From Open Content Repositories to Open Sensemaking Communities

The Open Content movement is concerned with enabling students and educators to access material, in order to then learn from it, and reuse it either in one’s studies or one’s own courses. The core efforts to date has focused on enabling access, e.g. building the organizational/political will to release and license content, and in developing open infrastructures for educators to then publish and reassemble it. The key challenge in the next phase of the open content movement is to improve the support for prospective students to engage with and learn from the material, and with each other though peer learning support, in the absence of formally imposed study timetables and assessment deadlines. This paper reports on tools for e-learning and collaborative sensemaking developed at the UK Open University which are now being considered as candidates for open content learning support

The ins and outs of participation in a weather information system

In this paper our aim is to show even though access to technology, information or data holds the potential for improved participation, participation is wired into a larger network of actors, artefacts and information practices. We draw on a case study of a weather information system developed and implemented by a non-profit organisation to both describe the configuration of participation, but also critically assess inclusion and exclusion. We present a set of four questions - a basic, practical toolkit - by which we together with the organisation made sense of and evaluated participation in the system

Manipulation and removal of defects in spontaneous optical patterns

Defects play an important role in a number of fields dealing with ordered structures. They are often described in terms of their topology, mutual interaction and their statistical characteristics. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally the possibility of an active manipulation and removal of defects. We focus on the spontaneous formation of two-dimensional spatial structures in a nonlinear optical system, a liquid crystal light valve under single optical feedback. With increasing distance from threshold, the spontaneously formed hexagonal pattern becomes disordered and contains several defects. A scheme based on Fourier filtering allows us to remove defects and to restore spatial order. Starting without control, the controlled area is progressively expanded, such that defects are swept out of the active area.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Improved limits on the coupling of ultralight bosonic dark matter to photons from optical atomic clock comparisons

We present improved constraints on the coupling of ultralight bosonic dark matter to photons based on long-term measurements of two optical frequency ratios. In these optical clock comparisons, we relate the frequency of the ${}^2S_{1/2} (F=0)\leftrightarrow {}^2F_{7/2} (F=3)$ electric-octupole (E3) transition in $^{171}$Yb$^{+}$ to that of the ${}^2S_{1/2} (F=0)\leftrightarrow \,{}^2D_{3/2} (F=2)$ electric-quadrupole (E2) transition of the same ion, and to that of the ${}^1S_0\leftrightarrow\,{}^3P_0$ transition in $^{87}$Sr. Measurements of the first frequency ratio $\nu_\textrm{E3}/\nu_\textrm{E2}$ are performed via interleaved interrogation of both transitions in a single ion. The comparison of the single-ion clock based on the E3 transition with a strontium optical lattice clock yields the second frequency ratio $\nu_\textrm{E3}/\nu_\textrm{Sr}$. By constraining oscillations of the fine-structure constant $\alpha$ with these measurement results, we improve existing bounds on the scalar coupling $d_e$ of ultralight dark matter to photons for dark matter masses in the range of about $10^{-24}-10^{-17}\,\textrm{eV}/c^2$. These results constitute an improvement by more than an order of magnitude over previous investigations for most of this range. We also use the repeated measurements of $\nu_\textrm{E3}/\nu_\textrm{E2}$ to improve existing limits on a linear temporal drift of $\alpha$ and its coupling to gravity.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Twitter and non-elites. Interpreting power dynamics in the life story of the (#)BRCA Twitter stream

In May 2013 and March 2015, actress Angelina Jolie wrote in the New York Times about her choice to undergo preventive surgery. In her two op-eds she explained that - as a carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation - preventive surgery was the best way to lower her heightened risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. By applying a digital methods approach to BRCA-related tweets from 2013 and 2015, before, during and after the exposure of Jolie’s story, this study maps and interprets Twitter discursive dynamics at two time points of the BRCA Twitter stream. Findings show an evolution in curation and framing dynamics occurring between 2013 and 2015, with individual patient advocates replacing advocacy organisations as top curators of BRCA content and coming to prominence as providers of specialist illness narratives. These results suggest that between 2013 and 2015, Twitter went from functioning primarily as an organisation-centred news reporting mechanism, to working as a crowdsourced specialist awareness system. This paper advances a twofold contribution. First, it points at Twitter’s fluid functionality for an issue public and suggests that by looking at the life story – rather than at a single time point – of an issue-based Twitter stream we can track the evolution of power roles underlying discursive practices and better interpret the emergence of non-elite actors in the public arena. Second, the study provides evidence of the rise of activist cultures that rely on fluid, non-elite, collective and individual social media engagement

The ownership of digital infrastructure: Exploring the deployment of software libraries in a digital innovation cluster

Boundary resources have been shown to enable the arm’s-length relationships between platform owners and third-party developers that underlie digital innovation in platform ecosystems. While boundary resources that are owned by open-source communities and smaller-scale software vendors are also critical components in the digital infrastructure, their role in digital innovation has yet to be systematically explored. In particular, software libraries are popular boundary resources that provide functionality without the need for continued interaction with their owners. They are used extensively by commercial vendors to enable customization of their software products, by communities to disseminate open-source software, and by big-tech platform owners to provide functionality that does not involve control. This paper reports on the deployment of such software libraries in the web and mobile (Android) contexts by 107 startup companies in London. Our findings show that libraries owned by big-tech companies, product vendors, and communities coexist; that the deployment of big-tech libraries is unaffected by the scale of the deploying startup; and that context evolution paths are consequential for library deployment. These findings portray a balanced picture of digital infrastructure as neither the community-based utopia of early open-source research nor the dystopia of the recent digital dominance literature