Forgotten as data – remembered through information. Social memory institutions in the digital age: the case of the Europeana Initiative

The study of social memory has emerged as a rich field of research closely linked to cultural artefacts, communication media and institutions as carriers of a past that transcends the horizon of the individual’s lifetime. Within this domain of research, the dissertation focuses on memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums) and the shifts they are undergoing as the outcome of digitization and the diffusion of online media. Very little is currently known about the impact that digitality and computation may have on social memory institutions, specifically, and social memory, more generally – an area of study that would benefit from but, so far, has been mostly overlooked by information systems research. The dissertation finds its point of departure in the conceptualization of information as an event that occurs through the interaction between an observer and the observed – an event that cannot be stored as information but merely as data. In this context, memory is conceived as an operation that filters, thus forgets, the singular details of an information event by making it comparable to other events according to abstract classification criteria. Against this backdrop, memory institutions are institutions of forgetting as they select, order and preserve a canon of cultural heritage artefacts. Supported by evidence from a case study on the Europeana initiative (a digitization project of European libraries, archives and museums), the dissertation reveals a fundamental shift in the field of memory institutions. The case study demonstrates the disintegration of 1) the cultural heritage artefact, 2) its standard modes of description and 3) the catalogue as such into a steadily accruing assemblage of data and metadata. Dismembered into bits and bytes, cultural heritage needs to be re-membered through the emulation of recognizable cultural heritage artefacts and momentary renditions of order. In other words, memory institutions forget as binary-based data and remember through computational information

Dependent Double Branching Annihilating Random Walk

Double (or parity conserving) branching annihilating random walk, introduced by Sudbury in '90, is a one-dimensional non-attractive particle system in which positive and negative particles perform nearest neighbor hopping, produce two offsprings to neighboring lattice points and annihilate when they meet. Given an odd number of initial particles, positive recurrence as seen from the leftmost particle position was first proved by Belitsky, Ferrari, Menshikov and Popov in '01 and, subsequently in a much more general setup, in the article by Sturm and Swart (Tightness of voter model interfaces) in '08. These results assume that jump rates of the various moves do not depend on the configuration of the particles not involved in these moves. The present article deals with the case when the jump rates are affected by the locations of several particles in the system. Motivation for such models comes from non-attractive interacting particle systems with particle conservation. Under suitable assumptions we establish the existence of the process, and prove that the one-particle state is positive recurrent. We achieve this by arguments similar to those appeared in the previous article by Sturm and Swart. We also extend our results to some cases of long range jumps, when branching can also occur to non-neighboring sites. We outline and discuss several particular examples of models where our results apply.Comment: 35 pages, 7 figure

Openness and Legitimacy Building in the Sharing Economy: An Exploratory Case Study about CouchSurfing

Sharing economy start-ups are claiming legitimacy by drawing on notions of openness and, at the same time, by adapting to business institutions. We use the case of CouchSurfing to investigate how openness, which has been part of the organization’s raison-d’être, contributed in the legitimacy building efforts and why it was replaced by notions of profitability and revenue generation. Thus, we contribute the concepts of legitimacy and legitimacy building to the academic discourse of openness

The canonization of digital cultural artefacts

Memory institutions and their practices of canonization are closely tied to the emergence of a social memory based on material artefacts and communication media. As libraries, archives and museums are stepping into the online world of digitality and computational operations, the question arises as to how these institutions and their processes of canonization change. Based on Elena Esposito’s system theoretical concept of memory as an operation of forgetting and on David Weinberger’s three orders of ordering artefacts, the paper analyses the canonization of digital cultural artefacts according to the practices of selection, order and preservation. Against this backdrop, the theme of transversal forgetting is developed as a cyclical process of forgetting-as-data that cuts across the boundaries of libraries, archives and museums and their traditionally separated rationale of what to select and how to order and to preserve the selected. The concept, therefore, is an argument against the still dominating metaphor of social memory being an externalized storage. Thus conceived, transversal forgetting attempts to capture memory institutions as part of the wider information environment of bits and bytes, networks and algorithms

An Analysis of the Implications of ICT on Memory Organizations

The societal shift from writing to printing to information and communication technologies has been accompanied by a shift in the structure of social memory that seems to threaten our capability to remember. Within this context, a preliminary analysis is offered on the impact of the digitization of cultural heritage on the ways social memory is being organized by memory institutions (archives, libraries and museums) attempting to bring their repositories online. Informed by the work of Niklas Luhmann and Elena Esposito, the paper addresses the problem of an ICT driven organization of cultural heritage transforming information objects into autological, self-describing digital information objects. The research aims to contribute the notion of memory as a counter-concept to the discussion on information and its technologies in the information systems field and related domains such as organization studies and the social study of ICT. It also advocates the necessity to focus more on the implications of ICT on the ways social memory is structured

Host alarm calls attract the unwanted attention of the brood parasitic common cuckoo

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A new large-bodied Thalattosuchian crocodyliform from the lower Jurassic (toarcian) of Hungary, with further evidence of the mosaic acquisition of marine adaptations in metriorhynchoidea.

