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"Books Digitization Social aspects."
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Googlization of everything
In the beginning, the World Wide Web was exciting and open to the point of anarchy, a vast and intimidating repository of unindexed confusion. Into this creative chaos came Google with its dazzling mission--\"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible\"--and its much-quoted motto, \"Don't be Evil.\" In this provocative book, Siva Vaidhyanathan examines the ways we have used and embraced Google--and the growing resistance to its expansion across the globe. He exposes the dark side of our Google fantasies, raising red flags about issues of intellectual property and the much-touted Google Book Search. He assesses Google's global impact, particularly in China, and explains the insidious effect of Googlization on the way we think. Finally, Vaidhyanathan proposes the construction of an Internet ecosystem designed to benefit the whole world and keep one brilliant and powerful company from falling into the \"evil\" it pledged to avoid.
eBook
The case for books : past, present, and future
\"The era of the printed book is at a crossroad. E-readers are flooding the market, books are available to read on cell phones, and companies such as Google, Amazon, and Apple are competing to command near monopolistic positions as sellers and dispensers of digital information. Is the printed book resilient enough to survive the digital revolution, or will it become obsolete? In this lasting collection of essays, Robert Darnton--an intellectual pioneer in the field of this history of the book--lends unique authority to the life, role, and legacy of the book in society.\"--P. 4 of cover.
Book
Implementing Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Pros and Cons from the Perspectives of Academics
This article investigates the perspectives of Romanian academics on implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Higher Education (HE). The article analyzes the pros and cons of AI in HE, based on the views of eighteen academics from five Romanian universities. There is a large and heated debate about the proliferation of AI in many domains, with strong supporters and determined deniers. Studies that research the implications of AI enrich the evidence-based literature on the advantages, disadvantages, threats, or opportunities that AI creates for us, for businesses, or for societies. Though many aspects are still less well known, attitudes toward AI are still under construction. HE is a domain where the implications of AI create passionate discussions. HE is, eventually, the sector that shapes the masterminds of societies’ leaders. There is a quest to find the perspectives of those who will apply AI, who will work with or for AI, and those who are opposed to or in favor of implementing AI in HE. The conclusions revealed by this study are in line with similar studies that exist in the literature. The positive aspects of AI implementation in HE are related, in the view of academics, to gains in the learning–teaching process, improvements in students skills and competences, better inclusion, and greater efficiency in administrative costs. Similarly, the negative aspects revealed by the research are linked to psychosocial effects, data security, ethical aspects, and unemployment threats. However, there are some aspects (mostly negative) related to implementing AI in HE that are less exposed by the interviewed academics, which are mostly related to the costs and efforts of implementing AI in HE. The possible explanation of this situation is related to the lack of strategic vision on what, in fact, the implementation of AI in HE means, what this process involves, and the fact that digitalization in Romanian universities (as well as in the Romanian economy) is in its infancy. The contribution of the results of this research is mainly empirical and practical. These opinions should be used as resources for managers of HE institutions to develop better policies concerning the implementation of AI in HE and for strategic vision toward AI, with the ultimate purpose of achieving progress and prosperity for the entire society.
Journal Article
Increasing digitalization is associated with anxiety and depression: A Google Ngram analysis
The prevalence of anxiety disorders and depression are rising worldwide. Studies investigating risk factors on a societal level leading to these rises are so far limited to social-economic status, social capital, and unemployment, while most such studies rely on self-reports to investigate these factors. Therefore, our study aims to evaluate the impact of an additional factor on a societal level, namely digitalization, by using a linguistic big data approach. We extend related work by using the Google Books Ngram Viewer (Google Ngram) to retrieve and adjust word frequencies from a large corpus of books (8 million books or 6 percent of all books ever published) and to subsequently investigate word changes in terms of anxiety disorders, depression, and digitalization. Our analyses comprise and compare data from six languages, British English, German, Spanish, Russian, French, and Italian. We also retrieved word frequencies for the control construct “religion”. Our results show an increase in word frequency for anxiety, depression, and digitalization over the last 50 years (r = .79 to .89, p < .001), a significant correlation between the frequency of anxiety and depression words (r = .98, p < .001), a significant correlation between the frequency of anxiety and digitalization words (r = .81, p < .001), and a significant correlation between the frequency of depression and anxiety words (r = .81, p < .001). For the control construct religion, we found no significant correlations for word frequency over the last 50 years and no significant correlation between the frequency of anxiety and depression words. Our results showed a negative correlation between the frequency of depression and religion words (r = -.25, p < .05). We also improved the method by excluding terms with double meanings detected by 73 independent native speakers. Implications for future research and professional and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
Journal Article
Measuring Emotion in Parliamentary Debates with Automated Textual Analysis
An impressive breadth of interdisciplinary research suggests that emotions have an influence on human behavior. Nonetheless, we still know very little about the emotional states of those actors whose daily decisions have a lasting impact on our societies: politicians in parliament. We address this question by making use of methods of natural language processing and a digitized corpus of text data spanning a century of parliamentary debates in the United Kingdom. We use this approach to examine changes in aggregate levels of emotional polarity in the British parliament, and to test a hypothesis about the emotional response of politicians to economic recessions. Our findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the mood of politicians has become more positive during the past decades, and that variations in emotional polarity can be predicted by the state of the national economy.
