Migration on request, a practical technique for preservation

Maintaining a digital object in a usable state over time is a crucial aspect of digital preservation. Existing methods of preserving have many drawbacks. This paper describes advanced techniques of data migration which can be used to support preservation more accurately and cost effectively. To ensure that preserved works can be rendered on current computer systems over time, “traditional migration” has been used to convert data into current formats. As the new format becomes obsolete another conversion is performed, etcetera. Traditional migration has many inherent problems as errors during transformation propagate throughout future transformations. CAMiLEON’s software longevity principles can be applied to a migration strategy, offering improvements over traditional migration. This new approach is named “Migration on Request.” Migration on Request shifts the burden of preservation onto a single tool, which is maintained over time. Always returning to the original format enables potential errors to be significantly reduced

Personal Semantics

International audienceQuantified self, life logging, digital eyeglasses, technology is ad- vancing rapidly to a point where people can gather masses of data about their own persons and their own life. Large-scale models of what people are doing are being built by credit companies, advertising agencies, and national security agencies, using digital traces that people leave behind them. How can individuals exploit their own data for their own benefit? With this mass of personal data, we will need to induce personal semantic dimensions to sift data and find what is meaningful to each individual. In this chapter, we present semantic dimensions, made by experts, and by crowds. We show the type of information that individuals will have access to once lifelogging becomes common, and we will sketch what personal semantic dimensions might look like

Preserving Bibliographic Relationships in Mappings from FRBR to BIBFRAME 2.0

In the environment of the World Wide Web large volumes of library data have been pub-lished following different conceptual models. The navigation through these volumes and the data interlinking require the development of mappings between the conceptual models. Library conceptual models provide constructs for the representation of bibliographic families and the relationships between Works. A key requirement for successful map-pings between different conceptual models is to preserve such content relationships. This paper studies a set of cases (Work with single Expression, Work with multiple Expres-sions, translation, adaptation) to examine if and how bibliographic content relationships and families could be preserved in mappings from FRBR to BIBFRAME 2.0. Even though, relationships between Works of the same bibliographic family may be preserved, the progenitor Work is not always represented in BIBFRAME after mappings

Discovering the Unfindable: The Tension Between Findability and Discoverability in a Bookshop Designed for Serendipity

Serendipity is a key aspect of user experience, particularly in the context of information acquisition - where it is known as information encountering. Unexpectedly encountering interesting or useful information can spark new insights while surprising and delighting. However, digital environments have been designed primarily for goal-directed seeking over loosely-directed exploration, searching over discovering. In this paper we examine a novel physical environment - a bookshop designed primarily for serendipity - for cues as to how information encountering might be helped or hindered by digital design. Naturalistic observations and interviews revealed it was almost impossible for participants to find specific books or topics other than by accident. But all unexpectedly encoun-tered interesting books, highlighting a tension between findability and discoverability. While some of the bookshop’s design features enabled information en-countering, others inhibited it. However, encountering was resilient, as it occurred despite participants finding it hard to understand the purpose of even those features that did enable it. Findings suggest the need to consider how transparent or opaque the purpose of design features should be and to balance structure and lack of it when designing digital environments for findability and discoverability

Computing the everyday: social media as data platforms

We conceive social media platforms as sociotechnical entities that variously shape user platform involvement and participation. Such shaping develops along three fundamental data operations that we subsume under the terms of encoding, aggregation, and computation. Encoding entails the engineering of user platform participation along narrow and standardized activity types (e.g., tagging, liking, sharing, following). This heavily scripted platform participation serves as the basis for the procurement of discrete and calculable data tokens that are possible to aggregate and, subsequently, compute in a variety of ways. We expose these operations by investigating a social media platform for shopping. We contribute to the current debate on social media and digital platforms by describing social media as posttransactional spaces that are predominantly concerned with charting and profiling the online predispositions, habits, and opinions of their user base. Such an orientation sets social media platforms apart from other forms of mediating online interaction. In social media, we claim, platform participation is driven toward an endless online conversation that delivers the data footprint through which a computed sociality is made the source of value creation and monetization

The fundamental left-right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster

Cinque (2005, 2009, 2014a) observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinque’s ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative ‘let’, a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinque’s fundamental left-right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinque’s generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly