Análisis crítico de los discursos y narrativas digitales. The Gallery of Lost Art -Tate- como estudio de caso

Digital media is encouraging and fostering a changing process of museistic institution discourses. At the same time, these new methods of discourse create new narrative typologies that reflect of new forms of transmitting and conceiving art history and works of art. I have chosen this particular case, the virtual exhibition Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art, because its relevance to current practices that are taking place worldwide. Whether this example has been a step forward in the design of museums’ discourses and virtual exhibitions, it theme is just as new. This is due to it being a review of contemporary artworks that were lost under different circumstances but they were been recovered and on display to a large portion of the public thanks to the Internet. Starting with Foucault’s notion of discourse and paying attention specially to matter of the institutional legitimacy of its structural concepts, the aim is to analyze the different elements that make up museum’s discourse. Furthermore within this critical analysis I am also considering the textological understanding of a museum, which is leading to better understanding of the point of view being generated from hypermedia narratives.El medio digital está permitiendo y favoreciendo un proceso de cambio en los discursos ligados a la institución museística. En paralelo a estas nuevas modalidades discursivas, surgen también tipologías narrativas que reflejan nuevas formas de transmitir y concebir la historia del arte y las propias obras. La elección de este caso en concreto, la exposición virtual The Gallery of Lost Art de la Tate, responde a su relevancia en el marco de las prácticas que se están sucediendo en la actualidad en el ámbito internacional. Si este ejemplo ha supuesto un paso adelante en el diseño de discursos museísticos y exposiciones virtuales, su temática es igualmente novedosa, al realizar un recorrido por obras del arte contemporáneo perdidas bajo diversas circunstancias, que han sido recuperadas y mostradas al público nuevamente gracias a las posibilidades de Internet. Tomando como punto de partida la noción foucaultiano de discurso, y prestando especial atención a la cuestión de la legitimación institucional de los conceptos que lo estructuran, se pretenden analizar los diferentes elementos que componen el discurso museológico. Así mismo, en este análisis crítico también se hará presente la concepción textológica bajo la que se entiende al museo y que nos llevará a comprender a óptica desde la que se generan las narrativas hipermedia características del medio digital

Mining, Modeling, and Leveraging Multidimensional Web Metrics to Support Scholarly Communities

The significant proliferation of scholarly output and the emergence of multidisciplinary research areas are rendering the research environment increasingly complex. In addition, an increasing number of researchers are using academic social networks to discover and store scholarly content. The spread of scientific discourse and research activities across the web, especially on social media platforms, suggests that far-reaching changes are taking place in scholarly communication and the geography of science. This dissertation provides integrated techniques and methods designed to address the information overload problem facing scholarly environments and to enhance the research process. There are four main contributions in this dissertation. First, this study identifies, quantifies, and analyzes international researchers’ dynamic scholarly information behaviors, activities, and needs, especially after the emergence of social media platforms. The findings based on qualitative and quantitative analysis report new scholarly patterns and reveals differences between researchers according to academic status and discipline. Second, this study mines massive scholarly datasets, models diverse multidimensional non-traditional web-based indicators (altmetrics), and evaluates and predicts scholarly and societal impact at various levels. The results address some of the limitations of traditional citation-based metrics and broaden the understanding and utilization of altmetrics. Third, this study recommends scholarly venues semantically related to researchers’ current interests. The results provide important up-to-the-minute signals that represent a closer reflection of research interests than post-publication usage-based metrics. Finally, this study develops a new scholarly framework by supporting the construction of online scholarly communities and bibliographies through reputation-based social collaboration, through the introduction of a collaborative, self-promoting system for users to advance their participation through analysis of the quality, timeliness and quantity of contributions. The framework improves the precision and quality of social reference management systems. By analyzing and modeling digital footprints, this dissertation provides a basis for tracking and documenting the impact of scholarship using new models that are more akin to reading breaking news than to watching a historical documentary made several years after the events it describes

When the Literary Mutates and the Digital Emboldens: Transformations in Spanish Electronic Literature of the 21st Century

My dissertation analyzes Spanish-language electronic literature from Spain produced using new media technologies over the last 20 years. It more specifically looks at blogs, hypertext novels, hybrid publications that use digital codes needing scanning, and authorship. This project argues that new media technologies are exerting agency on both the physical and cyber world by affecting how literary texts are produced, presented to the reader, and embedded into everyday life. To achieve this, I propose looking at electronic texts through an Actor Network Theory approach as presented by John Law that treats all actors as interacting with various elements, both human and non-human, to create meaning. Supporting this approach is a combination of cyber-ecological and queer methodology that treats digital elements as having agency. In particular, I engage with scholars Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett to show that new technology has enabled the formation and visibility of original forms of literary and cultural expression through social media and traditional publishing avenues. Thus, the environment of digital works must be incorporated into any interpretation of the text as a whole. I employ this approach to better analyze a growing presence of individuals, cyber-intellectuals, engaged in social justice causes related to women’s, LGBT, and human rights who are able to network online via blogs and in the physical world to advance their activism. The analysis on hypertext novels provides a more complete understanding of the assemblages that construct meaning in digital works. Hybrid projects, where the content is partially in print and partially available on the Internet, serve to address the convergences of the digital and the physical worlds. Convergences such as these are also impacting the role of authorship in the production of texts in 21st century Spain. Digital components have become a part of everyday life and, subsequently, demand our attention as scholars in order to understand technology’s role in literature and, by extension, society and our lives