Information and Communication Studies Research Collection
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- PublicationAPIs for IPAs? Towards End-User Tailoring of Intelligent Personal AssistantsIntegrated into smartphones or smart speakers, Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) have grown into the most prevalent example of speech-based interfaces today. Enabling hands-free completion of tasks such as checking the weather, playing music, or controlling smart devices, IPAs have become a central feature of millions of homes. Yet, end-users are faced with barriers to understanding their `black box' devices, and a lack of opportunity to engage in end-user development (EUD) activities. Our current work considers the state of existing tools and platforms for development of IPAs, the key challenges to be overcome, and the potential benefits of doing so.
106 - PublicationChallenges of Designing and Implementing Simulation Models of Peer Review(2019-05-04)
; ; ; Science relies on peer review. Through this mechanism, manuscripts are selected for publication and grant proposals for funding. However, the processes of peer review do not operate in a vacuum; they reflect the priorities, norms, and practices of the institutions in which they are embedded, such as scientific communities, funding agencies, publishers, and scholarly societies, each with their own perspectives and logics (Bollen et al. 2014; Benner & Sandstrom 2000). Peer review is a multi-level system. At the macro level a funding agency sets its priorities and goals for funding based on national priorities and legal mandates. At the meso level, funding agencies use peer review to select which proposals to fund, but also integrate their own strategic objectives (gender balance, geographical diversity, disciplinary needs for example) into the selection process. At the micro level, individual reviewers and panels bring their own perspectives to bear on the review processes. In particular, the dynamics of meso- and micro-level complexity provides an area of exploration that could benefit from simulation studies for two reasons. Simulation studies help us understand what features of the peer review process emerge from different norms, relationships, attitudes and behaviors of the actors and organizations involved. These methods also allow us to develop and test policy recommendations for the improvement of peer review in these same organizations. In our own project we started by mapping existing simulation models of peer review and identified knowledge gaps in the literature, then started developing a simulation model to address these gaps. We found that numerous researchers had studied peer review systems by means of formal and computational modeling, such as agent-based models (ABM) (Squazzoni & Takács 2011). We counted 44 papers on simulation models of peer review published since 1969: some were used to compare the efficiencies of alternative peer review systems (e.g. Kovanis et al. 2017); some compared different behavioral strategies of authors, editors or reviewers (e.g. Thurner & Hanel 2011; Squazzoni & Gandelli 2013); some sought the origin of the issues of peer review, such as biases, high costs and inefficiencies (e.g. Righi & Takács 2017).119 - PublicationThe CogSIS Project: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Speech Interface Synthesis(2018-07-06)
; ; Speech interfaces are becoming a more common dialogue partner. With the growth of intelligent personal assistants, pervasive and wearable computing and robot-based technologies, the level of spoken interactions with technology is unprecedented. However, while the technological challenges around the production of natural synthetic voices have been widely researched, comparatively little is understood about how speech synthesis affects user experience and behaviour. The CogSIS Project examines the psychological and behavioural consequences of synthesis design decisions in human interactions with speech technology. In particular, we explore how design decisions around politeness, accent, naturalness and expressivity impact the assumptions we make about speech interfaces as communicative actors (i.e. our partner models). The project fuses knowledge, concepts and methods from psycholinguistics, experimental psychology, human-computer interaction and speech technology to 1) understand how synthesis design choices impact users’ partner models, 2) how these choices interact with partner models and impact user experience and evaluations and 3) how these choices impact users’ own language production. The project will lead to a set of theory-driven practical and actionable guidelines for speech synthesis and speech interface design.325 - PublicationData, Power and Bias in Artificial Intelligence(2020-07-21)
; ; Artificial Intelligence has the potential to exacerbate societal bias and set back decades of advances in equal rights and civil liberty. Data used to train machine learning algorithms may capture social injustices, inequality or discriminatory attitudes that may be learned and perpetuated in society. Attempts to address this issue are rapidly emerging from different perspectives involving technical solutions, social justice and data governance measures. While each of these approaches are essential to the development of a comprehensive solution, often discourse associated with each seems disparate. This paper reviews ongoing work to ensure data justice, fairness and bias mitigation in AI systems from different domains exploring the interrelated dynamics of each and examining whether the inevitability of bias in AI training data may in fact be used for social good. We highlight the complexity associated with defining policies for dealing with bias. We also consider technical challenges in addressing issues of societal bias.159 - PublicationDevelopment Plan Rezonings: The Political PressuresRezonings and section four motions have made planning an issue for public discussion, media publicity, and professional conferences, but debates have tended to focus on planning problems, such as proper land use, future rezoning requirements, financing local services, and so on. Rezonings are not so much a planning problem, as a political problem. The real issues are the political pressures behind planning decisions and the role of community opinion in determining planning policy. In this context, politicians are not necessarily villains; they too are victims of the Irish political system and voter's expectations.
