuna in research by examining the political focus of a recent Internet phenomenon the Human Flesh Search Engine (HFSE). This term might be more at home in pages of a horror novel but was originally applied by the Chinese media to refer to the practice of online searching for people or human hunting. While existing examinations have focused on breaches of individual privacy by these so called online vigilantes this study mainly focuses on the ability of HFSE to reveal norms transgressions by public officials and lead to their removal. As the politically-focused HFSE is part of the tendency of Chinese popular protest, it is necessary to explore how the HFSE differs from and is similar to those offline protests in China. A case-oriented approach is applied to the research on HFSE. More specifically, the first part of this research puts the understanding of HFSE in Chinese historical context, with the aim of exploring the common dynamics between HFSE and those historical examples of Chinese bottom-up collective action. Then in the second part, a comparison between HFSE and recent Chinese offline popular protests is conducted in order to establish the pattern of politically-focused HFSE. In the third part, based on the empirical cases, the research on HFSE continues with an exploration of HFSE s underlying causal mechanisms to answer a key question of this research: why did HFSE occur? The study implies that there are continuities with respect to the Chinese bottom-up collective action as HFSE and Chinese rural resistances as well as urban labour strikes in the twentieth century of China tend to show similar dynamics, which are determined by the power structure they are exposed to. Moreover, the internal process of politically-focused HFSE differs largely from that of recent Chinese offline popular protests, which indicates that HFSE does not have an offline equivalent, although some of its stages can be witnessed offline. Furthermore, HFSE s occurrence is brought about by a combination of online and offline factors, which are relevant to not only the Internet and Chinese cyberspace, but also the political system that has contributed to the growth of official corruption and low government credibility in China

The Map As An Object of Service Design

The rapid development of ICT has led to the transformation of maps from printed paper to virtual digital publishing and three-dimensional mapping. This allows speculation to be replaced with certainty and accuracy in maps. This also allows maps to function as participatory platforms with the capacity to collect, create, store and process data through people’s interaction with other individuals, the environment and cities. This has significantly changed the way that key stakeholders interact with each other through mapping and raised fundamental ontological and epistemological questions about the nature of maps and mapping. This paper reviews literature in critical cartography and map examples to see how recent technological developments relate to mapmaking. The current practice and thinking in cartography has been challenged, as cartography is traditionally considered the core mapmaking profession. When maps start to function as participatory platforms and become democratized, cartography seems to become obsolete. In light of this, we suggest that maps become the objects of service design. In this role, service designers consider maps as services and take a user-centred approach to facilitate the engagement of key stakeholders in complex systems. The key contribution of this paper lies in the fact that it initiates a discussion of the potential of service design in developing digital platforms, smart cities and public services through mapping. It suggests that future studies could contextualize the involvement of service design in this new territory and investigates its implications and limitations

Navigating the Black Box: Generativity and Incongruences in Digital Innovation

Digital technologies offer generative potential as they are malleable, dynamic and can be leveraged across a range of tasks. Prior studies have mainly focused on generativity as driver for recombinatorial innovation. However, not much attention has been paid to 1) how innovators develop cognitive frames in the face of seemingly unbound possibilities and 2) how heterogeneous actors resolve differences, or incongruences, in their cognitive frames.Extant research provides only partial answers on how innovators navigate those challenges. Therefore, this thesis aims to generate new insight on how innovators balance generativity and incongruences in digital innovation. It is based on two empirical papers that draw upon a two-year, longitudinal single-case study of a distributed, heterogeneous innovation network engaged in leveraging digital technologies in the context of marine environment.This thesis finds that embracing generativity increases the risk of clashes between incongruences amongst innovators. On the other hand, innovators leverage the generative potential of digital components to respond to incongruences by producing boundary objects or facilitating innovation trajectory shifts. Moreover, the appended papers illustrate how innovators may employ a non-linear innovation approach and loosely defined organizational structures to facilitate repeated shifts in their innovation trajectory. At the same time, this thesis finds that too many shifts create challenges in network coordination and maintaining a coherent strategic vision

Imagery to the Crowd, MapGive, and the CyberGIS: Open Source Innovation in the Geographic and Humanitarian Domains

The MapGive initiative is a State Department project designed to increase the amount of free and open geographic data in areas either experiencing, or at risk of, a humanitarian emergency. To accomplish this, MapGive seeks to link the cognitive surplus and good will of volunteer mappers who freely contribute their time and effort to map areas at risk, with the purchasing power of the United States Government (USG), who can act as a catalyzing force by making updated high resolution commercial satellite imagery available for volunteer mapping. Leveraging the CyberGIS, a geographic computing infrastructure built from open source software, MapGive publishes updated satellite imagery as web services that can be quickly and easily accessed via the internet, allowing volunteer mappers to trace the imagery to extract visible features like roads and buildings without having to process the imagery themselves. The resulting baseline geographic data, critical to addressing humanitarian data gaps, is stored in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database, a free, editable geographic database for the world under a license that ensures the data will remain open in perpetuity, ensuring equal access to all. MapGive is built upon a legal, policy, and technological framework developed during the Imagery to the Crowd phase of the project. Philosophically, these projects are grounded in the open source software movement and the application of commons-based peer production models to geographic data. These concepts are reviewed, as is a reconception of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) called GIS 2.0

Quality Assessment of the Canadian OpenStreetMap Road Networks

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has been applied in many fields such as participatory planning, humanitarian relief and crisis management because of its cost-effectiveness. However, coverage and accuracy of VGI cannot be guaranteed. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a popular VGI platform that allows users to create or edit maps using GPS-enabled devices or aerial imageries. The issue of geospatial data quality in OSM has become a trending research topic because of the large size of the dataset and the multiple channels of data access. The objective of this study is to examine the overall reliability of the Canadian OSM data. A systematic review is first presented to provide details on the quality evaluation process of OSM. A case study of London, Ontario is followed as an experimental analysis of completeness, positional accuracy and attribute accuracy of the OSM street networks. Next, a national study of the Canadian OSM data assesses the overall semantic accuracy and lineage in addition to the quality measures mentioned above. Results of the quality evaluation are compared with associated OSM provenance metadata to examine potential correlations. The Canadian OSM road networks were found to have comparable accuracy with the tested commercial database (DMTI). Although statistical analysis suggests that there are no significant relations between OSM accuracy and its editing history, the study presents the complex processes behind OSM contributions possibly influenced by data import and remote mapping. The findings of this thesis can potentially guide cartographic product selection for interested parties and offer a better understanding of future quality improvement in OSM

TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201