Exploring The Value Of Folksonomies For Creating Semantic Metadata

Finding good keywords to describe resources is an on-going problem: typically we select such words manually from a thesaurus of terms, or they are created using automatic keyword extraction techniques. Folksonomies are an increasingly well populated source of unstructured tags describing web resources. This paper explores the value of the folksonomy tags as potential source of keyword metadata by examining the relationship between folksonomies, community produced annotations, and keywords extracted by machines. The experiment has been carried-out in two ways: subjectively, by asking two human indexers to evaluate the quality of the generated keywords from both systems; and automatically, by measuring the percentage of overlap between the folksonomy set and machine generated keywords set. The results of this experiment show that the folksonomy tags agree more closely with the human generated keywords than those automatically generated. The results also showed that the trained indexers preferred the semantics of folksonomy tags compared to keywords extracted automatically. These results can be considered as evidence for the strong relationship of folksonomies to the human indexer’s mindset, demonstrating that folksonomies used in the del.icio.us bookmarking service are a potential source for generating semantic metadata to annotate web resources

From Betrayal to Power

Resistance is the secret of joy! --Alice Walker Possessing the Secret of Joy What does it mean to love a daughter in a culture that is hostile to her integrity? In a culture where power equals dominance and superiority, men\u27s control of public life--the world of political and economic power that shapes the desires of private life--places mothers in a double bind as their daughters approach womanhood. The common ways that mothers have of guiding daughters--what we call the paths of least resistance in chapter two 1 --ask girls to make deep psychological sacrifices to straddle the cultural division of work, in the male public world of politics and business, and love, in the female private world of home and family. As girls find that they cannot enter patriarchy fully and powerfully as themselves, they feel betrayed by their mothers. But mothers did not create the separate spheres of public and private life. It is this cultural betrayal of human integrity, which divides our wholeness into these separate spheres, that makes loving and raising a daughter political work. The romance-into-mothering myth created in the mid-1800s told women that their true nature is best expressed in the home, in private life. 2 When market-driven factory life in the Industrial Revolution consumed women\u27s traditional work of producing food, clothing, medicine, and crafts, women were suddenly stripped of their expertise and authority. Rather than adopting a rationalist solution of admitting women into modern society ..

Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms

In their article Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms Joachim Vlieghe and Kris Rutten present a case study of the discourse surrounding literary phenomena that are emerging within social media. The case study is part of a methodological exploration within literacy studies whereby the social media\u27s transformative effects on literary literacies are studied by focusing on language as symbolic and situated action. Vlieghe and Rutten have identified unique social reading platforms based on a prolonged study of the social media environment. The analysis of the developers\u27 discourse on social reading platforms shows how developers are formulating new instructions on how to talk and to act in relation to literature by changing the scope of concepts related to literary phenomena within the social media system

Bodies and everyday practices in designed urban environments

In recent years, the centres of many towns and cities have been reshaped by urban design projects, but little attention has been paid to how these transformations are experienced everyday by users of the city. In other words: how do the users of urban centers, such as shoppers, cleaners, or workers, perceive these changes, as embodied subjects in specific material environments? This paper analyses how bodies in two intensely designed urban spaces – the shopping centre of Milton Keynes, a 1960s new town, and Bedford's recently redeveloped historic town centre – are affected by elements of the built environment. 'Affected' is a term borrowed from Latour (2004), and the paper works with, and elaborates, some of his and others' work on how bodies are effectuated by other entities. Such Latourian work pays a great deal of attention to how bodies are affected by both human and non-human entities of many kinds, and we examine how certain aspects of the built environment in these two towns affects bodies in specific ways. However, we also emphasise the variability in this process, in particular that bodies seem unaware – or ambivalently aware – of many entities' affordances

Unraveling Ethos: the Commodification of Ethical Clothing

In the last decade there has been a noticeable attempt to subvert traditional modes of clothing production. The recent emergence of “ethical consumption” in the fashion industry is a case in point. This project argues that these new formations and practices around ethical consumption are mere appropriations of anti-corporate politics and sentiments for consumers in the West. Signification of ethical consumption through language and cultural capital give more value to individual articles of clothing and branded entities. This reformation of the clothing industry towards an ethical attitude is a rebranding tactic that avoids the source-issue altogether. Through advertising and normalization of globalized labor, it is not the part of the consumer to take responsibility for the harms the fashion industry perpetuates. It is the system itself by which clothing is produced that need to be changed, not brands added. The fashion industry needs less and better, not more

Building emergent social networks and group profiles by semantic user preference clustering

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the International Workshop on Semantic Network Analysis (SNA 2006) at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2006), held in Budva on 2006This paper presents a novel approach to automatic semantic social network construction based on semantic user preference clustering. Considering a number of users, each of them with an associated ontology-based profile, we propose a strategy that clusters the concepts of the reference ontology according to user preferences of these concepts, and then determines which clusters are more appropriate to the users. The resultant user clusters can be merged into individual group profiles, automatically defining a semantic social network suitable for use in collaborative and recommendation environments.This research was supported by the European Commission (FP6-027685 – MESH), and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (TIN2005-06885). The expressed content is the view of the authors but not necessarily the view of the MESH project as a whole

Characteristics Of Social Networking Services

Social networking services (SNSs) have recently emerged as a research topic of interest, in line with their commercial success and popularity. They are internet (sometimes mobile) services that have, as a primary purpose, the building and sustaining of users’ social networks. In this article we conduct two analyses. We review the existing literature on social networking software, and we examine the functionality of four leading social networking services: Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter. The two analyses are iteratively matched to provide an initial account of six characteristics evident both the in services themselves, and the literature which discusses them. The characteristics help shape the area of study, and can be tested and developed by more rigorous forms of research

Mealspace : beyond the table

This is a chronicle of a tableware enthusiast who set out to share her ideas by designing for the everyday eater. The quest began with questioning what an ideal meal experience is and why it revolves around a static, flat table. What are the aspects of present-day eating scenarios that could be improved upon? I considered the conventions of dining, studying traditional forms, materials and spaces related to this practice, and proposed new ways of eating. I designed props for establishing a new kind of mealspace, the objects and events paired together as performances. Each project or act is documented here as an entity in itself and as a catalyst for the next experiment. This book could be flipped through like an encyclopedia or viewed from beginning to end. The work illustrates alternately different approaches of how eating could be. My investigations revealed no singular answer but rather a wider understanding of what enjoyment looks like beyond the table and beyond food itself. Eating is about creating a space, one that can be entered — only then can one experience a meal

The Business Value of Social Network Technologies: A Framework for Identifying Opportunities for Business Value and an Emerging Research Program

Although social network technologies have been the focus of many articles in the popular and business press, businesses remain unclear about their value. We use theory and data gathered from IT leaders to develop an initial model assessing the value of social network technologies in the business environment. Insights are given into when different features should be used to enhance existing business processes and to provide business value