Towards a Social Dramaturgy of Digital Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Romania

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its induced lockdowns, significantly changed the way the educational act was performed. Using both technological references in phenomenology and features on the relationship between performer and audience, encountered in social dramaturgy, this chapter follows the valences brought by the change in education in the online environment. Based on an exploratory approach made through discourse analysis with seven Romanian professors and 20 Romanian students, two major discursive repertoires can be identified: on the one hand, the one regarding the return to face-to-face courses and, on the other hand, the discourse on maintaining online courses. The discourse regarding the return to classical education is supported by all the interviewed teachers but also by the students who had connectivity problems during the pandemic. The favorable discourse for online classes was supported by most students, especially for temporal and financial reasons. This exploratory pattern confirms that even such choices have a socio-economic character, not necessarily an individual one.

Mercator: a pipeline for multi-method, unsupervised visualization and distance generation

Summary Unsupervised machine learning provides tools for researchers to uncover latent patterns in large-scale data, based on calculated distances between observations. Methods to visualize high-dimensional data based on these distances can elucidate subtypes and interactions within multi-dimensional and high-throughput data. However, researchers can select from a vast number of distance metrics and visualizations, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The Mercator R package facilitates selection of a biologically meaningful distance from 10 metrics, together appropriate for binary, categorical and continuous data, and visualization with 5 standard and high-dimensional graphics tools. Mercator provides a user-friendly pipeline for informaticians or biologists to perform unsupervised analyses, from exploratory pattern recognition to production of publication-quality graphics. Availabilityand implementation Mercator is freely available at the Comprehensive R Archive Network (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Mercator/index.html).