Journal Article
The impact of terrorist attacks on cultural values as expressed in books
We assessed the effects of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the salience of moral words and phrases in the United States, Great Britain, and Spanish-speaking countries, focusing particularly on those phrases related to authority and loyalty. Our predictions were that the 9/11 attacks would increase the salience of authority phrases suggestive of disorder (“chaos”, “disobedience”, etc, labeled authority-vice ) and decrease words and phrases suggestive of organization (“hierarchy”, “obedient”, etc: authority-virtue ) in books published in the United States. Similarly, we anticipated that the salience of phrases consistent with fidelity to members of one’s social group (“allegiance”, “one for all”, loyalty-virtue ), would decrease, and those suggestive of social corrosion (“betrays”, “back stabs”, loyalty-vice ) would increase. To test these predictions, we calculated the relative frequency of authority-vice, authority-virtue, loyalty-vice, and loyalty-virtue phrases, as well as those associated with other moral values, in books published in the U.S., Great Britain, and Spanish-speaking countries for each year between 1960 and 2019. A Bayesian structural time-series approach for each type of phrase provided additional support for the hypotheses for books published in the United States. Descriptive analyses suggested that the period following 9/11 was characterized by a deceleration in historical trends toward increasing use of moral vocabulary in published books. We discuss the implications of our findings for the measurement of cultural values and the impact of terrorism events on moral foundations and suggest that the encoding of these value shifts in texts is one way in which cultural effects are sustained.
Journal Article
Automated data extraction from historical city directories: The rise and fall of mid-century gas stations in Providence, RI
The location of defunct environmentally hazardous businesses like gas stations has many implications for modern American cities. To track down these locations, we present the directoreadr code (github.com/brown-ccv/directoreadr). Using scans of Polk city directories from Providence, RI, directoreadr extracts and parses business location data with a high degree of accuracy. The image processing pipeline ran without any human input for 94.4% of the pages we examined. For the remaining 5.6%, we processed them with some human input. Through hand-checking a sample of three years, we estimate that ~94.6% of historical gas stations are correctly identified and located, with historical street changes and non-standard address formats being the main drivers of errors. As an example use, we look at gas stations, finding that gas stations were most common early in the study period in 1936, beginning a sharp and steady decline around 1950. We are making the dataset produced by directoreadr publicly available. We hope it will be used to explore a range of important questions about socioeconomic patterns in Providence and cities like it during the transformations of the mid-1900s.
Journal Article
eCulture : cultural content in the digital age
Do virtual museums really provide added value to end-users, or do they just contribute to the abundance of images?Does the World Wide Web save endangered cultural heritage, or does it foster a society with less variety?How can information technology help to preserve the diversity of cultures in our fast-changing world?.
eBook
Introducing Digitized Cultural Heritage to Wider Audiences by Employing Virtual and Augmented Reality Experiences: The Case of the v-Corfu Project
In recent years, cultural projects utilizing digital applications and immersive technologies (VR, AR, MR) have grown significantly, enhancing cultural heritage experiences. Research emphasizes the importance of usability, user experience, and accessibility, yet holistic approaches remain underexplored and many projects fail to reach their audience. This article aims to bridge this gap by presenting a complete workflow including systematic requirements analysis, design guidelines, and development solutions based on knowledge extracted from previous relevant projects. The article focuses on virtual museums covering key challenges including compatibility, accessibility, usability, navigation, interaction, computational performance and graphics quality, and provides a design schema for integrating virtual museums into such projects. Following this approach, a number of applications are presented. Their performance with respect to the aforementioned key challenges is evaluated. Users are invited to assess them, providing positive results. To assess the virtual museum’s ability to attract a broader audience beyond the usual target group, a group of underserved minorities are also invited to use and evaluate it, generating encouraging outcomes. Concluding, results show that the presented workflow succeeds in yielding high-quality applications for cultural heritage communication and attraction of wider audiences, and outlines directions for further improvements in digitized heritage applications.
Journal Article