Unraveling idea development in discourse trajectories

Conference Theme: The Future of LearningShort Paper Session: SP 6.7With the present paper we want to shed light onto an issue that is central within the knowledge building theory but only little studied – the development of ideas in collaborative learning discourse. Starting from the construction of a network of explicit and implicit relations between ideas, we apply a scientometric method to tackle the temporality of collaborative processes based on the structure of successive ideas. The resulting discourse trajectories are shown to give a holistic and also a detailed view on how knowledge advances when their interpretation is combined with a qualitative analysis of the content of the ideas and their relations. The weighted relevance of relations between ideas enables the identification of sub-topics in the discourse, important ideas, and influence or uptake events.postprintThe 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2012), Sydney, Australia, 2-6 July 2012. In ICLS 2012 Proceedings, 2012, v. 2, p. 162-16

Linked Data Supported Content Analysis for Sociology

Philology and hermeneutics as the analysis and interpretation of natural language text in written historical sources are the predecessors of modern content analysis and date back already to antiquity. In empirical social sciences, especially in sociology, content analysis provides valuable insights to social structures and cultural norms of the present and past. With the ever growing amount of text on the web to analyze, also numerous computer-assisted text analysis techniques and tools were developed in sociological research. However, existing methods often go without sufficient standardization. As a consequence, sociological text analysis is lacking transparency, reproducibility and data re-usability. The goal of this paper is to show, how Linked Data principles and Entity Linking techniques can be used to structure, publish and analyze natural language text for sociological research to tackle these shortcomings. This is achieved on the use case of constitutional text documents of the Netherlands from 1884 to 2016 which represent an important contribution to the European cultural heritage. Finally, the generated data is made available and re-usable as Linked Data not only for sociologists, but also for all other researchers in the digital humanities domain interested in the development of constitutions in the Netherlands

Ontogenetic loops in habitat use highlight the importance of littoral habitats for early life-stages of oceanic fishes in temperate waters

General concepts of larval fish ecology in temperate oceans predominantly associate dispersal and survival to exogenous mechanisms such as passive drift along ocean currents. However, for tropical reef fish larvae and species in inland freshwater systems behavioural aspects of habitat selection are evidently important components of dispersal. This study is focused on larval Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) distribution in a Baltic Sea retention area, free of lunar tides and directed current regimes, considered as a natural mesocosm. A Lorenz curve originally applied in socio-economics to describe demographic income distribution was adapted to a 20 year time-series of weekly larval herring distribution, revealing size-dependent spatial homogeneity. Additional quantitative sampling of distinct larval development stages across pelagic and littoral areas uncovered a loop in habitat use during larval ontogeny, revealing a key role of shallow littoral waters. With increasing rates of coastal change, our findings emphasize the importance of the littoral zone when considering reproduction of pelagic, ocean-going fish species; highlighting a need for more sensitive management of regional coastal zones

Status of Biodiversity in the Baltic Sea

The brackish Baltic Sea hosts species of various origins and environmental tolerances. These immigrated to the sea 10,000 to 15,000 years ago or have been introduced to the area over the relatively recent history of the system. The Baltic Sea has only one known endemic species. While information on some abiotic parameters extends back as long as five centuries and first quantitative snapshot data on biota (on exploited fish populations) originate generally from the same time, international coordination of research began in the early twentieth century. Continuous, annual Baltic Sea-wide long-term datasets on several organism groups (plankton, benthos, fish) are generally available since the mid-1950s. Based on a variety of available data sources (published papers, reports, grey literature, unpublished data), the Baltic Sea, incl. Kattegat, hosts altogether at least 6,065 species, including at least 1,700 phytoplankton, 442 phytobenthos, at least 1,199 zooplankton, at least 569 meiozoobenthos, 1,476 macrozoobenthos, at least 380 vertebrate parasites, about 200 fish, 3 seal, and 83 bird species. In general, but not in all organism groups, high sub-regional total species richness is associated with elevated salinity. Although in comparison with fully marine areas the Baltic Sea supports fewer species, several facets of the system's diversity remain underexplored to this day, such as micro-organisms, foraminiferans, meiobenthos and parasites. In the future, climate change and its interactions with multiple anthropogenic forcings are likely to have major impacts on the Baltic biodiversity

Climate induced human demographic and cultural change in northern Europe during the mid-Holocene

The transition from hunter-gatherer-fisher groups to agrarian societies is arguably the most significantchange in human prehistory. In the European plain there is evidence for fully developed agrariansocieties by 7,500 cal. yr BP, yet a well-established agrarian society does not appear in the north until6,000 cal. yr BP for unknown reasons. Here we show a sudden increase in summer temperature at6,000 cal. yr BP in northern Europe using a well-dated, high resolution record of sea surface temperature(SST) from the Baltic Sea. This temperature rise resulted in hypoxic conditions across the entire Balticsea as revealed by multiple sedimentary records and supported by marine ecosystem modeling.Comparison with summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates from archaeological sitesindicate that this temperature rise coincided with both the introduction of farming, and a dramaticpopulation increase. The evidence supports the hypothesis that the boundary of farming rapidlyextended north at 6,000 cal. yr BP because terrestrial conditions in a previously marginal regionimproved