15,334 research outputs found
Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions
What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of
relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a
test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational
structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict
among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace
structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a
computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of
conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize
the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction
of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions
taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no
statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of
particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news
events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being
driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of
belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing
predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase,
and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we
observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the
system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting
available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state
machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm
The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the “Memory Boom” in Contemporary Historical Studies
Jay Winter delivered the following in the form of a lecture at the Canadian War Museum on 31 October 2000. A distinguished academic, Winter has been writing about the cultural history of the First World War for nearly three decades. He has taught at the University of Cambridge in England and is presently at Yale University. Since 1988, he has been a director of the Historial de la grande guerre in Peronne, an important war museum in northern France. In this capacity, he has become familiar with a great many institutions of war and military history around the world and he has great knowledge and familiarity with the important historical and intellectual debates that will be fundamental to the creation of a new Canadian War Museum, which is now slated to open in May 2005.
Probably Winter’s best-known book is Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History published in 1995. In it, he argues that the rituals of mourning associated with commemoration after the First World War had a history stretching far back in human life and experience. In this he contradicts the thinking of Canadian historian Modris Eksteins who argued that the Great War marked the birth of the modern age. Lately, Daniel Sherman has proposed that commemorative ceremonies and memorials are significantly politicized in the interests of state control. In the following paper Winter warns against the dangers of collective memory being collapsed into “a set of stories formed by or about the state” while also providing a rich overview of the great importance that attention to memory and culture studies has taken on in contemporary thought. These cannot be ignored in any serious attempt to lay the intellectual foundation of any new museum, and perhaps especially may have specific relevance to a new war museum
First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia
Contributing to history has never been as easy as it is today. Anyone with
access to the Web is able to play a part on Wikipedia, an open and free
encyclopedia. Wikipedia, available in many languages, is one of the most
visited websites in the world and arguably one of the primary sources of
knowledge on the Web. However, not everyone is contributing to Wikipedia from a
diversity point of view; several groups are severely underrepresented. One of
those groups is women, who make up approximately 16% of the current contributor
community, meaning that most of the content is written by men. In addition,
although there are specific guidelines of verifiability, notability, and
neutral point of view that must be adhered by Wikipedia content, these
guidelines are supervised and enforced by men.
In this paper, we propose that gender bias is not about participation and
representation only, but also about characterization of women. We approach the
analysis of gender bias by defining a methodology for comparing the
characterizations of men and women in biographies in three aspects: meta-data,
language, and network structure. Our results show that, indeed, there are
differences in characterization and structure. Some of these differences are
reflected from the off-line world documented by Wikipedia, but other
differences can be attributed to gender bias in Wikipedia content. We
contextualize these differences in feminist theory and discuss their
implications for Wikipedia policy.Comment: 10 pages, ACM style. Author's version of a paper to be presented at
ACM Hypertext 201
Radicalism and the limits of reform : the case of John Reed
Poet, journalist, editorial board member of the Masses and founding member of the Communist Labor Party, John Reed is a hero in both the worlds of cultural and political radicalism. This paper shows how his development through pre-World War One Bohemia and into left wing politics was part of a larger movement of middle class youngsters who were in that era in reaction against the reform mentality of their parent's generation. Reed and his peers were critical of the following, common reformist views: that economic individualism is the engine of progress; that the ideas and morals of WASP America are superior to those of all other ethnic groups; that the practical constitutes the best approach to social life. By tracing Reed's development on these issues one can see that his generation was critical of a larger cultural view, a system of beliefs common to middle class reformers and conservatives alike. Their revolt was thus primarily cultural, one which tested the psychic boundaries, the definitions of humanity, that reformers shared as part of their class
Web 2.0 @ BU – Use of Wikis within the School of Health & Social Care
The aim of the Web 2.0 @ BU project is to investigate current good practice and to map the use of Web 2.0 technologies within Bournemouth University. This paper aims to communicate the findings from the School of Health & Social Care project team during the academic year 2007/2008 concerning the use of wikis in three distinct areas: Reviewing The Literature Wiki - A teaching session on reviewing the literature is included as a part of the Masters Research Unit - Principles of Enquiry Unit 1. This case study concerns using a wiki as a replacement for PowerPoint and as a separate study guide. LIMBIC Project Wiki - The aim of the LIMBIC project is to evaluate an inter-professional approach linking practice based learning with the principles and methods of healthcare improvement. This case study examines how an external project group wiki could be utilised to enable collaboration between non-technical healthcare users. Teamworking and Communication in Health and Social Care Unit Wiki - The purpose of this third year unit is to provide students with the opportunity to undertake interprofessional project work and, through this develop their skills of working collaboratively in teams and to communicate and function more effectively within their role. This case study looks at how effective small student group wikis are as a part of a long, thin unit where students sometimes find that they vary their contribution according to the time that they have. The paper hopes to share knowledge and experience of utilising wikis, enabling teachers and practitioners to be in a stronger position to respond and react to the changing demands of using innovative new learning technologies
Galois Got his Gun
This paper appeals to the figure of \'Evariste Galois for investigating the
gates between mathematics and their "publics." The figure of Galois draws some
lines of/within mathematics for/from the outside of mathematics and these lines
in turn sketch the silhouette of Galois as a historical figure. The present
paper especially investigates the collective categories that have been used in
various types of public discourses on Galois's work (e.g. equations, groups,
algebra, analysis, France, Germany etc.). In a way, this paper aims at shedding
light on the boundaries some individuals drew by getting Galois his gun. It is
our aim to highlight the roles of authority some individuals (such as as
Picard) took on in regard with the public figure of Galois as well as the roles
such authorities assigned to other individuals (such as the mediating role
assigned to Jordan as a mediator between Galois's "ideas" and the public). The
boundary-works involved by most public references to Galois have underlying
them a long-term tension between academic and public legitimacies in the
definition of some models for mathematical lives (or mathematics personae
PaperRobot: Incremental Draft Generation of Scientific Ideas
We present a PaperRobot who performs as an automatic research assistant by
(1) conducting deep understanding of a large collection of human-written papers
in a target domain and constructing comprehensive background knowledge graphs
(KGs); (2) creating new ideas by predicting links from the background KGs, by
combining graph attention and contextual text attention; (3) incrementally
writing some key elements of a new paper based on memory-attention networks:
from the input title along with predicted related entities to generate a paper
abstract, from the abstract to generate conclusion and future work, and finally
from future work to generate a title for a follow-on paper. Turing Tests, where
a biomedical domain expert is asked to compare a system output and a
human-authored string, show PaperRobot generated abstracts, conclusion and
future work sections, and new titles are chosen over human-written ones up to
30%, 24% and 12% of the time, respectively.Comment: 12 pages. Accepted by ACL 2019 Code and resource is available at
https://github.com/EagleW/PaperRobo
Practicing Authorship: The Case of Brecht’s Plays
Practicing Culture seeks to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research. Culture is not just products and representations but practices. It is made and remade in countless small ways and occasional bursts of innovation. It is something people do – and do in rich variety and distinctive contexts as engaging case studies from the book reveal. Practicing Culture will reshape and invigorate the sociology of culture, not only through internal development, but through enhanced connections to the interdisciplinary social theory and to related fields like the sociology of knowledge and ethnography. It will prove an essential tool for students and researchers of cultural theory, contemporary social theory and cultural sociology
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