Ephemeral mimetics: memes, an X-ray of Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted a crisis with consequences for public health, but also with economic, social and cultural implications that have affected all layers of society to a greater or lesser extent. Communication has been impacted by the immediacy and virality of messages and misinformation has galloped across social platforms. Against that backdrop, memes have emerged as a powerful means to channel citizen sentiment. A study of these digital objects is essential to understanding social network-based communication during the pandemic. The qualitative research reported here analyses the role of memes in communication on Covid-19, studies their development and defends their status as one of this generation’s cultural artefacts that, as such, merits preservation. Meme evolution is studied using Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, which has been applied in a number of contexts involving psychological change. Studying memes in those terms both brings information on the evolution of citizens’ concerns to light and proves useful to sound out social media communication around the pandemic media. The challenges to be faced in meme preservation are defined, along with the ways in which heritage institutions should ensure the conservation of these cultural objects, which mirror early twenty-first century communication and world views and in this case provide specific insight into one of the most significant historic circumstances of recent decades.

Evaluating Auction Mechanisms for the Preservation of Cost-Aware Digital Objects under Constrained Digital Preservation Budgets

Digital preservation is a field of research focused on designing strategies for maintaining digital objects accessible for general use in the coming years. Out of the many approaches to digital preservation, the present research article is a continuation work of a previously published article containing a proposal for a novel object-centered paradigm to address the digital preservation problem where digital objects share part of the responsibility for self-preservation. In the new framework, the behavior of digital objects is modeled to find the best preservation strategy. The results presented in the current article add a new economic constraint to the object behavior. Now, differently from the previous paper, migrations, copies and updates are not free to use, but subject to budget limitations to ensure the economic sustainability of the whole preservation system, forcing the now-called cost-aware digital objects for efficient management of available budget. The presented approach compares two auction-based mechanisms, a multi-unit auction and a combinatorial auction, with a simple direct purchase strategy as possible efficient behaviors for budget management. TiM, a simulated environment for running distributed digital ecosystems, is used to perform the experiments. The simulated results map the relation between the studied purchase models with the sustained quality level of digital objects, as a measure of its accessibility, together with its budget management capabilities. About the results, the best performance corresponds to the combinatorial auction model. The results are a good approach to deal with the digital preservation problem from a sustainable point of view and open the door to future implementations with other purchase strategies.

Representing a Relationship: The use of metadata to represent the relationship between physical objects and their digital surrogates

<p>Digital collections are increasingly prominent in museums as born-digital material is acquired by institutions, and digital surrogates of physical items are created through digital imaging, digitisation, and reformatting projects. These digital collections are a significant development in museums and a useful tool, particularly for access. When a digital surrogate is created of a physical object, they have an inherent connection to one another. Representing this relationship is important for museums in order to provide context for their collection items. These types of relationships also occur across physical formats, and the consequence of a breakdown in this relationship has been shown in the literature to lead to a loss of context. However, it is unclear how the relationship a physical object has with its digital surrogate is represented in the metadata. Current literature on digital collections only briefly explores existing relationships between digital and physical collections and provides no framework for best practice in a museum context. This thesis examines how metadata is used to represent the relationship between a physical object and its digital surrogate at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The research involved a single-site case study, with interviews and documentary research which were thematically analysed. This thesis shows how the relationship between physical and digital objects are primarily represented at Te Papa through the collection management system’s structure, with some metadata elements representing the relationship incidentally. It also shows that there are differing worldviews and perspectives across the GLAM domains in the language and the drivers of digitisation. This research serves as a snapshot of current practice at one institution and encourages further research to better understand the long-term implications of this and other approaches. For museums, understanding how the relationship between physical objects and digital surrogates is currently being represented through metadata could help support professional practice for both types of collections, ensure the relationship is maintained, and help support existing and future digital interventions in museums.</p>

Representing a Relationship: The use of metadata to represent the relationship between physical objects and their digital surrogates

<p>Digital collections are increasingly prominent in museums as born-digital material is acquired by institutions, and digital surrogates of physical items are created through digital imaging, digitisation, and reformatting projects. These digital collections are a significant development in museums and a useful tool, particularly for access. When a digital surrogate is created of a physical object, they have an inherent connection to one another. Representing this relationship is important for museums in order to provide context for their collection items. These types of relationships also occur across physical formats, and the consequence of a breakdown in this relationship has been shown in the literature to lead to a loss of context. However, it is unclear how the relationship a physical object has with its digital surrogate is represented in the metadata. Current literature on digital collections only briefly explores existing relationships between digital and physical collections and provides no framework for best practice in a museum context. This thesis examines how metadata is used to represent the relationship between a physical object and its digital surrogate at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The research involved a single-site case study, with interviews and documentary research which were thematically analysed. This thesis shows how the relationship between physical and digital objects are primarily represented at Te Papa through the collection management system’s structure, with some metadata elements representing the relationship incidentally. It also shows that there are differing worldviews and perspectives across the GLAM domains in the language and the drivers of digitisation. This research serves as a snapshot of current practice at one institution and encourages further research to better understand the long-term implications of this and other approaches. For museums, understanding how the relationship between physical objects and digital surrogates is currently being represented through metadata could help support professional practice for both types of collections, ensure the relationship is maintained, and help support existing and future digital interventions in museums.</p>

Offerings That are “Ever-in-the-Making”

Digital ventures are entrepreneurial young firms that introduce new digital artifacts that are “ever-incomplete” and “perpetually-in-the-making” onto the market. The study examines how six digital ventures continued to develop their digital market offerings post launch. Three key designing mechanisms are identified that explain continuous post-launch product development in digital ventures: deploying complementary digital objects, architectural amplification, and porting. The study discusses how these mechanisms advance our understanding of how digital technologies change entrepreneurial processes and outcomes.

