Virtual or online content creation is no longer an external process done by software developers or professional new media players, but is more and more performed by ordinary people. In this paper, we focus on non-professional users to present how different categories of users get involved in the process of content sharing and creation within a city community. That only a few of them are interested in contributing to this community is nothing new in itself. Instead, we want to look at what is needed to encourage them to help us build up a virtual ‘replica’ of the city using an ad hoc application, i.e., the A4MC-application. To support them in achieving this goal, this mobile city device must have some iterative elements (like tags, ratings, comments, etc., which are also known as social features) that stimulate users to become active members of that particular community. By exploring which of these interactive elements are most suitable on mobile devices, we hope to define a framework to support users in generating content in a user-friendly way.
The Utrecht School of Journalism has a long tradition in international higher education. The School’s European Culture & European Journalism (ED&EJ) programme is an example of a pedagogical practice in higher education where advanced students learn how to perform in an international context. Journalism students from Moscow to Ottawa and from Helsinki to Bilbao learn alongside Dutch students. It is not only the content of the programme and the reporting for the Web Magazine that makes the EC&EJ programme an inspirational educational experience. The programme demonstrates the importance of sharing different professional and cultural values. This sharing and confronting of professional standards contributes to an important new qualification for all higher educated professionals: awareness of cultural differences and similarities
Introduction: The Netherlands has been known as one of the pioneers in the sharing economy. At the beginning of the 2010s, many local initiatives such as Peerby (borrow tools and other things from your neighbours), SnappCar (p2p car-sharing), and Thuisafgehaald (cook for your neighbours) launched that enabled consumers to share underused resources or provide services to each other. This was accompanied by a wide interest from the Dutch media, zooming in on the perceived social and environmental benefits of these platforms. Commercial platforms such as Uber, UberPop and Airbnb followed soon after. After their entrance to the market, the societal debate about the impact of these platforms also started to include the negative consequences. Early on, universities and national research and policy institutes took part in these discussions by providing definitions, frameworks, and analyses. In the last few years, the attention has shifted from the sharing economy to the much broader defined platform economy.
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The scientific publishing industry is rapidly transitioning towards information analytics. This shift is disproportionately benefiting large companies. These can afford to deploy digital technologies like knowledge graphs that can index their contents and create advanced search engines. Small and medium publishing enterprises, instead, often lack the resources to fully embrace such digital transformations. This divide is acutely felt in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Scholars from these disciplines are largely unable to benefit from modern scientific search engines, because their publishing ecosystem is made of many specialized businesses which cannot, individually, develop comparable services. We propose to start bridging this gap by democratizing access to knowledge graphs – the technology underpinning modern scientific search engines – for small and medium publishers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Their contents, largely made of books, already contain rich, structured information – such as references and indexes – which can be automatically mined and interlinked. We plan to develop a framework for extracting structured information and create knowledge graphs from it. We will as much as possible consolidate existing proven technologies into a single codebase, instead of reinventing the wheel. Our consortium is a collaboration of researchers in scientific information mining, Odoma, an AI consulting company, and the publisher Brill, sharing its data and expertise. Brill will be able to immediately put to use the project results to improve its internal processes and services. Furthermore, our results will be published in open source with a commercial-friendly license, in order to foster the adoption and future development of the framework by other publishers. Ultimately, our proposal is an example of industry innovation where, instead of scaling-up, we scale wide by creating a common resource which many small players can then use and expand upon.