108 - PublicationDon't Believe The Hype! White Lies of Conversational User Interface Creation ToolsFollowing the initial hype and high expectations of conversational user interfaces (CUIs), a number of creation tools have emerged to simplify development of these complex systems. These have the potential to democratise and expand application development to those without programming skills. However, while such tools allow end-user developers to build language understanding and dialog management capability into a CUI application, actually fulfilling or executing an action still requires programmatic API integration. In this paper, we look at how CUI builders that claim to be ``no code required'' struggle to yield more than toy examples, with an aim to provoke the community to develop better tools for CUI creation.
243Scopus© Citations 2 - PublicationHurling against a haystack: The incentives and challenges of open data in the Republic of Ireland(2015-03)
; Comparative research on data practices is hampered by the difficulty of studying across cases. The Republic of Ireland, with its small geographical size and population, an economy that is highly leveraged in information technology investment, and a centralized funding model provides a unique 'laboratory' for examining data infrastructures in social and cultural contexts. This project reports on a preliminary study of the Open Data movement in the Irish public sector with an eye to surfacing themes for understanding data practices and challenges across different sectors. Using semi-structured interviews with individuals (n=11) involved in open data administration across the Republic, the researchers discuss current implementation and ongoing practices. Initial findings with respect to difficulties in measuring success, the sustainability of data, and valuating data are discussed. Future work on understanding how culture may play a role in open data infrastructures, stated and implicit values and biases, and creating and measuring need and impact are briefly discussed.116 - PublicationInformation Technology and Regional Developments: promises and prospects(The Environmental Institute, University College Dublin, 1992)We live in an age where all problems have a technological solution. We also live in the information age, where information is the modern currency of exchange. Small wonder, then, that the combination of the two into Information Technology, is a potent talisman indeed. Computers and telecommunications, in tandem, offer a powerful vision of the future. As a peripheral, and less economically developed, part of the European Community, Ireland is particularly interested in Information Technology. There is a concern that, especially as 1992 approaches, Ireland is becoming more peripheral to Europe, rather than more integrated into Europe. Irish and EC policy is concerned with both the fate of peripheral parts of Europe and the role of Information Technology in avoiding that fate. The following quote exemplifies this: "...information and communications technology essentially provide a means of communicating and processing information, [thus] the economic constraints imposed by geographical location which have characterised rural areas will become less significant. This will provide an opportunity for revitalizing economic activity in rural areas." (Commission of the European Communities 1989: 2)2 There is significant EC and Irish funding for investment in IT (e.g., STAR, Telematique, ORA, and RACE). It is hoped this will improve the economic position of Ireland, and especially the rural areas of Ireland. The decentralisation of bureaucracy, use of communications technology in tourism and agriculture, greater use of IT by small businesses, improved individual access to government services are all ways in which IT should make the Less Favoured Regions more economically viable. The vision of Ireland conveyed by IT is decentralized and environmentally friendly. Rural businesses mean lower population density and less congestion in urban areas. This reduces transport costs, reducing both the use of fuel for automobiles and trains and the consequent atmospheric pollution. Better yet, if one can work at home, it also means less office construction. With fewer offices, there is less energy wasted heating those offices, less space needed for car parking, less demand for public transport, and so on. The growth of cities can be slowed, and rural areas can be maintained. We can be 'green' and 'new age' and still have jobs as well.
47 - PublicationInter-organisational coordination work in digital curation: The case of Eurobarometer(2020-02-20)
; Open research is predicated upon seamless access to curated research data. Major national and European funding schemes, such as Horizon Europe, strongly encourage or require publicly funded data to be FAIR - that is, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (Wilkinson 2016). What underpins such initiatives are the many data organizations and repositories working with their stakeholders and each other to establish policies and practices, implement them, and do the curatorial work to increase the available, discoverability, and accessibility of high quality research data. However, such work has often been invisible and underfunded, necessitating creative and collaborative solutions. In this paper, we briefly describe how one such case from social science data: the processing of the Eurobarometer data set. Using content analysis of administrative documents and interviews, we detail how European data archives managed the tensions of curatorial work across borders and jurisdictions from the 1970s to the mid-2000s, the challenges that they faced in distributing work, and the solutions they found. In particular, we look at the interactions of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and social science data organizations (DO) like UKDA, ICPSR, and GESIS and the institutional and organizational collaborations that made Eurobarometer “too big to fail”. We describe some of the invisible work that they underwent in the past in making data in Europe findable, accessible, interoperable, and conclude with implications for “frictionless” data access and reuse today.150 - PublicationKnowledge and Culture: limitations of place in the Information SocietyKnowledge is a fundamental aspect of the Information Society. The growth of 'knowledge management' in organisations is indicative of knowledge's new commodity value. Equally fundamental, in the Information Society, is the sharing of knowledge between people in different locations. Yet, increasing discussion of 'tacit knowledge', as well as knowledge management, indicates a realization that both the management and transfer of knowledge is a complex issue. Knowledge is embedded in social and cultural structures that may be place-dependent, and not easily replicated electronically. Culture, practice, and community are concepts which can usefully describe these structures in which knowledge is embedded. These structures must be successfully created and maintained electronically, if the Information Society vision of making distance irrelevant is to be fulfilled. In this paper, knowledge 'work' in organisations, especially organisations in a geographically peripheral society such as Ireland, will be discussed, exploring the embedded nature of knowledge in structures of place and space. Particular attention will be paid to the use of Lotus Notes, the premier groupware or CSCW system, as a means of sharing knowledge.
