Taming Wild High Dimensional Text Data with a Fuzzy Lash

The bag of words (BOW) represents a corpus in a matrix whose elements are the frequency of words. However, each row in the matrix is a very high-dimensional sparse vector. Dimension reduction (DR) is a popular method to address sparsity and high-dimensionality issues. Among different strategies to develop DR method, Unsupervised Feature Transformation (UFT) is a popular strategy to map all words on a new basis to represent BOW. The recent increase of text data and its challenges imply that DR area still needs new perspectives. Although a wide range of methods based on the UFT strategy has been developed, the fuzzy approach has not been considered for DR based on this strategy. This research investigates the application of fuzzy clustering as a DR method based on the UFT strategy to collapse BOW matrix to provide a lower-dimensional representation of documents instead of the words in a corpus. The quantitative evaluation shows that fuzzy clustering produces superior performance and features to Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), two popular DR methods based on the UFT strategy

Characterizing Transgender Health Issues in Twitter

Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet this population's health-related needs. Social media sites like Twitter provide new opportunities for transgender people to overcome these barriers by sharing their personal health experiences. Our research employs a computational framework to collect tweets from self-identified transgender users, detect those that are health-related, and identify their information needs. This framework is significant because it provides a macro-scale perspective on an issue that lacks investigation at national or demographic levels. Our findings identified 54 distinct health-related topics that we grouped into 7 broader categories. Further, we found both linguistic and topical differences in the health-related information shared by transgender men (TM) as com-pared to transgender women (TW). These findings can help inform medical and policy-based strategies for health interventions within transgender communities. Also, our proposed approach can inform the development of computational strategies to identify the health-related information needs of other marginalized populations

An exploratory study of (#)exercise in the Twittersphere

Social media analytics allows us to extract, analyze, and establish semantic from user-generated contents in social media platforms. This study utilized a mixed method including a three-step process of data collection, topic modeling, and data annotation for recognizing exercise related patterns. Based on the findings, 86% of the detected topics were identified as meaningful topics after conducting the data annotation process. The most discussed exercise related topics were physical activity (18.7%), lifestyle behaviors (6.6%), and dieting (4%). The results from our experiment indicate that the exploratory data analysis is an effective approach to summarizing the various characteristics of text data for different health and medical applications

Twitter and Research: A Systematic Literature Review Through Text Mining

Researchers have collected Twitter data to study a wide range of topics. This growing body of literature, however, has not yet been reviewed systematically to synthesize Twitter-related papers. The existing literature review papers have been limited by constraints of traditional methods to manually select and analyze samples of topically related papers. The goals of this retrospective study are to identify dominant topics of Twitter-based research, summarize the temporal trend of topics, and interpret the evolution of topics withing the last ten years. This study systematically mines a large number of Twitter-based studies to characterize the relevant literature by an efficient and effective approach. This study collected relevant papers from three databases and applied text mining and trend analysis to detect semantic patterns and explore the yearly development of research themes across a decade. We found 38 topics in more than 18,000 manuscripts published between 2006 and 2019. By quantifying temporal trends, this study found that while 23.7% of topics did not show a significant trend ( P=\u3e0.05 ), 21% of topics had increasing trends and 55.3% of topics had decreasing trends that these hot and cold topics represent three categories: application, methodology, and technology. The contributions of this paper can be utilized in the growing field of Twitter-based research and are beneficial to researchers, educators, and publishers

The Epigenetic Research Program (EPR): a transdisciplinary approach for the dynamics of knowledge, society - and beyond

'Mit dem 'epigenetischen Zugang' wurde ein einheitliches Forschungsprogramm aufgebaut, das zur Analyse von 'wissensbasierten Prozessen' in einer Unzahl von Bereichen dient. Konkret wurde mit dem epigenetischen Programm bislang auf der einen Seite ein anspruchsvolles 'transdisziplinäres Forschungsprogramm' konstruiert und auf der anderen Seite eine Reihe von Anwendungen im Bereich von Organisationsanalysen oder auch 'Nationalen Innovationssystemen' durchgeführt. Darüberhinaus erlaubt das epigenetische Programm, sich jenseits der gegenwärtig diskutierten Merkmale von 'Wissensgesellschaften' wie der Diffusion von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien oder der Ausweitung in den traditionellen Stätten der Wissensproduktion - Universitäten und Forschungsinstitute - zu bewegen. Zu guter Letzt sei der Hinweis angebracht, daß gerade die neue Architektur von Wissens- und Informationsgesellschaften innovative Schlaglichter auf Fragen der gesellschaftlichen Ungleichheit wirft und gegenwärtige Problemfelder in diesem Bereich scharf zu akzentuieren vermag.' (Autorenreferat)'With the 'epigenetic approach', an entire research program has been set up which is devoted to the study of 'knowledge-based processes' in human societies - and beyond. More concretely, an epigenetic approach has been built up in which two different areas are addressed and dealt with simultaneously, namely theoretical foundations for the analysis of 'knowledge based processes' and a comparatively large number of empirical applications, ranging from the study of organizations to the level of 'National Innovation Systems'. Moreover, the emphasis on 'knowledge and information societies' is not motivated by current reconfigurations via communication and information technologies or the expansion of 'knowledge generating capacities' beyond the confines of traditional universities or research institutes. Likewise, 'knowledge and information societies' are not conceptualized as a stage beyond socio-economic inequality, contrasting it, for example, to traditional 'class societies', but, once again, as a theoretical approach which offers new insights into the basic structure of current societal disparities.' (Autorenreferat)

Overlapping dialogues: the role of interpretation design in communicating Australia’s natural and cultural heritage

This research investigates the development of interpretation design in Australia during the period 1980 – 2006, and its role in presenting natural and cultural heritage to audiences in visitor settings. It establishes Australian interpretation design at the intersection of two professional fields, interpretation and design. Where heritage interpretation originates from a background of spoken language, through narrative and storytelling, graphic and communication design have origins in visual language, communicated through images and text. This research positions interpretation design as a new field within design and traces its emergence as a hybrid of spoken and visual traditions of communication.The study gives visibility to this previously undocumented and un-theorised hybrid field of design and creates a thematic conceptual framework within which to locate its historical, conceptual and practical origins. In substantiating interpretation design as a new field, three avenues of enquiry were considered; documentation and analysis of the visual artefacts of interpretation design, locating interpretation design in a wider conceptual and professional context through literature reviews, and consultation with designers in order to understand the challenges and problems in this new mode of design. Further, to facilitate designers to continue to work effectively in highly collaborative, complex and cross-disciplinary professional environments a conceptual collaborative tool was developed for use by interpretation design project teams. The conceptual tool integrates the theoretical and practical findings from this research and is based on a pattern language approach first developed by Christopher Alexander et al (1977).The research is conducted from a design perspective, and integrates theoretical and professional knowledge from related fields into interpretation design practice. Through a progressively widening interrogation of the literature, professional contexts, and designed artefacts of interpretation design, this new area of design is examined from a number of perspectives, building up a multi-faceted framework for understanding its historical, conceptual and practical dimensions. A Grounded Theory methodology was adapted to develop the theoretical framework of this study and to gather a wide range of relevant data. The practical outcome of the research was developed using a Pattern Language methodology originating from a problem-based design approach in architecture (Alexander et al 1977) and underpinned the interpretation of data.Conclusions of the research found that despite invisibility within the discourse of Australian design, designers working in this specialised field of practice have, since the early 1980s, contributed to projects which shape ideas, attitudes and visual representations of natural and cultural heritage in Australia’s most widely visited and valued sites. Designer’s practice is identified as part of an ongoing process of both contributing to Australian cultural narrative and being influenced by the legacy of culture. Contemporary interpretation design is highly cross-disciplinary and collaborative, characterised by a differentiated professional practice with dispersed networks of stakeholders. While interpretation design is located within a larger framework of the professional practice of interpretation, there exists many opportunities to enrich and better inform designers by integrating wider pools of knowledge that intersect the activities of interpretation, including education, tourism, visitor studies and psychology