Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions

The world is digitising as the need for low-carbon transitions gains urgency. Decarbonising energy requires the digital process control of energy production, transmission and end use. Diversified electrification across sectors requires real-time digital coordination of distributed energy production, At the same time, digitisation is accompanied by significant increases in energy demand, partly compensated through energy efficiency gains. The emergent linkages between digitisation and decarbonisation – that constitute and enable the twin transition – are the subject of this book. The collection features authors from across the social sciences who situate digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions in the socio-technical and political economic contexts in which they unfold, to offer insights on the dynamics and contingencies of digitisation in and beyond the energy sector. This is an open access book

Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions

The world is digitising as the need for low-carbon transitions gains urgency. Decarbonising energy requires the digital process control of energy production, transmission and end use. Diversified electrification across sectors requires real-time digital coordination of distributed energy production, At the same time, digitisation is accompanied by significant increases in energy demand, partly compensated through energy efficiency gains. The emergent linkages between digitisation and decarbonisation – that constitute and enable the twin transition – are the subject of this book. The collection features authors from across the social sciences who situate digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions in the socio-technical and political economic contexts in which they unfold, to offer insights on the dynamics and contingencies of digitisation in and beyond the energy sector. This is an open access book

Networked Publics, Networked Politics: Resisting Gender-Based Violent Speech in Digital Media

This dissertation is a qualitative study of digital media that identifies and analyzes feminist responses to violent speech in networked environments across Canada and the United States between 2011 and 2015. Exploring how verbal violence is constitutive of and constituted by power relations in the feminist blogosphere, I ask the following set of research questions: How do feminist bloggers politicize and problematize instances of violent speech on digital media? In what ways are their networked interactions and self-representations reconfigured as a result of having to face hostile audiences? What modes of agency appear within feminist blogging cultures? This work engages with feminist theory (hooks, 2014; McRobbie, 2009; Stringer 2014), media studies (boyd, 2014; Lovink, 2011; Marwick 2013) and their intersections in the field of feminist media studies (Jane 2014; Keller, 2012). Drawing on interviews with the key players in the feminist blogosphere and providing a discursive reading of selected digital texts, I identify networked resistive strategies including digital archiving, public shaming, strategic silence and institutional transformations. I argue that feminist responses to violent speech are varied and reflect not only long-standing concerns with community building and womens voices in public context, but also emerging anxieties around self-branding, professional identity and a control over one's digital presence. This research underscores the importance of transformative capacities of networked feminist politics and contextualizes agentic modes of participation in response to problematic communication

Affective Computing for Emotion Detection using Vision and Wearable Sensors

The research explores the opportunities, challenges, limitations, and presents advancements in computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions (Picard, 1997). The field is referred to as Affective Computing (AC) and is expected to play a major role in the engineering and development of computationally and cognitively intelligent systems, processors and applications in the future. Today the field of AC is bolstered by the emergence of multiple sources of affective data and is fuelled on by developments under various Internet of Things (IoTs) projects and the fusion potential of multiple sensory affective data streams. The core focus of this thesis involves investigation into whether the sensitivity and specificity (predictive performance) of AC, based on the fusion of multi-sensor data streams, is fit for purpose? Can such AC powered technologies and techniques truly deliver increasingly accurate emotion predictions of subjects in the real world? The thesis begins by presenting a number of research justifications and AC research questions that are used to formulate the original thesis hypothesis and thesis objectives. As part of the research conducted, a detailed state of the art investigations explored many aspects of AC from both a scientific and technological perspective. The complexity of AC as a multi-sensor, multi-modality, data fusion problem unfolded during the state of the art research and this ultimately led to novel thinking and origination in the form of the creation of an AC conceptualised architecture that will act as a practical and theoretical foundation for the engineering of future AC platforms and solutions. The AC conceptual architecture developed as a result of this research, was applied to the engineering of a series of software artifacts that were combined to create a prototypical AC multi-sensor platform known as the Emotion Fusion Server (EFS) to be used in the thesis hypothesis AC experimentation phases of the research. The thesis research used the EFS platform to conduct a detailed series of AC experiments to investigate if the fusion of multiple sensory sources of affective data from sensory devices can significantly increase the accuracy of emotion prediction by computationally intelligent means. The research involved conducting numerous controlled experiments along with the statistical analysis of the performance of sensors for the purposes of AC, the findings of which serve to assess the feasibility of AC in various domains and points to future directions for the AC field. The AC experiments data investigations conducted in relation to the thesis hypothesis used applied statistical methods and techniques, and the results, analytics and evaluations are presented throughout the two thesis research volumes. The thesis concludes by providing a detailed set of formal findings, conclusions and decisions in relation to the overarching research hypothesis on the sensitivity and specificity of the fusion of vision and wearables sensor modalities and offers foresights and guidance into the many problems, challenges and projections for the AC field into the future

On Making in the Digital Humanities

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. The volume draws focus to the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship. To do this, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities). The volume honours the work of John Bradley, as it is totemic of a practice of making that is deeply informed by critical perspectives. A special chapter also honours the profound contributions that this volume’s co-editor, Stéfan Sinclair, made to the creative, applied and intellectual praxis of making and the digital humanities. Stéfan Sinclair passed away on 6 August 2020. The chapters gathered here are individually important, but together provide a very human view on what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present and future. This book will accordingly be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of the digital humanities; creative humanities, including maker spaces and culture; information studies; the history of computing and technology; and the history of science and the humanities

Re/constructing Computing Experiences. From "punch girls" in the 1940s to "computer boys" in the 1980s.