99 - PublicationMapping Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for Understanding Speech Interface InteractionsThe use of speech as an interaction modality has grown considerably through the integration of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs- e.g. Siri, Google Assistant) into smartphones and voice based devices (e.g. Amazon Echo). However, there remain significant gaps in using theoretical frameworks to understand user behaviours and choices and how they may applied to specific speech interface interactions. This part-day multidisciplinary workshop aims to critically map out and evaluate the- oretical frameworks and methodological approaches across a number of disciplines and establish directions for new paradigms in understanding speech interface user behaviour. In doing so, we will bring together participants from HCI and other speech related domains to establish a cohesive, diverse and collaborative community of researchers from academia and industry with interest in exploring theoretical and methodological issues in the field.
507Scopus© Citations 6 - PublicationMigrants' information practices and use of social media in Ireland : networks and communityMigrants, having left their home society and community, often depend on electronic modes of communication to maintain contacts with distant friends and relations. Their practices illustrate the affordances provided by social media when face to face communication is not available. This paper describes the information and communication practices of Polish and Filipino nationals in Ireland, based on interviews with over sixty-five migrants in 2009. Migrants display increased dependence on the Internet as an information source and use various electronic media to maintain significant contacts with friends and relations in their home societies. Social media (including Web 2.0) practices have an impact on long distance relations that previous technologies have not had, due to differences in the way these technologies are utilized. Social media usage is a passive monitoring that complements the active communication of first generation technologies; this monitoring creates a background awareness and presence in terms of which active communication takes place, which facilitates bonding as well as bridging capital. This enables resilient and durable transnational links, while also facilitating greater mobility for migrants.
427Scopus© Citations 25 - PublicationMitigating Gender Bias in Machine Learning Data SetsAlgorithmic bias has the capacity to amplify and perpetuate societal bias, and presents profound ethical implications for society. Gender bias in algorithms has been identified in the context of employment advertising and recruitment tools, due to their reliance on underlying language processing and recommendation algorithms. Attempts to address such issues have involved testing learned associations, integrating concepts of fairness to machine learning, and performing more rigorous analysis of training data. Mitigating bias when algorithms are trained on textual data is particularly challenging given the complex way gender ideology is embedded in language. This paper proposes a framework for the identification of gender bias in training data for machine learning. The work draws upon gender theory and sociolinguistics to systematically indicate levels of bias in textual training data and associated neural word embedding models, thus highlighting pathways for both removing bias from training data and critically assessing its impact in the context of search and recommender systems.
174Scopus© Citations 15 - PublicationNo metrics for postdocs: Precarious labour in science policy(2021-07-15)In recent years, the pressure of producing impacts such as the creation of intellectual property and other commercialisation activities ('knowledge transfer') has increasingly dominated the discourse of research institutions and universities. Research projects can be comparable to 'gigs' when they employ postdocs on precarious fixed-term contracts. However, there seems to be little consideration in research and science policy about the career development of postdocs beyond funded projects and there seems to be no metrics about the contributions of postdocs to knowledge production, nor data about 'brain drain' as a result of precarious contracts. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with postdocs, PIs, and support staff, this study aims to understand the perceived roles of postdocs as a career stage and the perceived success factors that help them transitioning from precarious contracts to long-term academic/research positions. The work-in-progress paper will discuss some preliminary findings including the meanings and contexts of postdoc, as well as the problems and issues of precarious, fixed-term contracts in relation to publication and knowledge production. This paper also calls for comprehensive data collection and analysis about the contributions by postdoctoral researchers and the potential loss of knowledge as a result of the precariousness of academic career.
