The Knowledge-Remixing Bottleneck

One of the primary examples of Web Science is the study of political movements and how they are mediated by the Web in an effort to understand the challenges involved in information-remixing. The lack of transparency around the decisions made during knowledge base creation becomes more pernicious as users move farther away from a single data source where a particular decision can be connected more readily back to its origin. DBpedia and other Web-sourced knowledge bases are extremely useful as a resource for analysis of these issues. These resources are being integrated into text analytics pipelines, which is a key technique for Web science, data science, and computational social science. The lack of transparency can also be solved through careful and extensive forensic work

InstructME: An Instruction Guided Music Edit And Remix Framework with Latent Diffusion Models

Music editing primarily entails the modification of instrument tracks or remixing in the whole, which offers a novel reinterpretation of the original piece through a series of operations. These music processing methods hold immense potential across various applications but demand substantial expertise. Prior methodologies, although effective for image and audio modifications, falter when directly applied to music. This is attributed to music's distinctive data nature, where such methods can inadvertently compromise the intrinsic harmony and coherence of music. In this paper, we develop InstructME, an Instruction guided Music Editing and remixing framework based on latent diffusion models. Our framework fortifies the U-Net with multi-scale aggregation in order to maintain consistency before and after editing. In addition, we introduce chord progression matrix as condition information and incorporate it in the semantic space to improve melodic harmony while editing. For accommodating extended musical pieces, InstructME employs a chunk transformer, enabling it to discern long-term temporal dependencies within music sequences. We tested InstructME in instrument-editing, remixing, and multi-round editing. Both subjective and objective evaluations indicate that our proposed method significantly surpasses preceding systems in music quality, text relevance and harmony. Demo samples are available at https://musicedit.github.io/Comment: Demo samples are available at https://musicedit.github.io

The social web and archaeology's restructuring: impact, exploitation, disciplinary change

From blogs to crowdfunding, YouTube to LinkedIn, online photo-sharing sites to open-source community-based software projects, the social web has been a meaningful player in the development of archaeological practice for two decades now. Yet despite its myriad applications, it is still often appreciated as little more than a tool for communication, rather than a paradigm-shifting system that also shapes the questions we ask in our research, the nature and spread of our data, and the state of skill and expertise in the profession. We see this failure to critically engage with its dimensions as one of the most profound challenges confronting archaeology today. The social web is bound up in relations of power, control, freedom, labour and exploitation, with consequences that portend real instability for the cultural sector and for social welfare overall. Only a handful of archaeologists, however, are seriously debating these matters, which suggests the discipline is setting itself up to be swept away by our unreflective investment in the cognitive capitalist enterprise that marks much current web-based work. Here we review the state of play of the archaeological social web, and reflect on various conscientious activities aimed both at challenging practitioners’ current online interactions, and at otherwise situating the discipline as a more informed innovator with the social web’s possibilities

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

OERlabs: Empathy first, solution later?

[EN] The project ‘OERlabs - jointly training student (teachers) for Open Eductional Resources (OER) use’ is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany (BMBF[SH1] ) and aims to sensitize and contextualize OER for all relevant university actors by strategically carrying out an open developmental process. This process includes organizing regular Multi-Stakeholder[SH2] Dialogues (MSD) over the course of the project. This paper briefly outlines the kick-off MSD event, its methodological approach in context of the entire process, i.e. building a base for working on solutions with implicit use of OER-principles and presents the participants feedback and provides results from the event. In contrast to committee work, our MSD-approach provides participants with more spacefor open discussions while still working towards a shared goal. In the context of OER, these events show the importance of focusing on the participants attitudes and mindset, rather than confronting them with general OER-related topics right away, such as licensing and creative commons. The project OERlabs will organize its final MSD in July of 2018, while also documenting additional experiences in an Open Book.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Andrasch, M.; Hofhues, S.; Lukács, B. (2018). OERlabs: Empathy first, solution later?. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1231-1238. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8182OCS1231123

Collaborative Agency in Youth Online and Offline Creative Production in Scratch

Few studies have focused on how youth develop agency to organize and participate in online unstructured creative collaborations. This paper describes and analyzes how youth programmers organized collaborative groups in response to a programming “Collab Challenge” in the Scratch Online Community and in an accompanying workshop with high school students. The analyses focused on modalities of online collaborations, determined the breadth of online participation, and examined local teens’ awareness of the online community. The discussion addresses youth’s collaborative agency in these new networked contexts, studied the role that online social awareness plays in completing tasks and makes recommendations for the support of online programming communities

The Open Translation MOOC: creating online communities to transcend linguistic barriers

One of the main barriers to the reuse of Open Educational Resources is language (OLNet, 2009). OER may be available but in another language so a preliminary step to reuse is translation or localisation (see as an example the UnisulVirtual courses translated from OpenLearn into Brasilian Portuguese). One of the obvious solutions to the vast effort required to translate OER is to crowdsource the translation, as exemplified by Wikipedia (Wikipedia Translation) or TED (Ted Open Translation Project). From October to December 2012 the Department of Languages at the Open University UK ran a MOOC on Open Translation Tools and Practices (OT12). Participants explored a range of online open translation tools (Amara, Transifex, Google Translator Toolkit) that enable and facilitate the crowdsourcing of translation, dubbing and subtitling. For this specific event, participants collaborated in the translation and subtitling of open educational resources mainly to and from English and Spanish, but also Portuguese, French, Greek, German and Catalan. Forum discussions, synchronous online sessions, recorded podcasts and the tasks themselves were designed to provide input, facilitate discussion and share views not only on the linguistic specificities of translating different languages, but also on issues such as quality assurance in open translation and the ethics and practicalities of openness in education and translation. Data for this paper is drawn from online surveys covering participants’ backgrounds and their prior experience as translators; their expectations and motivation for participating in the OT12 MOOC; and their evaluation of the outcomes of the MOOC. Metrics provided by Google Analytics and VLE logs of participants’ activities are used to inform the analysis of the survey data. We understand MOOCs as events (Cormier, 2010) or, following the principles of connectivism, catalysts for starting conversations within a network (Downes, 2011), and therefore feel that they might be a suitable way of engaging online communities of translators, language teachers and learners, and those interested in OER in the crowdsourcing of translations for OER. The OT12 MOOC content is released as an open educational resource (OER) under a Creative-Commons License so that it can be adapted and reused in other contexts. In this paper we would like to open up a debate on how the world of open education can harness existing open translation models to further the openness agenda