Based on associated and three-dimensionally preserved cranial and postcranial remains, a new thalattosuchian crocodyliform, Magyarosuchus fitosi gen. et sp. nov. from the Lower Jurassic (Upper Toarcian) Kisgerecse Marl Formation, Gerecse Mountains, Hungary is described here. Phylogenetic analyses using three different datasets indicate that M. fitosi is the sister taxon of Pelagosaurus typus forming together the basal-most sub-clade of Metriorhynchoidea. With an estimated body length of 4.67–4.83 m M. fitosi is the largest known non-metriorhynchid metriorhynchoid. Besides expanding Early Jurassic thalattosuchian diversity, the new specimen is of great importance since, unlike most contemporaneous estuarine, lagoonal or coastal thalattosuchians, it comes from an ‘ammonitico rosso’ type pelagic deposit of the Mediterranean region of the Tethys. A distal caudal vertebra having an unusually elongate and dorsally projected neural spine implies the presence of at least a rudimentary hypocercal tail fin and a slight ventral displacement of the distal caudal vertebral column in this basal metriorhynchoid. The combination of retaining heavy dorsal and ventral armors and having a slight hypocercal tail is unique, further highlighting the mosaic manner of marine adaptations in Metriorhynchoidea

Sequence-Based Prediction of Fuzzy Protein Interactions

It is becoming increasingly recognised that disordered proteins may be fuzzy, in that they can exhibit a wide variety of binding modes. In addition to the well-known process of folding upon binding (disorder-to-order transition), many examples are emerging of interacting proteins that remain disordered in their bound states (disorder-to-disorder transitions). Furthermore, disordered proteins may populate ordered and disordered states to different extents depending on their partners (context-dependent binding). Here we assemble three datasets comprising disorder-to-order, context-dependent, and disorder-to-disorder transitions of 828 protein regions represented in 2157 complexes and elucidate the sequence-determinants of the different interaction modes. We found that fuzzy interactions originate from local sequence compositions that promote the sampling of a wide range of different structures. Based on this observation, we developed the FuzPred method (http://protdyn-fuzpred.org) of predicting the binding modes of disordered proteins based on their amino acid sequences, without specifying their partners. We thus illustrate how the amino acid sequences of proteins can encode a wide range of conformational changes upon binding, including transitions from disordered to ordered and from disordered to disordered states

Random walk of second class particles in product shock measures

We consider shock measures in a class of conserving stochastic particle systems on Z. These shock measures have a product structure with a step-like density profile and include a second class particle at the shock position. We show for the asymmetric simple exclusion process, for the exponential bricklayers' process, and for a generalized zero range process, that under certain conditions these shocks, and therefore the second class particles, perform a simple random walk. Some previous results, including random walks of product shock measures and stationary shock measures seen from a second class particle, are direct consequences of our more general theorem. Multiple shocks can also be handled easily in this framework. Similar shock structure is also found in a nonconserving model, the branching coalescing random walk, where the role of the second class particle is played by the rightmost (or leftmost) particle.Comment: Minor changes after referees' comment

Call rate in Common Cuckoos does not predict body size and responses to conspecific playbacks

The brood parasitic Common Cuckoo Cuculus canorus is best known for its two-note “cu-coo” call which is almost continuously uttered by male during the breeding season and can be heard across long distances in the feld. Although the informative value of the cuckoo call was intensively investigated recently, it is still not clear whether call characteristic(s) indicate any of the phenotypic traits of the respective vocalising individuals. To fll this gap, we studied whether the call rate of male cuckoos (i.e., the number of calls uttered per unit of time) provides information on their body size, which might be a relevant trait during intrasexual territorial conficts. We captured free-living male cuckoos and measured their body size parameters (mass, wing, tail and tarsus lengths). Each subject was then radio-tagged, released, and its individual “cu-coo” calls were recorded soon after that in the feld. The results showed that none of the body size parameters covaried statistically with the call rates of individual male Common Cuckoos. In addition, we experimentally tested whether the “cu-coo” call rates afect behavioural responses of cuckoos using playbacks of either a quicker or a slower paced call than the calls with natural rates. Cuckoos responded similarly to both types of experimental playback treatments by approaching the speaker with statistically similar levels of responses as when presented with calls at the natural rate. We conclude that male Common Cuckoos do not advertise reliable information acoustically regarding their body size, and so, cuckoo calls are neither useful to characterize cuckoos’ phenotypic traits directly nor to indicate environmental quality indirectl