Nuovi servizi a valore aggiunto per riviste elettroniche di studi classici

Le riviste elettroniche sono decisamente meno diffuse in ambito umanistico piuttosto che scientifico, non tanto per un ritardo delle discipline umanistiche in questo senso quanto per la diversa rispondenza del medium alla disciplina stessa. La vasta gamma di funzionalità e servizi che possono essere offerti online in aggiunta alla copia stampata di una rivista costituisce una delle più importanti differenze tra l'editoria tradizionale e quella elettronica. L'attuale offerta ed i futuri sviluppi delle riviste nell'ambito delle scienze umane sono analizzati attraverso i dati raccolti con un sondaggio sulle caratteristiche di una rivista elettronica, del tipo di diritti impiegati, degli strumenti elettronici usati nel lavoro editoriale e degli elementi che ne ostacolano la diffusione. Ne risulta una realtà ancora legata alla pubblicazione a stampa; nel caso di esistenza di riviste elettroniche, la presenza di una forma non innovativa, che ricalca piuttosto la forma tradizionale. Inoltre, sono stati rilevati pregiudizi sulla qualità delle risorse elettroniche, sull'accuratezza degli articoli, sulla loro persistenza e reperibilità on-line, e dubbi sui diritti d'autore. Nonostante i timori degli editori, l'editoria on-line può tuttavia divenire un fertile campo in cui l'accesso libero si sposa con la nascita di funzionalità aggiuntive. I servizi a valore aggiunto possono incentivare l'uso delle riviste di un'area disciplinare come quella umanistica, in cui le riviste elettroniche hanno ancora poca diffusione.E-journals are undoubtedly less widespread in the Humanities than in the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) field. This is not just because of a lag in Humanities journals' development, but also because of the different extent at what electronic publishing technologies fit respectively the different nature and requirements of disciplines. The wide range of functionalities and services that can be offered online in addition to the print copy of a journal is one of the most important differences between paper-based and electronic publishing. Value Added Services (VAS) represent also a key aspect to be leveraged in the development of a sustainable business model for open access journals. VAS need to be though carefully. To provide them comes at a cost and it is a process that can just partly be automated. The paper aims at designing a new model for Classics e-journals specifically tailored on classicists' needs, identifying a set of functionalities that may be provided by e-journals on the basis of a deep understanding of the field and of recent user studies. The implementation of such functionalities and the automatisation of the process needed to enable them are then discussed in detail

Towards the Automatic Retrieval of Cited Parallel Passages from Secondary Literature

My presentation at the "Classical Philology Goes Digital" workshop in Potsdam (16-17 February 2017), www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/events/global-philology-open-conference

An Educator\u27s Guide to Expanding Accessibility to Nature Connections in Traditional Early Childhood Education

Over the last few decades, nature-based education has increased greatly in popularity across the United States. With its many developmental benefits, nature-based preschools have been an important hub to this movement. Children attending these schools are afforded many critical experiences that aid in their growth and development; gross-motor & social emotional skills, greater attentional capacity, and expanded creativity and critical thinking. This popular pedagogy has, however, not been equally accessible to all. With its many barriers, including but not limited to financial, this capstone uses an educator\u27s guide to help answer the question: How can traditional Early Childhood Education programs promote equitable nature connections amongst children in underrepresented communities? This project concludes with a PDF guide to provide educators with affordable and adaptable ways to increase nature connection within non-nature-based underrepresented urban communities

A semantic linking framework to provide critical value-added services for E-journals on classics

In the field of Classical Studies the use of e-journals as effective means for scholarly research still needs to bootstrapped. This paper proposes a possible implementation of two value-added services to be provided by e-journals that is to reach this goal: reference linking and reference indexing. Both these services would contribute to make more machine-evident the hidden bond but of utmost importance which link together primary and secondary sources in this field of studies. On a technical level, this paper proposes the use of Microformats and of the Canonical Texts Service (CTS) protocol to build the semantic and nonproprietary linking framework necessary to provide scholars reading e-journals with some advanced and critical features

