Back to the future: authors, publishers and ideas in a copy-friendly environment

How could scholars survive in a copy-friendly environment jeopardizing the established system of scholarly publishing in which scientific publishers seemed to be authors' best friends? A backward itinerary across three German Enlightenment thinkers who took part to the debate on (unauthorized) reprinting shows us ways – usual and unusual - in which culture can flourish in a copy-friendly environment. While Fichte endorsed an intellectual property theory, took the function of publishers for granted and neglected the interests of the public, Kant saw authors as speakers and justified publishers' rights only as long as they work as spokespersons helping writers to reach the public. Eventually Lessing's project was designed to foster authors' autonomy by means of a subscription system that could have worked only on the basis of a free information flow and of direct relationships with and within the public itself. Such a condition can be compared with the situation of ancient auctores, with one difference: while the ancient communities of knowledge were educated minorities, because of the limitations of orality and manuscript media system, we have now the opportunity to take Enlightenment seriously

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Research and Development Workstation Environment: the new class of Current Research Information Systems

Against the backdrop of the development of modern technologies in the field of scientific research the new class of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and related intelligent information technologies has arisen. It was called - Research and Development Workstation Environment (RDWE) - the comprehensive problem-oriented information systems for scientific research and development lifecycle support. The given paper describes design and development fundamentals of the RDWE class systems. The RDWE class system's generalized information model is represented in the article as a three-tuple composite web service that include: a set of atomic web services, each of them can be designed and developed as a microservice or a desktop application, that allows them to be used as an independent software separately; a set of functions, the functional filling-up of the Research and Development Workstation Environment; a subset of atomic web services that are required to implement function of composite web service. In accordance with the fundamental information model of the RDWE class the system for supporting research in the field of ontology engineering - the automated building of applied ontology in an arbitrary domain area, scientific and technical creativity - the automated preparation of application documents for patenting inventions in Ukraine was developed. It was called - Personal Research Information System. A distinctive feature of such systems is the possibility of their problematic orientation to various types of scientific activities by combining on a variety of functional services and adding new ones within the cloud integrated environment. The main results of our work are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of the scientist's research and development lifecycle in the arbitrary domain area.Comment: In English, 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, added references in Russian. Published. Prepared for special issue (UkrPROG 2018 conference) of the scientific journal "Problems of programming" (Founder: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Software Systems of NAS Ukraine

Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work

The Reactor Room: An Immersive Chernobyl Exhibition

The Reactor Room: An Immersive Chernobyl Exhibition is a digital installation featuring the work of students in Professor José Vergara’s course Chernobyl: Nuclear Narratives and the Environment (Spring 2020) at Swarthmore College. Students designed this interactive exhibition to facilitate public engagement with the catastrophe. Students researched topics of their own choosing and produced outward-facing digital projects that investigate diverse aspects of Chernobyl’s cultural, environmental, social, and political consequences: maps that visually trace the radioactive fallout; biographies of key figures who experienced, survived, and perpetrated one of the worst nuclear disasters in history; audio-based works that engage with the sounds, silences, and songs associated with Chernobyl; a virtual tour of street art in Pripyat; annotated poetry translations; timelines and StoryMaps that trace Chernobyl\u27s effects on flora, fauna, and culture, among many others. Individually, these projects are snapshots that reflect the fragmented narratives and memories of Chernobyl. Together, they invite readers to become an active participant in the study of Chernobyl’s mythology

Striking a Balance Between Physical and Digital Resources

In various configurations—be they academic, archival, county, juvenile, monastic, national, personal, public, reference, or research, the library has been a fixture in human affairs for a long time. Digital — meaning, content or communication that is delivered through the internet, is 20 years old (but younger in parts). Basically, both approaches to organizing serve to structure information for access. However, digital is multiplying very fast and libraries all-round contemplate an existential crisis; the more hopeful librarians fret about physical and digital space. Yet, the crux of the matter is not about physical vs. digital: without doubt, the digital space of content or communication transmogrifies all walks of life and cannot be wished away; but, the physical space of libraries is time-tested, extremely valuable, and can surely offer more than currently meets the eye. Except for entirely virtual libraries, the symbiotic relationship between the physical and the digital is innately powerful: for superior outcomes, it must be recognized, nurtured, and leveraged; striking a balance between physical and digital resources can be accomplished. This paper examines the subject of delivering digital from macro, meso, and micro perspectives: it looks into complexity theory, digital strategy, and digitization

Measuring Emotions in the COVID-19 Real World Worry Dataset

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a dramatic impact on societies and economies around the world. With various measures of lockdowns and social distancing in place, it becomes important to understand emotional responses on a large scale. In this paper, we present the first ground truth dataset of emotional responses to COVID-19. We asked participants to indicate their emotions and express these in text. This resulted in the Real World Worry Dataset of 5,000 texts (2,500 short + 2,500 long texts). Our analyses suggest that emotional responses correlated with linguistic measures. Topic modeling further revealed that people in the UK worry about their family and the economic situation. Tweet-sized texts functioned as a call for solidarity, while longer texts shed light on worries and concerns. Using predictive modeling approaches, we were able to approximate the emotional responses of participants from text within 14% of their actual value. We encourage others to use the dataset and improve how we can use automated methods to learn about emotional responses and worries about an urgent problem.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2020 COVID-19 worksho