If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0

Over the past 15 years, the web has transformed the way we seek and use information. In the last 5 years in particular a set of innovative techniques – collectively termed ‘web 2.0’ – have enabled people to become producers as well as consumers of information. It has been suggested that these relatively easy-to-use tools, and the behaviours which underpin their use, have enormous potential for scholarly researchers, enabling them to communicate their research and its findings more rapidly, broadly and effectively than ever before. This report is based on a study commissioned by the Research Information Network to investigate whether such aspirations are being realised. It seeks to improve our currently limited understanding of whether, and if so how, researchers are making use of various web 2.0 tools in the course of their work, the factors that encourage or inhibit adoption, and researchers’ attitudes towards web 2.0 and other forms of communication. Context: How researchers communicate their work and their findings varies in different subjects or disciplines, and in different institutional settings. Such differences have a strong influence on how researchers approach the adoption – or not – of new information and communications technologies. It is also important to stress that ‘web 2.0’ encompasses a wide range of interactions between technologies and social practices which allow web users to generate, repurpose and share content with each other. We focus in this study on a range of generic tools – wikis, blogs and some social networking systems – as well as those designed specifically by and for people within the scholarly community. Method: Our study was designed not only to capture current attitudes and patterns of adoption but also to identify researchers’ needs and aspirations, and problems that they encounter. We began with an online survey, which collected information about researchers’ information gathering and dissemination habits and their attitudes towards web 2.0. This was followed by in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of survey respondents to explore in more depth their experience of web 2.0, including perceived barriers as well as drivers to adoption. Finally, we undertook five case studies of web 2.0 services to investigate their development and adoption across different communities and business models. Key findings: Our study indicates that a majority of researchers are making at least occasional use of one or more web 2.0 tools or services for purposes related to their research: for communicating their work; for developing and sustaining networks and collaborations; or for finding out about what others are doing. But frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous. In deciding if they will make web 2.0 tools and services part of their everyday practice, the key questions for researchers are the benefits they may secure from doing so, and how it fits with their use of established services. Researchers who use web 2.0 tools and services do not see them as comparable to or substitutes for other channels and means of communication, but as having their own distinctive role for specific purposes and at particular stages of research. And frequent use of one kind of tool does not imply frequent use of others as well

Descending the Stairwell: Dwelling Places and Doorways in Early Post-War Black British Writing

Dwelling places - houses, hostels, basements, bedsits - established themselves as key arenas of contestation in the narration of early post-war black British settlement. It was here that the panics and pleasures surrounding black immigration tended to accumulate and stage themselves. As Britain\u27s doors were opened to its colonies and former colonies through the Nationality Act of 1948, those doors guarding the nation\u27s residential hinterlands were being effectively dosed. Housing was, perhaps more than any other threshold in the 1950s, subject to a \u27colour bar\u27. Its fortification could be read in the proliferation of those now hackneyed signs of racial exclusion displayed in the windows of shops, guest houses and hotels: \u27Rooms to Let. Sorry, No Dogs and No Coloureds\u27. Here it was the dwelling place, not the official point of entry, at which the regulation, policing and deferral of black settlement was to be most effectively mythologized

Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice: The Function of Narrative in Redressing the Legacy of Mass Atrocities

This doctoral dissertation, Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice: the Function of Narrative in Redressing the Legacy of Mass Atrocities, examines the extent to which the success and feasibility of human rights tribunals and truth commissions are dependent upon the ways in which the past is narrativized in State-sponsored legal reports and subsequently promulgated through the stories we tell. Juxtaposing three historical cases that have constituted transitional justice according to divergent ideological paths, Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice compares and cross-references the final reports on three high-profile transitional justice cases: the Nuremberg tribunals (1945-49), the Argentine Trial of the Juntas (1985), and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008-15), to study the ways in which these reports have shaped the collective or national memories of various historical traumas. The dissertation examines how the final reports on truth commissions and war crimes tribunals deploy a highly sophisticated set of rhetorical and narratological techniques in order to fix a single, specific version of historical events in the cultural memories with disparate aims in bringing together a fractured nation. By highlighting the significant degree of artistry that go into preparing these reports, it examines how and why transitional governments are often motivated to frame historical violence in order to elicit collective feelings of outrage, shame, guilt, or forgiveness. Narratology, Rhetoric, and Transitional Justice thereby illustrates how transitional justice practices mobilize blueprints for reconciliation, restoration, or retribution through the recovery and narrativization of traumatic memories, and how these respective sentiments have facilitated the implementation of subsequent political and economic policies by the transitional governments. A key aspect of this analysis centeres on the unique ability of final reports to contextualize national traumas by designating precisely which crimes were committed, by and against whom, by regulating whose testimony is to be included and/or excluded from the master narrative, and by articulating the appropriate measure of justice that ought to be faced by the perpetrators. As the apotheosis of the transitional justice process, my research demonstrates that truth commission reports not only present their mercurial and highly contentious histories as binding, legally-validated, and irrefutably fixed versions of a series of often dubious events, but they also effectively situate each citizen within the victim/perpetrator and innocent/guilty binary ethical paradigms upon which the judicial system is grounded. Negotiating the final reports on truth commissions and human rights tribunals as historical non-fiction texts, these case studies weigh their reports alongside other vehicles of cultural storytelling (including historical novels, films, ballets, etc.)

