European generation link: promoting European citizenship through intergenerational and intercultural learning

In the past decades, Europe has experienced several waves of internal migration, including displaced persons before, during and after World War II, in the 1960s when “guest workers” were invited from South Europe to the richer states, after the fall of the Iron Curtain and through conflict in the former Jugoslavia. There are, therefore, millions of older people who are “European citizens” in the sense that they have lived in several European countries, cultures and societies and who have thus collected considerable experience of “a wider Europe”. Promoting European citizens’ awareness of Europe has been one of the main objectives of European policy for many years, but prejudices and attitudes linger on, especially among those who have little or no European experience with migration and multicultural approach. Furthermore, the treasure of those older people who have experienced a multilingual and multicultural life in Europe has hitherto been under-researched. The project “European Generation Link” has, therefore, developed a web-based platform that contains recordings of people who have, during their lifetime, lived in more than one European country. The site is arranged like a real library, with individual volumes containing the “stories”. They are based on structured interviews, mainly carried out by young people, and complemented with photographs, audio files and videoclips. Visitors may search the library using a variety of search parameters, including include countries, periods, cultures and languages. This presentation will introduce some of the stories uncovered so far and a preliminary analysis of the contents of the library

Slashing the slayer: a thematic analysis of homo-erotic Buffy fan fiction

This essay reports the research that I have carried out on Internet slash fiction based on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. I became interested in this area when I stumbled across slash fiction on the web myself and found that I enjoyed it. As someone who studies sexuality I was intrigued by this new (to me) form of erotic fiction and began to read the academic literature in the area. As I became familiar with the main theories, I wondered how they would relate to slash fiction written about Buffy, since this series differs from many of the programmes that have been slashed in the past. There are strong female and gay characters in Buffy, emotional and relationship-based themes are directly addressed, and the interaction between vampires and humans adds an additional dimension to the plot. In my study, I analysed both slash stories and my e-mail correspondence with the authors of Buffy slash. I come at the topic as both a slash reader and a psychologist, and I hope that I achieve a good balance between the position of mutual knowledge (as a fan) and critical distance (as a researcher) as recommended by Tulloch and Jenkins (1995). In the past, slash authors have been stigmatised by other fans and by convention organizers (Jenkins, 1992), and several of my participants felt that they had been misrepresented in previous research. I hope to be accountable in my research (Bannister et al., 1995) and to give a respectful and realistic portrayal of Buffy slash and its writers

Linking women editors of periodicals to the Wikidata Knowledge Graph

Stories are important tools for recounting and sharing the past. To tell a story one has to put together diverse information about people, places, time periods, and things. We detail here how a machine, through the power of Semantic Web, can compile scattered and diverse materials and information to construct stories. Through the example of the WeChangEd research project on women editors of periodicals in Europe from 1710 – 1920 we detail how to move from archive, to a structured data model and relational database, to a Linked Open Data model and make this information available on Wikidata, to the use of the Stories Services API to generate multimedia stories related to people, organizations and periodicals. This resulted in the WeChangEd Stories App, https://stories.wechanged.ugent.be/

Public Humanities EcoGothic at the Coast in Ireland and Wales

The Gothic clings to Irish and Welsh coasts and finds voice through strange stories. Centuries of accumulated death and tragedy forms a dense web of sorrow with particularly prolific roots in the literature, songs, and stories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These traditions resonate within the longer history of lives and vessels lost in the Irish Sea, becoming part of what Gillian O’Brien has described as the ‘ring of sorrow’ encircling Ireland, and the wider archipelago, ‘binding together communities who have suffered maritime tragedies like beads on a rosary’. This paper explores the Gothic resonances that cross the Irish Sea and some of the conundrums of expressing this material through digital and stakeholder-based public history activities. These manifestations are a form of blue knowledge, sense-making in the face of danger mediated by a sense of ecological anxiety mixed with human feats of bravery. The case studies of this essay originate from the collection of the Ports, Past and Present project, an initiative funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Ireland Wales Cooperation programme

Snap Scholar: The User Experience of Engaging with Academic Research Through a Tappable Stories Medium

With the shift to learn and consume information through our mobile devices, most academic research is still only presented in long-form text. The Stanford Scholar Initiative has explored the segment of content creation and consumption of academic research through video. However, there has been another popular shift in presenting information from various social media platforms and media outlets in the past few years. Snapchat and Instagram have introduced the concept of tappable “Stories” that have gained popularity in the realm of content consumption. To accelerate the growth of the creation of these research talks, I propose an alternative to video: a tappable Snapchat-like interface. This style is achieved using AMP, Google’s open source project to optimize web experiences on mobile, and particularly the AMP Stories visual medium. My research seeks to explore how the process and quality of consuming the content of academic papers would change if instead of watching videos, users would consume content through Stories on mobile instead. Since this form of content consumption is still largely unresearched in the academic context, I approached this research with a human-centered design process, going through a few iterations to test various prototypes before formulating research questions and designing an experiment. I tested various formats of research consumption through Stories with pilot users, and learned many lessons to iterate from along the way. I created a way to consume research papers in a Stories format, and designed a comparative study to measure the effectiveness of consuming research papers through the Stories medium and the video medium. The results indicate that Stories are a quicker way to consume the same content, and improve the user’s pace of comprehension. Further, the Stories medium provides the user a self-paced method—both temporally and content-wise—to consume technical research topics, and is deemed as a less boring method to do so in comparison to video. While Stories gave the learner a chance to actively participate in consumption by tapping, the video experience is enjoyed because of its reduced effort and addition of an audio component. These findings suggest that the Stories medium may be a promising interface in educational contexts, for distributing scientific content and assisting with active learning

International news coverage online as presented by three news agencies

Past research examining international news reveals that news consumers are frequently presented with a geographically imbalanced worldview shaped by Western ideals. The present study provides an updated look at international coverage as it exists online by three news agencies that historically dominated global news reporting: the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence-France Presse. A content analysis of news item datelines and storylines from April 2010 for each source on the aggregate Yahoo! News Website revealed that international coverage remains imbalanced despite the inherently global characteristics of the World Wide Web. While agency material no longer retains a Western focus and offers neutral and unbiased reporting, it does not equally portray the world\u27s geographic regions and emphasizes updated and breaking political stories

Digital Storytelling and History Lines: Community Engagement in a Master-Planned Development

The introduction of new media and information and communication technology enables a greater variety of formats and content beyond conventional texts in the application and discourse of public history projects. Multimedia and personalised content requires public historians and cultural community developers to grasp new skills and methods to make representations of and contributions to a collective community memory visible. This paper explores the challenge of broadening and reinvigorating the traditional role of the public historian working with communities via the facilitation, curation and mediation of digital content in order to foster creative expression in a residential urban development. It seeks to better understand the role of locally produced and locally relevant content, such as personal and community images and narratives, in the establishment of meaningful social networks of urban residents. The paper discusses the use of digital storytelling and outlines the development of a new community engagement application we call History Lines