Turning Research Code into a Webservice with CLAM

Abstract The Computational Linguistics Application Mediator (CLAM) is a Python tool developed in the context of CLARIN-NL which aims to simplify the process of transforming code into webservices. In this demo I show a concrete example of applying CLAM to the code I've written for my doctoral research project. What the code does is to extract bibliographic references to classical texts and map them to a set of unique identifiers. Thanks to CLAM I was able within few hours to turn my code into a fully-fledged web-service, which provides an interface for humans as well as machines. In this hands-on session I will demonstrate two ways in which this web-service can be used to index automatically a set of documents: manually by means of a graphical user interface and programmatically by means of a client library

Tribological characterization of modified polymeric blends

The present work reports of a series of experimental tests with two polymeric materials, a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) and a polyamide (PA), modified with the inclusion of additives, in terms of their tribological properties of friction and wear. Many thermoplastic materials are in fact used in applications with sliding contact and friction (as in journal bearings, supports\u2026) and, to improve their properties, the polymer is modified with additives having the capacity to change the surface properties. Used additives are of several types: in this work a comparison is made between graphite, polytetrafluoroethylene, a silicone (siloxane), molybdenum disulfide, and carbon nanotubes. For each additive, different percentage in weight have been considered. All these materials can modify the surface properties of the base material exploiting different physical and chemical phenomena. Moreover, the presence of such additives can alter the mechanical properties of the materials sometimes reducing stiffness, strength, and strain limit. The work reports of the experimental methods obtained with a typical tribological test (pin-on-disk method) to measure the tribological properties of the compounds in terms of friction and wear, together with mechanical tests. The analysis will show correlations between the composition, in terms of type and quantity of the additive, on the properties of the compounds

International new ventures in the digital age: the case of a big data and analytics provider

Digital technologies offer new opportunities of business for entrepreneurs that possess big data and analytical skills. In particular, in the international competition context, new opportunities for new ventures internationalization arise in sectors related to Industry 4.0 digital technologies. However, when internationalization and digitalization merge, the dynamics can change, opening a new area of research still little investigated. To contribute to fill this gap, we adopted a case study approach to investigate the internationalization process of a digital International New Venture, which offers services related to Big Data and Analytics. Preliminary findings highlight factors influencing the growth process of this company, showing opportunities and challenges related to digitalization. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the authors´findings, opening new debates for international entrepreneurship research and practice

Towards Resolution Services for Text URIs

In this paper we address the lack of fully resolvable URIs for texts and their citable units in the currently emerging Graph of Ancient World Data. We identify three main architectural components that are required to provide resolution services for text URIs: 1) a registry of text services; 2) an identifier resolution service; 3) a document metadata scheme, to represent the relations between texts in the registry, as well as between these texts and related external resources (e.g. library catalogues). After presenting some of the use cases a central registry providing resolvable URIs for texts would enable, we discuss in detail each component. We conclude by considering three examples where the proposed document metadata scheme is used to describe digital texts; this scheme contains a minimum yet extendable set of metadata that can be used to explore and aggregate texts coming from a network of distributed repositories

The Epoch of Reionization in Warm Dark Matter Scenarios

In this paper we investigate how the Reionization process is affected by early galaxy formation in different cosmological scenarios. We use a semi-analytic model with suppressed initial power spectra to obtain the UV Luminosity Function in thermal Warm Dark Matter and sterile neutrino cosmologies. We retrace the ionization history of intergalactic medium with hot stellar emission only, exploiting fixed and variable photons escape fraction models (fesc). For each cosmology, we find an upper limit to fixed fesc, which guarantees the completion of the process at z<6.7. The analysis is tested with two limit hypothesis on high-z ionized hydrogen volume fraction, comparing our predictions with observational results