45 - PublicationOf Seamlessness and Frictions: Transborder Data Flows of European and US Social Science DataOpen science initiatives are predicated upon managing research data to overcome "data frictions," or the points of resistance in the movement of data time [12]. This paper explores organizational creation of data frictions to manage the flow of data from one data organization to another. We describe the creation and modification of data frictions between European data organizations and between data organizations in Europe and the USA. We analyze historical documentary data from CESSDA, an umbrella organization representing European data organizations that has served as a platform for development of international data sharing arrangements from the 1960s through today.
149Scopus© Citations 2 - PublicationOrganizational resilience, financial strategies, and social science data archives(2016-09-13)
; How do financial strategies, and changes to financial strategies over time, contribute to the organizational resiliency of data archives? We explore the challenges, crisis and opportunities faced by data archives over 40 years and the financial strategies they have employed to deal with challenges and opportunities. This paper describes how two well-known social science data archives, ICPSR and the UK Data Archive (UKDA), adopted and adapted their financial structures over a 40 year period in order to remain sustainable.61 - PublicationPolitical Transformations: clientelism and technological change(School of Social, Political and Economic Sciences, University of Northumbria at Newcastle, 1999-04-01)New information and communications technologies are expected to transform political systems as part of a move to an 'Information Society'. A Utopian view of this transformation is often reflected, not only by some who write about cyber-democracy, but also in government policy statements. For instance, in Europe, the 'Bangemann Report' (High Level Group on the Information Society, 1994) expected that the Information Society would lead to a "more efficient, transparent and responsive public services, closer to the citizen and at lower cost" in Europe. The High Level Expert Group on the Social and Societal Aspects of the Information Society (1996) noted that "ICTs create new opportunities for greater public participation in and awareness of the political process". Thus, new technologies are expected to improve political participation and administrative efficiency, as long as appropriate policy decisions are taken.
43 - PublicationPrevalence and use of the term "business model" in the digital cultural heritage institution professional literatureWe investigate how the term “business model" was used in the digital cultural heritage literature from 2000 to 2015 through content analysis. We found that discussion of business models is not prevalent and there is no observable growth trend. Analysis of how authors represented business models showed predominately positive uses of the concept but include discussion of tension between the concept of business model and traditional cultural heritage field values. We found that non- element representations of business models were most common.
877 - PublicationProceedings of the 2nd European Data and Computational Journalism ConferenceThe European Data and Computational Journalism Conference aims to bring together industry, practitioners and academics in the fields of journalism and news production and information, data, social and computer sciences, facilitating a multidisciplinary discussion on these topics in order to advance research and practice in the broad area of Data and Computational Journalism. Held in Cardiff, Wales, UK, the 2nd edition of the conference will present a mix of academic talks and keynotes from industry leaders. It will be followed by a day of workshops.Submissions of academic research focused talks, industry talks, as well as hands-on workshops were invited for the conference, on the subjects of journalism, data journalism, computational journalism, and information, data, social and computer science. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: •Application of data and computational journalism within newsrooms •Data driven investigations •Data storytelling •Open data for journalism, storytelling, transparency and accountability •Algorithms, transparency and accountability •Automated, robot and chatbot journalism •Newsroom software and tools •‘Post-fact’ journalism and the impact of data •User experience and interactivity •Data and Computational Journalism education •Post-desktop news provision/interaction •Data mining news sources •Visualisation and presentation •Bias, ethics, transparency and truth in Data Journalism •Newsroom challenges with respect to data journalism, best practices, success and failure stories. Collected within these proceedings are the academic abstracts presented at the conference. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the programme committee for their hard work reviewing submissions and helping us to come up with the fantastic line-up of talks for this year.
1804 - PublicationProceedings of the 3rd European Data and Computational Journalism ConferenceThe 3rd European Data and Computational Journalism Conference aims to bring together industry, practitioners and academics in the fields of journalism and news production and information, data, social and computer sciences, facilitating a multidisciplinary discussion on these topics in order to advance research and practice in the broad area of Data and Computational Journalism.Held in Malaga, Spain, the conference presented a mix of academic talks and keynotes from industry leaders. It was followed by a day of workshops and tutorials. Submissions of both academic research-focused and industry-focused talks for the conference, on the subjects of journalism, data journalism, and information, data, social and computer sciences were invited for the conference. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: • Application of data and computational journalism within newsrooms • Data driven investigations • Data storytelling • Open data for journalism, storytelling, transparency and accountability • Algorithms, transparency and accountability • Automated, robot and chatbot journalism • Newsroom software and tools • ‘Post-fact’ journalism and the impact of data • User experience and interactivity • Data and Computational Journalism education • Post-desktop news provision/interaction • Data mining news sources • Visualisation and presentation • News games and gamification of News • Bias, ethics, transparency and truth in Data Journalism • Newsroom challenges with respect to data journalism, best practices, success and failure storiesCollected within these proceedings are the academic abstracts presented at the conference.
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