Markets for ecosystem services: Applying the concepts

In recent times, use of market-based instruments to facilitate enhanced protection or production of ecosystem services has achieved a high public profile. However, much work remains to apply these tools in practice. Particular issues include definition and measurement of ecosystem services, development of institutions and mechanisms to facilitate trade and integration of these instruments into the broader natural resource management agenda and toolbox. In this paper these issues are explored with respect to pilot markets for ecosystem services in three case study catchments. Emphasis is placed on pilot selection rationale and identification of key facilitative mechanisms and institutions.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

A broken fenestrated tracheostomy tube fragment removed from the right main bronchus

Aspiration of a broken tracheostomy tube fragment is a relatively rare complication with the potential to result in serious airway complications. Case reports of tracheal fragment aspiration have been documented infrequently in the past, with the earliest documented case in 1960. What follows is a case report of an 80-year-old male patient whose tracheostomy was replaced a year ago. While at home, the tracheostomy broke and the fragment lodged in his right main bronchus. He was unable to recall when the tracheostomy broke and only presented to the ear, nose and throat clinic for his annual follow-up appointment. The discussion highlights similar reported cases and emphasises some concerns regarding the long-term use of tracheostomies.Keywords: airway, aspiration, complication, foreign body, tracheostomy tub

That's maybe where I come from but that’s not how I read: Diaspora, Location and Reading Identities

First paragraph: The historical neglect of readers within the field of postcolonial studies has produced what C. L. Innes suggests is a reductive and presumptuous idea of  "the reader": "most critical analyses of postcolonial writing implicitly or explicitly presume that the reader is either a member of the writer's nation, as in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) . . . or, more frequently, a generalized cosmopolitan Westerner"; even in those accounts that do exist "there is little differentiation between different kinds of Western reader" (2007, 200). Much of the haziness around readers here hinges upon commonsense assumptions about the location of reading, whether it is conceived in terms of national affiliation or in more generalised, global and diasporic terms of cosmopolitan consumption in "the" West. In what follows we explore some of the findings of a recent project that attempted to firm up current conceptions of readership by investigating how readers in a series of geographically dispersed locations made sense of the same, or similar works of fiction associated with postcolonial or diaspora writing. These works included canonical classics such as Things Fall Apart (1958), as well as proto-canonical contemporary works such as White Teeth (2001), experimental writers like Junot Diaz and more mainstream realist novelists like Andrea Levy and Monica Ali, poetry and short fiction, as well as novels, and prescribed works as well as books selected by the individual groups themselves. By recording and transcribing a series of isolated book group readings of these texts in Africa (Lagos, Kano, Nigeria; Tetuan, Morocco), India (New Delhi), Canada (Kingston), the Caribbean (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Kingston, Jamaica) and across the UK (from Cornwall to Glasgow), this project asked how (if at all) the reception of the same book differs according to the place in which it is read

Not reading Brick Lane

When someone becomes or does not become a reader - and how we make a claim to or refuse these kinds of identity - clearly matters within globalised cultures, where the challenges of literary representation quickly become problems of cultural misrepresentation. Yet precisely because not reading would appear to amount to nothing, its significance remains unexplored. In order to trace the conjunctural and multiple meanings of not reading, this essay explores the embattled reception surrounding Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane (2003) and its adaptation into film (2007), and locates not reading within a longer history of book controversies that is overshadowed by the Rushdie Affair. Our paper argues that, far from mere negation, not reading is an intensely productive site of cross-cultural negotiation and conflict without which the contemporary significance of global readerships and reading acts makes only partial sense

That's maybe where I come from but that’s not how I read: Diaspora, Location and Reading Identities

First paragraph: The historical neglect of readers within the field of postcolonial studies has produced what C. L. Innes suggests is a reductive and presumptuous idea of  "the reader": "most critical analyses of postcolonial writing implicitly or explicitly presume that the reader is either a member of the writer's nation, as in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) . . . or, more frequently, a generalized cosmopolitan Westerner"; even in those accounts that do exist "there is little differentiation between different kinds of Western reader" (2007, 200). Much of the haziness around readers here hinges upon commonsense assumptions about the location of reading, whether it is conceived in terms of national affiliation or in more generalised, global and diasporic terms of cosmopolitan consumption in "the" West. In what follows we explore some of the findings of a recent project that attempted to firm up current conceptions of readership by investigating how readers in a series of geographically dispersed locations made sense of the same, or similar works of fiction associated with postcolonial or diaspora writing. These works included canonical classics such as Things Fall Apart (1958), as well as proto-canonical contemporary works such as White Teeth (2001), experimental writers like Junot Diaz and more mainstream realist novelists like Andrea Levy and Monica Ali, poetry and short fiction, as well as novels, and prescribed works as well as books selected by the individual groups themselves. By recording and transcribing a series of isolated book group readings of these texts in Africa (Lagos, Kano, Nigeria; Tetuan, Morocco), India (New Delhi), Canada (Kingston), the Caribbean (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Kingston, Jamaica) and across the UK (from Cornwall to Glasgow), this project asked how (if at all) the reception of the same book differs according to the place in which it is read

NCeSS Project : Data mining for social scientists

We will discuss the work being undertaken on the NCeSS data mining project, a one year project at the University of Manchester which began at the start of 2007, to develop data mining tools of value to the social science community. Our primary goal is to produce a suite of data mining codes, supported by a web interface, to allow social scientists to mine their datasets in a straightforward way and hence, gain new insights into their data. In order to fully define the requirements, we are looking at a range of typical datasets to find out what forms they take and the applications and algorithms that will be required. In this paper, we will describe a number of these datasets and will discuss how easily data mining techniques can be used to extract information from the data that would either not be possible or would be too time consuming by more standard methods