Guided Tours Across a Collection of Historical Digital Images

We propose the use of short lectures, called narratives, embedded in a digital archive as a personalization method to support and guide users within a collection of historical material. The effectiveness of the approach has been evaluated with two groups of users. An analysis of the results has been conducted enabling the presentation of preliminary results

Issues to be Addressed for Transforming a Digital Library Application for Experts into One for Final Users

This paper reports on the effort we made in adapting and opening a specialist tool, focused on illumination and designed purposely for scholars and researchers, in order to be suitable also for the general public. We describe the ongoing process we are conducting: the adaptation and the improvement of the IPSA digital archive using the results we collected after several sessions of user interviews, following suggestions of both scholars and simple users. We discuss user studies dynamics, that we consider as a loop-interaction, and the consequences that they entail upon the system design.Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Via Gradenigo 6/a, 35131 Padua, Italy, Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Padua, Piazza Capitaniato 7, 35139 Padua, Italy

From memory or formulary : how were medieval documentary formulae reproduced?

This paper reviews the state of the art concerning how documentary formulae were reproduced in early medieval private charters written in Latin. It assesses the theoretical considerations and empirical evidence supporting one or the other of the two main hypotheses: i) that charter scribes copied the formulae from models or ii) that they had memorized the formulae and reproduced them from memory each time they wrote a new charter. While proposing that the memorization hypothesis is more robust, I also recognise intermediate positions.Peer reviewe

Corrupção, cultura política e capital social negativo no Brasil

One of the problems in strengthening Brazilian democracy has been the endurance of continued corruption on the part of state officials. The result has been the institutionalization of a political culture, which shows a growing alienation, and apathy of citizens regarding politics. This behavior has its origins in citizens´ perception that the state and public authorities cannot be trusted producing an inertial democracy with low stocks of social capital. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corruption practices by state authorities and the structuring of a defective political culture in Brazil. The working hypothesis is that serious cases of institutionalized corruption are possible due to invisible social ties created among public authorities, producing social capital of a negative nature, which constraints the effective advancements in Brazilian democracy.Um dos problemas no fortalecimento da democracia brasileira é a continuada corrupção de gestores públicos e políticos. O resultado se manifesta na institucionalização de uma cultura política que mostra uma crescente alienação e apatia dos cidadãos em relação à política. Esse comportamento tem sua origem na percepção dos cidadãos de que as autoridades públicas não podem ser confiadas, produzindo uma democracia inercial com baixos níveis de capital social. O objetivo deste trabalho é examinar a relação entre as práticas de corrupção pelas autoridades eleitas com a estruturação de uma cultura política defeituosa no Brasil. A hipótese de trabalho é de que casos graves de corrupção institucionalizada são possíveis em virtude dos laços sociais invisíveis criados entre as autoridades públicas. Neste sentido, o capital social, de natureza negativa constrange avanços substantivos na democracia brasileira