Re/constructing computing experiences from “punch girls” to “computer boys” traces the life cycle of five computing devices between the 1940s and the 1980s, each representing a key development in the history of computing. The experimental media archaeology framework of Nutzerperspektiven critically evaluates the type of user sources re/construct. The object’s life cycle traces phases of design, production, sale, installation, application and use, and decommission or re-use. The lens of intersectionality with a focus on gender facilitates (visual) discourse analysis of advertisements to expose stereotypes. User experiences differ because inequalities in computing have at times resulted in occupational segregation, and working conditions varied across case studies. Computing experiences encompass the object, the environment, and application, and a user, serving as a structure for the case studies. The first case study discusses the accounting departments of Helena Rubinstein which used Remington Rand, and later Powers-Samas, punch card machinery since 1940. Miss Summerell led the Powers room in the London branch from 1955 onward. The second case study centers around a workflow Dr. E. Blatt created for the International Business Machines (IBM) System/360 announced in 1964 used in German clinical chemistry laboratories since 1969. The Digital Equipment Company’s client applications slides form the basis of the next case study and showed several uses of the Programmable Data Processor or PDP-11 in aerospace and commercial aircraft between 1970 and 1980. The final chapter compares two educational initiatives from the 1980s. By 1981 the BBC Microcomputer kickstarted the Computer Literacy project in the United Kingdom, first targeting adults but soon entering primary and secondary schools. Apple’s Kids Can’t Wait initiative in the United States equally introduced many children to computing. Methods from user experience (UX) design and experimental media archaeology supported the re/construction or reenactment of past human-computer interaction. As a study of material culture, the historical case studies were informed by museum objects paired with additional archival sources. The research added phases to the life cycle framework and paired a reflection on the provenance of material objects with a focus on human actors. The case studies in turn demonstrated how sources limited the type of user and computing experiences historians can re/construct

Speaking for the Social

What does it mean to “speak for the social” in projects of technical and infrastructural change? This is the problem that the contributors to Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods set out to explore through a series of creative interventions that reimagine the role for qualitative social science in understanding and shaping design and engineering projects. The book departs from familiar methods like interviews, surveys, and participant observations, to propose walks, exhibitions, performances, dialogues, online museums, meetings, and staged performances as an array of alternative ways of thinking about and eliciting the social implications of infrastructure projects. Prompted both by a turn to infrastructure and material relations in social research and the concern with social impact and social value in technical projects, this book seeks to outline new ways for social scientists to engage with, critique, and participate in infrastructure design. The chapters build on theoretical attention to the social life of objects like roads, buildings, cities, and environments to devise practical methods that can help make social issues newly visible in infrastructure projects. Individually the entries offer a range of practical methods for “speaking for the social” in technical infrastructure projects. Taken together the book lays the ground for new kinds of collaborative, applied social research embedded in the latest discussions in social theory to explore how social value, impact, and responsibility might be rethought and achieved in the process of designing and engineering social change

Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

Cultural and natural heritage are central to ‘Europe’ and ‘the European project’. They were bound up in the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they were used to justify differences over which border conflicts were fought. Later, the idea of a ‘common European heritage’ provided a rationale for the development of the European Union. Now, the emergence of ‘new’ populist nationalisms shows how the imagined past continues to play a role in cultural and social governance, while a series of interlinked social and ecological crises are changing the ways that heritage operates. New discourses and ontologies are emerging to reconfigure heritage for the circumstances of the present and the uncertainties of the future. Taking the current role of heritage in Europe as its starting point, Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe presents a number of case studies that explore key themes in this transformation. Contributors draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives to consider, variously, the role of heritage and museums in the migration and climate ‘emergencies’; approaches to urban heritage conservation and practices of curating cities; digital and digitised heritage; the use of heritage as a therapeutic resource; and critical approaches to heritage and its management. Taken together, the chapters explore the multiple ontologies through which cultural and natural heritage have actively intervened in redrawing the futures of Europe and the world

WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Attention-Based BiLSTM

Recently, significant efforts have been made to explore human activity recognition (HAR) techniques that use information gathered by existing indoor wireless infrastructures through WiFi signals without demanding the monitored subject to carry a dedicated device. The key intuition is that different activities introduce different multi-paths in WiFi signals and generate different patterns in the time series of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose and evaluate a full pipeline for a CSI-based human activity recognition framework for 12 activities in three different spatial environments using two deep learning models: ABiLSTM and CNN-ABiLSTM. Evaluation experiments have demonstrated that the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models. Also, the experiments show that the proposed models can be applied to other environments with different configurations, albeit with some caveats. The proposed ABiLSTM model achieves an overall accuracy of 94.03%, 91.96%, and 92.59% across the 3 target environments. While the proposed CNN-ABiLSTM model reaches an accuracy of 98.54%, 94.25% and 95.09% across those same environments