Examining cyber security implementation through TLS/SSL on academic institutional repository in Indonesia

Indonesia is one of the countries that implement Institutional Repositories (IR) in their academic world. According to the National Library of Indonesia, there are more than 7890 academic IR in Indonesia. However, there is no research investigating the institutional repository's security aspect in the Indonesian academic institutional repository. This paper will explore Indonesian academic IR's security by examining how to secure a connection between the network with encrypted communication to ensure that an intruder does not compromise the relationship between the server and the browser. This research's methodology is conducting experimental on the best institutional repository in Indonesia involving a private and public university. Some serious finding is that most Indonesian Academic Institutional Repositories have vulnerable security issues in their SSL and TLS and can cause a severe problem for their information asset's security in the future. The conclusion is that Indonesian academic institutions' security is not secure, and they need to consider this issue seriously. Create better security intervention for IR with the latest high-quality technology and policy to protect the information asset such as user, administrator, and visitor personal data and valuable digital objects in Indonesian academic IR.

Audiovisual practices of new media and their communicative nature

The purpose of the article is to analyze the specifics of audiovisual practices of new media and reveal their communicative nature. The methodology of the work is to involve an analytical approach to highlight the features of new media and their components. A comparative approach was used to highlight the features of audiovisual practices and media art. Scientific Novelty. The specifics of audiovisual practices of new media, which are characterized by interactivity, are revealed. Their role in communication through audiovisual content is emphasized. Simplifying the mechanisms for creating an audiovisual product in software applications makes it easy to distribute messages. In contrast to media art, which has a clear aesthetic function, in audiovisual practices prevail communicatively. Conclusions. New media occupy a significant place in the modern cultural space. A wide range of phenomena that can be attributed to new media is characterized by certain common features. These include their communicative nature and existence on the Internet. Audiovisual practices of new media are extremely diverse. They include both media art and practices that contain an aesthetic component but cannot be fully attributed to the arts. The art practices of new media are evolving through a combination of birth digital and became digital objects. Communication and interactivity are the basic characteristics of new media audiovisual practices.

Revolutions Take Time

The 2018 paper titled “Common Patterns in Revolutionary Infrastructures and Data” has been cited frequently, since we compared the current discussions about research data management with the developments of large infrastructures in the past believing, similar to philosophers such as Luciano Floridi, that the creation of an interoperable data domain will also be a revolutionary step. We identified the FAIR principles and the FAIR Digital Objects as nuclei for achieving the necessary convergence without which such new infrastructures will not take up. In this follow-up paper, we are elaborating on some factors that indicate that it will still take much time until breakthroughs will be achieved which is mainly devoted to sociological and political reasons. Therefore, it is important to describe visions such as FDO as self-standing entities, the easy plug-in concept, and the built-in security more explicitly to give a long-range perspective and convince policymakers and decision-makers. We also looked at major funding programs which all follow different approaches and do not define a converging core yet. This can be seen as an indication that these funding programs have huge potentials and increase awareness about data management aspects, but that we are far from converging agreements which we finally will need to create a globally integrated data space in the future. Finally, we discuss the roles of some major stakeholders who are all relevant in the process of agreement finding. Most of them are bound by short-term project cycles and funding constraints, not giving them sufficient space to work on long-term convergence concepts and take risks. The great opportunity to get funds for projects improving approaches and technology with the inherent danger of promising too much and the need for continuous reporting and producing visible results after comparably short periods is like a vicious cycle without a possibility to break out. We can recall that coming to the Internet with TCP/IP as a convergence standard was dependent on years of DARPA funding. Building large revolutionary infrastructures seems to be dependent on decision-makers that dare to think strategically and test out promising concepts at a larger scale.

Fundamentals of Common Digital Space of Scientific Knowledge Building

The article discusses the general issues of creating a Common Digital Space of Scientific Knowledge (CDSSK) as a modern integrated structure focused on supporting the tasks of information support for science and education, popularizing and storing knowledge reflected in various digital objects. The tasks of the CDSSK are formulated, user groups are determined, the architecture of the space is considered. The CDSSK includes a set of subspaces related to various scientific fields. The unity of space is ensured by unified principles for constructing subspaces and ontological connections between their objects. Each subspace includes digital objects, metadata containing facts associated with objects, and subject ontologies that provide advanced searches and navigation through space. All information is reflected in the CDSSK according to the rules of the “Semantic Web”. The content of each subspace includes a core (time-tested reliable scientific results) and a superstructure - new scientific results that have passed preliminary examination article describes

Wrestling with Digital Objects and Technologies in Studies of Work

Studying technical work at digital interfaces, especially the work of engineers, poses challenges for ethnographers. In addition to the difficulties of understanding and documenting what engineers do at their computers, engineers use concepts and vocabularies that are foreign to social scientists without technical training. The authors describe the methods they developed over a decade to deal with these and related issues in their ethnographies of three engineering occupations: structural engineering, hardware engineering, and automotive engineering. Using dual observers, developing glossaries of technical terms, recording streams of behaviour, developing task tables, creating technology inventories, and creating databases of digital artefacts cross-referenced to one’s fieldnotes are among the 14 techniques discussed and illustrated.